Just a heads up.

This episode deals with issues of self-harm and suicide, so take care of yourself.

On Reddit, you can find this forum for National Guardspeople stationed at the Texas-Mexico border.

It's the armed services equivalent of a virtual water cooler. Sometimes you log on and find people laughing over a funny meme.

Other times, the content is more pointed. Service members complain about catching COVID.

More than half of the platoon is quarantined right now, one writes.

Another soldier asks, anyone run across troops who are literally doing nothing?

And then someone else chimes in about a survey he's just taken, about troop morale.

The best way to boost team spirit, this guards member

writes, is to send troops home. And that's the attitude of a lot of the guardsmen there.

Davis Winky writes for the Army Times. He's gotten familiar with this kind of talk.

He says, chatter online is the least of it.

Guard members deployed to the border have been reaching out to him for months.

It all started when I had a source reach out to me last summer saying,

Hey, Davis, I'm somebody who is on the National Guard's federally controlled border mission. We just had a soldier die, and I'm worried that

there might be more. And this source was, you know, pretty adamant from the get-go that there were some pretty serious systemic issues and that things were starting to fall apart.

After a little digging, Davis found more than one death.

There was a deadly DUI, an officer who died of COVID.

And there was something else, the sheer volume of service members.

Thousands deployed federally and thousands more from Texas alone.

The Texas soldiers were there at the request of Governor Greg Abbott for something he called

Operation Lone Star. When you see what we're seeing with Operation Lone Star and to a lesser extent

...