Much attention was paid to the Nov. 5th shooting rampage at Fort Hood, and rightly so. It was a terrible tragedy in which 13 were killed and 30 others wounded by a deeply disturbed U.S. Army psychiatrist.
Yet news today that 12 more Army soldiers committed suicide in November, bringing the yearly total to a record high 147 suicides thus far in 2009, will likely pass with little national debate. And that’s just the suicides in the Army. As of last month 334 active members of the U.S. military services had committed suicide in 2009, also a record high.
By comparison, the U.S. military has so far suffered 304 fatalities in Afghanistan this year, and an additional 150 in Iraq.
Politicians in both parties like to talk about supporting the troops. I doubt the families of the service men and women who took their own lives believe we’ve supported them nearly enough.
general mcchrystal says that no suicices actually occurred in the army in 2009. and he will be singing “won’t get fooled again” with the who at halftime of the superbowl. also.
Are you blaming Bush??
Oh yeah…this is 2009!
When your Kommander in Chief is a limp-wristed Kommie…hard to imagine the psychological toll.
That’s always been the tragedy of military thinking, that the enemy is always the enemy.
In the grand arc of history many more fighting men have lost their lives to suicide, accidents and disease than to actual combat.
It’s the discharge they can’t deny you.
@2 As we approach the holidays and bury the dead, let us not forget it was BUSH who used “stop-loss” to keep soldiers in the Army after their enlistments expired because he couldn’t get enough volunteers to fight his recreational war in Iraq.
Mr. Cynical,
“…your Kommander in Chief is a limp-wristed Kommie”
(*Snicker*)
Have another drink, Cynical. It’ll calm your nerves.
Really, Cynical, you teabagging xenophobes are all worried about nothing. Obama is definitely NOT going to “take” your wives and daughters….
But do the rest of us a favor and continue to hole-up on the compound anyway, please.
Women In Combat
By the numbers:
230,000 women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
120 have been killed and 650 wounded in action.
* * * * * * * * * *
Many suffer from PTSD; in addition to combat stress, women service members also are likely to have experienced sexual harassment, sexual assault, and/or rape from their fellow soldiers.
When they get home, they not only face the same indifference from the civilian population that Vietnam veterans did, but they’re cut off from social contact from male fellow veterans
due to disapprovinge wives and girlfriends, so they don’t have the social support network that other veterans have.
On Army bases, military personnel don’t recognize them as veterans because they assume they’re the wives or girlfriends of male soldiers.
And they can’t even get anyone to buy them a beer.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....place.html
@3 “In the grand arc of history many more fighting men have lost their lives to suicide, accidents and disease than to actual combat.”
I’m not sure that’s so in the modern era. The answer is in the statistics, but I don’t know what the numbers are. I can tell you that in Vietnam, combat killed many more soldiers than disease, accidents, and suicides. In particular, the number of troops lost to disease has dropped very dramatically in modern times. The suicide numbers get fuzzier if you count veteran suicides. For example, one of my Vietnam buddies died 4 days after being discharged from the Army back in the States by hitting a bridge abutment at high speed in his car. It might have been an accident (getting used to driving again can be tricky when you haven’t done it for over a year) but it looked like a suicide. Some of the figures for Vietnam veteran suicides are double the combat deaths but how reliable these figures are has been a subject of debate. There also may be non-service-related causes for veteran suicides, and the number of those goes up with passing time (e.g., terminal illnesses that motivate people to put themselves out of their misery). When you evaluate veteran suicide statistics, you run into problems of defining what is service-related or not. My own thought is that combat deaths far outstrip accidents, suicides, “friendly fire,” and homicides combined, probably by a ratio of 4-to-1 or more. That said, there are lots of ways to become a casualty besides combat. Historically, before the advent of modern medicine, disease killed far more soldiers than combat in most wars.
The saddest part of Mr Cynical
Only the most extreme partisans of the left imagine Bush exulting in the deaths under his command. In contrast, the radical cynicism of Mr. C is now the norm for the Republican party.
Perhaps they should remember that Mr. Lincoln the only US President to have his entire term defined by war, came to office determined to make peace .. even if that meant accepting slavery. That man had to deal with the no know nothings and radical right of his day. Ironically those radical conservativess were then called Democrats and their bigotry led us to the civil war.
suicide rates have always been higher than we would like to admit. i served in the us navy for 2 years.
funny. i can’t speak for mr.cynical but true libertarians believe in open borders. its the dems who are historically xenophobic.
when everybody is so sick in the head that they disguise the symptoms, showing signs of depression implies mental stability. catch 22.
the tragedy is, the army doesn’t notice there is a problem until the shit seriously hits the fan.
