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July 16, 2023 - Stew Peters Show
58:51
Why is This Not News?!?! - The Richard Leonard Show
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It's no secret that for many years we've been told numbers like 22 a day.
Sometimes more, sometimes less.
But that's a number we've been told as it relates to the amount of veterans daily that decide to take their own lives.
The number that we don't discuss often and that we're not really told about is the amount of currently serving men and women that decide to take their own lives.
The amount of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines that make the decision to take themselves deep and end their own lives while serving.
I found some information about this topic And I also, as you can imagine, have some of my own opinions about it.
So today we're going to discuss those things.
So stick with us.
Don't go away.
We start now.
Hey, everybody, and welcome here to the next episode of The Richard Leonard Show.
I want to thank you, as always, for joining us.
Once again, as always, I'm very humbled by the folks that decided to watch, provide some comments, and have this discussion via the live chat and or the comment section here below.
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Okay, so as I said in the intro, I was doing some perusing.
I was doing some research, as usual, to come up with...
So here's what happens, folks, is I am every day...
Looking through what's happening, right?
And trying to keep a running list of issues that I want to discuss on this show.
To try to keep it fresh, of course, and to try to keep information coming to you that you're not going to get on any of the mainstream media.
It doesn't matter which outlet.
They're all bought.
They're all compromised.
And so I don't know that you're going to hear much of any of the important stuff.
On any of these outlets.
And if any of you have watched this show with any regularity over all these weeks, I want to say that today is the 68th or 69th show.
We've talked about suicide a couple times.
It's something that is pretty important to me that we discuss, we don't forget, and that it's a discussion that we keep going.
Even when, of course, we're not talking about it on this show, but it's something that we continue to talk about.
In our inner circles, if we are a family of people that have veterans or military members in our family or we're close to them or they're our neighbors or we work with them, whatever the case may be.
This topic in particular is very important to me and I just don't want anybody to Forget about it.
And maybe that's silly of me to say.
How can you forget about a topic such as this?
But the one thing that is not often talked about Is the amount of currently serving military members that decide to take their own lives.
And the reason why this popped up to me this week was our government is trying to confirm a new Chief of Staff of the Army.
And the House Armed Services Committee was interviewing folks and Elizabeth Warren, Senator Elizabeth Warren was questioning this general and this was one of her questions about military suicide and if she can count on him to address this issue.
And so I found a little bit of this hearing.
Now I'll show you just a few minutes of it.
But here's the weird thing, right?
It's July of 2023, and when you see this thing on the screen, you're going to swear it was from the mid-80s.
It's astounding to me that the amount of money our government prints and just throws out the window for whatever the case may be, That the quality of the product that they put out for all of us to see what's happening inside of these chambers, these committee hearings or wherever is very low.
But let's take a look at this.
This is Senator Elizabeth Warren questioning the soon-to-be Possibly soon to be Chief of Staff of the Army.
Here we go.
See what I mean?
You could have swore it's from some 70s James Bond movie.
Anyway, let me just make sure we have the right audio here.
Okay, here we go.
So I am deeply concerned about the increasing number of suicides that we're seeing among active duty soldiers.
In the first quarter of 2023, 49 active duty soldiers took their own lives.
That is the highest first quarter number since DOD first started collecting these data a decade ago.
Now, the Army has studied this problem a lot, but it hasn't acted with enough urgency.
From 2019 to 2022, the Army sponsored 47 studies addressing suicide.
However, an Army audit obtained by the Project on Government Oversight found that nearly 90% of those studies, quote, didn't have any actionable recommendations or recommended only more research.
Nearly 90% of them, and for the few studies that did have actionable recommendations, the Army did nothing.
Now, the Army was originally supposed to issue new suicide prevention regulations in the fall of 2021.
Nearly two years after that deadline, it has still failed to do so, and our service members are suffering.
So, General George, if you are confirmed, can I count on you To help get these regs out, and even more importantly, to help get these regs implemented in order to address the suicide crisis in our military.
Yes, Senator.
Good.
Can I talk, can I say a couple of things about that?
You sure can.
You sure can.
Just in my experience, because as a commander, it wasn't necessarily the regulation that made the difference for me.
