Commentary: How to stop veteran suicides
By Aaron Glantz | The Progressive Media Project
This Veterans Day, let's do more to prevent our troops from taking their own lives. Community colleges can play a pivotal role in the life-saving process.
Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day. One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. In January of this year, the Army reports, more of our active-duty soldiers killed themselves than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
It wasn't long ago that T.J. Boyd nearly became one of those statistics.
Boyd doesn't look like a disabled veteran. The 29-year-old former Marine sergeant sports a winning smile and shows no obvious wounds in his muscular 6-foot frame. He even runs his own personal training business out of his home in Sacramento, Calif.
But Boyd suffers from two of the invisible injuries of our wars: post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. And when he returned to his boyhood home in Southern Illinois after his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he nearly took his own life.
"I had a little .45 under my bar and I was just taking Jack Daniels to the head, just trying to drown myself and get some of that liquid courage," he says.
Boyd was pushed to the brink by a combination of combat stress, guilt and isolation that's all too common among soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
What saved his life was the love of a new girlfriend, who urged him to move out to California, and the veterans club at Sierra College near Sacramento, where he was able to share his experiences with other veterans and see that he was not alone.
Community colleges provide an ideal place for veterans to meet up with others just like themselves and process their combat traumas. Already, the VA reports more than 500,000 returning veterans are using their GI Bill to attend college, a number that's expected to swell even higher once the newer, expanded education benefit is fully implemented.
The vast majority of veterans are landing at community colleges like Sierra. In California, for instance, community colleges enrolled more than 15 times as many vets in 2007 as the University of California campuses did.
So it's at these community colleges that outreach efforts are most important. At Sierra College, veterans' counselor Catherine Morris has helped organize pizza parties and whitewater rafting trips. She has done this primarily on her own time and with next to no financial support from the government. But her efforts have nonetheless saved lives.
"Having a place where veterans can meet and greet and have that sense of belonging is so important," Morris explains. "There needs to be a place where they can give each other hope and share stories" - without anyone around to judge. The sense of camaraderie and the commitment to leave no one behind that exists on the battlefield can be created again in the classroom.
Unfortunately, six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, programs like the one at Sierra College are few and far between.
To do right by our veterans, we need to increase funding at our community colleges to establish counseling center and clubs for them. We can make our community colleges a safe home from the hell of war.
This is a matter of life and death.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Aaron Glantz is the author of the book "The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans." He is also a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow at the Carter Center in Atlanta and a fellow at the Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media and Columbia University. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Readers may write to the author at: Progressive Media Project, 409 East Main Street, Madison, Wis. 53703; e-mail: pmproj@progressive.org; Web site: www.progressive.org. For information on PMP's funding, please visit http://www.progressive.org/pmpabout.html#anchorsupport.
This article was prepared for The Progressive Media Project and is available to MCT subscribers. McClatchy-Tribune did not subsidize the writing of this column; the opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of McClatchy-Tribune or its editors.
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