Today, Explained - The silent war

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

The story of Army specialist Austin Valley highlights a crisis the US military can’t seem to solve: More service members die by suicide than in combat. A veteran psychologist told Congress what to do about it, and today he tells us. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Noel King. Photo courtesy of Erik Valley. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In April of 2023, Army Specialist Austin Valley took his own life. There were two mysterious things about this tragedy. Valley had tried already while deployed overseas in Poland, just a month earlier. He'd nearly succeeded, and the Army knew that, after the attempt they'd flown him home from Poland to Fort Riley, Kansas. Also, the 21-year-old driver hadn't seen combat. His short time in the service had been fairly calm. The military has a crisis.

Active duty service members who've never seen war are dying by suicide. Thousands more, in fact, than died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Coming up on today explained Austin Valley's parents, who want answers, and the veteran psychiatrist who may be best equipped to help solve a mystery that the U.S. military's got a crack. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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I was at home. I was in the garage working on something, and I checked my phone and realized I had a text from him. It was essentially night over there. I thought, oh, he sent me a text, and I looked. It was roughly a half hour earlier. Oh, I missed it, so I opened it up, and it was, hey, Dad, it's not your fault. It was a long text, and I remember looking at it and pausing a minute and thinking, is this a joke? Eric Vallee is Specialist Austin Vallee's father. I tried calling him. I got no answer. I'm like, oh, shit, you know.

So I called the unit, and I said, here's the situation. I just got a suicide text from my son. You need to go find him right now. We didn't really know what was going on. It was just a back and forth. I got a call from one of the NCOs in Poland asking, you know, hey, do you know any more information or anything like that? I was like, no, this is what I got.

By now they had emptied the barracks and were looking for him. I think probably roughly like an hour after I had called, we got a call from someone saying, hey, we found him. One of the soldiers had shined his light around, found Austin hanging in a tree and cut him down and threw him in an ambulance. He went to a local Polish hospital where they stabilized him and then medevaced him to Germany. That was March. By April, the army had escorted Austin back to Fort Riley, Kansas. His family were assured that he'd be hospitalized. Instead, commanding officers granted Austin a four-day pass to leave the post for Easter weekend.

While on that leave, he bought a gun at a pawn shop. A few days later, he went to see an ex-girlfriend. He texted. She told him to go away, he pounded on her door, so she called the police. They found Austin bleeding from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. Doctors declared him brain dead and he died in the hospital. He left behind his parents. His dad, Eric, and his stepmom, Stephanie, are both veterans themselves. When did he decide that he wanted to be a soldier? Grade school? I think maybe probably third or fourth grade. They assign you a project, or in this case, the school did kind of what do you want to be when you grow up,

and it gave him three lines and a little area to draw a picture. And he drew an Army plane and put the Army star on it and had soldiers jumping out of the plane, and he said, I want to be an Army. And that was it. He didn't fill anything else out, and the teacher was like, well, there's more lines. He said, nope, this is what I want to do. Eric, why do you think that is? I don't know.

I mean, my dad was in Vietnam. I served in Desert Storm. I was an infantry sergeant. And maybe because I talked too much about some of the fun I had. So sometimes Grandpa would sit down with him. And my dad had a lot of slides of Vietnam, so he would go through pictures of firefights and stuff like that at night, and I think that just got him even more pumped.

He came from a family who very much believed in the duty to serve. If you can, you should. That's how we keep what we have in this country. I feel like he very much believed in that. We both had very similar views that way, where if you can, you should. Somebody has to. He signed his papers at 18, but he was a senior in high school at the time, and it was right in 2020.

So, you know, everybody was homeschooling because of COVID. So I actually took him to the recruiter's office because he said, for my birthday, I want to go sign my Army papers. You know, he would have been a lifetime soldier. Austin was stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. He started off in the infantry, and then he became a driver, Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The stories he told his parents put them on edge just a little. The military that Eric remembers took care of you. Like, it was your commanding officer's job

