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veterans
Rising Military Suicides Bring the War on Terror Home
As with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short.
Jul 26, 2024
At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil,” provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of “wooden boxes and coffins” and weaken American resolve. “This is when you will leave,” he predicted.
After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.
As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35%—883 troops—took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.
The war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001—a global conflict that still grinds on today—ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.
Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000—57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans—an estimated 30,177 of them—had killed themselves.
“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”
Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides
In June, a New York Timesfront-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them—a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.
The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
None of it should, however, have been surprising.
Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.
That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”
Quite obviously, it never happened.
The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.
Studies on the Shelf
Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.
While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops.
The New York Timesrecently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental healthcare providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.
The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.
Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”
Bin Laden’s Triumph
On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” U.S. President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001—a global conflict that still grinds on today—ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.
The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.
Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues.
During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.
Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.
“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans—four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths—has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.
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More Than One Greatest Generation?
Refusing to fight in an unjust war also counts as greatness.
May 27, 2024
This year Memorial Day falls within a week of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the costly Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from the Nazi conquest. It will be a somber opportunity to remember and celebrate those Americans who fought and died in wars—and particularly those who died in the only war in my 81-year lifetime that was actually fought to preserve the democratic way of life. Those who fought in World War II—referred to by some as the “Greatest Generation” because they also endured the Great Depression—are nearly all dead.
But it takes nothing from those who served in the so-called “good war” —or who were sacrificed in more recent and more dubious wars—to observe that resisting an unjust war can also make a generation “great.” Those who were born around the end of World War II, among whom I number myself, and came of age in the 1960s did something rare in the annals of nations: we rejected our own country’s “patriotic” call to fight, kill, and die in an unjust war.
Our generation recognized that the war in Vietnam was a barbaric crusade, a war against the people of Vietnam, and we declined to join the parade.
Many of our generation did participate in a fight for freedom—not with guns or bombs and not overseas, but here in the United States, confronting violent adversaries with peaceful determination in the civil rights movement.
Our generation was not unpatriotic. But we were revolted by the images we saw each day on television and in the newspapers, visions of burning Vietnamese villages, children scarred by napalm, and bullet-ridden bodies of babies, small children, women and old men.
We came to understand that the excuses for the mass murder were lies. America was neither defending itself in Vietnam—confirmed by the fact that communism did not wash over our shores after the war was lost—nor were we defending freedom or democracy by killing millions of civilians to preserve a succession of unpopular client regimes in South Vietnam.
My generation saw the evil of the war, and determined to refuse, avoid, evade or escape “service” in that war however we could.
By the end of the war, those members of our generation who had not succeeded in avoiding conscription—those in the dissolving U.S. military forces—also organized themselves against the war. They met in anti-war coffeehouses near military bases; they published hundreds of GI-written anti-war newspapers; they led peace demonstrations both in-country and at military bases in the U.S.; and they were often jailed for refusing to fight. Their opposition was critical to ending the war.
America needs to acknowledge that different generations are called to greatness in different ways.
Many of our generation did participate in a fight for freedom—not with guns or bombs and not overseas, but here in the United States, confronting violent adversaries with peaceful determination in the civil rights movement. Our freedom movement was a struggle for voting rights and human dignity, a fight against racism, segregation and white supremacy. That nonviolent movement ultimately brought down the South’s legal apartheid system and revived American democracy. And our movement triggered a resurgence of the women’s movement and inspired other movements for social justice.
America needs to acknowledge that different generations are called to greatness in different ways. The critical challenge taken up by today’s younger generations is that of climate change, which threatens the entire human race. May we live to celebrate their greatness in a future in which we have avoided the worst effects of climate change and have equitably protected those most likely to be victims of catastrophic global heating!
As we pay homage to the sacrifices of those who fought with guns, let us not glorify war itself nor see greatness most of all in violent, military approaches to the problems within and among nations. The generations of Americans who strove for justice through peaceful means are as worthy of memorialization and honor as the greatest of warriors.
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Tom Cotton: The Nation's Very Worst Veteran
At a time when the United States needs to be careful and clear-headed about how it responds to the Middle East crisis, Cotton’s cheerleading for devastating military action against Iran is deeply unhelpful.
May 08, 2024
The next time you see a politician’s lawn sign or hear a politician’s voice, saying, “Vote for a Vet,” you need to remember two things:
First, there are good veterans and there are bad veterans. The bad ones go all the way back to Benedict Arnold, a Revolutionary War turncoat whose name has become a handy shorthand for traitor. In more modern times, bad vets include Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, preventing the president from pulling American troops out of Vietnam, as he had planned, a murderous act that led to 58,000 American deaths in that war; Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; and Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer. That names a few.