It was, you know, getting the resources and then command emphasis, and that's what we have to do.
And right now we're I'm doing what we call the Building Cohesive Teams Update.
And I always talk about every location's a little bit different.
And I always give, you know, the example of Alaska versus Fort Irwin versus now Fort Liberty.
Very different.
They're facing different challenges, and I think that that's what we're trying to do is focus.
One of the things that we've learned from, we'll take things at work, but in Alaska they're doing something called Mission 100, which is Basically, getting somebody to talk to a counselor immediately.
Everybody has to do that within the year.
Because what we're finding is a lot of these problems aren't necessarily, you know, behavioral health problems.
They're relationship issues, financial issues.
I think we've got to look at this Through health and holistic fitness, our health and holistic fitness, where we've fielded that in the brigades, we have seen, you know, reductions in behavioral health and in suicides.
And so, again, I think that's what we have to focus on are the end results.
And we're not happy with where we're at right now.
Well, and I appreciate the attention that you have paid to this, and I have every confidence you will continue to do this.
But I just want to be able to say quite publicly, you and I, this has got to be a priority for the Army, and seeing these first quarter numbers is truly alarming.
Okay, so that is...
Excuse me, sorry about that.
That's General...
Dude, come on.
General Randy George being questioned by Senator Elizabeth Warren.
And he said something pretty interesting there.
As a commander in the United States Army, this whole issue of soldier suicide was not so much about the regulations.
It was more about...
Command emphasis, getting the resources, and follow through.
And what that leads me to believe is that getting the resources usually means it's about money.
It usually means that there is some brainiac or some egghead or a team of people that have come up with some kind of training plan or some kind of block of instruction or multiple blocks of instruction to put out to soldiers, but yet they don't have the resources to actually facilitate the training.
And so if resources such as money was the problem, I would imagine that this type of training to be put out to soldiers would be something that maybe was contracted and not done by military personnel, but some kind of government contract possibly.
The numbers are, as she says, staggering.
In the first quarter of this year, and mind you that this House Armed Services Committee hearing took place on the 12th of July of this year, so just a few days ago.
But the numbers, historically, of military suicides is pretty interesting.
I have them here.
I just want to, real quick, Give them out to you.
So there was an organization, a research organization that did a bunch of research about soldier suicide dating all the way back to 1843.
And what they say here is, I'll just read you the paragraph.
Starting in 1843, the overall trend in annual suicide rates among active duty service members with a peak rate of 118.3 per 100,000.
So these numbers are per 100,000 soldiers.
So in 1843, which was the highest that they found for when they started, Tabulating this data was 118.3 soldiers per 100,000 soldiers, and that was in 1883.
From that historical high point, the rate decreased in three successive waves, each corresponding to the end of the following wars.
The Spanish-American War in 1898, World War I in 1918, and World War II in 1945.
The latter had the historically lowest rate of 5 soldiers per 100,000 In 1944 to 1945, so at the end of World War II. During the Cold War, approximately 45 to 1941, the rate generally stabilized in the low teens to mid teens, so 10 to 15 soldiers per 100,000.
And the rate increased again during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and it went up to 29 per 100,000 in 2012.
And so then they rounded out with from 2008 to present, which would have been, I believe that this was 2021, they put this out.
The annual rate is anywhere from 20 to 29.7 per 100,000.
So my question is, what was it?
What was going on in our country?
What was it about our communities?
What was it about our society that in 1945, at the end of World War II, that our service members were chilled out, according to this.
They weren't taking their own lives.
And mind you, a lot of those men and women went through some pretty horrific and pretty traumatic experiences.
So just something to think about.
We've run out of time in the segment.
We'll be right back.
Hey folks, welcome back here for the next segment of the show.
So before we went to the break, we were just talking about the research data that we found.
And the question I had was, in our country's history, since we've been tabulating data about service members committing suicide, 1944-1945 is the lowest ever.
Now, we have heard a lot about, you know, America's greatest generation.
And it was the World War II generation.
But there was also a lot of men and women that fought that war.
We didn't just necessarily come home and get out of the service.
A lot of folks continued to serve.
