CPTnet
24 November 2007
FORT FRANCES, ON REFLECTION: Soldiers and suicide

[Note: The following reflection by CPT Director Emeritus Gene Stoltzfus was
adapted from a longer essay available at
http://www.gstoltzfus.blogspot.com/ ]

Each week in 2005, 120 persons who had served in the US military killed
themselves according to a recent CBS news report. That is 6,256 suicides in
2005--a rate twice as high as the general population.

What is the meaning in these statistics? How do we explain this collapse of
faith? How does that place within where hope lives disappear into a vacuum
bereft of love, compassion, and belief in life? Is the participation in war
too painful to bear? The thought of these soldier victims takes me back to
the soup kitchens where I served occasionally since coming back from Viet
Nam in 1967. In those lines, I met homeless soldiers who did not take their
own lives, but may have contemplated doing so and, in any case, were
psychologically devastated. Some watchers estimate that more than three
times as many veterans from the war in Viet Nam have committed suicide as
the 58,000 who lost their lives in direct combat.

Whether it takes the form of soldiers killing themselves because of internal
breakdowns or militants blowing themselves up because they believe in their
cause, suicide is also the abandonment of hope in civil society to provide
meaning and justice. It is a reminder that a hollowness remains in the most
advanced society and the most devout of religious faiths. It reminds us
that a patriotism promoting warfare as its supreme test of loyalty has deep,
decaying cavities.

When I returned from Viet Nam, where I had been a civilian volunteer, I was
welcomed home by my community, not as a hero, but as one who had tried to
speak the truth about war. When I grew tired and my efforts seemed to lack
internal meaning, I went to find help for my empty heart, set adrift by the
reality of war and the support for it in the larger society. I found help,
including financial aid from my church's health insurance agency and from
other individuals. The assistance I got forty years ago was probably more
personal, more enlightened, and nuanced than Veteran's Affairs or the
Department of Defence offers its soldiers today. Generations of developing
a culture of peace in my church made that help possible.

I hope that I will not meet suicidal former soldiers in soup lines thirty
years from now. I hope that the churches, peace groups and institutions
that strive to create a culture of peace, will grow into a renaissance of
creativity that embraces all the victims of war. But, I also know that the
very best efforts of faith or therapy will not rebuild the inner life of
some victims, laid waste by war's firebombs. I know that we have very large
work before us--work that is foolishness to many liberals and conservatives
alike--to create more perfect union of faith, hope and justice and put an
end to war before it puts an end to life.