There are two substantial issues facing the American military and veteran community today. The first, a logical and narratively unified reaction to years of hero-worship, is a backlash against the impulse to thank soldiers for their service – a tendency, made explicit in recent media pieces, to vilify veterans and stigmatize them as prone to violence, hatred, racism, bigotry, and murder. The second issue is less dangerous than the first in absolute terms, but based on real statistics and empirical evidence: a growing problem with suicide.
This topic has been examined under a microscope. 22 soldiers and veterans die per day in America by their own hand, victims of some unknowable, tragically preventable plague. Especially tragic given the notion that a person who has cheated death should have some sort of inherent attachment to life. We believe that a man, having avoided bombs, bullets, and grenades from determined foes as variable as the enemies we’ve faced over the last seventy years, should have a higher reason to live. We believe that a soldier-veteran, ennobled by the experience of having come close to an end to their existence, should far more than others be eager to embrace the world, to love life. We imagine that we, in our dull day to day lives, which include regret, and trifle, and petty annoyances, have got it bad, and that veterans have seen clear through to some transcendent truth. Like a sunset over the water after a thunderstorm, with rays of light reaching up into the heaven, and beyond ourselves. Like encountering a known limitation, and moving beyond it.
Of course veterans are people like everyone else. Different in the sense that they’ve made a choice many non-veterans think – wrongly – that they’re incapable of making, fed on a steady diet of propaganda from movies, books, comics, video games, and history. Think, then, how disappointing it must be for a servicemember – a soldier, marine, airman, sailor, or coastguardsman (what do they call themselves?) – to discover that they won’t see war? Or, having seen it, that there’s no transcendent truth behind a dead face – friend or foe? Imagine that every meaningful assumption you’d made about the order of things was up-ended – good, generous, industrious and clever people died or were thwarted, while bad people, lazy and unscrupulous people profited and prospered? How would you feel, to know that life and death meant nothing?
I’m laying aside the question of faith in a higher power, and refraining from offering my own thoughts on the subject because a great many different ideas have occurred simultaneously in war on the topic of who believed what about which God, and praying to each of them seems to have had about the same effect (which is to say, nothing). Also, men of faith have taken their own lives, and agnostics and atheists have done the same, and out of respect for their service to God and Country, I should like to imagine that their lives are better or easier now.
During my time in the military, I came to believe that one reason there were so many suicides – apart from the proportional wealth of toxic leaders I encountered who likely did much to encourage their soldiers to take their own lives – was that it’s the single area over which the military has absolutely no jurisdiction. Each individual is instructed from the earliest moments in training that authority is violence, and violence is authority, and who can do the greatest harm to whom determines rank. A salute isn’t just a gesture of respect, it’s an acknowledgement of hierarchy. One person must awake at four in the morning to clean an area so that another person can walk over it with dirty boots. Infractions are punished. Individuality is punished. Thoughts are punished. Feelings are punished.
But suicide can’t be punished. Threats of suicide and suicide attempts are taken seriously by military units – very seriously – with the offending soldier often being carted out to behavior health and instantly transformed into a walking pariah, at least to the extent to which that soldier is still allowed to be a part of their unit. The impulse or desire to commit suicide, vocalized, is the worst type of offense possible – likely because it undermines the possibility of corrective violence, which is the military’s only organizational / institutional ability to correct misbehavior. For a toxic leader, who relies only on the threat of violence, suicide must be an evil. For a good or scrupulous leader, suicide is an unparalleled catastrophe.
Some people are afflicted with medical conditions that prevent them from taking any joy in life, or the world. Depression – suicidal depression – is a real condition. For these people, sights and smells and sentiments from which reasonable people would take pleasure offer nothing instead. These people require help – medical assistance, psychiatric guidance – and should be in places, surrounded by professionals who are capable of giving them said help. I’ve had brushes with depression in my own life, had my share of beautiful summer evenings that unaccountably tasted like ash – enough to know that people who must live with depression, with existential crisis, on a daily, hourly basis are truly cursed.