Cynical does have a point, although it pretty well disappears when he puts on his hat.
Putting on a uniform and receiving combat training doesn’t automatically make a soldier exempt from human frailty. It’s not a big surprise, after overextending the military for nearly a decade, for an increasing number of those in uniform to have some trouble dealing with the prospect of being sent back for the third or fourth time into the same clusterfuck. The longer this goes on, the more it does become the current commander-in-chief’s problem, regardless of who started it. Obama’s been taking too much of the wrong advice about the economy the same Goldman Sachs alumni that spawned Hank Paulson. Similarly, he risks disaster by continuing to act on the advice of whatever sycophants and ass-kissers weren’t run out of the Pentagon hierarchy by Bush/Cheney/Rummy for speaking out of turn.
“Cynical does have a point, although it pretty well disappears when he puts on his hat.”
Heh…. I’ll have to remember that one.
re 10: “i can’t speak for mr.cynical but true libertarians believe in open borders. its the dems who are historically xenophobic.”
Open borders every where?? Then workers could just pick up and move to wherever wages were higher forcing manufacturers to pay higher wages or lose their workers.
A glut of workers in one area would not reverse that trend, as the excess workers would go wherever wages were higher.
Are you in favor of that kind of open border?
Mr Cynical is hardly a true anything, other than a pain in the ass provocateur.
About all he seems to believe in is that he is the center of the Universe with close orbiting objects that obey his will, including Jesus.
If that relationship were reversed. obviously Mr. Cynical would be in a terrible position as a libertarian.
SJ
It is frightening that Cynical’s craziness reflects mainstream Republicanism nowadays. Remarkably, a recent poll shows that over half of self-described Republicans believe ACORN stole the election for Obama (PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.) I’ve also seen a poll indicating that about a third of Republicans believe Obama is or may be the Antichrist. When you have a major political party that contains that high a level of lunacy, it’s hard to be optimistic about the prospect of sane political debate in this country.
“Sane political debate”? Somehow, that sounds awfully dull.
17
Dull, yes, but also healthy perhaps? I know the “debate” we’re presently having isn’t doing much to advance the national interest. Of course, when one-fifth of Republicans believe that Obama has “666” tattooed on his head underneath his hair (I’m not making this up), I get a bit disillusioned about the possibility of a meaningful policy debate between the two parties.
Cynical celebrates the fact that they’ve been able to snow so many people into believing that ACORN stole the election.
The only lie Cynical objects to is one that doesn’t work.
If you get involved with two shootin’ matches without the plan to win, you’re wasting lives and limbs for no good reason. There’s nothing really worth winning in Afghanistan, and Iraq doesn’t offer much more. Why not just close down the shows and call it a day in Afghanistan and Iraq?
@16…and how is that any different than when the left went frothing and foaming and howling at the moon after the 2000 elections, claiming they were stolen and chirping DIEBOLD! in every sentence?
no difference if you think about it.
@12 Do you KNOW who rokitansky was?
Anyhow,
I was careful to compare extremes. I would agree that some of Diebold stuff was notty, but it never represented thge majority of the Dems and certainly was never part of its leadership.
The insane ones in Reps ARE now the people in power.
I actually value having two parties, we need a new GOP.
of course I know who Max Rockatansky is….I work for Main Force Patrol and drive a black V8 Pursuit Special.
check me out….
maxrockatanskyDOTorg
@22….I think you have forgotten how big the “Bush stole the election” crowd was…christ, they were everywhere – including Howierd Dean – and last I checked, he at one time held a pretty high office in the D party – like the head dude.
:)
Something to consider: When the Army gets to the point of personnel starvation that it lowers its standards to induct anyone, whether mentally ill, with substandard IQ, or physically ill, and THEN send them into a terrorist zone where they get attacked by roadside bombs, not enemy soldiers they can see—it’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be hundreds or thousands of suicides (and also the incidents of “friendly fire” that we’re expected to believe).
