Stopping the Root Cause of Veteran Suicide

“Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” After his public suicide, Sergeant Mathew Livelsberger left that note.

You probably saw his sad and tragic demise, or its immediate aftermath, in video footage on the news. Parked in front of a Las Vegas hotel in a rented Tesla Cybertruck, Sgt. Livelsberger set off fireworks and incendiary devices immediately after killing himself with a handgun, saying in the same note that “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”

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A stunt. Can you imagine? Why would someone end their life that way? If we look a little deeper into that life, maybe we can start to understand.

Livelsberger, 37 years old, served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan. A Green Beret, he had recently been “… forgetting words, losing his train of thought midsentence and struggling with insomnia. He had headaches and depressive moods that sometimes kept him shut away for days,” according to coverage in the New York Times.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that terrorist attacks, suicides like Sgt. Livelsberger’s, and many other injurious and even fatal violent outbursts are often committed by veterans and active-duty soldiers. Traumatized by their combat experiences, with hidden brain injuries from blast concussions and other causes, and trained to solve problems with weaponry, veterans commit suicide at a much higher rate than non-veterans.

If you experienced what some veterans do during wartime, you might question the value of human life, too.

In 2019, the Veterans Administration, in its “National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report,” found that the suicide rate for veterans was 1.5 times the rate of non-veterans. Veterans account for 14 per cent of all deaths by suicide in US adults, but only make up eight per cent of the US adult population. Those sobering statistics don’t count the veterans who commit suicide slowly, through drug and alcohol abuse or drunk driving or intentional high-risk behaviors. 

It turns out that killing another human being stays with you forever. As Sgt. Livelsberger said in his suicide note, he couldn’t bear to continue carrying that burden any longer.

So how can we stop this terrible toll?

We can go right to the source of the problem and stop fighting useless wars, the Baha’i teachings say. Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith, wrote:

… it is Our purpose, through the loving providence of God — exalted be His glory — and His surpassing mercy, to abolish, through the force of Our utterance, all disputes, war, and bloodshed, from the face of the earth.

The United States and its massive military forces fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan and left the country decimated, not only in its infrastructure but in its economic and social structures as well. America’s longest war killed more than 200,000 people, including well over 7,000 US troops, contractors, and allied personnel, as well as at least 46,000 innocent civilians, many of them children. The United States spent $2.3 trillion on that fruitless, senseless war. When it ended in 2021, the US military withdrew in defeat and disgrace, and the Taliban forces re-took the country. What, many people ask, was the point? 

Perhaps we still need to learn this lesson: the death and destruction of war doesn’t stop when the immediate combat ceases. The trauma of war and killing lingers long after, not only in the soldiers who fought the war but in their families, in their wider social circle, and in their society itself.

This means we can count the seven people who were injured in Livelsberger’s explosive “stunt” in Las Vegas as casualties of the war in Afghanistan and include the needless deaths from terrorist acts like the recent one in New Orleans, as well. War creates long-term pain and injury, not just immediate casualties. War, like a virulent cancer, afflicts the entire culture. War stays with us for generations, hurting everyone in its path.

So the Baha’i teachings have a suggestion for every soldier who faces deployment into combat, put forth here by Abdu’l-Baha, the son and successor of Baha’u’llah:

The soldiers must petition, through their representatives, the Ministers of War, the politicians, the Congressmen and the generals to put forth in a clear, intelligible language the reasons and the causes which have brought them to the brink of such a national calamity. The soldiers must demand this as one of the prerogatives. “Demonstrate to us”, they must say, “that this is a just war, and we will then enter into the battlefield otherwise we will not take one step …. Come forth from your hiding-places, enter into the battlefield if you like to attack each other and tear each other to pieces if you desire to air your so-called contentions. The discord and feud are between you; why do you make us, innocent people, a party to it? If fighting and bloodshed are good things, then lead us into the fray by your presence!”

In short, every means that produces war must be checked and the causes that prevent the occurrence of war be advanced … so that physical conflict may become an impossibility. On the other hand, every country must be properly delimited, its exact frontiers marked, its national integrity secured, its permanent independence protected, and its vital interests honoured by the family of nations. These services ought to be rendered by an impartial, international Commission. In this manner all causes of friction and differences will be removed. And in case there should arise some disputes between them, they could arbitrate before the Parliament of Man, the representatives of which should be chosen from among the wisest and most judicious men of all the nations of the world.

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This eventual condition — the establishment of a global governmental entity designed to make “physical conflict … an impossibility” is completely within our power to implement. Humanity has successfully operated such transnational agencies for decades now. If we had the will and enough people spoke out in support, we could require enlightened, peace-minded leaders in a plurality of nations to sufficiently strengthen existing international law and completely outlaw war. The NATO treaty alliance provides a working model, providing collective security for 30 countries — what if we opened its membership up to all nations? What if — as Baha’u’llah revealed in his 1873 messages to the world’s political and religious leaders — we made a global pact against aggression and war by agreeing to a multilateral union of nations?:

It is incumbent upon the Sovereigns of the world — may God assist them — unitedly to hold fast unto this Peace, which is the chief instrument for the protection of all mankind. It is Our hope that they will arise to achieve what will be conducive to the well-being of man. It is their duty to convene an all-inclusive assembly, which either they themselves or their ministers will attend, and to enforce whatever measures are required to establish unity and concord amongst men. They must put away the weapons of war, and turn to the instruments of universal reconstruction. Should one king rise up against another, all the other kings must arise to deter him. Arms and armaments will, then, be no more needed beyond that which is necessary to insure the internal security of their respective countries. 

Maybe then, as this Baha’i prayer recommends, the world could finally find its way to stop the needless, wasteful, and inhumane loss of life in our forever wars and extinguish the fires that burn in the minds and hearts of our soldiers long after the shooting stops:

O God, my God! Thou seest how black darkness is enshrouding all regions, how all countries are burning with the flame of dissension, and the fire of war and carnage is blazing throughout the East and the West. Blood is flowing, corpses bestrew the ground, and severed heads are fallen on the dust of the battlefield.

O Lord! Have pity on these ignorant ones and look upon them with the eye of forgiveness and pardon. Extinguish this fire, so that these dense clouds which obscure the horizon may be scattered, the Sun of Reality shine forth with the rays of conciliation, this intense gloom be dispelled and the resplendent light of peace shed its radiance upon all countries.