Illustration by Scott Bakal
Katie Sponsler is on a mission.
Barely 20 years old when she joined the Air Force in 2001, she recalls having simple goals — get out of her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, find a better life for herself and her daughter, and do something to help the world become a better place. Plus, she had run out of money and could not afford to pursue her degree in criminal justice at Youngstown State University.
By the time she left military service in 2011 as a sergeant, Sponsler had served in Germany as a weapons specialist on A-10 and F-16 aircraft, with short tours in Iraq, Turkey, Guam and Texas. She had also done a full combat tour at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
Throughout her service, Sponsler recalls seeing and hearing about active-duty and veteran military personnel who survived combat only to return home and die by suicide.
Then she lost a veteran friend to suicide. Rather than accept the latest data from military reports showing that, on average, 22 veterans and active-duty personnel die by suicide every day, Sponsler resolved to speak out.
Advocating on behalf of veterans and their families is a key component of her recently announced campaign for the Virginia General Assembly. A Democrat, she’s seeking the House of Delegates seat vacated by Kirk Cox (R-66th) when he announced he was running for governor in November.
Data from the 2019 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report show that death rates among U.S. veterans are at their highest point in years, while the suicide rate for female veterans is climbing even faster than that of their male peers.
According to the report, female veterans are nearly 250% more likely to take their own lives than civilian women.
Male veterans also are more likely than their civilian counterparts to die by suicide; their rate is 18% higher.
Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense also reveal that more military veterans have died by their own hands in the last decade — 60,000 — than the 58,000 who were killed during the 20 years the United States had troops in Vietnam.
Air Force veteran Katie Sponsler lost a good friend to suicide. She says he stopped showing up for mental health services at the VA and no one followed up with him. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Communication Is Key
Sponsler, who lives in Colonial Heights, is not alone in her mission, her grief, or her resolve to speak out and try to save lives.
Marine Sgt. Charles Bump lost his friend, Sgt. Shawn Childress, to suicide in 2020. Bump is also speaking out about the increasing number of military suicides.
Childress, 24, a graduate of Manchester High School and a veteran of three overseas deployments, was home on leave when he was stopped in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2020 by a Chesterfield County police officer on suspicion of drunk driving. Rather than simply handing over his driver’s license and vehicle registration, Childress pulled out a handgun and shot himself. Despite the best efforts of the police officer and the emergency medical team, he died.
Bump, who served with Childress in Kuwait and attended leadership school stateside with him, says he is tired of burying friends. “We’ve reached a point where every veteran I know knows somebody who has committed suicide,” he says. “Think about that — people need to talk about this if we are ever going to be able to save lives.”
Bump adds, “We need to understand that hotlines aren’t really cutting it. We need to invest in improving the transition plans from active duty to veteran status, and we need to have a hard-line dedication to communication. The VA and vets need to check on each other, and we need to have those hard conversations about alcohol, money and love.”
While many efforts by the VA and the Department of Defense to prevent suicide focus on identifying and treating the mental health issues of people in crisis, some suicide experts point to the availability of firearms as an important piece of the puzzle.
One possible solution — restricting gun access and ownership — is political kryptonite in the United States, where more than 40% of adults own a gun or live with someone who does, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center and Harvard and Northeastern universities.
Contrary to a popular misconception, Uncle Sam does not — and has never — given away guns to people who leave the military.
Interviews with veterans and enlisted personnel, along with numerous articles in the mainstream press, military newspapers and medical journals, reveal three basic reasons people say they don’t get help from their local VA hospitals:
- frustrations with disability eligibility determinations and with getting appointments;
- fear that it will make getting a job more difficult if they are labeled with mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or suicidal ideations; and
- fear that they will be put on a list restricting their access to firearms.
Concerning claims about the difficulty of getting an appointment to determine eligibility for mental health and disability services, Laura Pond, the suicide prevention coordinator at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, is succinct: “Not accurate,” she says. “We have a 24/7 hotline available … and we will even dispatch immediate help if necessary.”
Random checks to determine response time on the 24-hour Veterans Crisis Line showed that not only were the calls answered promptly, but the people on the other end were eager to engage. “We are about the business of saving lives and saying thank you to people who served our country,” one operator said.
Pond explains that the VA encourages veterans to follow Operation S.A.V.E. if they believe a peer is experiencing suicidal thoughts. The acronym S.A.V.E. instructs people to notice Symptoms, Ask the right questions, Validate their peers’ experiences, and Expedite help.
She says the VA has also recently undertaken a process to contact veterans around 90, 180 and 365 days after they leave the military. There are no data yet to determine the efficacy of this effort.
Pond says more community engagement is necessary to remove any negativity associated with seeking mental health services.
“We cannot do this by ourselves,” she says. “Asking the right questions requires bringing the subject into the conversation in a way that keeps a potentially suicidal person at ease and willing to share their feelings.”
Pond says there is “no way” that seeking help for service-related injuries will result in a denial of Second Amendment rights. However, she acknowledges that the VA does have the power to restrict access to firearms when a veteran is determined to be incompetent to manage their finances. Such declarations, she says, are common when someone has had a severe brain injury or profound PTSD.
“Suicide is a tough topic for people to embrace, but I think that at last, we’re getting things in place to truly be there,” she says. “I want to hear from veterans and family members on how to improve the system so it can grow and be more responsive.”
