Here’s piece of advice number 4. This post will lack the light-hearted touch of previous posts, as this is the most serious and difficult of topics for me.

4). Our veterans are dying daily. They need for you to devote a huge portion of your second term to finding solutions, not just rhetoric. Find someone with passion to run Veteran’s Affairs-Eric Shinseki needs to go. Ask somebody like Ross Perot seemed to be to run it for a dollar a year. Get some FDR mojo on this one.

What’s the latest suicide statistic for the Army? Interesting question, because there is nothing about it on the Web since the rate spiked in July. The election and the economy trumped news about veterans’ killing themselves. But thru a circuitous route, I found the statistic on the Stars and Stripes web page. Eighteen a day. That’s 126 a week; a year will net you over 6,500 suicides of veterans. Why does this happen? This little piece for one vet’s story is a recurring theme:

The former soldier had been distraught for weeks, frustrated by family problems, unemployment and his lingering service injuries. He was long ago diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, caused by a military training accident, and post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the aftermath. He had battled depression before, but never an episode this bad.

Has there been any introspection on the part of the Army on this topic?

How about this headline from the Army G1 Suicide Prevention Team?

Army Suicide Prevention Month 2012
September 2012
Suggested Activities
“A HEALTHY FORCE IS A READY FORCE

So they declare one month a “Suicide Prevention Month”? Kind of reminds you of those old training films about Syphilis from WWII

We don’t want you to kill yourself because if you do, you won’t be ready to fight in the next war…oh my. Sure looks like rhetoric to me.

Here’s a map I took from the Veteran’s Affairs Website dealing with Suicide Prevention:

It tells Vets to visit their nearest help center if they’re feeling suicidal. There are 24 circles on this map, by my count. According to Wikipedia, there are 3.79 million square miles in the United States. So that means there’s a Veteran’s Suicide Help Center for every 157,917 square miles in this country. Might take a while to get to one of them if you live in a fairly rural area, eh?

But fear not – the Army has entered cyberspace to deal with the problem – there are mobile apps to remind you of why you shouldn’t take your life if you are a distraught vet:

If what I’ve written sounds angry, it’s because I am angry. I am tired of reading about the problem, and finding that little to no progress has been made in dealing with it. If you don’t have a loved one or family member who is one of the 2.4 million who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, then you really don’t appreciate the impact those wars had on these young men and women.

So my advice to the big man is: find someone of high stature and lots of moxie to take on this problem for a dollar a year. The pay is symbolic; the point is to elevate veterans’ suicides to the status of the other problems we discuss every day and that dominate the media. Like the economy or who knew what before and after Chris Stevens was killed in Bengazi. At this point, that is a very small issue, compared to the eighteen young men or women who risked their lives in service to their country, and today will decide to end that life out of hopelessness, depression and despair.

God damn it, man! Do something!