For these women, the challenges they faced on the battlefield were just the beginning.

In 2005, Elana Duffy was an Army interrogator deployed to Iraq when her vehicle was hit by an IED. Duffy was knocked out and bled briefly from her ears. She didn’t feel she was badly injured though, and continued on with her mission. “I didn’t want to get pulled off the road,” she tells Playboy. “My job was my job, I wanted to keep on doing it.” When she started experiencing symptoms like bad headaches, Duffy hid them: “I covered up for as long as I possibly could.”

The 8th anniversary of the Fort Hood Massacre has come and gone. Save for the awarding of the Purple Hearts to the wounded and the families of the fallen in 2015, nothing has changed. Thirteen Soldiers and one Army retiree are still dead. Thirty-three of the wounded are still among the forgotten. Seven of the wounded and the survivors have taken their own lives. There will be more. Medical disabilities and other entitlements due those wounded and killed in action are being denied the wounded because Nidal Hasan is not an enemy of the state and the because the Fort Hood Massacre is still not an act of domestic terrorism.

We have found the enemy and it is us. We are consumed with hatred for anything and everything that dares to offend our fragile egos, simply because there cannot be any viewpoint or belief systems other than ours. Depending on who or what one votes for or against, the Bombay doors are thrust open for far more than mean-spirited attacks. We are at war with one another, provoked by no more than simple disagreement to all-out taunts, verbal attacks, and physical assaults; treated to the piece of knowledge that we are not worthy of life if we have the audacity to disagree or lean a little too far to the right or the left.

Nearly 8 years have passed since the Fort Hood Massacre. The victims have been long forgotten; the voices of the families of the fallen, the wounded, and the survivors left to tell the truths have long been silenced. The facts surrounding the largest massacre on any military installation in US history remain buried in an unmarked grave, along with the terrible truths that have yet to come to the fore: that eight civilian and high ranking military officers knew that the shooter, former Major Nidal Hasan, was a ticking bomb who had promised to do lethal harm to those who would dare to send him to war. The toll of the systematic assassinations and those left to carry the burden of unmatched survivor guilt continues to rise. Furthermore, there have been six suicides among the survivors. Four have been confirmed.

It is the frayed and demolished life to which many Veterans return to in rocket velocity, without any opportunity to transition or de-escalate from combat to the comparative lavishness of civilian life, that often shatters their once firm foundation and sends Service Members into a rapid downward spiral.

Recently, significant numbers of older Veterans (those over the age of 50) are taking their lives by suicide, yet they receive the least attention. Several of us who are well over the age of 50 have also deployed multiple times to the combat theater of operations since 2001. Sadly, Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf War Veterans are very often overlooked with respect to mental health and VA legislation, as if they already fail to exist, providing only for service entitlements for Iraq and Afghanistan war Veterans.

Interestingly enough, a considerable body of recent research has indicated that within the armed forces, there is no clear or direct correlation between completed suicides and deployment. However, the 2016 Department of Defense Quarterly Suicide Report maintains that deployment overseas to the wartime theater is an extremely stressful and life-altering experience that disrupts the fabric of the family and the existing “social and interpersonal structure” of the Service Member’s life. The DOD correlates suicide with the “interplay of feelings of belongingness,” which can be affected by deployment.

The VA’s 2012 Suicide Date Report estimates twenty-two Veteran suicides a day. This is a misnomer and a widely misunderstood calculation, says Stacy Bare. This figure has rallied a nationwide movement and electrified the devotee mantra of promoting the performance of 22 pushups a day, and setting in motion hype of titanic proportions among media outlets and politicians. This has all come about at the expense of a highly inaccurate and misinterpreted context and the genuine problem of epidemic proportions that lies at the root of veteran suicides.