120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week

[♦ nivek ♦]

Buddy of mine took his life in '96 after returning from GW-1 and tour in Saudi. "Gulf War Syndrome" and a fast acting cancer, plus a mind full of pictures he couldn't shut off. Drugs, booze did nothing but amplify the fires.

 

Jon elected to opt out of life when they sent him home to die. Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law gave him a more gentle option than frying in his own burnt systems.

 

Lady friend also from GW-1 is about half nuts. Was somewhat before she went. Driving the trucks full of prisoners and bodys tilted her thinking so now she is a ghost about our town, living *somewhere* and out of dumpsters and trashcans.

 

The latest wars have quite a few of our towns folks coming back with more questions and problems than the local VA Docs can fix..

 

kFL

****

AlterNet

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet

Posted on November 26, 2007, Printed on November 29, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/

 

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

 

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

 

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."

 

Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.

 

They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.

 

The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.

 

For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.

 

Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.

 

Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!

 

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

 

Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.

 

There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.

 

There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?

 

*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.

 

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/

[Fweethawt]

Sickening and sad...

[Casey]

For what it's worth, I never got to meet either of my uncles on my Dad's side. They were both WW2 Veterans and both drank themselves to death, the one mainly because his wife played up on him like a loose tappet when he was away, and the other, so far as I'm able to work out, because he, as people in those days said, was "bomb happy", or more roundly, "shell-fucked". I don't know so much about the first one but I do know the second was an Anti-Aircraft gunner.

 

He was in North Africa and the Middle East. Their guns were towed by soft-skinned (non-armoured) vehicles and they'd only a little time to unlimber, get into action, limber up and get the hell out of it before the Panzers over-ran them. The Germans usually sent their Stuka dive-bombers in first, followed by their tanks.

 

I have heard that even years later, if an aircraft flew overhead, he could barely stand it. He would never admit this, even though it was obvious to anyone who knew him. He preferred to drink away his terror, but there was and is only so much OP rum a body can stand, and it killed him in the end. And the stuff those old fellows drank would burn with a blue flame if you lit it. I don't know if even the legendary Taos Lightning could've stood the competetition.

 

At least nowadays, they recognise PTSD. Back then a Veteran mostly just had to get on with it. Some did. My uncles, unfortunately, didn't.

Casey

[♦ nivek ♦]

 

Casey sent me this song quite a bit ago. Someone hung it on You Tube. Watch it, please.

 

>edit:

 

kL

[Unknowing1]

My brother in law served in Vietnam, exposure to agent orange has left him with a lot of medical problems. He is also suffering from PTSD. The care he receives from the VA is terrible. A friend also served in Vietnam. He doesn't talk about his experience a whole lot but from what limited amount he has told me it is just unbelievable what he and others went through. My best friends husband served in the Gulf War. He came back with PTSD and while they tried to stay together the PTSD and his experience had changed him so much they divorced. A friend of my son's signed up right after graduating from high school. He's home now with a permanently lame leg, he's only 19.

 

I can't imagine seeing what our soldiers see and what they do. And then when our own country turns their back on them it is pathetic.

[Sexton Blake]

It has always been the same. When the British soldiers starting coming back from WWII, they were ignored. If wounded, left to beg. Even as POW's many were treated better in that they could guarantee being fed and having a roof over their heads.

 

The countries use, then abuse soldiers.

[hereticzero]

I worked as an Adjudicator for Dept. of Veterans Affairs working claims for benefits from veterans and their families. The system used to process claims is antiquated and needs revamping. The process is irritating to say the least, I know because it took me longer than 20 years to get my own claim approved and in the process I was reduced to eating out of garbage cans before Voc Rehab got me into the training to work for Dept. of Veterans Affairs. Five years later, I got fired from the job, not because I was incompetent at work, but because my service-connected disabilities, PTSD being one of them, had gotten to where I spent more time at the doctor's office instead of at work. I do recall that the way the claims are processed increases the time it takes to get a claim processed. Evidence is requested even if evidence is already of record, very few Adjudicators work 'outside the box' on a claim and few Adjudicators will jeopardize their career to push an application through faster than development allows. It was very frustrating to have to chop away at red tape in order to get help for a veteran. Some did commit suicide before their checks were approved. I know I helped some who needed it and I know my hands were tied from helping someone that did not 'meet basic requirements' and others I found had been approved but never paid for many years. Often, the real frustration is in filing a claim years after discharge from service. File a claim for benefits within one year of discharge while evidence in support of a claim can still be found.

 

The military is the absolute worst keeper of records. If you do not take a copy of your military records, including medical records, with you when you get discharged from service, you may never prove your claim. The burden of proof is on the veteran alleging injury was the result of his or her military service. The VA does not have to prove a veteran was not injured in service to disallow a claim. Most claims are disallowed because the veteran does not complete the process with a physical by the VA or completing needed forms and evidence to support his claim. The veterans must show proof of injury. And, even after presenting his case, any reason for disallowing the claim will be used by the govt. to deny the claim and then the govt. blames the VA for disallowing the claim. The VA uses laws passed by govt. legislators to process veterans benefit claims. They don't make up the law as they go, and the VA does not write its own laws and regulations--Congress does. There are shelves of manuals that are used in processing claims. When a bill is presented to be signed into law, our Representatives have ample opportunity to vote against the bill but most do not and tow the party line out of fear of losing conservative votes. Laws are passed by Congress, not the VA. If there are laws people do not like, they have to lobby to change those laws.

 

Our govt. does not like its veterans. This has been shown from one war to the next as promises are made to get people to sign up and then excuses are made to prevent those promises from happening. If the govt. does not like its veterans it should quit making them. If the govt. liked its veterans it would not place so many obstacles in their way when filing for disability or medical care at the local VAMC. The Regional Office that processes disability claims do not do medical claims for the VAMC. If you are approved for care at a VAMC, this is no guarantee your claim for a disability will be approved. The best way to fight a disallowed claim is to appeal the decision to the Board of Veterans Appeals. Most adverse ratings are overturned on appeal, around 85%--does this tell you the IQ of the people doing the ratings? It is worth the time to appeal!

 

I have never seen a VAMC that turned away veterans seeking help for PTSD. The VA has always had time for me in the PTSD clinic. I know of no one who was ever turned away or rescheduled in an emergency. I have met veterans who were told by the military that they did not qualify for a disability. The military does not run the VA. File a claim no matter what you were told at discharge from service, even bad discharges with Other Than Honorable, are not necessarily a bar to benefits. It all depends on the circumstances for the OTH discharge and a person's military service.