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War's unfortunate bond

ames G. Zumwalt
December 4, 2007

A name engraved onto the Vietnam Veterans Memorial "Wall" only three years after the invasion of Iraq symbolizes both a similarity and a difference between these two conflicts.

Air Force Capt. Alan Brudno died not from enemy fire — nor was his life even taken on a Vietnamese battlefield. In February 1973, Brudno returned home as one of our longest-held POWs. Unfortunately, the indomitable fighting spirit that served him so well during 7½ years of brutal captivity failed him within days of his return; four months later he was dead. Bearing no clear outside wounds but the scars of rope burns from his torture, he suffered an invisible, but just as deadly, internal wound.

When Brudno left Vietnam"s battlefields, Vietnam's battlefields had not left him. He tragically took his own life. It would take the efforts of a loving brother, pressing the Defense Department into officially recognizing a nexus between one's tortuous POW captivity and post-combat suicide, to finally get Alan's name added, decades later, to 58,000 others veterans on the Wall recognized for their ultimate sacrifice.

Just as Capt. Brudno returned home from war plagued by psychological wounds of combat — a condition better known today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — so too are many of our veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is worrisome is the much higher rate at which they are taking their own lives. While some have done so while serving within the war zone, more than twice as many returned home to become their own executioners. Like Brudno, perhaps they found in a combat environment their focus to be totally survival-oriented but, upon returning home, the battle turned to fighting invisible demons within.

An important difference in how the PTSD health problem is handled today as opposed to the days of the Vietnam conflict is the speed with which assistance is made available to all veterans. Sadly, another family had to suffer the loss of a son to suicide before Congress was motivated to act.

In 2005, eleven months after her son's return from Iraq, Ellen Omvig witnessed his self-inflicted execution. Joshua, 22, locked himself inside his pickup truck as she pleaded with him not to pull the trigger of the gun he held in his hand. Telling her he loved her and elevating the barrel of the weapon so its bullet would hit its intended mark without causing collateral damage to his mother, Joshua finally put his personal demons to rest. The family's political activism forced final congressional approval in October of the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act. This law seeks to improve early detection of mental health problems and mandates a comprehensive suicide prevention program for war veterans.

The Army's 2006 suicide rate (17.3 suicides for every 100,000 troops) marks the highest ever in the 26-year period it has been tracking such deaths. Those who have lost loved ones to post-combat suicides in previous wars say this should not come as a surprise. Even among an aging World War II veteran population losing thousands of its numbers each month, some are still treated for battlefield traumas.

At the 135th annual meeting of the American Public Health Association Nov. 5, it was estimated PTSD among returning war vets ranges from 12 percent to 20 percent. Treatment in the decades ahead will cost more than the war itself. This may not even factor in the "dose response" — i.e., the unprecedented multiple deployments by these veterans which only intensifies PTSD's impact.

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