I watched WPS ep. 004 with Jeff Strueker which included a great discussion on moral courage vs insulated comfort. This prompted me to start a thread here regarding some work I've done the past five years on "scary things to do." Now, I am a service academy grad and led over 300 outside-the-wire missions in Afghanistan, so after 25 years AD I am not a stranger to fear/discomfort. But five years ago I "hoisted the black flag, spit on my hands, and started slitting throats" figuratively on the issue of veteran suicide. Wow. I did not expect the "scary" that came with it, especially from the veteran community. I reside in the #3 city in the US for veteran population density, and so I figured "what better place than to create a 'for real' effort to fight veteran suicide and make an authentic effort to address it?"
Why this particular challenge? I am convinced that this is the "World War 2/Normandy/Manhattan Project" of our generation. And I don’t even mean the “22 a day” thing, but according to the VA’s official (and probably low ball) numbers, there have been at least 6,000 veteran suicides per year from 2001-2020. The number is certainly bigger, but the official tally is at least 120,000 dead veterans by their own hand in the past 20 years. That makes veteran suicide in this period more deadly for American troops than World War 1 (about 117k), or if you combine US deaths from all causes all wars from Korea+Vietnam+Desert Storm+Iraq+Afghanistan (about 101k). That’s insane.
So I created a 501(c)3 called the Warrior Healing Center (WHC) dedicated to “veteranology” or the science of why we are doing this to ourselves despite the fact that the VA has made it their top priority the last 10 years or so. As soon as we started operations, we had local “influencers” come warn us “you better not talk about veteran suicide” and “we take care of our veterans here—don’t talk about that.” So we started asking questions like “so how many veterans killed themselves here in the past year? Two years? Five years?” Guess what? No one knows because we don’t have a coroner and “not my job, man.” So we spend the next 3 years fighting the resistance and finally convince a neighboring county’s medical examiner to do the counting for us. Turns out, our veterans here are a 2 times the risk for suicide as the national average. Also turns out, mention that and the hammer falls on you.
We have had the state department of veterans affairs come after us, local veteran support ops don’t want to work with us, and the local “charities” don’t want to give us grants, etc. Just last year, we had 574 new veterans come to us to request some form of life assistance (which we provided), 61 of which self-identified as “a danger to myself or others.” Of those, zero have hurt anyone and are still enrolled in our programs. OBTW, the county suicide rate dropped by 27% in the past year. People don’t want to talk about it because one of our main points is that the veteran suicide problem is not by nature a mental health problem. We make the distinction that it is a psychological crisis problem—it isn’t that veterans are crazy or have lost touch with reality—it is that veterans are all too aware of the reality that the VA and the government they served don’t get it. The support systems veterans need are community based, not merely government based. So communities need to start taking responsibility for their veteran families in a very real way BEFORE the crises that lead to suicide. We’re doing that every day, without any pay, with the ire of so many around us. It is my “scary thing to do” but it helps a lot of veterans who would be otherwise silent losses.
The Warrior Healing Center is my act of moral courage. I challenge everyone here to do something to fight this problem.