On Tuesday night, CBS News announced the devastating results of a five-month investigation into the incidence of suicide among American war veterans. Until the CBS folks did their own count using existing state death records (that no one had bothered to gather together and analyze), little information existed about how many suicides among veterans there were nationwide.

The numbers CBS found are extremely disturbing. In 2005, 6256 veterans killed themselves—an average of 120 suicides each week. Furthermore, the CBS researchers found that veterans age 20-24 had the highest suicide rate of any age group. These, of course, are the Iraq and Afghani war kids. Whereas other veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide than the non-veteran populace. The new, young vets were three or four times more likely.

The examples CBS used to illustrate the problem, for me as a mother, were nearly unbearable to watch.

Twenty-three-year-old Marine Reservist Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of this parents’ home - where his father, Kevin, found him.

“There’s a crisis going on and people are just turning the other way,” Kevin Lucey said.

Kim and Mike Bowman’s son Tim was an Army reservist who patrolled one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road.

“His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn’t there anymore,” Kim Bowman said.

Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim shot himself. He was 23.

Diana Henderson’s son, Derek, served three tours of duty in Iraq. He died jumping off a bridge at 27.

Meanwhile, in related story reported in this morning’s LA Times, a new study was released on Wednesday showing that post-war emotional stress and depression caused by combat in Iraq often don’t appear until months after a soldier has returned home.

Overall, about 20 percent of active-duty soldiers and more than 40 percent of National Guardsmen and reservists were referred for care or had sought care on their own, a military team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Psychologists hope that catching incipient problems early and getting soldiers into treatment will prevent the type of long-term mental health problems that afflicted many soldiers who fought in Vietnam, said Dr. Charles S. Milliken of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who led the study.

Yes, but are we really catching things early—or at all?

The story excerpted below ran in the Texas Observer this summer. It’s a portrait of three different service people who have come back from Iraq, and it It suggests we aren’t doing quite so swimmingly at the Walter Reed guy would have us believe.

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