HUFFINGTON
09.01-08.13
COURTESY OF CRAIG BRYAN
INVISIBLE CASUALTIES
ma, he said, does affect “all those
other career fields who see the
consequences of war even if they
are not directly involved.”
“We are realizing now that a lot
of service members and vets see
things and experience events that
are not necessarily life-threatening
situations but that disrupt their
sense of security, what is right and
wrong — and that creates tremendous inner conflict,” Bryan said.
A gradual change in the military culture has also raised stress
within the ranks, experts believe.
Frequent deployments have increased the isolation of those left
behind. At the Army’s Fort Drum
in New York, for instance, it was
not uncommon after 9/11 for two
of the 10th Mountain Division’s
three infantry brigades to be gone
at the same time, leaving the post
a virtual ghost town.
At military posts across the
country, many families have chosen to move into nearby civilian
communities. More spouses find
work outside the military and
many send their kids to civilian schools. Under congressional
mandate, underused bases have
been shuttered and their military
Dr. Craig
Bryan,
director of
the National
Center for
Veterans
Studies at
the University
of Utah,
served in
Iraq in 2009
and has led
numerous
research
projects
on military
suicide.
families sent elsewhere. Social
media has made it easy to connect
to the world beyond the military.
All of this disrupted what in
the 1980s and 1990s was a comfortable, insular existence. Life in
places like Camp Lejeune, the Marine base in North Carolina, and
the Army’s Fort Benning in Georgia often resembled small towns of
the 1950s, with children walking
to Defense Department schools,
housewives gathering for coffee,
families maintaining manicured
lawns, and crime and drugs staying mostly outside the main gates.
“Service people used to live in
their own world, and I don’t mean
that negatively,” said Jacqueline
Garrick, a retired Army officer
who directs the Pentagon’s suicide
prevention programs. “There was