I mean, a lot of those guys that were just fresh out of high school, 19 years old, 20 years old, hell, 18 years old, jumped into a plane and went over to Europe to fight the Nazis.
A lot of them had some pretty long, illustrious military careers.
And so my question is, what was the mindset maybe?
What was going on and why did they not have this problem?
Because again, as we've discussed, there is nothing about the war experience.
Whether you find yourself in combat or if you find yourself in a support role of combat soldiers that is glorious or fancy or sexy, right?
War is hell.
We know that.
We've discussed that almost to nauseam.
We know that.
So what is it about That generation of people that were able to just take it on the chin, so to speak, and drive on.
And how are we seemingly...
How is our military seemingly, for lack of a better term, becoming weaker?
As time goes on to where we're at now, to 20 to 29 soldiers per 100,000 deciding to kill themselves.
Now we're at 49 in the first quarter of this year.
That's what, 16.4 or 16.3 a month?
Well, let me tell you.
I have my own theory about why some of this might be going on.
And I think that a lot of it has to do with, possibly, just the world around us.
Not to mention that our country is just finishing up, and I would say that we're still in the recovery phase of our country's longest war ever.
20 years?
So, our soldiers are still in the recovery phase from that.
We're still trying to figure out what happened.
We're still trying to figure out how the hell we got to where we're at.
Especially for those soldiers that were in Afghanistan at the end.
And the absolute disaster debacle that happened when we unasked the AO. And I think that a lot of soldiers also who have been serving for some years and have multiple deployments to the Middle East,
Iraq, Afghanistan, even the Horn of Africa, all over the globe, but more specifically in those combat roles, I think a lot of them are asking themselves, well, what the hell did I do this for?
I know that I asked myself that when I was watching all this getting out of Afghanistan going on on the television, on the internet, reading about it on my phone, wherever I got the information from that particular day.
You know what it reminded me of was The night or the days, the couple days in Minneapolis during the riots shortly after George Floyd overdosed on fentanyl on the street when the rioters burned down the third precinct in Minneapolis with the cops inside.
And I'm fortunate to be able to call one of those men that was inside my friend.
And in talking to him about that night, it was infuriating.
It was maddening to hear how it all played out.
It was upsetting to hear that he got the call.
He just so happened to be the ranking person in the building.
He was the one in the building with the highest rank which meant that he was in charge.
And so as him and all the other cops were trying to defend their home and his phone rang or however he was contacted and he was given the order to leave.
Give up the building.
His words were, I couldn't believe it.
He said, I wanted to throw up.
I wanted to puke.
We don't give up our house.
We don't give up our home.
And so I imagine that Soldiers who were on these bases that had sacrificed almost everything to defend their home, albeit in a foreign land,
but their home at the time, and the home of their brothers and sisters before them, and the home of many soldiers who didn't make it home alive.
That died there, in that country, in that dirt.
You mean we're just gonna leave?
We're just going to leave it.
Maybe some of that has something to do with the way that soldiers are feeling about themselves, about their service, about what's going on about their service, about what's going on around them.
This is not what I signed up for.
You know, we're told over and over and over again that we're arguably the strongest, most prepared, Most technologically advanced, most badass military fighting force in the world.
And if that's the case, why did we just leave?
I mean, these soldiers are probably looking for a way, maybe, To validate their service.
And maybe not.
I mean, we talked about it a few weeks ago that, you know, when me and all our team and all my guys and all my buddies or whatever, when we were all overseas, you could have asked us why we were there and the answer probably would have been, I don't know.
At that given time, it was about him and him and the one lady we had on our team.
We go to work every day because that's what we're here to do.
We fight hard.
We work hard.
We stay vigilant.
We continue to train to be masters of our craft for each other.
To do the best that we can to make sure that we all go home together.
Now, if somebody had told us, hey man, begin to collect your things, we're leaving before the job was done.
I guess I don't know how I would feel about that.
So I imagine it's a problem for a lot of soldiers.
And then we have all these other things going on in our country.
We have recruitment issues where we have trannies and drag queens recruiting folks.
And like we discussed last week, we have confused trannies who've been depressed about the fact that they hate their wieners since they were children, since they were kids.
Being commended for being brave.
It's not bravery.
Not military bravery.
