"The Uncounted"

This story came about after a conversation with a friend whose husband had deployed many times to Afghanistan. “Wives are killing themselves,” she told me. “You should look into that.”

An Army wife had placed her baby and two-year-old in the backseat of her car and asphyxiated them all. Another wife had shot herself wearing her husband’s dog tags. Her death came just days after the Iraq veteran had ended his life. A pregnant wife had barricaded herself in her home near Fort Bragg. She killed herself, and her unborn child.

I spoke with spouse after spouse who told me that they’d attempted suicide. They said they were wrung out from so many years of deployments, long stretches that they feared their spouse would never come home, wracked with guilt over the damage America’s longest wars had inflicted on their children. Some had struggled with depression before what they termed “The Deployment Monster” had taken over their lives. 

Soon, I was talking with parents of service members who had also attempted suicide, unable to find the will to live after they’d lost a son or daughter at war. Then came interviews with siblings of service members who felt the same desperation but also the sting of alienation from the rest of the military family member community. No one considered the weight of their grief, they said. Like parents, siblings are protectors. “How am I going to protect them now?” a sister thought, as she watched her two brothers head to war. She was unmoored by their deaths. 

Children, too, were reeling. A teenager whose father came home with severe PTSD said she both feared him and loved him more than ever. “No one knew about my suicidal thoughts,” she told me.

While the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and U.S. Department of Defense had made strides in keeping track of the suicides of veterans and active-duty service members, they did not track the deaths of these family members. It is often said that when a soldier goes to war, so too does his or her family. So why not count suicides among family members? I got no satisfying answers. The DOD and Congress appeared to be slow in working on it, and that effort came in 2014 after these families had endured more than a decade of war. 

Impact:

Shortly after “Uncounted” published, Congress asked the U.S. Defense Department to collect data on the number of military family members who die by suicide