U.S. troops are losing a war with their deadliest enemy, writes Nick Turse.
U.S. Army soldiers during a firefight with Taliban forces in Barawala Kalay Valley in Kunar province, Afghanistan, March 31, 2011. (U.S. Army, Cameron Boyd, Public domain)
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 percent — 883 troops — took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.
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 percent 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’ by Rise in Suicides
In June, a New York Times front-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.
U.S. soldiers cover their ears as they fire a 120m mortar round during a live fire exercise on Sept. 20, 2012, at the Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii’s Big Island. (Department of Defense, Michael R. Holzworth)
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.
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 percent 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
A former explosive ordnance disposal technician who suffers from PTSD and traumatic brain injury after combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq , displays a mask he painted in Hanover, Pa., April 5, 2017. (J.M. Eddins Jr., Airman Magazine Flicker, CC BY-NC 2.0)
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 percent of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.
The New York Times recently 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-health care 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 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
Members of the Obama administration in the Situation Room, tracking the mission that killed Bin Laden, May 1, 2011. (Pete Souza/White House Flickr Feed, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
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,” 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.
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.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author most recently of Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan and of the bestselling Kill Anything That Moves.
This article is from TomDispatch.com.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The only thing I see missing from this very good essay and excellent comments is this:
Look at the family structure. Every child I’ve known who joined the military came from miserable circumstances. I don’t mean they lacked money, but they had not been raised with love and structure. Both of one woman’s sons joined up; she had left her husband, hooked up with another woman, said woman abused her two sons and mother did nothing about it. They joined up to find a daddy, and that’s what your sergeant is, the daddy who orders you to write your mother every week.
My brother-in-law joined up. His father was a monster and his mother was passive and didn’t like her male children. In the Air Force he found a daddy figure. A wonderful minister I had joined the Air Force; she had basically had no mother, so wasn’t nurtured.
I believe these are common patterns. The socioeconomic stuff is nonsense. Here in Maine we have a very high veteran population, and we also have community colleges which are all over the state with very reasonable tuition. I think a lot of men push their sons into the military “to make men out of them” and follow in the family tradition. No one does this who deeply cares about their children’s welfare, but I have not met many parents who qualify as even “good enough.” When you think you’re worthless, why not go into the military, especially when your parent/s have told you nothing about the world?
The civilian population of Gaza, on a daily basis, suffer the worst combat soldiers ever face.
Thank You Nick
Overlooked is the cocktail of Psychiatric drugs they are forced to take. Those drugs cause suicide and violence. Taxpayers are paying for that suicide and violence in the name of mental health. But those Psychiatric drugs destroy physical and mental health. The prescribers love the immoral kickbacks they get. But they don’t help our troops. Get educated. Watch the online free documentary “The Hidden Enemy” at the Citizens Commission on Human Rights website. Also recommended is the “Making a Killing” Documentary.
It is all capitalism. The reasons for those wars, all the lies, the propaganda, the corruption, is all capitalist business. So many people need the prescription drugs to try to cope in an insane society. But, they cannot. Most people in US society are half psychotic because they are deceived and ripped-off incessantly. The US could not do a good, right, moral thing if its existence depended on it; and it does. The US, and most of the world, is doomed by capitalism, US capitalism and “morals”. If things really were as US leaders say, and if the US were the force of good, and freedom, and democracy, and liberty as US leaders say, and if their mission were rightful and true, then there would be nowhere near the number of suicides and mass slaughters in the US. All those suicides and murders do not happen for no reason. But, never mind that; just hope the economy is doing good. Do as w bush said, and get out there “and shop”.
Excellent, Tov. What can one think of a country that cares nothing for the health of its citizens and only sees them as something to squeeze more profits out of? We are poisoning our babies, our children, our teenagers, and our adults, all for more bucks in the pockets of the parasites. I had someone say to me, “But white-collar criminals aren’t violent.” My response: So you don’t see killing working men and women on job sites as violence? You don’t see poisoning and sickening people as violence? You don’t see destroying the environment as violence? (I got no response.) Things are even worse than they were when Ferdinand Lundberg wrote The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968), explaining how corporate crimes are basically just laughed off.
America is much too DUMB…too sanguine to understand this.
The choice of not sending our youth into combat for no good reason is never an option.