So for those soldiers who joined the military to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, they don't give a shit that you hate your wiener.
And it's extremely frustrating to see it as a headline news announcement.
Why is something like 49 service members in the first quarter not front page news?
Maybe that's the better question.
Why do we have to dig for a video of the House Armed Services Committee questioning a general that wants to be confirmed to be the Chief of Staff of the Army to hear about staggering suicide numbers in the United States Army.
But all you have to do last week or two weeks ago is open your Facebook, your Twitter, your TikTok, your Instagram app, And see some major doofus that hates his dick.
That is at the top of your feed.
Not that we're losing service members to their own hands.
And so then it makes me wonder, why the hell is Elizabeth Warren asking these questions when she knows the answers?
you're not going to be able to do this.
I find it hard to believe that there should be a whole lot of confusion in the halls of Congress, in the halls of the Senate, in the halls of the White House, or even in the halls of the Pentagon.
I think it goes just a little bit further to show that from the bottom up in the United States military, you're a number.
You become a more important number if you're one of the 49 that decided to take your own life in the first quarter of this year.
But until then, you're a much smaller number.
You're just a part of a really big number.
I don't know, man.
I think that there's a whole lot of other things behind the scenes that we should be asking, that we should be talking about.
We've run out of time in this segment.
Stick with us.
We'll be right back.
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Hey folks, welcome back here to the third segment of the show.
I wanna just continue on down the road.
One thing that I was thinking about on the break is that we kinda skated past this research numbers.
And I had asked the question about the greatest generation, right, 1945, and how the numbers of service members taking their own lives was so low, and how it has gradually gotten to where it's at today.
And why might that be?
My last thought on this is that we have just become a society of weak individuals.
I think that, and I shouldn't say our society as a whole, But I think that there's a lot of things that go on in our schools, in our communities, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, and just in general, in our country, that have really just weakened us.
Especially our young people.
I think that our younger generations have become a lot of them, not all of them, you know, because you see some pretty impressive young men and women out there roaming around doing some pretty cool things.
But I think in large part, you know, young people don't want to work hard They don't want to be accountable.
It's that whole participation award syndrome.
It's like a disease.
People just can't be wrong.
They can't lose.
They can't be accountable.
You know, I think that it's those It's those times in our lives where you fall flat on your face and you gotta pick your ass up and keep putting one foot in front of the other and humble yourself and learn from those experiences that make you mentally tough and mentally sound.
And I think that that's what we're missing in our younger generations.
And I think that it's playing out now in things like our military.
And you know what though?
Not just our young generations.
Because we're seeing it in top tiers of government, in big businesses, in all kinds of places.
The word that I like to use is integrity.
Thank you.
We're missing a lot of integrity in this country.
Just in everyday life.
The people that have the power To make change and use their influence or their power for good purposes don't seem to really do that unless they're getting something out of it.
It seems like if some of these folks in top tier places are going to get themselves ahead quicker By doing the wrong thing or something less moral, that's what they're going to do.
And they don't hesitate, it seems, to do it.
And so I just...
I don't know, man.
I don't understand how anybody...
Cannot want to attack this issue full on, full steam ahead.
And I am a thousand percent aware that it's a tough issue.
It's a tough nut to crack because who knows what the right answer is?
And I am positive that there are a lot of people that are working diligently on this issue to try to figure out some good, healthy ways to address it, to get people to see that there is a better way.
What I don't think is happening very effectively is That some of the stressors, if we want to call them that, that cause these feelings, that cause soldiers to feel the way they feel when they decide to take their own lives, those are the things, I think, that are not being mitigated.
I think that there are people and organizations that are working hard to figure out how to address these issues after they've happened.
But I don't know that there's a whole lot of work going on.
Maybe there is, and maybe I'm completely dead wrong about the whole thing.
But I think that if there was a way to prevent the issues that get folks to these feelings, then it would help out a lot.
But also take into account, and see, this is why it's such a bear.
It's such a bear to tackle.
But also identifying that, as we said, war is hell, right?
And for the men and women that volunteer and choose to join the military, your job is to fight a war.
And your job is to run towards the gunfire.
Your job is to shoot, move, and communicate.
