Vets' suicides: casualties that go uncounted and another hidden cost of war

Yesterday, I wrote about the number of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post traumatic stress disorder -- much of it undiagnosed -- even while veterans' care is on the chopping block in the next budget.

I want to share an e-mail I received, in response to that post, from reader Penny Coleman, whose husband suffered from PTSD and sadly took his own life after coming home from Vietnam. She writes …

The facet of the issue that has been consistently minimized, if not erased, is that the emotional wounds of soldiers and veterans -- and the suicides that so often tragically result -- are not a new phenomenon. No one knows how many Vietnam veterans killed themselves because no one ever bothered to track or count. There are many experts, Jonathan Shay for example, who have no trouble believing that there have been more suicides since the war than there are names on the Wall, but whatever the actual number, those deaths never triggered the kind of official response one might expect from such an epidemic. In fact, the official response has been to point to the lack of proof of a causal relationship between PTSD and suicide, proof that could only be established by scientific studies that were never done.

When it began to happen again, and this time to active duty soldiers as well as to recently returned veterans, the news was received, by the administration, the VA, the military and, to an overwhelming extent, the media, with disingenuous surprise.The Mental Health Advisory Team that was sent to Iraq in 2003 to investigate the spike in soldier suicides concluded that soldiers were killing themselves because of poor life coping skills, specifically marital, legal, or financial problems. Last month, confronted with reports that soldier suicides had doubled in 2006, [Army Surgeon General Kevin] Kiley continued to insist that there was no connection between stress on the force and suicide. Is it possible that military psychiatrists and VA officials have so normalized war that it is invisible to them as the source of the problem?

Last year I published Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War. The book is, in part, a history of scientific (mis)understanding of combat-related stress injuries and of government/military policy. The investigative chapters are framed by oral histories of other Vietnam-era women whose husbands, sons, and fathers also suffered psychic wounds that were, in the end, lethal. Had those deaths been officially acknowledged, studied, counted, not only would our lives as survivors been very different, but it would be far more difficult for officials now to credibly deny a PTSD/suicide connection.

Veteran suicides still are not tracked or counted. Vietnam veterans, whose PTSD has been re-triggered by this new war, are still taking their own lives. The Defense Department admits to 116 soldier suicides in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that number does not include any of the other branches of service, the Guard, the Reserves--and it does not include veterans. The tragic death of Jonathan Schulze, for example, an Iraq veteran from Minnesota, has recently attracted a great deal of national attention. There seems to be no argument about whether or not his death was service-related, but still it will not be included on any official casualty lists.

You asked, "Why?" the cuts and the underdiagnosis. There are so many ways in which this administration has claimed to support the troops while making budgetary decisions that in fact endanger them. The policies you describe have an Orwellian fiscal advantage that is consistent with that record of indifference; if a veteran dies with his or her case still under appeal, the case dies, too. Mainstream newspapers have reported that over the past decade, more than 13,700 veterans died while their cases were in some stage of the appeals process.