I wonder if Russian troops commit suicide at rates similar to those reported in the article above. TBI seems to be a big part of the story, but it seems reasonable to me that a soldier defending his homeland against an aggressor would be more determined to endure the physical trauma resulting from such an ordeal than a soldier doing the dirty work for an aggressor.
I remember very well a US combat veteran from Iraq on National Public Radio in 2004 telling the radio audience that suicide was not a problem among veterans returning home. He claimed the reports of increased suicide among veterans was a lie. He was quite insistent. Obviously, we’ve been gaslighted for decades. If you watch the news broadcasts from the actual date of 9/11, there is still journalism going on. The next day, however, was the beginning of the propaganda infusion we’ve been drowning in for years. The two-minute hate is now a two-minute chill-0ut. It’s all okay, no matter what happens, until someone pulls the trigger of the gun we loaded once more.
He was quite insistent? I’m sure he was. That was in 2004.
The corporatized process of commodifying human beings is spiritual rape. Wars to seize valuable material (oil, precious metals) in the ultimate servicing of Great Big Money’s profits, is also spiritual rape. The fact that suicide prevention program’s prodigiously fail because of the quality or psychological deficits of the military Big Guns are incapable of feeling the loss of human life. You do not protect that for which you have no feeling for. Look at the USA leadership in government, media, corporations. Contrast that with a President and man like AMLO. Look at the anointing of Harris by the Democratic corporatized bigwigs. Is that a process by people with deep feelings for the well being of the American people? Where the American people have zero participation in the selection of presidential nominees that an open convention would offer. And are structurally excluded. Why? Because their inclusion would be “too messy and too risky.”
This article should be a must read to anyone contemplating on enlisting and joining the military.
Yes. At the least, if you know of any young person thinking of joining the military, tell them don’t do it!
Many people around the world suffer concussions as our helpful contribution too. Some may retaliate on other ways.
Many like bin Laden got strategic training from our CIA and military.
Healthy humans are not designed to kill and maim. They can do it when a cause is just, such as literally fighting for their freedom or their homeland but an immoral and unnecessary war will poison their minds, hearts and souls.
In all likelihood, the military brass would rather not be informed of the mental damage to combatants. That way they can claim they knew nothing about it and continue to send troops into combat with a clear conscience.
I have no sympathy for U.S. soldiers who need to be held accountable for the massive amount of death and destruction they have wreaked on people who’s only crime is to not be one of us, and to have something we want.
Your statement is holding individual soldiers responsible for the policies of the U.S. government and its military, and that is nonsense. Individual soldiers do not decide where they are going to be sent and against whom they will be ordered to fight. Once in the military they are required to obey orders, although the Code of Military Conduct allows some soldiers in theory to disobey an order subject to particular situations. What you are expecting is that those who join the military disobey orders in active war zones. That’s a court martial offense. Put the blame where it belongs, on the ones who decide which people who ‘are not one of us’ to go after. Those decisions are made from the White House on down through the chain of command with major input by the CIA and other unelected government departments.
“Your statement is holding individual soldiers responsible for the policies of the U.S. government and its military, and that is nonsense.”
You are wrong. The U.S. military (at least currently) is a volunteer organization hence being part of it is the responsibility of the individuals in it. As I noted above many may join it due to financial pressure which simply makes their choice more understandable if they were horn-swoggled by the pervasive propaganda that permeates the U.S. public but it’s still a choice.
Back in 1968 when the draft still existed I had the sense to refuse to be inducted and face jail time for doing so for exactly the reasons you note above. I was lucky: my draft board decided to classify me as a conscientious objector (something usually done only on religious grounds which did not apply to me) and to require me to perform 2 years of ‘alternative service’ as a hospital orderly. Other options back then included going underground or seeking refuge in Canada without taking an explicit stance against the Vietnam war in a prosecutable manner if you were caught and there were ways to obtain draft deferments and avoid facing the issue entirely at least temporarily.
Every U.S. citizen bears some responsibility for the military actions of our government if they do not take actions to oppose them. That’s one of the inconveniences of living in an at least nominal democracy, as is possibly suffering the consequences of attacks on our country for its military misbehavior.
And what actions do you suggest we take to oppose them? You are crazy and ill informed. Every revolution with the most recent being the muslim brotherhood in Egypt drafting a constitution, almost immediately violating it, and thrown out on it’s arse by the Military is always the same. Whoever has the military on their side wins.
