S1E118 Clip

"The Hidden Crisis: Why Military Suicide Is Not About Combat"

". . . what's interesting was that our participation in our conflicts had gone down. Our suicide kept going up. What's going on? Why would we fight and then come home and kill ourselves? That doesn't make sense. The Commandant of the Marine Corps (the guy who ran the Marine Corps) had been one of my commanding officers. When I asked him about this, he said 'Well, Mac, 80 to 90% of our suicides, they've never even left the country.' And I was stunned. I said 'It has to do with our operations.' He said 'No.' And so what I've learned is that one of the secrets of the all-volunteer force is who serves - who's looking to get out of town at the age of 17, 18, 19. Well, a lot of them are trying to get to a better place in life - financially, maybe - or from a bad family or maybe from no family at all. So they come in with a lot of adverse childhood experiences. So the (common) story I would hear was 'it started when I was a kid,' - right? 'Blah, blah, blah, blah.' Right. 'And then I came in the Marine Corps and then I got married. Then I got divorced. I was alone. I was drinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Three times I had a gun in front of me. Once it was in my mouth' - and I heard a variation of that story over and over. And so it was a stunning to me that our suicide wasn't linked to combat, but to child abuse - child sexual abuse. And nobody writes that story . . ."