Apparently, war is hell. And, if you're a US soldier, you're likely to go there (by catholic standards) yourself.
A recent Time Magazine article by Mark Thompson lifts the cover off the rabbit hole to the growing rate of suicides by service men and women- to the point that more troops have committed suicide since the invasion of Afghanistan than have died there.
For the Army's response, foller me o'er the jump...
"It's frankly frustrating that with the level of effort that we've put out there, that we haven't stemmed the [suicide] tide," General George Casey, the Army's top officer, told a House panel March 23. When pressed by a lawmaker the previous month on whether the Army was getting closer to solving the challenge, Army Secretary John McHugh was blunt. "Sadly, the answer is not much closer," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee Feb. 23. "As to why people take this step — particularly as to why men and women in uniform do — we're still in many ways befuddled."
Befuddled, you say?
The Army commanders who stuck around long enough to give semi-pedantic responses to serious fucking questions mentioned only that, in most cases, it appears that there was a fractured relationship in the lives of these men and women. Well, they have a point...separation from your family, friends, and other loved ones in order to be dropped into region so categorically unconquerable that no one since Alexander the Great has managed to do it, and it took him three years. In 320 B.C.
As the article points out, there is no mention by Army spokesmen to address the fact that these folks are Fucking. Stressed. Out.
What they fail to note, however, is the corrosive effect repeated deployments can have on such relationships.
Snip
In recent years, soldiers had been allowed only a year of dwell time before heading back to war. Even though dwell time is now getting closer to two years, research suggests it takes up to three years for the stress of a one-year combat deployment to abate.
So...lemme get this straight: it takes three years to recover from (fingers crossed, y'all) the malignant nightmare of combat, and the troops only get maybe two-thirds of that necessary time. Quite possibly coincidentally (if you believe in that sort thing)...
"A third of the confirmed suicides are committed by troops that had never deployed," McHugh recently told a House panel. But the other two-thirds killed themselves either in a war zone or after returning from one. "The suicide rate among soldiers who have deployed to [war zones] is higher than for soldiers who have never deployed," Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, a top Army psychiatrist, told a suicide-prevention conference in January.
Now, I'm certain it's with abject, Beck-ish, slavery-omitting, fucking stupidity upon which I entertain the notion of permitting myself the mental pablum of thinking, for one fucking second, that something can be done about this mountainous heap of bullshittery.
A handful of things come to mind.
Thing the first: Get the flying blue fuck out of Iraq.
Thing the second: Presidential-you know, the CIC of the armed forces- mandate that service men and women receive military-funded treatment during "dwell time", and that said dwell time be, at the very least, the fucking minimum three year period before return to active duty.
Thing the third: Get the ever lovin', Jesus-humpin', flying blue fuck out of Afghanistan. See the aforementioned historical footnote regarding Alexander the Great.
Thing the fourth: Provide "How To Not Go All Fuckin' "I'ma Kill Myself" training at boot camp. Seriously, if one-third of our troops commit suicide before they deploy, perhaps a lil' chit-chat beforehand would do some good. Maybe a bit...
Thing the fifth (because, after all, I did say "handful"): See things 1 & 3
Cheers,
RR
* Parenthetical, italicized comments better fuckin' be read as sarcasm, or I'll be forced to beat you with a spiked, rubber chicken.