Your job is to handle all the gruesome, ugly, horrific things that war has to throw at you.
And then put it away.
Put it in your backpack.
You put it in your backpack because tomorrow you gotta do it again.
And the day after that you gotta do it again.
And you do it again and again and again until it's your time to get on a plane and go home.
And then the next person takes over and it's their turn to do it day after day.
And so those are a couple of things that are unavoidable.
But I'm not convinced that those are the only reasons that soldiers are deciding to take their own lives.
In fact, There is information that was put out by the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies that says the overwhelming majority of military suicides, greater than 90% of them, are by male personnel who are typically younger than 35 years of age.
The most common way for them to die by suicide is by firearms.
Military personnel are more likely than civilians to use firearms when making a suicide attempt, meaning they're much more likely to die due to lethal gunshot wounds.
In general, military personnel seem to make more lethal suicide attempts than civilians, even when using other methods such as overdosing or jumping or whatever those methods are.
So military members who decide to commit suicide, 90% of them, so 90% of the 49 that killed themselves by these numbers, and maybe the numbers aren't accurate for this year.
This was, when was this, this was 21 also.
So maybe this year it wasn't 90%, but this year it was.
But let's just for conversation's sake, this year 90%, 92% of the 49 soldiers that killed themselves were under the age of 39.
And also, where does it say, did not experience combat.
So there's another example.
There's a whole other dynamic, right?
But service members who decide to kill themselves do it a whole lot more successfully and a whole lot more gruesome than non-service members.
What causes military personnel to attempt suicide?
Suicide is complex.
We know that already.
We've discussed that a few times.
And many different factors contribute.
Suicide is therefore very hard to accurately predict.
It is rarely caused by a single problem or issue, but rather seems to be due to a combination of stressors.
Relationship problems, financial stress, legal or disciplinary problems are the life events that occur most often in the time before military personnel decide to kill themselves.
These situations can cause military personnel to become emotionally overwhelmed.
They then start to think that they cannot handle the stress and feel like their problems will never get any better.
They may consider suicide and make a suicide attempt.
Reliving emotional pain and or stopping bad feelings are the most common reasons.
So for whatever reason, these soldiers feel like they just want this pain to stop.
And so what this makes me think about is when we talk to soldiers, you know, maybe pre-deployment or annually when, you know, so in the National Guard every December around Christmas time was death by PowerPoint week, right?
Our December drill was all your annual trainings and it was Sit for a day and a half and watch PowerPoint presentations, and everybody takes a turn.
You know, you get up, you read it, you ask questions, and then you have a comment time and blah, blah, blah.
So, maybe part of your death by PowerPoint annually is to talk about Talk about these things.
Talk to soldiers about...
These are the numbers, guys.
This is raw data.
It doesn't lie.
There's no fluff here.
And these are the reasons we have found why soldiers are deciding to do this.
So, before you get into these situations, know that...
You can come to this person, this person, there's this organization.
But then we get into this whole situation of seeking out mental help and having it hurt your career.
And the Army, in my experience, telling you that, hey man, there's Nobody's gonna penalize you for seeking out mental health help.
Nobody's gonna...
Your career will be fine.
You're not gonna have to...
You're not gonna lose your security clearance.
You're not gonna have to change jobs.
You're not gonna be looked at differently.
You're not gonna be treated differently.
And for many, many, many soldiers, that has not held true.
And so...
Part of the issue, maybe, is that the Army needs to hold true to that.
If you're gonna tell soldiers that it's okay to seek out mental health care and it's okay to go to the first sergeant or to the commander or to your first line leader and ask for help and let them know that you have a problem and you're not feeling right and have there be no repercussion, You got to prove it, right?
Think about this, you know, when your best friend or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your kids or whoever just walks all over you or ruins the trust that you have for them, it takes time to build that back.
And clearly, Since the Army came out and said all those years ago that if you, hey, no problem.
We'll get you the help you need.
We just, we want to keep the force strong.
We know that we have skilled personnel in these positions.
So if you need the help, let us know.
We'll let you make the time to do that.
Don't worry about it.
Clearly it hasn't been happening.
Our soldiers would be trusting that that's true.
Now, I don't know at what rate it's not happening, or if it's not happening at all, or if it's happening all the time, whatever.
