For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Actually, I'm going to back up here, because something is amiss...that is in fact the opening sentence of the linked article, but it has this paragraph following it:
Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.
I know, that doesn't match. But there's a reason, read on-
Last week’s figures, though, understate the problem of military suicides because the services do not report the statistics uniformly. Several do so only reluctantly.
Figures reported by each of the services last week, for instance, include suicides by members of the Guard and Reserve who were on active duty at the time. The Army and the Navy also add up statistics for certain reservists who kill themselves when they are not on active duty.
But the Air Force and Marine Corps do not include any non-mobilized reservists in their posted numbers. What’s more, none of the services count suicides that occur among a class of reservists known as the Individual Ready Reserve, the more than 123,000 people who are not assigned to particular units.
Suicides by veterans who have left the service entirely after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan also are not counted by the Defense Department. The Department of Veterans Affairs keeps track of such suicides only if the person was enrolled in the VA health care system — which three-quarters of veterans are not.
But even if such veterans and members of the Individual Ready Reserve are excluded from the suicide statistics, just taking into account the deaths of reservists who were not included in last week’s figures pushes the number of suicides last year to at least 468.
And there it is. It's a little confusing, but it's good to know how the numbers are arrived at.
So that's depressing. Our soldiers are killing themselves off faster than 'the enemy' can. I think that this underlines the problem with the gung ho military attitude that we adopt when we ask people to kill in our name without consideration for the effect that has on a person. I know that we cannot live in a world without a military because, well, it's an idea that perpetuates itself, but I'm sure more idealistic people than me will take up that banner, but honestly, it takes more than an "America, Fuck Yeah!" USO tour by Toby Keith to deal with what we do to the mental health of our young volunteers when we program them to fight.
And it's not that there aren't people who recognize this:
Moved by [Army Sgt. Coleman S.] Bean’s story, [New Jersey Democratic Representative Rush D.] Holt wrote a bill requiring phone contacts with these reservists every 90 days after they come home from war. The House adopted Holt’s provision as part of its defense authorization bills for both fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2011.
But the flag-waviest, troop-lovingest Senator of them all, someone who is no stranger to the trauma that a soldier might endure, decided...not so much:
But conferees writing the final version of the bills took it out both years.
Holt said in December that Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain was responsible for that decision in the most recent bill. A spokeswoman for McCain, Brooke Buchanan, would not state his position on the provision. Instead, she said House members had removed it.
A House Armed Services Committee spokeswoman, Jennifer Kohl, said the House reluctantly pulled the provision from the bill because of the opposition of senators, whom she did not name.
Alright, he hasn't said he did it...Holt just accused him of it.
Part of the problem, it seems, is that not all soldiers are created equally:
Some types of reservists are more cut off than others. Rep. Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, says that members of the Individual Ready Reserve and other categories of citizen-soldiers do not receive a thorough screening for mental health issues when they return from deployments.
One of those soldiers, a constituent of Holt’s named Coleman S. Bean, was an Army sergeant and Iraq War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder but could not find treatment. He took his own life in 2008.
So, this is in the news, but it's not news. Which brings me to my second point/question/whatever, which has elements of my first, buried in the quote farm up there...shouldn't this be news? I argue that it's because it flies in the face of the mythology we've managed to reconstruct around the American soldier after Vietnam. I'm not making excuses for the alleged actions of those against Vietnam to the veterans (seriously, don't want to get into that argument--what's salient is the perception, whether it happened to the degree believed or not is not relevant, what is relevant is the attitude about the American soldier that has formed in its wake). Since Vietnam, you have to more or less preface any criticism of military policy with, "Of course, I support the troops, however-"
But can we really be said to support them when we are neglecting their mental state after they have served? It's all fun and games to support them shooting people (unless you're the people they're shooting, or you have to live in the homes that they're having their rockin' little fire fight around...but I digress), but it's harder to face the ugly truth of the damage that does to someone's psyche. And it's not just combat troops, but people who have never seen combat. We are sacrificing our youth on their own swords. Not quite the Mail Call "Hoo ah!" moment, really.
