National Guard Suicides: The Problem is the War on Terror

Shortly before Thanksgiving, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel released an important investigative report (behind a paywall) by reporters Katelyn Ferral and Natalie Brophy on the tragic increase in suicides among soldiers in the Wisconsin National Guard. The report tells the stories of four Wisconsin National Guardsmen who went to Afghanistan together and returned safely. Tragically, all of them took their own lives within months of each other. The four soldiers--James Swetlik, Eric Richley, Evan Olson, and Logan Collison--were victims not just of the inadequate support system available for guardsmen during and after their service commitment, but of the misguided and never ending war on terror policy that changed the National Guard "forever." 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's important and informative report on Wisconsin National Guard suicides included this photo of the mothers of Logan Collison, Eric Richley, and Evan Olson at a memorial for their sons. 

As a university teacher I've had National Guardsmen in my classes as students. They are usually extraordinary young people striving to be "ordinary." That description certainly fits the fallen soldiers portrayed in Ferral and Brophy's reporting: "Specialist Evan Olson,a 24-year-old from Waunakee, had a penchant for trivia and wore red, white and blue every Fourth of July. Specialist Logan Collison, 21, was an exceptional artist and wanted to be a history teacher. He was from Oshkosh. Specialist James Swetlik, a 23-year-old from Appleton, enjoyed traveling, at one time working as a cross-country truck driver. Sergeant Eric Richley, at 32 was the oldest of the four. He lived in Nichols and was the father of two boys, ages 7 and 9." Collison was a student at UW Oshkosh. I did not know him, but several of my students did and they describe him as a fun loving, amazing young man who treated everyone with concern and kindness. More about each of the four soldiers can be found here. 

The death of young soldiers by suicide has become all too common. According to Ferral and Brophy, four times as many veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war have died by suicide than in battle. Nationwide, 90 Guard members died from suicide in 2019. In 2020 the number jumped to 120. The victim is most commonly male and under the age of 30. The report suggests that a large part of the problem stems from mental health issues brought on and/or reinforced by the extreme workload: "Guard units across the country have been called up more in the last year than in any 18-month period since World War II, and there's no cap on the number of times a soldier can be activated. Some families who lost soldiers to suicide say they are frustrated that the Guard markets itself as a part-time commitment." 

Even though 3 of the 4 victims profiled in the report expressed frustration with their Guard experience, Ferral and Brophy do not explore the connection between war policies hatched in Washington and the resulting impact on the military personnel putting those policies in place. Instead, the reporters frame the solution as essentially one of better mental health assistance for soldiers, more transparency from the Guard in terms of granting access to suicide investigations, developing more specific guidance on treatment with medications, and raising awareness of gun safety issues with veterans. 

All of the proposed solutions are important and should be implemented immediately. Unfortunately, they side step the real problem, which is the failed war on terror policy. That policy, known euphemistically as the "Bush Doctrine," has for 20+ years allowed the Pentagon to wage continual war in a number of countries in the name of "protecting the homeland." In 2001 the only member of the United States House of Representatives to vote against the "Authorization for use of military force" was California's Barbara Lee, who warned that it would be a blank check to wage war anywhere in the world with little accountability. Sadly, Lee turned out to be 100 percent correct. The authorization has been used to allow military deployments in at least 10 countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia), usually with limited or no debate in the Congress or in the national media. National Guard troops can be sent anywhere at any time. For example, one-thousand troops from Virginia and Kentucky just found out that they are going to the horn of Africa. 

The Department of Defense releases an "Annual Suicide Report." Journalists frequently use this document as a resource for discovering number of suicides by military unit, assistance available for veterans, and efforts the military is taking to confront the problem. The document is not surprisingly silent on how DOD's war on terror policies are at the root of the crisis. 

Under "Operation Inherent Resolve" the United States established what appears to be a permanent presence in Middle East hot spots, dropping bombs continuously. If you thought that the Biden Administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan meant that we would be scaling back these "dirty wars," you would be wrong. Just recently the Pentagon announced the renaming of Operation Inherent Resolve to "Special Operations Joint Task Force-Levant," and that its authority in the region would be expanded. The expansion of the dirty wars lends itself to more provocation of anti-US and anti-Europe sentiment in the world, which then increases the likelihood of the eventual need for troop deployments, which then leads back to the National Guard. In fact, what the Guard have experienced since 2001 is a defining feature of what I recently referred to as the "third score of shame".(By which I meant the years 2001-2021 as being a twenty-year period as shameful in its political cowardice, fear appeals, and tribalism as 1837-1857 and 1877-1897). 

Reporters Ferral and Brophy in the Journal Sentinel did not frame Guard suicides as an inevitable consequence connected to the failed war on terror. But the connection is there, and even suggested in the quoted remarks of suicide victims Eric Richley and  Logan Collison. Sergeant Richley, the father of two, was stricken with guilt after participating in an attack that killed 25 Afghan civilians including women and children. According to the report, his mother recalled him asking, "What if it had been my kids that somebody did that to?" Logan Collison started to grasp the politics of it all. Ferral and Brophy write that "According to his family, Logan increasingly felt like a political pawn. He said the Guard had become an 'easy button' that politicians pushed anytime there was a problem they didn't know how to address." What Richley and Logan exposed in their remarks is nothing short of a national scandal, one that is bipartisan in nature and should--if democracy and the rule of law were anything more than applause lines at political fundraisers--lead to war crimes trials for the scoundrels who got us into this mess. 

Journalism that raises awareness of the plight of the National Guard is valuable and should be more common. But its value is diminished when it accepts the Pentagon's and the hack politicians' framing of the problem as being one of essentially how to guarantee better mental health access. The problem is much greater than that. As noted recently by Mark Landler in the New York Times, "Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the so-called war on terror shows no signs of winding down. It waxes and wanes, largely in the shadows and out of the headlines." 

It's time to get the war on terror back in the headlines. It's time for journalists to resist pressures to parrot the Pentagon's line on all matters related to war and peace, including military suicides. It's time for the emergence of a new, reinvigorated peace movement that can honor the legacy of James, Eric, Evan, Logan and many others by demanding better from those who plan and profit from wars.