“Your statement is holding individual soldiers responsible for the policies of the U.S. government and its military, and that is nonsense.”
Your comment is nonsense. The U.S. military (at least currently) is a volunteer organization hence being part of it is the responsibility of the individuals in it. As I noted earlier many may join it due to financial pressure which simply makes their choice more understandable if they were horn-swoggled by the pervasive propaganda that permeates the U.S. public but it’s still a choice.
Back in 1968 when the draft still existed I had the sense to refuse to be inducted and faced jail time for doing so for exactly the reasons you note above. I was lucky: my draft board decided to classify me as a conscientious objector (something usually done only on religious grounds which did not apply to me) and to require me to perform 2 years of ‘alternative service’ as a hospital orderly. Other options back then included going underground or seeking refuge in Canada without taking an explicit stance against the Vietnam war in a prosecutable manner if you were caught and there were ways to obtain draft deferments and avoid facing the issue entirely at least temporarily.
Every U.S. citizen bears some responsibility for the military actions of our government if they do not take actions to oppose them. That’s one of the inconveniences of living in an at least nominal democracy, as is possibly suffering the consequences of attacks on our country for its military misbehavior. The same observation applies of course to Israel as well.
That’s an eminently reasonable attitude which I’ve held ever since reaching maturity during the ’60s, but it has taken me that long to understand just how incompetent the American public is to withstand the degree and pervasiveness of manipulation it is subject to that distracts it from how evil and accomplished their self-selected thought leaders are in distracting it by using and creating mundane issues to keep their attention focused elsewhere. This also applies to the ground-pounders in the military who often cannot find remunerative employment elsewhere in part because our educational system has been sufficiently polluted to ensure that they aren’t qualified to get it.
I still find sympathy difficult to dredge up for those whose humanity has been destroyed by this process (though the suicide rate suggests that some of their humanity may still exist), but some pity might be justifiable.
Sadly, “the universal soldier” is the eternal problem, as the old song went. “Just obeying orders” went out of fashion a long time ago. Without men, and now, god help us, women, willing to carry out orders, the amoral power addicts who inhabit the top tier of just about every human hierarchy would be harmless.
It is hard to be optimistic about the future of our preternaturally aggressive primate species. Once unquestioning obedience to the commands of the pack’s alpha male was how we survived; now it is likely to be how we will perish.
There’s a touching old sci-fi story about a race of intelligent dogs who inherited the earth after humanity annihilated itself in nuclear war. The dogs remembered their former companions, the “websters”, with enduring affection, and also with great compassion, for the poor apes who learned how to duplicate the power of the sun but who lacked the wisdom not to burn their paws with it.
Absolutely correct. Refuse to serve the “war pigs”
I work on brain injury and none of this is surprising at all. This is what we would expect. You can’t send people into combat and expect the survivors to be alright. That isn’t how diffuse, blast injury to the brain works. If you want to put an end to this problem, you need to stop having wars of choice. But this extends beyond combat to sports. I knew Tom McHale of the Miami Dolphins, who committed suicide in 2008 and was found to have post-traumatic encephalopathy from head injuries. This is a problem that encompasses war and certain contact sports. Brain injury is permanent.
You are quite right. But when things like money or politics are involved, the human material used is never considered.
war=money=death
Here is a military suicide prevention protocol: Stop promoting wars all over the world
This is one of many things that deserves attention but will not get better soon. After all, many join the military imagining that they will do something legitimate and valuable, for which they will be amply thanked. The lessons are stark.
Thank you for this article. It takes a special kind of conditioning to override the natural human inclination to not kill another human. It’s dreadful that the military doesn’t take the experience of combat violence seriously. But then, if they did, we perhaps would find that we do not need the military in its current form.
Well, what do you expect when our government sends young men and women to kill innocents in foreign countries so they can steal their natural resources? War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing – except padding the pockets of billionaires…
@susan:
exactly!
before it serves the undertaker,
it serves the war machine maker.
because “peace does not pay!” as they say.
and too many agree, quite unfortunately.
in my EU country, the CEO of one such
arms manufacturer recently received a
death threat – which he found uncalled for,
of course.
but killing the manufacturers
wouldn’t change the deadly system …