CALIFORNIA:Shinseki Responds to The Bay Citizen Investigation

OFF THE WIRE
http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/pulse-of-the-bay/shinseki-responds-bay-citizen/ Shinseki Responds to The Bay Citizen Investigation By Aaron Glantz |November 11, 2010 12:59 p.m. |In Veterans
U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki on NPR's Morning Edition today responded to an investigation published last month by The Bay Citizen, which showed three times as many California vets are dying at home from suicide, motorcycle accidents and other high risk behaviors than are dying in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Host Steve Inskeep opened the interview by asking him to respond to the report, and he said, "I don't have enough insights," and then went on to reflect on his own experience coming home from Vietnam 40 years ago.
"It parallels a little bit of my experiences where I was still serving in uniform where you take a unit on a very, very difficult operation," he said. "You come back there’s a tendency for these kinds of things to occur – the driving long hours, the trying to get as much living in on a weekend and trying to make it back on a Sunday night early morning … but the suicides always get our attention because this ties back very clearly to the exposures to stress that go on in our operation."
Shinseki added that he had no idea exactly how many veterans have committed suicide because only a third of the nation's 23-million veterans are enrolled in VA health care.
"I know the suicide numbers are up," he said, but "exactly how to quantify that in this large population [I’m] unable to do that right now."
The Bay Citizen used a vital statistics database of death certificates provided by the California Department of Public Health to show that 2,668 veterans committed suicide between 2005 and 2008 -- and we've published an interactive table of how those suicides break down for each of California's 58 counties.