There are few things more likely to produce horrible outcomes than men who will not advocate for themselves becoming wedged in the machinery of bureaucracy.
There are few things more likely to produce horrible outcomes than men who will not advocate for themselves becoming wedged in the machinery of bureaucracy. This appears to be the case for a young soldier who attempted suicide while deployed to Poland and then ended himself in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment as the police closed in.
Janet Reitman reports for the New York Times magazine:
A boyish-looking 21-year-old, Valley grew up in a military family in rural Wisconsin and declared his intention to join the Army at age 7. He enlisted on his 18th birthday, so intent on a military career that he tried to sign a six-year contract until his father, a Gulf War veteran, persuaded him to take it more slowly and commit to three. Stationed at Fort Riley, in Kansas, he made an immediate impression on his superiors. “He was one of the best workers that I’ve seen in the military,” a squadmate says, recalling how Valley, who drove an armored troop carrier, thought nothing of crawling into its guts to check for broken parts, emerging covered in grease, a flash of mischief in his deep brown eyes.
Valley left Sly’s door and walked into the forest. A fresh snow had fallen, and the larch trees towered above him, their branches bare and ghostly. Valley carried the borrowed knife and some nylon cord he’d probably procured from another fellow soldier. He texted his parents: Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault.
To summarize, Valley, the young soldier, took too many hits (failed to make Ranger; reassigned to maintain a fleet of busted Bradleys; girlfriend dumps him; back-to-back deployments; etc.), and the Army was incapable of correctly treating his mental distress — or even trying all that hard to do something for a young man whose warm body was needed to meet their deployment-strength quota no matter what black thoughts may have been rolling through his mind.
The Times‘ reporting is lengthy, but it really does an exceptional job of explaining the cumulative errors of Army leadership and medical personnel. To be fair, the story would and has played out similarly in any other branch — I’ve written as much in the past.
You just want to shake these people by the shoulders and demand they do something for the young man. Unfortunately, suicidal ideation does not wait to be an issue between the hours of 0700 and 1700 and then only on Mondays through Fridays. Nor can any battle buddy or sergeant be expected to be with a terminally depressed soldier for months at a time.
The best solution for the soldier is immediate separation from the military and intensive care away from the corporate punishment and shame of his chain of command. With manpower shortages across the branches, however, and leadership’s instinctual and self-serving skepticism toward allowing enlisted an early release from their contracts, the onus is on the suicidal to prove himself sufficiently mentally ill so as to prompt his leaders to take him seriously.
The Pentagon needs to figure out how to alleviate pressure on commands so that local commanders are not asked to choose between their careers and their men when not absolutely necessary. The operational tempo of our peacetime military assumes material and manning readiness that only exists on paper.
Stuff is old and broke, and throwing broken enlisted at the problem does neither any good. There’s only so much that can be done to prevent suicide — there are a few who can’t be fixed, they’re “branded for the slaughter by the gods” — but a great many more who’ve offered themselves to the country need those above them to recognize when asking for more will produce only evil results.