Army Declares New All-Out “War” on Soldier Suicide – Saving Traumatized Heroes Lives

“Understanding of the whole person and ensuring that the whole person is equipped to face what we are asking them to do. We are inviting people into a loving community and we are asking a lot of them, so we must prepare them for their very worst day,”………. MG Thomas Solhjem, 25th Army Chief of Chaplains

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington DC) US Army post-combat soldier suicides are unspeakably traumatic, devastating and tragic, as they often both end lives with unwanted violence and shatter other lives with loss and life-long pain and confusion. Perhaps no-one can fully comprehend or analyze the ineffable mixture of variables which ultimately cause such tragedy, yet the complexity of the task has not slowed down what could be described as the Army’s increasingly intense “war on suicide.”

Suicide prevention and resilience, long emphasized in the Army, has taken on new urgency in recent decades during and after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin writes, “one death by suicide is too many.” The numbers of veteran suicides are alarming, as they have increased massively in the last several decades since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. An interesting essay from the American Addiction Centers reports that, in 2020, there were 6,146 veteran suicides, an average of 16.8 per day.

“Additionally, in the two decades between 2001 and 2020, the prevalence of mental health or substance use disorder (SUD) among participants using Veterans Health Administration (VHA) rose from 27.9% to 41.9%,” the essay states.

There may simply be no words which can capture the irreparable pain and loss caused when soldiers who risk their lives for all of us tragically take their own lives amid pain, confusion, guilt and the pure trauma of war. Although language itself may seem insufficient to capture the limitlessness of the loss, pain and emotional wreckage caused by soldier suicide, it aligns with dark phrases used by Mary Shelley in her famous 19th Century Gothic Novel Frankenstein wherein she uses descriptions such as “heart sickening despair,” “devouring blackness of melancholy” and “your disaster is irreparable.” Indeed there may be some pains and traumatic events which themselves defy description and for which there is ultimately no answer or reasonable explanation. However, these complexities are not impeding the Army’s massive, comprehensive, community and nation-wide campaign to stop soldier suicide. Should one life be saved because one suicide was prevented, then the entire effort of the Army and joint community would be more than worth it.

Certainly, prevention efforts have already saved lives, a reason perhaps why the Department of Defense and the Department of the Army continue to massively accelerate, expand and uptick suicide prevention initiatives.

While suicide prevention has long been on the radar with the Army, the need has become even more pressing in light of continued statistics and soldier suicide rates which simply remain much too high. With this in mind, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin launched a specific, measured effort in 2022 to break new ground in the ongoing battle to save lives of those who suffered in combat. In March of 2022, Austin established the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, an integrated, multi-faceted initiative to better understand and therefore prevent soldier suicide.