Second, remember this: Probably the worst, most dangerous vet currently occupying a seat in the United States Congress is Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas. His latest bit of warmongering is a threat to the International Criminal Court, which has been investigating the way Israel is pursuing its war in Gaza. "Target Israel and we will target you," reads the letter, leaving zero doubt that he would love to make life difficult for the Court. Cotton not only signed it, but led in putting that threatening letter together, signed by 11 other senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
At a time when calmer voices are expressing something approaching alarm about the dangers of a possible wider war in the Middle East... Cotton has predictably thrown caution to the winds.
And this wasn't the first time that Cotton has led senators far senior to himself in seeking confrontation. Years ago, when President Barack Obama was negotiating a deal with Iran about nuclear weapons, Cotton intervened by putting together a letter to the Iranian mullahs, essentially warning them off the deal. In the Senate, an institution where seniority is everything, how did the youngest senator—at age 37 and with only two months of seniority—manage to persuade 46 other senators, with a total of 4,775 months of seniority (390 years), to join him in this bold venture? Was it the power of his intellect and his Harvard degrees? Was it his status as a combat veteran? Or was it the incipient aura of some future presidential candidacy?
None of this should come as a surprise, because Cotton clearly announced his fierce ideology in his maiden speech in the Senate. Cotton’s intense demeanor and appearance, right out of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look”) was fully on display from that moment on. He delivered that maiden speech on March 15, 2015—a date that brings to mind another Julius Caesar reference, “Beware the Ides of March.” It was a grim piece of our-enemies-are-coming-for-us rhetoric, painting a dark picture of America’s “retreat” and declining status in the world, raising concern about increasing threats from Russia and China and a list of other nations. To react to those threats, Cotton set out national goals of “global military dominance” and “hegemonic strength,” and he made absolutely clear where he stood on defense spending: America needs more—a lot more.
Cotton built the career leading to that speech with an impeccable academic and military resume. He earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, followed by a law degree from Harvard Law School. He has also checked the warrior box: After 9/11, he left the practice of law and spent nearly five years as an infantry officer, including deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. His time in combat boots does not appear to have soured him on war. That consistent bellicosity, plus his proven knack for making headlines, makes him especially scary. “He is my least favorite congressional veteran, maybe in history,” said Danny Sjursen, a former army major who also saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, taught history at West Point, and became as staunchly antiwar as Cotton is pro-war. “I mean, he’s that bad.”
As his leadership in that letter to Iran's mullahs demonstrates, the Arkansas Republican has had a fixation on Iran from his first moments in the Senate. Now, at a time when calmer voices are expressing something approaching alarm about the dangers of a possible wider war in the Middle East, and Iran gets mentioned often as a backer of terrorists, Cotton has predictably thrown caution to the winds. He has fired volleys of criticism at President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for being soft on Iran. Soft, of course, is a beloved word of Republican politicians. They emerge from the birth canal yelling, “You’re soft on national security,” or “You’re soft on crime.” Cotton is no exception.
The Iran letter was not the only time Cotton made headlines. In 2020, after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck until he died, protests broke out around the nation and the world. To Cotton and others, the sporadic violence arising from those protests was serious business. Cotton had long ago made clear his views on the issue of race relations. During his Harvard days, he had written a review of a book about race for the conservative Harvard Salient. Cotton claimed to have seen real progress on the issue of race, and all America really needed to do was to just quit talking about it so much. “If race relations are better now than at any time in our history and would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life, what would the self-appointed ‘civil rights leaders’ have to do with themselves? For this reason, they continue to make hysterical and wholly unsubstantiated claims that inflame public opinion and create a gnawing cynicism in the American people.”
His attack on the International Criminal Court, which is trying to investigate whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, is terrifying.
Suddenly, in 2020, that progress seemed to have ground to a halt with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. So Cotton weighed in loudly with an immediately controversial op-ed in the New York Times about the looting and violence that had broken out at a limited number of the protests. “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants,” Cotton wrote. “But the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes.” His solution: Invoke the Insurrection Act and call in the military.
Cotton’s op-ed, under the headline that the Times chose, “Send in the Troops,” caused an immediate uproar inside the Times. Dozens of staffers complained, many of them tweeting this line: “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” It didn’t take long for the paper’s leadership to issue an unusually earnest apology for not vetting the piece more carefully: “After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.” In the uproar, the paper’s opinion editor, James Bennet, acknowledged that he had not even read Cotton’s op-ed during the editing process and admitted that it was the Times that had invited the senator to write the piece. A few days after the op-ed ran, Bennet resigned from his senior position at perhaps the most powerful newspaper in the country. Cotton clearly has the power to shake things up.
At a time when the United States needs to be careful and clear-headed about how it responds to the Middle East crisis, Cotton’s cheerleading for devastating military action against Iran is deeply unhelpful. His attack on the International Criminal Court, which is trying to investigate whether Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, is terrifying. He is someone to be watched carefully, as Julius Caesar felt about Cassius. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
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