(Reuters) - Efforts to prevent suicides among U.S. war veterans are failing, in part because distressed troops do not trust the military to help them, top military officials said on Thursday.

Poor training, a lack of coordination and an overstretched military are also factors, but a new 76-point plan lays out ways to improve this, Colonel John Bradley, chief of psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, told a conference.

Bradley said a team of experts spent a year interviewing troops who had attempted suicide, family members and others for the report and plan, presented last month to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is due to report to Congress in 90 days.

"They tell us again and again that we are failing," Bradley told a symposium on military medicine sponsored by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.

Each branch of the services -- the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines -- rushed to create a suicide prevention program, but there was no coordination. The report recommends that the defense secretary's office take over coordination of suicide prevention efforts.

On-the-ground prevention training often failed because those running the sessions did not understand their importance, Bradley said.

"They are mocked and they are probably harmful," he said.

FORT HOOD, Texas — Fort Hood officials are investigating a rash of suicides in recent days, including the apparent murder-suicide of a soldier and his wife.

The incidents come as the central Texas Army post reports a record number of soldiers taking their own lives. According to figures released Tuesday, 14 suicides and six more suspected suicides have been reported so far this year among soldiers stationed at Fort Hood. Fort Hood reported 11 suicides in all of 2009.

On Sunday, 31-year-old Sgt. Michael Timothy Franklin and his wife, Jessie Ann Franklin, were found shot dead in their Fort Hood home. Army officials are investigating the deaths as a murder-suicide.

Two soldiers died Saturday in unrelated apparent suicides, including a veteran of four tours in Iraq. A fourth soldier was found dead Friday.

WASHINGTON — The most vexing free speech fight in years confronts the Supreme Court on Wednesday, pitting a loud-mouthed, anti-gay Kansas church against a grieving Pennsylvania father.

The father, Albert Snyder, has already won the popular vote hands-down. Forty-eight states support him. So do 42 senators and all the major veterans' organizations.

The constitutional tally, though, isn't nearly so simple.

"The government may not curtail speech simply because the speaker's message may be offensive to his audience," University of Missouri Law School Professor Christina Wells noted in a legal filing.

In Snyder v. Phelps, justices will decide whether to protect speech that Wells characterized as "provocative, offensive and disrespectful." Wells acknowledged it might even be considered "contemptible."

For all the pain they may have caused, however the public rants against homosexuality by the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., might just be found to be protected by the First Amendment.

"This is obviously an emotion-laden case," said Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, but "the First Amendment was designed to protect unpopular speech against (the majority's) distaste. At the end of the day I think that's where the Supreme Court ends up."

Most everyone outside of the small Westboro Baptist Church voices distaste for how church members exploited the funeral of Albert Snyder's son Matthew.