This Veterans Day, know that the U.S. military is losing to the war called suicide

As Americans honor veterans this holiday, it’s vital to remember the silent war being waged in homes and barracks and countless other places where soldiers, past and present, are dying by the thousands every year. They’re killing themselves in a war of self-destruction that the United States is losing.

The tide of this struggle turned years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks, when America’s all-volunteer military — a force of fixed and limited size, unable to expand through conscription — was pressed into fighting two extended wars at once, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The resulting strain was unprecedented. Amid a daily drumbeat of news from far-flung wars, desperately personal conflicts were being fought and lost at home.

Military suicide rate vs. civilian rate

Army Sgt. Douglas Hale Jr., 26, twice a veteran of combat, bought a pawnshop pistol and killed himself in a restaurant bathroom outside Fort Hood, Texas. After five deployments, Army Maj. Troy Donn Wayman, 44, died in his Texas home. And Army Private Jeremy Johnson, 23, medically evacuated from Afghanistan, texted his mother before taking his life.

A generation ago, the military suicide rate was lower than in the civilian world, as well it should have been. Service members were a specialized population, screened for health and emotional problems and exempt from societal tribulations over finding a job, housing, health care and other issues that trouble those outside the military.

But that changed after about 2003. Military suicide rates suddenly and sharply increased. And they’ve never come down. Last year, 325 active-duty troops died by suicide, a rate of 24.8 per 100,000. The civilian suicide rate is 18 per 100,000.

The trend bled through to the veteran population, where thousands take their own lives each year. The highest rate — 44.5 per 100,000 — is among veterans ages 18-34.

In the early days, this contagion of death shook the Pentagon as research and awareness programs were launched en masse. But with the passage of time, outside of ongoing suicide-prevention task forces, the clamor for action has faded.

“We’ve accepted this new high rate as normal,” says Carl Castro, a psychologist and retired Army colonel, now an associate professor at the University of Southern California. “They don’t even remember a time when it was lower.”

'A perpetual war'

The crisis cries out for a fresh approach. Programs should be more aggressively evaluated to see whether they really work. Recruiters must do a more precise job of screening applicants for suicide risk and emotional issues. And greater emphasis should be placed on assisting service members through crucial periods of transition after deployment or leaving the military, when many suicides occur.

Finally, there must be greater emphasis around firearm safety in military and veteran homes. Where half of civilian suicides are with a gun, that rate jumps to 60-70% among troops and veterans.

The U.S. military is the world’s finest. But it has been at a high operational tempo for going on two decades. “The very nature of military service has changed,” says M. David Rudd, president of the University of Memphis and a leading expert in military suicides. “We’re in a perpetual war.”

Any member of the armed forces who dies in the thrall of a personal crisis is a casualty of that war — every bit as much as if they had fallen on the battlefield. This reality has to be embraced on Veterans Day, and every other day.

By Gregg Zoroya for the Editorial Board.

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