Thirty-two soldiers took their own lives last month, the most Army suicides in a single month since the Vietnam era. Eleven of the soldiers were not on active duty. Of the 21 who were, seven were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Department of Defense said.
Army officials say they don’t have any answers to why more and more soldiers are resorting to suicide.
“There were no trends to any one unit, camp, post or station,” Col. Chris Philbrick, head of the Army’s suicide prevention task force, told CNN. “I have no silver bullet to answer the question why.”
Makes the heart sad–read it all.
Update: An NBC News segment on this may be viewed here:
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“Hope” and “meaning”.
If one has these two adequately in place they can suffer amazing trials with no thought of self-destruction.
Look at the Church, what abject suffering has occurred among us in history and now and the evidence of any self-destruction is near zero.
Don
[i] Slightly edited by elf. [/i]
You sign up for 3 years, figuring you will be deployed once. You try to leave after three years, but because of the individual ready reserve are an indentured servant for 8 years. You get called back 4 times. You cant keep your job, your family lives on food stamps, and your wife realizes she can do better by finding somebody who is actually home most of the time. In the meantime, America has completely forgotten you exist. You are serving garrison duty on the other side of the world, and the rest of America is having fun at the lake on Memorial day. When/if you finally survive the 8 year committment, you will have fewer skills than the guys who went to college or trained as a plumber. YOur exwife still won’t want you back. She found somebody better 3 years ago. Your little brother who didn’t go to war has a well established career and your parents who spent 2 years straight draft in Vietnam, and your grandparents who spent 3 years in WWII dont understand what is wrong with this modern generation of weaklings.
America has abandoned her servicemen. They have been duped, enslaved, and forgotten, sent to work the desert of Arabia, like Roman’s sent slaves to work in the silver mines. What hope do they have? How can they get free, honorably?
Does anybody remember the newspapers during WWII? Every day, there was a tale of one of the heroic, funny, tender things our men at war did. There would be little blurbs in every home town rag about “PFC Anthony Brown, (son of Mr. and Mrs. John Brown of Mt. Vernon, MO) and three of his buddies in the Big Red One came under heavy fire for 12 hours, but courageously held their position, until relieved by other divisions. Mr. Brown sustained a shrapnel wound to his left thigh, which is expected to heal well. He will be awarded the Purple heart on Tuesday. Our congradulations to Mr. and Mrs. Brown for their gallant son.”
Every day, there would be tons of little stuff like this. EVERY DAY. It meant that people looked up to soldiers. Today, the same number of wounds, battles, injuries go on, but nobody knows the names of the folks engaged in them. In fact, major engagements are fought, and the press doesn’t bother to report it. All the press reports is stuff like how a bunch of nameless soldiers kill themselves for unknown reasons and Dr. Shrinkwrap is “really concerned”.
Soldiers commit suicide because it is an exit from a situation they feel is hopeless. Short of a change of heart of the American people (who voted that they be duped, and abandoned) rather than make the difficult choices of paying more for energy, giving up our position in the world, or having a draft, absent strong faith, this seems a reasonable solution.
Amen Clueless!!! And God help them if they are injured, because the VA system and Tricare and the disability retirement system sure won’t do it!
My brother-in-law was honorably discharged last October from the Army National Guard after about 30 years of service. He had two war time deployments; Desert Storm and the Global War on Terror. He slightly injured his back/neck during Desert Storm, but had no disability…his PT tests just got a little harder. Then, during a training deployment to S. Korea, he re-injured the same area. Finally, after his last wartime deployment to Iraq, he injured the same area again, very seriously. Inititially, it he was granted a 40% disability by the VA. He was still in the Guard and working as a full time technician. He was viewed as a “slacker” and a trouble maker because of his disability. The disability became worse despite therapy. The VA granted him an 80% disability. He was honorably discharged from the National Guard, but his DD-214 didn’t specify that his Line of Duty injuries were during his Title 10 Active Army service. Because he was no longer in the Army National Guard, and because he was disabled, and because he had over 20 years of Federal Civil Service…he retired. Now, since he theoretically is receiving a disability retirement from the Federal Civil Service via the Office of Personnel Management, the Army only pays him $17 a month for his 80% disability. Social Security acknowledges his disability but won’t pay him anything because he isn’t disabled enough. The OPM won’t pay him his disability because their records indicate that he is still employed (the National Guard holds on to the paperwork until the end of his enlistment term, despite his being discharged, because he shows up as a soldier in their strength reports…and that has to do with funding). He stopped working for the Federal Civil Service at the end of February. It is now getting on toward the end of July…or about 6 months later…and all he is receiving for his 30 years of honorable military service, two wartime overseas deployments, 80% disability, and over 20 years of Federal Civil Service is $17 a month and a small stipend from the OPM until they process the paperwork saying that he is no longer working. By the way, his Tri-care (which only lasts until he is 62 and then he is forced into Medicare) provider issed a 90 day perscription for medicine for his wife. When they went to the local base to have it filled, they couldn’t because the base commander had issued a policy the week before that only 30 day or less perscriptions could be filled. They faced either an out of pocket expense on the local economy or no essential medication.
I won’t go into the mouldy housing my nephew was forced to live in after his first year long combat tour in Iraq.
And the generals smile and suck up to the politicians that perpetuate the system…and the American public goes blissfully along without knowing or caring.
