By Ashley Fantz
February 5, 2014
(CNN) – When Scott Warner swallowed a palm full of pills and washed them down with vodka, all he could think about was the way his son looked back at him and smiled before boarding a plane to Iraq.
Heath Warner was 19, an Army private, when a bomb killed him in al Anbar Province on November 22, 2006.
“From the moment those men in uniforms were at our door, each day, the pain kept getting worse,” recalled Scott Warner. “I was crawling up a wall. People out in the real world would tell me, ‘Why aren’t you over this? He’s been gone for years. Why aren’t you better by now?’
“All I wanted to do was end my life. I know I’m not alone. I’ve talked to other parents, other family members. We are hurting and someone must do something.”
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Though the military tracks suicides among service members, suicides among their family members — spouses, siblings and parents — go uncounted. But CNN learned Wednesday that the Pentagon’s Defense Suicide Prevention Office has sent a report to Congress detailing for the first time a proposal for tracking those deaths.
The report came partly in response to cries for help from groups like the National Military Family Association, whose members know firsthand about the suicides and have struggled to call attention to the problem.
Read the full report (PDF)
In interviews with CNN, military family members who have attempted or considered suicide say the cumulative trauma of 12 years of war — America’s longest battles — and unprecedented multiple deployments of their loved ones have left them wrung out and desperate. Some have attempted suicide while struggling to care for injured service members. Others, like Scott Warner, have been pushed to the edge by the loss of their loved one at war.
Warner has slowly emerged from the darkness that enveloped him before his suicide attempt in 2010. When he heard about the Defense Department’s report, he was hopeful.
“If they do this, it would validate that families are traumatized,” Warner said. “This is a lonely journey that parents, siblings, spouses are walking. I know; I’ve talked to them. I don’t care how long it takes, we all want this.”
The report, obtained by CNN Wednesday, says the Defense Department does not currently have the ability to investigate, monitor or receive notification of military family member deaths and details how that might be done and what it would cost.
It would take 18 to 24 months for the Pentagon to analyze data it could buy from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks deaths in the general U.S. population, the report says. That data — names and locations of deaths — could then be compared against data the Defense Department has on family members enrolled in an ID card program. The card allows them access to health benefits and other services, like shopping at on-base commissaries.