Chart sources: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 2020 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report; U.S. Department of Defense 2018 Suicide Event Report
Possible Solutions
Retired Marine Lt. Col. Michael Purcell, who served multiple overseas deployments as a tank commander, knows what it is like to lose soldiers in battle and to suicide. He also knows it is past time for the military to solve this decades-old problem. “How many more people need to die before we find solutions that work?” he asks.
Purcell believes that routinely requiring all personnel to receive mental health checkups would save lives and help destigmatize PTSD. In February 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, which requires a yearly mental health assessment for all service members.
Currently an adjunct professor at George Washington University living in Northern Virginia, Purcell notes that “there has been huge progress in destigmatizing PTSD.
“We check all kinds of health-related things proactively … and this would be a responsible way to both identify issues early as well as [to] equip service members with an awareness of what to look for in themselves and others.”
He acknowledges that despite past efforts to improve access to mental health professionals in the military, this would require a significant investment in that capability. “I believe we have the means, and if we could get improved resources to get ahead of this, we can do better than our civilian counterparts,” he says.
“Every veteran I know knows somebody who has committed suicide.” —Marine Sgt. Charles Bump
Getting the money to help the military provide more mental health resources is the purpose of bipartisan legislation that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner and others fought for with the passage of the Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act last fall.
That legislation, which allocates up to $174 million during the next five years to state and local organizations that provide suicide-prevention services to veterans and their families, among other measures, was signed into law by President Donald Trump in October.
Purcell lost someone in his command to suicide. “It took us all by surprise,” he says. “We thought we had helped him turn the corner. It looked like he had made it. He had suffered traumatic burns. And then, boom. Everyone has a tendency to blame themselves for what happens to the people in their command. We need to figure out how to help the living deal with the dead.”
Sponsler says that, based on her own experiences and those of other veterans she knows, she is “amazed that the number [of suicides] isn’t higher.”
She says there must be multiple solutions for preventing veteran and active-duty suicides, and that the suicides won’t be stopped until “the folks up the chain of command take the time to understand the real needs of the rank-and-file enlisted men and women serving in all branches in the military.”
Sponsler endorses the idea of more frequent mental health checkups and suggests that in addition to routinely incorporating mental health care, “we need to have people trained in spotting possible suicidal ideation before we reach the crisis point.
“It is bad management to wait for the crisis, rather than learn the warning signs,” she says. “When you wait for the crisis, you never get ahead.”
Beyond Basic Training
Sponsler maintains that as long as young people are “joining right out of high school, we are going to have to deal with not just training people how to be good military personnel, but also how to help them acquire life skills. We need to help them navigate life basics that go beyond basic training.
“Life can get pretty overwhelming ... for people who went straight into the military from high school and never really had to take care of themselves, who suddenly find themselves exiting the military and trying to reenter a society that they never really dealt with before,” she says. “In many respects, the military becomes a second home for people. They eat together, work together, hang out together, and then ... they are thrown back into the deep end of the real world.”
Much like college, the military is the first time away from home for many young people, the major difference being that people in the military are paid.
All entry-level military personnel across all branches receive the same starting salary of $1,733 per month, plus housing and food allowances, with incentive pay for hostile fire and dangerous duties. The average total compensation for a private is roughly $38,636 per year as of 2020. Faced with losing the ability to support their families when they leave the military, some veterans decide to take their own lives.
Young enlisted troops are a primary concern. They account for 43% of the military population but 61% of deaths by suicide. Privately owned firearms, not military weapons, were the primary means of death.
The friend Sponsler lost to suicide had stopped showing up for mental health services, and she says no one at the VA followed up to see why he wasn’t coming in.
Her friend had stepped on a landmine while serving in Afghanistan, losing one leg and part of the other. He settled in western Maryland, and Sponsler would visit him at least once a month while she was working with the National Park Service.
“Three years after [returning] I went to a police academy in Georgia and couldn’t visit for five months,” she recalls. “During that time, he took a shotgun into his barn and took his own life. I learned only after his death, at his funeral, that I was the only person who regularly saw him.”
Sponsler and others stress that there is no easy answer to this problem.
“To be sure, there is no one answer, because no two people are identical,” notes Army Sgt. Sean Tompkins, a veteran of three tours in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq who is still active in the National Guard.
The 2018 Defense Department Annual Report reports the highest suicide rate — 30.8 per 100,000 service members — for the National Guard. Tompkins thinks that one reason for this is that “[National Guard troops] don’t have the same interaction that active troops do with their leadership. Basically, we straddle the line between military and civilian health care. Many people don’t know where to go.”
A Richmond native and a graduate of Richmond Public Schools’ Franklin Military Academy, Tompkins says he knows of three suicides involving people in his various units. “When I first heard about it happening, I hoped it wasn’t true.”
He says he understands why some people hesitate to get help because they think it might make them seem weak. “But it is a sign of strength to get help,” he says. “Don’t be afraid of what anybody thinks — get help.”
Tompkins, like other veterans and enlisted personnel, says that people who are coming into the military “need to be trained in coping with emotions and situations they have never experienced.
“The other two suicides that I knew were great guys, but they were dealing with relationship issues and financial concerns. Basic training really does need to go beyond basic for our younger veterans.”
Tompkins used the G.I. Bill to get a bachelor’s degree in audio production from the Art Institute of Washington, and he currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
“I don’t think it will change anything if you try to restrict gun ownership,” he adds. “If somebody wants a gun, they’ll get a gun. We need to help people reach for help before they reach for a gun.”
If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255). You can also text a crisis counselor at 741741.
