White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Brain Injuries From Blasts Driving Young Vets to Suicide

by Leave a Comment

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Larkin says his son became withdrawn and “stopped smiling, as if a mask had been put over his face.”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.

Veterans Who Have Borne the Battle Suffer the Peace in Isolation

U.S. Army veteran saluting during a Veterans Day parade

by Leave a Comment

For those who serve in the military, that is the ultimate bonding time: Camaraderie beyond imagining and sharing beyond compare. Laughing, fearing, hurting, hoping, and, sometimes, dying together. A time when the future is just a day ahead, a command away and if in combat, a time when death can arrive in an instant.

When men and women survive in the military, their greatest struggle lies ahead: Reentering civilian life.

Coming home, demobilized, set adrift in a sea of indifference, the veteran is separated from the ties that bind, in a world of alien values, mixed signals, and terrible, inescapable, nightmarish loneliness. This is compounded by the stresses of finding accommodation, work, and a purposeful life.

Our returning veterans are committing suicide at a greater rate than at any other time in our history. In recognition of Veterans Day, I talked with Frank Larkin, who works to connect Americans, especially those who have worn or are wearing the uniform, with veterans through a simple call and to help vets navigate their lives after service.

Larkin is a former Navy SEAL, a former U.S. Senate sergeant at arms, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, and he has worn the uniform of two police departments. But mostly, he is the grieving father of Ryan, a Navy SEAL who saw duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and who took his own life five years ago.

“I couldn’t save my own son,” he told me in an emotional moment during the interview I did with him on “White House Chronicle” on PBS.

Currently, Larkin is chief operating officer of the Troops First Foundation and chairman of the Warrior Call Initiative.

Larkin said “isolation” is the biggest pressure on former troops. They are cut off from the world they know – which he called “their tribe” — and plunged into one they don’t know, alone with their memories. These can amount to what Larkin calls “moral damage,” things that they have done and seen in the battle space which they can’t share with the civilian world. Things that have changed them.

Larkin said of his own son, “He came back changed. I could see it, but I couldn’t reach him, nor could my wife who is a medical professional.”

There are physical injuries as well. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the best known, but there are others. For example, Larkin said, today’s weaponry may be damaging troops, especially in training. Blast waves and repeated recoil shaking may be causing Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which is different from the brain injury suffered by football players. With TBI, there are minute tears in the brain which can’t be detected with normal brain scans.

These blast or shock waves from high-velocity weapons are a constant in training. Larkin noted that when a soldier fires a Carl Gustav shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, “It’s like getting your head blown off.”

After World War II, there were ticker tape parades. Every warrior was a hero. Everyone had served or knew someone who had served. The war had been a common shared experience. Most men and a lot of women had “done their bit” in the parlance of the Greatest Generation.

That began to change with Korea, and especially with Vietnam; returning troops weren’t celebrated and those wars weren’t a matter of national pride.

Then the draft ended, Larkin reminded me, and going to war ceased to be a shared experience. It became a discrete occupation, although U.S. troops have been at war or in harm’s way for two decades now. But without the draft, it is out of mind, out of sight, out of caring. Many of us don’t know a single veteran in these days of the volunteer army. We respect them in absentia, sometimes just on Veterans Day.

If all isn’t well with mental health out there in the battle space of civilian life, it isn’t well inside the military either. Suicide among serving men and women, is at record highs too.

More veterans have died from suicide than died in Vietnam combat, Larkin said. His initiative, Warrior Call, advocates that a simple phone call can save a life. “‘How are you doing? I’m thinking about you, buddy,’ is all you have to do,” Larkin said.

Veterans Day has become about sales and discounts, less and less about those who have borne and battle and now must bear the aftermath, often in terrible isolation.