to relieve you for dinner. It was a small thing, but also kind of a big thing. But then Austin's telling them. A lot of nights he would be in the motor pool, six, seven, eight o'clock at night. And I know more than one night they forgot him, didn't feed him. He would call angry because the NCOs and whatnot had gone home for the day, but they left him down there. Five o'clock, the chow hall's closing, and it's six or seven o'clock at night, and he has left down there because they're trying to repair their equipment. In your time in the service, how common was it that someone would forget to tell you it's dinner time? You didn't. You took care of your soldiers. You were accountable for those soldiers. You had to know where they're at. And something happened

and you didn't. It was you. But him being at Fort Riley, it seemed like it was everybody for themselves. When the five o'clock whistle rang those ncls went home that was one of the nights that uh they were having a barbecue or something but he was left in the motor pool i know he texted me like one night it was like almost nine o'clock and he was still down there and he still had to get up the next day for duty and whatnot so how much did either of you know, or did both of you know, about what Austin's frame of mind was like at Fort Riley? Just how he was doing emotionally.

I think it was good up until the point of the summer before the Poland deployment. He was starting to not look at the Army the same way. The leadership was an issue. You want to know when you're in there that your leadership has your back, and I don't think he was feeling that as much. He liked the company he was in. He liked the guys he was serving with.

He liked what he was in he liked the guys he was serving with he liked what he was doing but i think he became very disenchanted when you know when you go in and you expect one thing or you're told one thing or you read one thing and then you figure out the honest reality of the situation you know you guys you guys remember getting jobs when you were young, and like, you sort of know that your boss doesn't care about you, right? It's like one of those, one of those moments in life where adulthood like really hits home. It's like, oh, this person tells me what to do and pays me, but they don't give a damn about me. They just want me to like do a job. And I think, Eric, what you're saying is your experience of the military was not that. The

experience of leadership is not just, I'm a boss. It's supposed to be, I am also a leader and I am supposed to care about the guys who are serving under me. I was in Germany for three years and being a young soldier was financially not always an option to fly home to Wisconsin for two weeks and fly back. So it was just you stayed in the barracks or whatever. And I had an NCO that he would say, you know, Christmas dinner at my house on Saturday, it's not an option, and, you know, you are all coming. They would go around.

No one stayed in the barracks. And that wasn't just my squad or platoon. It was the barracks were empty. You went somewhere. Your NCOs, yeah, they cared. You know, what I started seeing with Austin was the things that drastically changed. I know I was never left with a feeling of I've been abandoned. It's just a thing.

But the generation that Austin's in with the soldiers now, it seems to be a whole different mindset. It's almost like everybody's looking out for themselves first. Do you have a diagnosis of why over the span of 25 or so years we went from a service where people really care about each other to a service where a kid is being left behind and not even told that it's time for dinner? What do you think happened? I think it became less of a brotherhood. And I say that and I kind of giggle about it because clearly not a brother. But it became less of a brotherhood and more of a numbers game. It became more of a corporate business. You know, they had to meet their quotas.

They had to meet their numbers. They had to, you know, play this numbers game or have to, not had to. That's what's currently going on. It's very impersonal. Austin felt overworked and overlooked, which is a universal feeling, but for him it spiraled. A year plus later, the thing his parents can't wrap their heads around is that their son had already tried to take his own life, and the Army knew that, and Austin's commanding officer made them promises that he would be watched. When they were bringing him back, I said, I want to know what is happening here. He should be impatient. Somebody should constantly be watching him.

What are your plans? What are your policies? And he absolutely assured us that us and would be watched, and that they wouldn't allow anything to happen, and, you know, that they were going to follow everything that they were supposed to follow. They didn't. We really figured that there was some integrity there, and that there was honesty that, hey, you know, this is something bad that happened, but we're going to take care of this and make sure your son is safe. And that was the farthest thing from the truth. All they were taking care of was their own career. You know, and I outright asked him, and it was a genuine question.

Like, do you understand? Do you understand what he's going to say? What he's going to do? You know, at this point, he just wants his freedom, and he's going to tell you everything you want to hear, so you leave him the F alone. Austin's commander had said, you know, we don't have the manpower to sit with him one-on-one like you're asking, and you guys just need to let us do our job, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it's not the Army's job to babysit these kids. And I said, actually, that's where you're wrong. That is exactly your job as a commander. Your job is these soldiers. A spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division told us in a statement that the Behavioral Health Department didn't recommend further inpatient treatment, in part because Austin regretted his decision and was actively anticipating moving forward with his life.

