Ligonier man walks memorial-to-memorial to raise awareness about veteran suicides

In the United States, more than 6,200 veterans committed suicide in 2019. And the suicide risk for veterans that year was 52.3% higher than that of the general population, according to the Veterans Affairs Department’s 2021 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Report.

Veteran David Rogers of Ligonier wants more people to be aware of the risk of suicide among the nation’s nearly 18 million veterans — and spur them to do something about it.

“It’s a big problem,” said Rogers, 62, a Navy veteran. “To me, there’s an awful lot of talk about how to help veterans, but not nearly enough action as I think there ought to be.”

To help draw attention to the issue, Rogers on Thursday walked 10 miles from the veterans’ memorial on the west side of Ligonier’s Diamond to Veterans Memorial Plaza in Latrobe.

“In talking to people, I was just struck by the number of suicides that occur and where they fit into the population,” Rogers said. “It’s just staggering.”

And while the figures have dropped in the short term between 2018 and 2019, when there was an unprecedented 399 fewer veteran suicides, the numbers had mostly climbed steadily over the past two decades.

In 2001, there were 5,989 veteran suicides. From 2005 to 2018, the number of veteran suicides increased on average by 48 each year, according to the VA’s Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention.

Though the figures have dropped in recent years, the “VA is poignantly and painfully mindful that 6,261 veterans died by suicide in 2019,” the 2021 annual reported states.

In September, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby acknowledged the Defense Department cannot fully explain the increases in suicides in recent years.

“One of the things that is bedeviling about suicide is that it’s often very hard to connect dots in causality — what leads somebody to make that decision,” Kirby said. “It’s difficult to denote specific causality with suicide on an individual basis, let alone on an institutional basis. And I think that’s why it’s so difficult for us to speak to it with any specificity, except to say we take this very, very seriously.”

Rogers said he wonders how many people have a veteran in the family “who they’ve never really talked to that much.”

“Sometimes it’s a case of no one ever asking, or it’s too fresh in their minds,” Rogers said. “But maybe a few years down the road, they may open up. I really wonder just how much of talking with family members could relieve some of this?”

VA officials remain committed to eliminating suicide deaths in its veteran ranks.

“Three hundred ninety-nine fewer, 6,261 to go,” authors of the most recent report stated. “We hold this belief to be true: Suicide is preventable on the individual and on the community level.”