Friends,
I agree wholeheartedly with your frustrations and how our warriors are getting shafted every day. Our folks get deployed too often because CONGRESS didn’t fund the MANNING that the Army needs for this two-front war on terror. Meanwhile the VA is shafting EVERYBODY because their money is going to bureaucrats instead of to patient care, so they disqualify warriors any way they can to save money. Thank you Congress!!!
I disagree slightly about the 3 year / 8 year trap issue. I’m sure some of our reservists and guardsmen got caught with expectations that didn’t hold true on deployments, but almost everybody I know expects to deploy multiple times during their tenure. They do, however, often forget to prepare their families for the likelihood of deployment.
I vigorously disagree about the notion of leaving military service with no marketable skills or missed education opportunities. The new GI Bill is VERY generous. I went to seminary under the old one and it only paid a few thousand bucks. Today I could get $26,000 of student loans repaid by Uncle Sam if I signed up as a brand new chaplain! In California, every National Guard member can attend a California college or university tuition free! Also, the leadership skills in the Army and the technical skills in the Air Force give veterans a significant edge over civilian competition for jobs. Our warriors just need better help marketing their skills.
Despite the article, most of us in the Chaplain Corps recognize that suicides are up because relationship failures are up. Folks are shacking up instead of getting married, marriages have less commitment, and these weaker relationships easily die from the separation of deployment. Other factors include a broader cultural acceptance of suicide, and fewer people of faith serving, where faith serves as a barrier to suicide.
Also, MEN DON’T WRITE!!! We lazy bums text, email, skype or call home, but we’ve lost the art of the frequent love-letter. SHAME!!! When a girl gets a hand-written love letter, it’s a token of the man himself, his sweat on the page, his ink smudge in the corner, his deepest and most tender thoughts in the words, only for his sweetheart and no one else. That’s KRYPTONITE to a grouchy wife! NAG your deployed loved ones to write such letters and they will save their relationships. I saw EIGHT marriages saved from divorce through hand-written love letters on my last deployment! Knowing Jesus, our Great Physician, is the BEST suicide prevention, but keeping the home fires burning is a very close second.
One more thing. If you know someone who is deployed in your parish, please spoil his wife on occasion. The work around the house, stress with bills and managing the kids can be overwhelming without dad around. Find a babysitter and give her a girl’s night out. Go to her house with a ready-made feast so she won’t have to cook that night. Kick her out of the kitchen or laundry room sometime, doing those chores for her so that she won’t get burned-out. Sometimes little things like that can save a marriage and remind a frustrated wife that Jesus loves her too. This also is suicide prevention for our guys overseas.
Thank you friends for your support!
I put this up this morning before I had a chance to get my run in and was interested to see on the run that the story got a whole segment on last night’s NBC Evening News.
Thanks for keeping this on our radar, Kendall. Clueless rightly points out that today’s wars are largely fought off the radar here at home, although a lot the information we were fed during wars like WWII and following was highly sanitized, too. One way or the other, we are going to have to step up and do right by these men and women when they return. I hope for everyone’s sake we can get back to the purported original mission in Afghanistan: What was that again? Wasn’t it to destroy or disrupt the activities of Al Qaeda? How did we get sidetracked with this ridiculous nation-building exercise? Why don’t we finish the original mission and and get out of that godforsaken place? But, regardless, the men and women who serve on our behalf deserve our support.
Dude, don’t get suckered by the media on the war. Both campaigns are a COUNTERINSURGENCY. That means nation building because both the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq were sponsors of Al Queda and they had to be removed. The only way to prevent their ilk from taking over again was to rebuild the infrastructure of those countries, protect the civilians, help more legitimate governments come to power and train up a legitimate local army. Iraq is nearly complete, but the bad guys are still trying to disrupt things. Afghanistan is still a mess because some provinces remain under Taliban control, but we are about to launch a major offensive to break their back, just like we successfully did in Iraq. Remember these jerks are truly evil monsters. They torture innocent people (with real torture) and murder children of anyone they think is on our side. Recently a seven year old boy was killed in front of his father by these guys, and yesterday they murdered two innocent people with explosives. They splash acid in the faces of girls going to school. We CAN’T let this stand! Skeptics say the people living there are too barbaric, but they said the same about the Germans, Japanese and Koreans, who now build our cars and computers! We’ve gotta win this one folks! I don’t want the Jihad over here. It’s already in Europe.
I agree with most of this, and I will simply add that there is help out there for veterans who need it…….particularly for those veterans who are combat-disabled. The Disabled American Veterans, of which I am a Life Member, has an excellent record of helping disabled veterans through the maze of VA regulations and paperwork. I know, because I am one disabled veteran who was helped. I think part of the problem is the fact that VA personnel are, and have been, overwhelmed by the number of cases now crossing their desks. I do think they are making an honest effort to cope, and I give them credit for that.
As for Afghanistan, we should remember that the Afghans are a tribal society, and for centuries they have been at each other’s throats. They don’t like outsiders, as the British Army discovered in the 1850s, followed by the Russians in the 1980s, and finally by us today. It would be far better to leave Afghanistan and isolate them from the outside world; the only problem being that the poppies would still be there, and the heroin would still be their major cash crop…..a fact which the Taliban know very very well. It would sadden me, though, that American soldiers would have died for nothing, and that includes the suicides.
The American government should shoulder all of the blame for these suicides, and the responsibility for rehabilitating these veterans and putting an end to this, and that includes seeing to it that their families and their jobs are protected, regardless of what branch of service or reserve component these men and women serve in. And the government should place no time limit on this help.