“One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. *** He “began to whimper,” as his head was roughly shaved, “folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell.” He “asked for his mother & cried as he was slapped again.”

The crisis responders who answer the national hotline run by the Department of Veterans Affairs are often talking to former armed service members at life’s lowest moments, many contemplating harming themselves or others.