That statement went on to say that leadership and direct supervision were implemented immediately upon Specialist Valley's return to Fort Riley. Now, asked why the Army granted a four-day pass to a soldier who had recently attempted suicide, the spokesman said this. Holidays and four-day weekends see a significant decrease in the number of personnel on military posts. Valley had no family visitors since his return from Europe, so allowing him to visit friends seemed beneficial. Coming up, a crisis, a psychiatrist, and what he told Congress needs to get done and get done now. Thank you. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the

end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents. And they are ready with a battle-tested playbook. The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times. And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU.

With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. Dr. Craig Joseph Bryan has a lot of credentials. Clinical psychologist, professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at the Ohio State University, author of Rethinking Suicide. He served on the Department of Defense Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, and maybe most important, he's a veteran of the U.S. Air Force he deployed to Iraq in 2009, and he has dedicated himself to this problem. How many active service members die by suicide every year? You know, it'll obviously vary from year to year, but, you know, you're typically looking at, you know, maybe like 500 or so service members. And, you know, most of the statistics will report active components, so active duty, military personnel separate from reserve and National Guard personnel. You know, the majority of service members who died by suicide have never deployed. And that's, this, I think, impression that the rise in suicide

rates amongst military personnel that started around 2005, 2006 was directly linked to deployment cycles, combat exposure, things like that. And the research actually never really supported that. The majority of suicides were always amongst those personnel who had never deployed. Really? And what does that tell us? Well, I think it tells us a few things. I think, first and foremost, it, I think, should warn us about the dangers of coming up with overly simplistic explanations for something as complex as suicide. And unfortunately, I don't think that lesson has really fully been learned by society, because there is this persistence in this storyline of

rising suicide in the military was related to deployments. That was never true. And my usual kind of reframing of that is to respond and say, well, why do civilians die by suicide? They're not deploying either. And then usually that's like, oh, yeah, relationship problems, financial strain, other problems in life. For some people, it involves mental health conditions, substance abuse, things like that. And so in that sense, military personnel are no different from civilians. Specialist Austin Valley, this young man we talked about in the first half of the show, was able to buy a weapon off post just a few days after he survived a suicide attempt. How typical is it that something like that happens? A man, young man, young woman is known to be in distress, but they're able to get a gun. what we often believe. And it's a big reason why researchers like myself and many of my closest collaborators are really emphasizing things like how we sell firearms, how we encourage and how we

support people storing their firearms in their homes actually makes a really big difference. And our willingness, if someone is having distress, if we know that they're in a vulnerable state, our willingness to, you know, temporarily hold onto their firearms to reduce that convenient access, we know is a very, very effective suicide prevention strategy that is hardly ever talked about and very rarely implemented within the U.S. When a civilian is experiencing suicidal ideation, we know what happens ideally, right? The person calls a hotline, maybe goes to a doctor, certainly a counselor, maybe gets on medication, maybe gets inpatient care. How easy is it for members of the military, active members of military to access those things that civilians are able to access? Military personnel theoretically

have better access to mental health care and other protective resources than civilians. And that's because most military installations have a mental health clinic. You don't have to pay for therapy. You don't have to pay for medications. You just call, go directly. You know, since suicide rates started increasing in the military, there was this very concerted effort to expand screening efforts, trying to identify who was suicidal. And this is typically done by implementing like questionnaires and screeners and medical clinics, but even in the military, they're doing it outside of medical settings. And so expanded screening, unfortunately, led to increased demand on mental health services. And what happened was there became this culture of

if someone's suicidal, they have to go to mental health. And so we ended up flooding the mental health care system. It takes a long time sometimes to get into the front door. And then once you're in, it can be many weeks before you can schedule a next appointment. And so then to try to fix that, we said, well, DOD, you need to get people in within a week. And so the DOD responded and they made it really easy to walk in the front door, but then you would have to wait six weeks for your second visit. And so you look like you're meeting the standard when really you're not. Let me run another thing past you. Austin Valley's father, Eric, is a veteran. His stepmom is also a veteran. They say that their son told them things about

