Pentagon Data Shows High Suicide Rates Among Troops Exposed to Blasts

"A military report on suicide rates broken down by occupation finds the highest rates among categories of troops that often work and train around weapons blasts.

Troops whose jobs can expose them repeatedly to blasts have among the highest suicide rates in the armed forces, according to a new report by the Defense Department.

The report, released on Wednesday, lists the suicide rates for each military occupational specialty between 2011 and 2022.

Explosives ordinance disposal team members, who disable roadside bombs and routinely train and work around very large blasts, had the highest suicide rate — 34.77 deaths per 100,000 people per year — followed by infantry and special operations forces; armor crews; and artillery troops; whose rates are closer to 30 deaths per 100,000.

The rates for these combat occupations are roughly twice those of service members who work in noncombat jobs like data processing or food service.

The current national rate for civilians is about 14 deaths per 100,000 per year.

The report released on Wednesday does not mention blast exposure as a factor, and offers no insights into what may be contributing to the different suicide rates. Still, the correlation between deaths by suicide and levels of blast exposure is a common theme in the figures.

Defense Department studies suggest that most blast exposure happens in training, not combat.

In the Air Force, where blast exposure is rare, there were no significant differences in suicide rates among different military occupations. But among Army and Marine Corps troops, the rates are elevated wherever blasts are part of daily work.

“This comes as no surprise,” said Chuck Stansberry, a recently retired Navy master chief who worked in explosives ordinance disposal for most of his career. “I can’t tell you how many guys I know who have died of suicide.”

Troops in his career field train around blasts on almost a weekly basis, and can be exposed to blasts of 1,000 pounds, he said. While they are required by safety guidelines to keep their distance to avoid having their eardrums blown out, the guidelines take no account of blast exposure risk to their brains.

Blast exposure has long been a misunderstood hazard, Mr. Stansberry said, adding that by the end of his career, he was grappling with sleeplessness, depression and severe memory problems.

“A lot of us are like that,” he said. “It’s not psychological — there is something physiologically wrong. And a lot of guys struggle.”

The report said that 5,997 service members died by suicide between 2011 and 2022 — more than six times the number killed in combat during the same period.

Eight Navy SEALs who died by suicide in the last 10 years, and whose brains were then studied in a specialized laboratory, all showed characteristic signs of damage caused by repeated blast exposure, an investigation by The New York Times found.

The overall suicide rate in the military has been increasing for 20 years. The stresses of war were long thought to be a driving factor in the increase, but the trend has continued even as the combat tempo has ebbed over the last decade, leaving many military leaders perplexed.

For years, the military has taken a one-size-fits-all approach to suicide prevention, stressing education of troops about the signs of suicide risk and the availability of mental health care. It has done comparatively little to pinpoint upstream causes.

The Defense Department report was initiated by Senator Angus King of Maine, who released the findings on Wednesday. In a statement, Mr. King said he hoped the data would guide the military “in its efforts to curb suicide rates and hopefully save lives.”

Legislation introduced by Mr. King that is pending in Congress would require the military to start releasing data on suicide by career field each year.

Mr. King and 10 other senators sent a letter in May to Congressional leaders expressing their concern that shock waves from weapons blasts may be causing brain injuries that go unrecognized by the military. “We need to better understand the potential physical, cognitive and behavioral impacts that exposure to these shock waves can have on service members,” the letter said.

Suicide is complex and rarely hinges on a single factor, but a number of studies, including some funded by the Defense Department, have shown that traumatic brain injuries can increase the risk.

Blast waves surging repeatedly through the brain can destroy cells, fray connections and lead to a tangle of mental health problems that are often not recognized as being caused by brain injury, including nightmares, insomnia, depression, anxiety, substance abuse and social isolation. Many service members who receive diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder may actually have brain injuries that produce similar symptoms, scientists say.

Even so, for decades the military largely overlooked the risk to brain health posed by the blast waves from weapons fired during training. Only in the last few years, when forced by Congress, has the military taken action on the issue.

The new report shows heightened suicide rates in some military occupations that are not obviously exposed to blasts, like medical care providers and radio operators. However, troops in those occupations — including combat medics — are sometimes embedded in combat units, where they may be exposed to many of the same stresses and blast waves as combat troops, even though they are counted separately in the report.

Because the report does not break out data on individual specialties within each broad career field, troops who may be at very high risk, like mortar teams, may be lost in the figures for the larger categories to which they belong, like infantry.

Risk factors other than blast exposure may be contributing to higher suicide rates, said Katherine Kuzminski, an expert on the military and veterans at The Center for a New American Security. For example, bomb technicians may deploy more often, and be exposed to more traumatic situations, than other troops, she said. And high-risk combat jobs may attract people with pasts that predispose them to suicide risk, independent of what happens while they are in uniform.

“This report is a good first step,” Dr. Kuzminski said. “It provides us the data to start asking the right questions. But there are still a lot of questions.”

Chief among them, she said, is how exposure to repeated blasts from weapons affects suicide risk.

The military does not track the blast exposure of individual service members, so it does not have data to show whether exposure erodes mental health.

Wearable blast sensors have been available for more than a decade, and have sometimes been employed by the military in field research. Thousands of soldiers wore them in Afghanistan as part of a study of brain injuries from roadside bombs and enemy attacks. The data revealed that a vast majority of blasts that the troops were exposed to came not from enemy action but from soldiers’ own weapons. The research program was shelved a short time later.

Special Operations Command, which oversees Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, among others, is in the final stages of issuing wearable blast gauges to all its operators. Congress recently required the rest of the military to begin tracking blast exposure in all other troops, but the military is considering using computer modeling to assign doses to troops, instead of issuing millions of individual gauges.

Congress’s interest in the issue has been heightened recently by the revelation this spring that Robert R. Card II, an Army Reserve soldier who went on a deadly shooting rampage in October, killing 18 people and himself in Lewiston, Maine, was found by a Boston University laboratory to have had extensive brain injuries that were probably caused by blast exposure.

Mr. Card’s case shows the limitations of analyzing risk of blast exposure through a soldier’s career field. To the Army, Mr. Card was officially a petroleum supply specialist — an occupation not at all associated with weapons blasts. But despite that career designation, he worked for years as a grenade instructor, where his brain was exposed to blasts by the thousands.

Army investigators said in a recent report that they saw no link between Mr. Card’s service in the Army Reserve and his deteriorating mental health." [1]

 No war. You are just training for it. You are dead by suicide as a result. Why did you train to begin with? Because Landsbergis said you have to do this? Tell those Lithuanians, who started training for a nuclear WWIII, to stop. Too dangerous games for you personally and all of Lithuania. Find something else to do. Let Landsbergis go fishing.

1. Pentagon Data Shows High Suicide Rates Among Troops Exposed to Blasts. Philipps, Dave.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 31, 2024.