The people who kill themselves and get killed are out of pain; that pain is transferred to their families who are basically abandoned. What we as a country have to deal with are the people who come back horribly maimed, often with tramatic brain injuries, who must be taken care of all their lives, often by their families because the service rejects any responsibility. What’s the army’s excuse? They were mentally ill or brain-injured, etc. before they went in the service, therefore it isn’t a service injury. A nice, convenient little lie.
@9 The Civil War is not that easily explained, SJ. Probably the heart of it was a combination of different economies and cultures, a Southern inferiority complex, and a collective Southern chip-on-the-shoulder looking for an excuse to act out. Sort of like a bad case of cabin fever just waiting to explode into violence. In short, a lot like today’s Republicans.
@25 Vietnam was a bigger war (560,000 troops versus 160,000 in Iraq, and 58,000 combat deaths versus 5,000 in Iraq) that involved soldiers fighting an enemy they couldn’t see and frequently being killed or injured by booby traps. Yet, suicides were exceedingly rare in Vietnam. It seems the soldiers who fought in Vietnam weren’t inclined to do away with themselves until after they got back to the States and found they couldn’t adjust to civilian society or get their old pre-war lives back. Then they took to alcohol or drove into bridge abutments.
There’s no question that combat traumatizes people. In Vietnam, combat stress was greatly aggravated by the rotation system. Instead of sending units that had trained together to the war zone to fight together, the Army sent individual replacements who, when they arrived at their units, didn’t know anyone and found no one cared what happened to them. This had a devastating effect on morale and magnified the dangers and psychological stresses. It’s my understanding the services have largely implemented the “lessons learned” in Vietnam by sending complete units to Iraq and Afghanistan. This policy should result in less, not more, stress-related problems than were experienced by Vietnam veterans.
I have to be circumspect in my comments because I haven’t served in Iraq or Afghanistan. I have only my Vietnam experience to draw on. So, I am in no way suggesting the current generation of veterans have an “easier” war experience. I don’t, however, see them having to cope with anything that Vietnam veterans didn’t face — except maybe repeated deployments. In the Vietnam era, generally speaking, a draftee or one-term enlistee served only one tour of 12 or 13 months in The Nam, and that was it. Only the career soldiers had to do multiple tours of duty in the combat zone, and those who did go back often got rear-area jobs in their second tour.
I knew a guy whose brother was a jet jock. This guy flew missions over both South and North Vietnam. After his first tour he volunteered for four more, and spent five consecutive years flying combat missions in Vietnam. I asked this guy why the hell his brother did that. His explanation was he was so used to combat that he couldn’t live in the States anymore — it would have been impossible for him to adjust. So he just decided to stay in the war zone forever. The poor bastard could still be there, for all I knew, living with a Vietnamese woman in a Montagnard village up in the hills or in a brothel in Ho Chi Minh City. A few guys never did come home. The U.S. of A. was like an alien planet to them.
Sometimes people extended their duty tours for perfectly rational reasons. Our supply sergeant spent 3 1/2 years in Vietnam because he had a brother in the Army whose MOS was Vietnamese language interpreter. His brother was assigned to Germany because, in those days, Pentagon policy allowed only one family member in a war zone at a time. This meant they couldn’t send his brother to Vietnam as long as he was there. He even re-enlisted so his brother’s enlistment would expire before first. As a supply sergeant, he had a relatively safe rear-area job; and by staying put, his brother served his entire enlistment in Germany and never set foot in Vietnam.
yes.
areas with an influx of workers would lower their wages because there is always someone who is willing to work for a little less.
areas with less workers would raise wages to attract more workers.
No, you dumbass. It was carrried out by a Muslim extremist terrorist that happened to infiltrate the Army and killed his victims while shouting “allah hu akhbar!”.
Like the simpleton president, you fail to acknowledge (despite knowing internally it is so) that this was a domestic terrorist attack upon our military. While you post with glee in announcing the atrocious suicide rate within the military ranks, you conveniently ignore the elephant in the room that occurred at Ft. Hood. Unfortunately for you and the unqualified president, your attitudes are in the minority as it relates to Major Hassans Islamo-fascist terrorist attacks last month.
Well Roger Dumb Bunny when you had radical progressive protesters (the parents of progressives today) screaming and calling them baby killers; when you had John Effin Kerry going to congress and telling the world about telephone wires on testicles; but you had the Jesse MacBeths and Jimmy Massy’s telling the world what they didn’t do.