his time in the Army, that he had a sense that his commanding officers weren't looking out for him, that at times they just kind of forgot about him, you know, forgot to call him for dinner. And they say that's very different than what they experienced. His dad in particular, who served a generation ago. Have you heard anything like that, that younger service members today are describing Army that is just different these days, less caring? You know, as the global war on terror extended for longer and longer and longer, the military's mindset, the focus became on, like almost exclusively zeroed in on war fighting. And so, garrison life, peacetime operations, in essence, that became a skill set that had been lost in the militaries. And that was something we were definitely hearing from particularly senior leaders. And I think it manifests in the younger service members by

describing these sort of quality of life issues. It's like, people don't care about me. My leaders aren't listening, things like that. It was, in essence, our leaders forgot how to run a community when you're not actively engaged in combat or you're deployed overseas. I remember when we were visiting an army base in Korea and doing our focus groups, one of the things that we heard over and over and over again, particularly from the junior enlisted, was delays in travel expenses, like reimbursement. So you get this government travel card, and you got to buy a flight, you got to move all your stuff, and you got to travel halfway around the world to do your job. Then you arrive in a foreign country where

you don't speak the language and you don't really have internet access. You don't have a phone that is on a local cell phone plan, things like that. And so while you are trying to get your life adjusted to this new world, to this new life, you have to submit all your receipts and all this paperwork for your employer to reimburse you for all of the expenses that you've incurred to get there, to do your job. And we were hearing that, you know, payments are delayed, vouchers are rejected, people are going into debt, they can't pay their bills, then their mistakes with just their routine salary, their paycheck has errors, all this kind of stuff.

And as we really kind of looked into it and started asking questions about what's going on, we found that there was this sort of dismissal of the initial response was, well, if soldiers can't fill out their paperwork properly, that's not our problem. But as we started asking more questions of that, we found out that the process that is used to this financial strain amongst over 50% of the people coming into this one location. And so you magnify that now across the entire enterprise, the entire DOD, because we're hearing this everywhere. And one of the core problems then that was identified was in essence, we've automatized almost everything in the military. There are no more experts whose job is to help you submit your voucher correctly. And the mindset was, well, hey,

that's not that important because we're at war. We've got to make sure that we maintain lethality and readiness. And the point that we were often trying to make was, well, it's hard to be lethal and ready if you can't pay your bills because your employer hasn't paid you back to do their work. Okay, that is, I'm so glad that you told us that, that you gave us that example, because I feel like, yes, that illustrates of us have are related to these everyday nuisances, these frustrations, these annoyances that build up and they're chronic because it gets kicked back to you four times. It's seen as not a real problem. It's not trauma. It's not life and death, that kind of stuff. But when you magnify that issue across multiple areas of life, people feel as though there's no one to turn to. There are no experts to help me. I'm on my own. The system doesn't work.

And what that kind of comes out as is the system doesn't care about me. I'm replaceable. I don't mean anything. And that's where I think you create the conditions for suicide to become more likely. I don't think those hassles by themselves, none of those experiences directly cause suicide, but I think they accumulate and they wear a person down. And yeah, when you're 19 years old, you're not in a stage of your life yet where you can absorb a few hundred, a few thousand dollars of delayed payments like you might be able to if you're in your 40s or 50s. When you testified before Congress, what did you tell Congress needs to happen here to stop this? We've medicalized suicide. And so as a result,

almost everything that we do now to prevent suicide has like a mental health kind of flare to it. That's why we do so much screening. We refer people to mental health treatment. You know, that is important. You know, I'm a psychologist. This is my job. I do therapy with people who are suicidal. So I know that it's important, but you can't therapy your way out of this. We need to look at these bigger issues because if a person gets reimbursed in a timely manner and is able to access support services from the community for relationship problems, things like that, then they're probably less likely to get to a point where we need to send them to a mental health professional.

I've directly recommended to Congress, stop pushing for more screening. All you're doing is making the problem worse. And secondly, the more provocative argument that I've made is like, we need to be talking about guns. And it's going to be really hard to get ahead of this problem if we are unable to have an honest conversation about the method that is nearly 75% of all suicides in the military. Dr. Craig Joseph Bryan of The Ohio State University. If you're having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 and talk to someone, please.

Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by Matthew Collette. Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd engineered. And Laura Bullard fact-checked. Many thanks to Steve Bainan of Military.com, who did some very good original reporting about Austin Valley. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.