Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day.1 One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month.2 More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas. These are statistics that most Americans don’t know, because the government has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, official Washington has tried to present it as a war without casualties.
In fact, these statistics never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental-health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones. The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense v. Peake, went to trial in April 2008 at a federal courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides will no doubt be battling it out in court for years, but the case is already having an impact.
That’s because over the course of the two-week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis affecting wounded soldiers.
“Shh!” began one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA’s Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that one thousand veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail concludes.3
Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz’s resignation. The chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA), weighed in as well. “We should all be angry about what has gone on here,” Filner said. “This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that’s not criminal negligence, I don’t know what is.”4
It’s also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren’t the only government statistics the Bush administration was forced to reveal because of the class-action lawsuit. Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, 2008, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.5
Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not made public on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon reports regularly on the numbers of American troops “wounded” in Iraq (32,224 as of June 1, 2008) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories: “injured” and “ill” (together 39,430).6 All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but splitting up the numbers minimizes the sense of casualties in the public consciousness.
Here’s another number that we don’t often hear discussed in the media: 287,790.7 That’s the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs as of March 25, 2008. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but had to be obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.
Each number in these statistics represents the suffering of a patriotic American who signed up for the U.S. Armed Forces and agreed to go anywhere in the world at the order of their commander in chief. As the testimony offered at Winter Soldier shows, veterans have been lied to twice—first about the reasons for going to war and second about the government’s commitment to take care of them when they get home.