Veteran suicide is a huge problem plaguing America today, with one in 18 veterans dying from suicide each day.U.S. veterans account for just 8.5 percent of our country’s population, yet they accounted for 18 percent of all adult suicides in 2014. Though certain measures have been taken to prevent veteran suicides, such as the expansion of the Veteran Crisis Line and predictive analytics to identify those at risk and intervene early on, it hasn’t been enough. Too many veterans with PTSD feel like they have nowhere or no one to turn to, so they opt to take their own life than suffer any longer.
Veterans David Sharpe and Bradley Fasnacht were on the same trajectory as so many veterans before them, but fortunately, they found the help they needed, in the form of four-legged heroes, Cheyenne and Zapper. I’m going to share their stories with you now.
David Sharpe and Cheyenne
“Cheyenne is my savior. She’s the love of my life,” David tells TIME reporters. David served for six years in the United States Air Force. He got deployed after 9/11 to Uzbekistan and came back in March of 2002. When he came back, he was a shell of the David that his friends and family once knew and loved. He closed himself off from the world, and when the world did come knocking, he wanted to fight it.
David recalls a night out with his friends. They’d say, “Hey Dave, do you want a beer?” and he’d say, “No thanks, I want to cruise around this bar, and I’m gonna look at the first guy who looks at me for longer than 2 seconds and I’m gonna pop him.” David says that after that, his friends told him they could no longer hang out with him–he was too dangerous, too much of a loose cannon.
After that, a friend stopped by his house and told David that he wanted to take him to check out a pitbull rescue. Sharpe’s first reaction was, “hell yeah, I’m a fighter, I want a fighting dog.” When he got down there, he immediately noticed the one puppy who wanted nothing to do with him. That was the puppy he decided to take home.
Cheyenne’s first month or so with David was a rough one. Cheyenne’s presence was a magical cure for David, and he still found himself punching holes in walls or throwing furniture around. But then there was one night in particular, when David was punching holes in the wall and beating up the refrigerator door–“this was normal for me,” he said–when he looked down and saw Cheyenne just watching him, wagging her tail and shaking her head. He stopped mid-rage, took her back to his bed and just held her and spilled his whole story to her.
“It felt like a 10,000 pound weight was lifted off my chest, it literally did,” he said.
Bradley Fasnacht
Bradley Fasnacht was sitting in a coffee shop when all of a sudden, it felt like everything was closing in on him. He wheeled himself out as quickly as he could, but even being in the open air wasn’t enough. He needed something more.
Bradley picked up Zapper from the Pets for Vets foundation. Before he had Zapper, he had no one to whom he could talk to. “We have these doctors you know, but they’ve heard [about it]…they haven’t seen it.” He felt he couldn’t talk to friends or family because he was worried that they would judge him. “But talking to your dog man, talking to Zapper…it just lets me get it off my chest and get it out there,” he shares with reporters.
Thousands of veterans commit suicide each year, and just as many dogs go homeless. There are several foundations out there that dedicate their resources to matching pets with vets, and they rely on people like you to get the funding they need to make a difference. If you want to know how you can change the lives of veterans and homeless dogs alike, watch this video through till the end, then share on your page. You don’t have to be rich or famous to make a difference – you just have to care enough to share.
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