But this is different. These active duty military service members are killing themselves not because of a biochemical predisposition toward self-murder, but as an alternative to a torture that must feel infinitely worse than the idea of painlessness.
Veteran suicide, meanwhile, points at a similar but more diffuse problem – the problem of finding suitable engagement for veterans habituated to being employed, accustomed to using themselves in a way that creates meaning and value for their societies (but unable to do that in the context of the military any more, for a variety of reasons). Society itself becomes the problem for which the only solution is painless release – a society where service members are allowed to transition out without having jobs ready for them, or livelihoods assured.
So long as the military has toxic leadership, and a promotion system that encourages toxicity, many service members will take their own lives. So long as society does not have adequate room for veterans who wish nothing more than a steady pay check and some sort of useful employment, veterans will take their own lives. Perhaps the answer to the scourge is not to vilify the preventable suicides – but vilify the systems that make them possible in the first place. Otherwise, the prudent solution could be to stop vilifying suicide in the first place – make it an acceptable option in the event that a person’s life is truly unbearable. Of course, the system of financial servitude we live in could not bear such a situation – it would quickly collapse.
An important and expertly-written essay on a topic many people have trouble analyzing. They either fall back on the comfort of statistics (x number in 2013 as opposed to y number in 2014) and take this for a job well done, or they simply gloss over the topic entirely. This makes sense. Like the Victorians shrank from sex so we shrink from suicide. Of course, as with the Victorians, this aversion is only an expression of an underlying obsession, and our attempts to conceal it are as sensational as they are sententious.
In my experience with military suicide – and there were quite a few in my battalion, each one driven by both immediate and enduring issues – it seems financial difficulties played a role in the majority. You close with a great question about systems of financial servitude. Not to go all Marxist, but I would describe it as one of exploitation, and exploitation coupled with a sense of failure at having lost the one morality agreed upon by all Americans (money). I believe the military is making an effort to curb the excesses of the loan shark culture outside military bases, but I know they did and continue to do a lot of damage.
I also think what you say about the military hierarchy accurate. Much military experience is about giving up one’s privacy and sense of autonomous self. The military succeeds in so far as the soldiers are willing to give this up (or in so far as their superiors drill it out of them). Suicide, therefore, is a big problem, likely the central problem, as it lies precariously close to what the military expects of its initiates. They want you to be willing to die for the institution but this death will lose all meaning if the death is a selfish one. And as with religions like Christianity, the self-homicide must be ruthlessly and utterly vilified; he is she is a poison whose example might very well give up the entire game.
How would you compare this to the fragging epidemic in the late 1960s? It was, in part, a practical expediency – kill the sergeant or lieutenant who insists on patrolling certain areas. But it was also, perhaps, an expression of larger metaphysical discontents, a breakdown in assumptions driving not just the war, but military culture and a militarized society as a whole.
Vietnam, as always, shows us what happens in the military when it’s purely compulsory. The challenges and choices are different in a draft army, as are the psychological coping mechanisms. In a world where an individual can reasonably claim to be in an awful situation with awful weapons, and no (or little) choice in the matter, such as “go to war or go to jail,” murder probably seems like a pretty reasonable last-ditch answer. We see shootings, too, in our military, but not as much as suicide, and it’s not quite the same as “fragging” – I suspect that has something to do with the way an individual confronts being in the volunteer or professional army versus a draft army. That’d be my hypothesis, anyway.
Some other thoughts that are important to include: the use of drugs and alcohol in WWII and Vietnam, and their relative scarcity in U.S. military. The cult of fitness and time people spend improving themselves in the gym. General advances in nutrition. Anti-malarial medication in Iraq / Afghanistan with serious adverse side effects for people with depressive tendencies. Underreporting of suicide statistics among WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam War veterans by a society deeply uncomfortable with the idea (more uncomfortable even than today).
Found your article via your response on a blog about an uncle’s (Jay) suicide, and the comparison of jumping from a burning building.
