Jack Hammond
The need for critical mental health and brain injury support for veterans, service members, and family members will continue for the foreseeable future
As I travel across the country and speak to many communities, there seems to be a growing perception in the American public that there is no longer a need to provide mental health and brain injury care for our veterans, service members, and families.
The cost of freedom, as we know, is high, and it is paid for by those wearing the uniform of this nation and the families they leave behind. We continue to lose more than twenty veterans each day to suicide. Last week's “Protest Suicides,” which took place on the properties of the Boston and El Paso VAs, serve as a stark reminder of both the failure of our country to meet the current needs of our wounded and injured warriors and the enduring support required of a grateful nation when it sends its men and women to war.
Most veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have lost several friends to suicide. Most recently, a close friend who served in Iraq with me and then had additional deployments lost his battle with his invisible wounds.
Poor is a country that has no heroes. Wretched is the one that has heroes but fails to care for them when they return from serving in combat to safeguard its nation.
The battles in Iraq and Afghanistan may have concluded with our chaotic evacuation from Kabul in 2021, but the casualties from these wars will continue for many years to come. Unfortunately, the protracted nature of these injuries, and the care required, will present our Veterans and their families with significant challenges as the American people have a very short attention span, and support for these wounded and injured veterans will wane. There is a flawed perception that has been increasing with time, that the clinical care requirements for our warriors ended with the cessation of combat operations in the Middle East and South West Asia. Unfortunately, the current demand for mental health and brain injury care has never been higher than it is today, and based on published VA reports, this need will continue for decades to come.
The number of patients now seen for care at the Home Base National Center for Mental Health and Brain Injuries in Boston continues to grow, and we treat some of the most injured Veterans, service members, Special Operations Force (SOF) members, and surviving family members of our fallen heroes. Every two weeks, thirty-five warriors are flown into Boston from across the nation for several intensive clinical programs designed and delivered by our Massachusetts General Hospital Harvard faculty, all at no cost to the veterans, service members, and families. The life-saving/changing programs are funded by an incredible group of non-profit partners and a grateful nation of supporters through their private donations to keep faith with those who serve and sacrifice to maintain our security. This support will need to continue for the foreseeable future.
Through the incredible programs at Home Base, we regularly care for Vietnam Veterans, who, like many older Veterans who came before them, continue to be affected by Post Traumatic Stress symptoms five decades after their service. They will routinely suffer from nightmares, and flashbacks to traumatic events, self-medicate and withdraw from family and friends. For some Veterans, these issues grow in severity after they leave the military or present later in life when they retire and have the time to process difficult memories and the loss of friends. For others, these memories can be triggered by events like our heartbreaking departure from Afghanistan. Some Veterans received texts and phone calls from the Afghan children and families they befriended or soldiers they served with pleading for help, and this created new trauma and wounds and reopened old.
As we all watch the horror unfold in Ukraine, with genocide, mass killings, and rape, these stories of war will trigger wartime memories for many combat Veterans and also affect more than the 100,000 Soldiers currently serving in Europe. This new generation of Veterans may never be called upon to fight in this latest war but are standing watch as freedom’s guardian on the borders of Ukraine to prevent further Russian aggression and atrocities. Many of these young warriors will return home feeling a sense of guilt for standing by as spectators to these atrocities, unable to protect the vulnerable and oppressed, but knowing we could end this war if it weren’t for the specter of nuclear war.
Sending our troops to war should only be done when we have exhausted every other option. But when we commit to war, we must also commit our resources to care for our sons and daughters for as long as it takes for them to heal.
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