Veterans’ Suicides and Selective Conscientious Objection from SOJO 8NOV10

NOT being a vet, I appreciate the elloquence of Logan Mehl-Laituri

This is the fourth installment of a series Logan Mehl-Laituri is writing for God’s Politics focusing on selective conscientious objection.  Read his first, second, and third installments here.
This week we celebrate Veterans Day. For me, it is a tragic holiday. I know many do not share that perspective. Sometimes it is easy to overlook the fact that veterans are a troubled minority, living sometimes in heartbreaking silence about the pain we bear for the things we have done or left undone in combat. When I came home in February of 2005, I was bombarded by banners thanking me for my service; service which, just days prior in the streets of Mosul, had left people dead or wounded. What was I being thanked for?
That moral ambiguity has left me and other veterans with deep moral questions about our service. Some of my compatriots, even my own team leader (a non commissioned officer) would go on to attempt suicide because the ambiguity was so overpowering.  Another NCO on my team turned to crystal methamphetamine, but lower enlisted guys could only afford alcohol. We were not given the opportunity to grieve what we had done; our moral consciences were as scarred as our minds and our bodies. We were not allowed to heal properly, and society does not know how to deal with us.
The moral injury I experienced in my own unit was a mere fraction of what was then only an epidemic-to-be. That year, in 2005, CBS acquired suicide data from 45 States regarding the numbers of suicides among veterans. (The Veterans Administration lied about tracking the data.) The results were, and remain, staggering; 17 veterans successfully committed suicide every single calendar day. That is worse than any other demographic on record, and was the worst rate in our nation’s history.
Since then, we have consistently broken national records for soldier and veteran suicides. For active duty troops, more have killed themselves this year than have been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The rate of suicide among veterans increased 26 percent for veterans ages 18 to 29. I am certainly no statistician, but that seems to suggest that something like 21 OIF and OEF veterans killed themselves yesterday. And will do so today. And tomorrow. And the next day ….
That is no reason to celebrate. This is a reason to change the way we engage in war fighting, and how we treat those who fight in our name. Instead of trying to merely treat the symptom of suicide, we need to practice preventative care. We need to ensure that service members are provided with the opportunity to respond genuinely to their God-given consciences.  We need to amend military regulations to allow those who want to serve their country honorably to do so conscientiously.
Most importantly, we need to be able to have meaningful national conversations about war’s consequence on the individual combatant.  Pastors need to preach about the war, friends and family need to prepare themselves to hear about its effects, and the church needs to create the space for congregants to respond genuinely to it’s moral challenges. This Veterans Day, consider mourning the deplorable situation veterans face before celebrating our service. There is a time for joy, and there is a time for grief, but until we can curb the epidemic of suicide, I see little cause for celebration.
Logan Mehl-Laituri is an Army veteran with combatant service in Iraq during OIF II and has experience with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Israel and the West Bank. He blogs sporadically and is a co-founder of Centurion’s Guild. The second public hearing for the Truth Commission on Conscience in War will be held November 11-12, 2010, in Washington, D.C. Learn more at www.conscienceinwar.org.