White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Brain Injuries From Blasts Driving Young Vets to Suicide

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We all get a warm glow when we hear the airline gate agent inviting active-duty service members to board early. What isn’t said, isn’t known, is that some of those young men and women will die eventually by their own hands, and at nearly three times the rate of civilians in the same under-34 age group.

Veterans, particularly young veterans, men and women, are in danger of walking on the dark side in terrible isolation, despair and misery — in a darkness so extreme it defies comprehension by those who are in the light.

These veterans are the victims of traumatic brain injury, a hard-to-diagnose and treat brain wounding by the force of shock waves from explosive blasts. The shock waves can cause minute tears or other damage that medical imaging and blood tests can’t detect in a living patient.

Frank Larkin, who heads up Warrior Call, an organization devoted to helping TBI-afflicted veterans, knows the problem in a savagely personal way: His son, Ryan, a decorated Navy SEAL, took his life at age 29. He was a victim of TBI.

Larkin is a former Navy SEAL, a police officer, a Secret Service agent and a U.S. Senate sergeant at arms. He is a passionate advocate for research, understanding, compassion and giving veterans an ecosystem in which they can feel secure, comforted and part of a tribal continuance that extends from the time in service to life in the civilian world.

Thomas Bowman, a Marine for 30 years and later the Republican staff director of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and deputy secretary of the Veterans Administration in the first Trump administration, knows the issue from its institutional challenges.

Larkin and Bowman joined me and my colleague, Adam Clayton Powell III, on the PBS and SiriusXM Radio program “White House Chronicle” to discuss a disturbing uptick in veteran suicide from TBI.

When a sufferer seeks and receives medical help, the chances are it will be treated as psychological rather than physical in origin. Bowman stresses how important records and continuity of monitoring are. He believes artificial intelligence will be a great asset in managing veterans’ medical histories and ensuring they are seen as a continuum, not a series of disjointed episodes.

Larkin says his son became withdrawn and “stopped smiling, as if a mask had been put over his face.” He knew his problem, but he was unable to overcome it, even with a dedicated support system. Before he took his life, Ryan asked that his brain be donated to science.

TBI victims can suffer from frequent headaches, sleeplessness, brain fog and shortened tempers. Drugs, alcohol and homelessness complicate and worsen their predicament.

Larkin says young veterans can find themselves “in a very dark place, suffering invisible wounds.”

Things are getting worse on the battlefield. Drones are an increased source of brain damage. These, Larkin and Bowman point out, are unlike mortars and improvised explosive devices: They explode on the same plane as soldiers’ heads.

Not all the damage takes place on the battlefield. Some of it can be part of routine training, the frequent exposure to everything from a soldier’s weapon to artillery and mortar live-fire practice.

Larkin and Bowman speak of the good work at the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also of the numbing bureaucracy there. Larkin regrets the loss of 30,000 personnel at the VA in recent government trimming.

Nonetheless, the rate of veteran suicide is going up, according to the latest VA report. The overall rate for veterans of all ages, based on data through 2023, was 35.2 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 34.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2022. The suicide rate for civilians of all ages was half the rate.

Suicide among veterans is the 12th-leading cause of death for veterans overall but the leading cause of death for veterans under 45, the VA report found.

As a former homicide detective, Larkin believes these suicides are underreported. He says this is sometimes to protect a family and for other reasons.

All suicides are terrible but particularly when the victims are young and have come to that bleak place because they served.

Beware the Armchair Terrorist

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Terrorism isn’t what it used to be. Disruptive technology is at work, and terrorism is much more threatening than it was.

The long-running, terrorist wars of the last century – like those of the Palestinians, the Basques in Spain, or the Kurds in Turkey – were relatively contained, both in the fields of operation and the political motivations.

The new face of terrorism is more awful, more random, and has little of the political purpose of terrorism of the past, however terrible its consequences were.

A new generation of robots is coming, which will make remotely controlled terrorism a real threat throughout the world. Add to that threat the profound difference in terrorism motivation.

Yesterday’s terrorism, though heinous, could claim high purpose: It was wholesale terrorism with political goals to be attained by murder and destruction of civilian targets. Today’s terrorism, by contrast, is increasingly retail, motivated by hatred and revenge. Often the motivation is more religious than nationalistic. The 9/11 attacks were the harbinger of this new terrorism.

Now take blind, irrational hatred, as in the Middle East, mix it with killer robots technology, and you have a huge global threat.

In May, the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons convened a first-ever meeting of experts in Geneva to discuss Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which could be the start of a wave of anonymous killing across continents and oceans.

These new robotic weapons can do everything that a human with a bomb or improvised explosive can do. The old brake on terrorism — that the terrorist would be caught or, more likely, be killed in the attack — could be over. The age of the armchair terrorist is at hand.

We have all seen the carnage from a simple bomb made from fuel oil and fertilizer. Now add to that the possibility that bombs and other weapons could be made and stored for future detonation using mobile phone technology; or that remotely operated vehicles could drive down a street with machine guns blazing.

Then there are drones. The United States has pioneered the highly sophisticated Predator — remotely-piloted vehicles that can destroy a target across continents and oceans with precision. But non-lethal drones are doing all sorts of work, from examining pipelines to determining the views from potential skyscrapers in New York.

Not only will tomorrow’s terrorists have farther reach, but they will also have the Internet to create chaos. Imagine a Web whisper about a drone armed with biological or chemical agents flying over a big city, its effects magnified by public panic. Likewise, a drone armed with a dirty nuclear weapon – its impact is likely to be quite limited, but the public panic over radiation could cause severe incident.

Israel may have been more panicked over the appearance of a drone from Gaza than the rockets that the Iron Dome missile system took out. A slow-moving drone at rooftop level might one day be a greater threat than a fusillade of high-flying rockets.

The late James Schlesinger, a former Defense secretary and CIA director, liked to discuss the British Empire with me and how it had held together. Because I had grown up in a British colony, he thought I could tell him.

The answer is a combination of economics, psychology and formation before the worldwide proliferation of small arms and explosives. It was fundamental after the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 that weapons be kept strictly in the hands of the British. African regiments and police, for example, were seldom armed, and then only for special purposes.

Schlesinger emphasized that all arms developments demanded further developments, because your enemy would soon catch up with you. This has happened throughout history: The British invented the tank in World War I, the Germans perfected it in World War II and overran Europe with its Panzer divisions.

Those who hate the West may use its own technologies to attack it at random with remote-controlled weapons, mobile phones, Google maps, and vehicles invented in America. Disruptive technologies are coming to terrorism — and that’s a horror. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate