A Navy SEAL’s chilling suicide note has been revealed five years after he shot himself in the heart to preserve his brain.
Lt. David Metcalf took his own life inside a garage at his North Carolina home in 2019, placing a stack of books on brain injuries beside him. According to the New York Times.
She also posted a note on the door that read in part: ‘The gaps in memory, lack of recognition, mood swings, headaches, impulsiveness, fatigue, anxiety and paranoia were not who I was, but they have become who I am.
“It’s getting worse and worse,” the 42-year-old wrote before shooting himself in the heart and letting his brain be analyzed by the Department of Defense, which has since discovered an unusual pattern of damage that it believes may have been caused by by their own weapons.
Now, Metcalf’s wife, Jamie, says she sees his sudden death as a way to draw attention to the problem affecting Special Operators.
“He left an intentional message because he knew things had to change,” he told the Times.
Lt. David Metcalf took his own life inside a garage at his North Carolina home in 2019, leaving behind a letter describing the brain issues he had been dealing with.
At least a dozen Navy SEALS have committed suicide over the past decade, either while in the military or shortly after leaving it.
A review of their deaths has determined that they all had a number of factors in common.
The average age of the deceased veterans is 43, and each of them was deployed to combat several times, but none were injured by enemy fire, according to the Times.
All of the veterans also spent years firing a variety of powerful weapons, jumping out of airplanes, blasting doors open, diving deep underwater, and learning hand-to-hand combat.
Around age 40, almost everyone began to struggle with insomnia, headaches, memory and coordination problems, depression, confusion, and sometimes anger.
Many were also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but a Department of Defense study of eight of the soldiers found blast damage to the brains of each of them.
Many are believed to have suffered brain damage caused by the shock waves released by the troops’ own weapons.
Studies suggest that that brain damage apparently came from shock waves released by troops’ own detonators in a range of weapons.
Energy waves from a gun blast travel through the brain and bounce off tissue boundaries like an echo, the Times reported.
For a few fractions of a millisecond, these waves create a vacuum that causes nearby fluid in the brain to explode into bubbles of vapor.
These explosions are then powerful enough to blow up brain cells.
At first, there may be no noticeable symptoms, but as exposure continues, the effects may worsen, according to Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.
He explained that brains can often compensate for damage, until injuries accumulate to a critical point where “people seem to fall off a cliff.”
“People can get hurt without even realizing it,” Daneshvar said.
“But over time, this can add up.”
Dr. Daniel Daneshvar said the effects can worsen over time with repeated exposure.
Warrant Officer David Collins took his own life in March 2014
For Petty Officer David Collins, repeated exposure created confusion in the years before he took his life.
Collins had spent 20 years working as a Navy SEAL and had deployed to Afghanistan twice and Iraq three times.
When he wasn’t deployed, his wife said he was away from home for hundreds of days each year training.
Fighting never seemed to faze him, his wife Jennifer said, but toward the end of his career, Collins began avoiding social gatherings, had trouble sleeping and started making obsessive family schedules, becoming irritated when they weren’t met.
Simple tasks, like raking leaves, began to confuse him, Jennifer said, describing how we would walk out the door to go to work, realize he had forgotten his keys, go back inside to get them and forget why he had come back.
His mental health began to improve at the age of 45.
He left the Navy and started a civilian job teaching troops how to operate small drones, but one morning, Jennifer said he called her in a panic from a work trip, saying he had forgotten how to do his job and hadn’t slept in four days.
“I was very anxious, almost paranoid,” he said. “He didn’t look anything like my husband.”
Collins’ wife, Jennifer, was adamant about her desire to donate her brain to research and has been encouraging other Special Operations families to do the same.
At the time, the military generally associated brain injuries with roadside bomb explosions, but Collins never experienced that.
Doctors eventually diagnosed Collins with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and prescribed him a series of medications that didn’t help.
Collins would later take his own life in March 2014.
When police arrived at her Virginia Beach home to confirm her death, Jennifer said she was “adamant” that she wanted her brain to be donated for research.
“I wanted to try to find some answers,” he said.
That donation was the first to the Department of Defense Brain Tissue Repository in Bethesda, Maryland, which had been created two years earlier to examine the brains of deceased veterans for clues about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injuries.
As researchers examined Collins’ brain, they noticed that almost anywhere tissues of different density or stiffness were found there was a rim of scar tissue.
“For the first time we were able to actually see the injury,” said Dr. Daniel Perl, noting, “If you know what the problem is, you can start to design solutions.”
The Pentagon says it has a “moral obligation to protect the cognitive health and combat effectiveness of our teammates”
They would later notice the same pattern in six of the eight Navy SEALs who took their own lives, as Jennifer convinced more and more families to come forward.
By the time Metcalf died in 2019, brain donations had become somewhat common for Special Operations troops.
So after the lieutenant’s death, Jamie decided to donate his brain for research as well.
She has described how she noticed a sudden deterioration in her husband when he returned in 2018 from his fifth deployment.
He had achieved great achievements, was an enlisted SEAL sniper and taught martial arts to other SEALs. A few years before he died, Metcalf also decided to pursue a military medical career, becoming an officer and participating in a medical assistant training program.
But he started getting confused and getting headaches, Jamie said, describing how he would put wet clothes in the dryer on top of dry clothes.
“It was very unlike him. He had always been very organized,” he said.
“I know now that he was afraid something was going on in his brain, but at the time I think he tried to hide it.”
But investigators determined that Metcalf and another soldier had a different type of damage to the same area of the brain as the other SEALs.
The star-shaped helper cells in their brains, called astrocytes, appeared to have been repeatedly injured and grew into large, tangled masses that barely functioned.
According to the Times, a study on astrocytes will be conducted soon.
Meanwhile, Rear Adm. Keith Davids, commander of the Navy Special Warfare Unit (which includes the SEALs), said, “We have a moral obligation to protect the cognitive health and combat effectiveness of our teammates.”
He said the Navy is trying to limit brain injuries “by limiting exposure to blasts and is actively participating in medical research designed to improve understanding in this critical field.”