Do you have any hope for an end to this epidemic? I noticed the mention that military suicides of the past may have been under reported due to the stigma. I think yes!
When i mentioned the current suicide rate to a recently retired general his comment was that today’s soldiers were not raised with the ‘quality’ of past generations!
Now seeing how some Veterans Hospitals have failed so criminally, we may all be blamed.
Your essay was moving, and I appreciate your having taken the time to read mine.
Thank you for that anecdote above, where a retired general lays responsibility for current military/veteran suicides on some undefined generational difference. That’s likely part of the problem, an unwillingness or inability in people who grew up at a time when suicide was massively stigmatized (not to claim that it isn’t now) to critically evaluate real causes, and therefore to imagine solutions.
I have confidence that things are getting better, and will continue to. The first step is always acknowledging that a thing happens. Where we go from here – to treat suicide as a thing to be prevented by any means, or to change the way we think about it, so that someone who is suffering can end their life with dignity and respect – well, that’s up to us.
The suicide rate for the military is actually not all that much higher than the general population. Each day, 85 people in America commit suicide; of those, 22 are veterans. The percentage of the American population that are veterans is 25%.
80% of the military is male and males have a much higher suicide rate than females do. So, naturally, the rate for suicide would be higher amongst any 80% male group than a group that is mostly female, which is what the American public is.
Some other interesting facts:
The majority of the suicides of veterans were committed by veterans that were over 50 years of age; something like 70% of these veterans were at least 50 years old.
Most of the veterans that committed suicide since 2001 never saw combat; I believe 75% of them did not. So, most suicides over the past 13 years were not related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Thank you for reading, and commenting. I should walk back the 22 suicides per day, as that number is not useful. More here: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-veteran-deaths-20131217-dto-htmlstory.html
Nevertheless, even at somewhere between 1 and 2 suicides per day among my cohort of young white veterans under 35, when one adjusts for military service, the rate of suicide per 100,000 is still shockingly higher among veterans than civilians. Yes, young white men have a higher chance of committing suicide than any other equivalent group, so far as statistics are concerned. At the same time, young white veterans – specifically, veterans of the volunteer military of GWOT / OCO – have a much higher rate of suicide than the average young white man. What’s especially interesting about this is that the numbers spike starting around 2000 – in the 1990s, being a young white veteran meant you had a significantly LOWER chance of committing suicide than the civilian population. There is a clear and undeniable correlation between GWOT/OCO and veteran suicide. I agree that this does not establish causation, which was why I wrote my essay.
Thank you for correcting the particulars of my argument. Upon reviewing and confirming your figures, I maintain that there is something distinct about military service within a professional / volunteer context during a time of war, and that distinction impacts how people interpret punishment and escape. This could explain in part the unprecedented spike in suicide rates among current veterans.
None of this excuses the execrable neglect of the PDSD afflicted veteran. And it is of little comfort to the widows and orphans left behind. We need to do something for the veteran.
ahbonenberger,
I don’t know anything, but I think the toxic leadership in the military that you write about is the same in civilian life as well. From past work experience and from people I know, toxic leadership at many organizations is the norm. Perhaps people in the military think they have no other way out or to rebel, as you write. But, many people in civilian life that have a tyrant for a boss have no other way out as well, especially if they need the job.
My uneducated guess is that the military attracts types of people that want adventure, danger, risk and they may be predisposed to suicide. When coupled with easy access and knowledge of guns, plus a bad economy, some choose to end their lives.
Toxic leadership – many would just call it “leadership” – is the single greatest plague affecting our human species. Starts with a mean or insecure dad or mom, usually, and works its way down. That’s oversimplifying things, but I’ll stand by it anyway.
What’s interesting about the numbers is that while common sense suggests that the type of person who joins the military is just more predisposed to commit suicide, for great stretches of time that was not true. For 20 years, joining the military as a young white man meant that your odds of committing suicide decreased. And the military wasn’t *safer* during the Cold War – there’s a good argument to be made that it was much more dangerous.
Amen.