But it would seem to me that if it was true, and the Army was living up to it, that things like this would begin to trend downwards.
But clearly it's not.
Clearly it's not because in the first three months of this year we lost 49 soldiers to their own hands.
Now think about this before we go to break.
Think about being in the United States Army.
Let's say you're in your ninth year.
Maybe you've deployed, maybe you haven't.
But in nine years, you've sacrificed a lot.
You've sacrificed a lot of time.
You've probably missed Christmas here.
You've missed some birthdays.
Maybe a loved one, your favorite aunt or your favorite uncle has passed away.
Maybe a grandparent has died.
Some big milestone.
Maybe you have kids that have graduated from high school.
Whatever the case may be.
Brother or sister got married.
You couldn't be there.
You're sacrificing every day.
And maybe you have deployed.
Lost a couple friends.
Maybe you got wounded and you got blown up.
You got shot.
Maybe you fell off a truck.
Hurt yourself.
Whatever the case may be.
There's probably a million different things that could go on.
That we would be able to identify as a pretty significant sacrifice for your ability to serve in the United States military.
So you go through all that for nine years and you sacrifice and you give up a lot of stuff.
And then one day, for you, The only answer is to end it.
The best thing that you can think to do for yourself is to end your life.
You go through all of that.
Thank you.
For what?
Now many people would say that that's the coward's way out.
Right?
Suicide is a coward's way out.
You leave much more of a mess behind than any mess that you had to clean up while you were here.
And I think that that's true.
It leaves a pretty big mess.
And I don't know that I would always label those folks cowards, but...
In some cases, maybe.
I guess it depends on the circumstance.
But I know one thing for sure.
It's never the right answer.
There's never anything that is worth that.
I believe very strongly that There is nothing.
The big guy, right?
The big guy upstairs will never put anything in front of you on your plate that you can't handle.
You just have to have the fortitude to attack it and to stick it out.
There isn't a whole lot of things in this world that are unsolvable.
Thank you.
But the answer is never.
It's never just to end it.
We're better than that.
At least we were. - Sure.
We should be.
I believe that we can be again.
But there's some things that need to fall into place.
Stick with us.
We'll be right back.
Hey folks, welcome back here.
I ran pretty long in that third segment, so we have just a short time left.
But I want to just close out with this.
Things like this topic are super important, in my opinion, because this population of people, members of the military and veterans, Are an extremely small percentage of our country's population.
But also an extremely small percentage of our country's history.
An extremely small percentage of our country's history that has made an enormous impact on the direction Now,
I'm not sitting here trying to say that members of the military and veterans deserve to have a free pass or be put up on this pedestal or anything like that.
Well, maybe I am.
Maybe I am saying that.
I think the most important thing that I'm trying to say is that it is worth our time to discuss it.
It is worth our time to try to solve it.
It is worth our time to let these folks know that they are not alone.
It is worth our efforts To make sure that these men and women understand that in their time of extreme strife and need, that there's a better way.
It doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be that way.
I believe that deciding to join our military for whatever reason, some people joke about joining the military because they had no other option.
right?
It was go to jail or join the military or they weren't good students or they're stupid or whatever.
You didn't make it in school and you weren't an academic genius so you had to join the service because you had to do something.
Well, there's a lot of other options.
But I believe the men and women who have chosen to serve this country Are somewhat of a national treasure.
Because without them, without the men and women that served, what was it, 1843 or whatever, when they started tabulating this data till today, who knows where we'd be.
So all those that came before us, All of us and all those that will come after us.
It's worth our efforts to ensure that they know it doesn't have to be that way.
Take the time.
Take the time.
Take the time to have these discussions.
Take the time to show that somebody cares.
They took the time to ensure that this proverbial blanket of freedom rests comfortably over your chest at night while you sleep.
If they weren't there, standing a post, where would we be?
Thank you.
I don't know.
We might be speaking German.
We might be speaking Chinese.
Who knows?
Maybe we'd be speaking a British form of English, whatever they call that.
Who knows?
Anyway, folks, that's all the time that we have today.
Please enjoy the rest of your evening.
Have a great week this week, and we will see you next Sunday.
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