Overwatch+Project is training and empowering thousands on how to start a conversation to save lives.
Two weeks after Casey Woods conducted firearm and suicide prevention training with soldiers at Fort Hood, she received a text from a soldier – “No joke, I saved lives today because I was in your training.” Another soldier in his platoon, who had a firearm, was going through marital problems and the soldier who took Woods’ training asked to hold on to it or take the ammo. After hearing no to it all, the soldier didn’t give up as he was taught in the training. So he asked for the soldier to just move it to a different location in the house, and he agreed to.
In relaying the story to Woods, the soldier who took the training shared that “at 2 a.m. the soldier called and said, ‘I’m so glad I listened to you. Last night when I was working the gate my wife had a mental breakdown and she called me, running around the house trying to find the firearm because she was going to kill herself and our child. She couldn’t find the firearm because I moved it that day because you told me to.’
“I tell that story as often as I can because if you were ever wondering if you should ask somebody, I want you to think about that,” said Woods, who shared that relationship problems are the No. 1 precursor to military suicides, to members of The American Legion’s Veterans Affairs & Rehabilitation Commission on Aug. 23 in Tampa, Fla., during the 106th National Convention. “It was a borderline situation, nobody was suicidal, he asked that question and he saved the life of that woman and that child. That’s what we’re working towards is everybody asking that question.”
Woods is the founder and executive director of Forge Overwatch+Project, a military and veteran suicide prevention initiative. The program provides peer-intervention training that empowers veterans to have a conversation with their friends by offering to temporarily hold onto their firearms or take safe storage measures to save lives.
Over the past two years, Overwatch+Project has trained more than 50,000 servicemembers and veterans through partnerships with the National Guard, reserve and active duty; employers and other veteran service organizations. Overwatch+Project also was a third-place winner in VA’s Mission Daybreak Innovation Challenge in 2023 and recently received a grant from USAA’s Face the Fight to work with and bring training to mission-aligned organizations, like The American Legion.
“In our work with the Overwatch+Project we like to focus on what does it mean when we can equip people to think and talk about firearms and suicide differently and then to use that knowledge to save lives,” Woods said. “Because if we can do one thing in America to most effectively bring down those numbers of suicide in the military and veteran community, and more broadly in the American community, it would be changing this conversation about firearms and suicide.”
The training is framed around creating decision points between impulse and action – to give someone moments to think before assessing their firearm. It’s the creation of time and distance.
“If you can build in some time to think between the gun and suicide attempt, you can save somebody’s life,” Woods said, adding that firearms are deadlier than all other methods combined. “If someone attempts with firearms, they are 90% likely to die. It is a proven fact by research that gun owners are not more likely to be depressed, they are not more likely to attempt suicide, they are just more likely to die in their attempts because their attempts are almost always fatal.”
Woods said that there are two parts of suicide – desire and the capability. Overwatch+Project focuses on the capability, or the how not the why. The peer-intervention training was started three years ago by working with 300 veterans about how to have a conversation on firearms and suicide. When Woods asked veterans who had saved lives by asking their peers in crisis about having a firearm, she wanted to know what words they used or how they had the conversation to replicate that success.
“Veteran after veteran said, ‘I just f-ing asked.’ So that is our call to action … #justfnask,” she said. “The biggest mistake when it comes to firearms and suicide is not asking the question. We always teach people that if you are asking yourself whether you should ask about somebody’s firearms, you already have your answer. You should ask.”
Overwatch+Project training empowers people to:
Take action – to create that time and distance. This can be done by:
- Getting the firearms out of the house temporarily;
- Holding on to the firing pin or ammo if the veteran says no to removing the firearm; or
- Disassemble the firearm and put pieces of it in different places in the house. “One guy said that he has to walk past pictures of his daughters to put his firearm back together,” Woods said. “We teach people if you ask someone about their firearms or suicide in general, and they say, ‘I’m not talking about that, it’s none of your business,’ you keep going, you keep trying, you don’t quit.”
- Putting family pictures in their gun safe or a note in there that says, “’Don’t do it. Call me,’ and put your phone number on the note so they are reminded of that when you’re not there to intervene.”
Pre-planning – have the conversation now and a plan in place before a crisis occurs.
“Who are you thinking about this second?” Woods asked the commission members. “This is your sign to go have that conversation right now and not wait until it’s a crisis. And say, ‘Hey, can we do this for each other.’”
Getting Ahead of the Crisis
America’s Warrior Partnership (AWP) spoke to the VA&R Commission about how the organization is connecting veterans with local and national resources to prevent veteran suicide.
“We educate the veterans what is out there, what they’re eligible for, what they can be involved in,” said Cheree Tham, AWP co-founder and chief of programs and initiatives. “What we do is by finding veterans and building a relationship with them, we get ahead of the crisis. So that when the person that is doing well has a tragedy that is going to cause them stress or cause them problems within their family, that they know, ‘OK, let me reach out to someone right now before this spirals into a situation that is too much for me to manage.’”
Since 2014, 80,000 veterans and their caregivers have been served by AWP. And since 2023, AWP has identified 526 veterans at risk of suicide.
Anyone providing resources to veterans at the local level can reach out to the AWP for national resources.
“The AWP network is to push the resource back down to you who has the relationship with the veteran,” Tham said. “You contact the network, you talk about what the need is with this particular veteran, and we push that resource down to you to help that veteran.”
Since 2018, nearly 15,000 cases have come through the network for national resources to be pushed down to the local level to support veterans.
Veterans needing support or providers needing national resources can fill out this form for assistance.
“We maintain a relationship with the individual for life so we can stay front and center to make sure that when they do have a hiccup that they don’t forget that we’re here and they can reach back out to us before it spirals.”
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