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Background. During deployment and upon returning home, veterans experience emotional challenges that test their social and psychological adaptation and place them at risk for suicidal thinking. Individual variability in skill-based capacity to adaptively perceive, understand, correctly use, and manage emotions (called emotional competence) may play a role in the development of psychological suffering and suicidal thinking. Based on research in healthy and clinical samples, poor emotional competence was predicted to be associated with suicidal thinking among returning veterans. Method. Participants were selected from the W. F. Caveness Vietnam Head Injury Study (VHIS) registry, which in the late 1960s began prospectively assessing 1221 veterans). The study sample was composed of veterans examined between 2003 and 2006 and included 185 participants who at the time of assessment with the Beck …