War sucks. This is not going to come as a big surprise to Kossacks. Nor will it shock US Armed Services’ medical and mental health professionals.
But specific, supporting new evidence is starting to leak out overseas, where despite a Draconian code of Official Secrets, the British Government has not quite put a stop to independent scientific evaluations of military health issues.
And the news is (are you ready for this?) War is Not Healthy for Soldiers and Other Living Things.
Especially unhealthy are extended deployments. Call them sentimental, call them weak, call them unpatriotic if you will, but soldiers seem to prefer dependably reintegrating their home lives over serving in war zones beyond 13 months with no end in sight. Not just prefer, but need to. As a matter of health.
The results of their deprivations? Enormously increased rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism, psychological distress and domestic problems.
Surely nobody in authority, and especially nobody in the punditocracy, could have seen that coming, right?
Yet the Friday August 3, 2007 Guardian features an article by its health correspondent, Polly Curtis, headed Iraq veterans suffer stress and alcoholism with the subhead Long tours in combat zones linked to serious mental problems, study finds.
Thousands of frontline veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are facing escalating mental health problems, alcoholism and family breakdown, an extensive examination of the British military has found.
Prolonged periods in conflict are linked to higher levels of [PTSD], psychological distress and problems at home, researchers report in the British Medical Journal online.
Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there's been a big swell of media shock and horror at the notion that manpower issues might have been mismanaged such that our soldiers, in addition to risking life and limb, have been saddled with preventable mental conditions.
Be sure to use the comments section to point me toward some stories on TV or in print that have enumerated the crushing burden of this particular cost of war on our surviving soldiers.
I especially want to hear about all the Republican Senators, Representatives and Administration officials, and fearlessly crusading members of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, who are tirelessly working to ease this strain on our gallant men and women at arms.
The Ministry of Defence [MoD] said it would study the findings to try to better understand mental health problems in the military, but last night there was pressure on the government to address accusations that the military is currently overstretched, forcing personnel into longer tours of duty.
The Kings College London military health centre's study of 5,547 veterans of overseas tours focused on the 20% who were deployed for more than 13 months within a three-year period, the maximum recommended time limit set by the [British] government.
There is a nice bit of Anglo-Saxon understatement for you: "accusations that the military is currently overstretched." Accusations, indeed.
Some Kossack already knows whether greater than 20% of US combatants have served more than 13 of 36 months in danger zones. Do tell. My wholly untutored sense is that it its closer to 40% of Iraq/Afghanistan forces who have endured the dubious honor of serving their country in combat that long.
Nicola Fear, one of the researchers, said: "We asked about problems with partners, children, financial problems and whether their families were receiving enough support. Being deployed for 13 months or more was associated with significantly higher problems at home."
Nicola, Nicola. Were you named by J.K. Rowling to serve as a minor character in "Harry Potter"? How sadly apt a name. And what a dismal tale you have to tell us. Let's review: we've torn up two countries. We've killed more than 4,000 and wounded an estimated 60,000 of our own in operations in both countries. And in addition to killing a probable 650,000 Iraqis, we have now condemned a significant proportion of our military survivors to having their own lives broken.
They found that nearly one in four of those deployed for longer than 13 months had "severe" alcohol problems compared with one in 10 of those deployed for less than five months.
[PTSD] is running at a rate of 5.2% of those deployed above the 13-month limit compared with 3% of those who spent less than five months in conflict.
Those of us who don't do fractions in our heads very well have had recourse to mechanical aids, "implements of math instruction" as the grossly-misnamed Transportation Safety Administration called them when relieving the flying public of calculators, abacuses and slide rules.
All joking aside, those numbers work out to staggeringly bad odds for long-serving armed forces members in combat theatres. Normal addiction rates are pegged at 10% of the whole population, civilian and military alike. The study found that serving less than five months in a combat zone within three years allowed you to retain the normal 10% chance of being alcoholic.
But if you were there 13 months out of 36 (the time didn't have to be consecutive) your alcoholism rate shot up to 25%. That means a quarter of our hardest working, longest serving combat personnel have contracted, or will contract, a disease from the effects of which the vast majority its victims ultimately die.
Furthermore, the incidence of PTSD shot up by 74%, from 3 soldiers out of 100 among those who spent less than five months in combat to 5.2 out of 100 who served for more than 13 months. I seem to recall that we are still working through the scars of addiction, PTSD and mental illness among surviving veterans of a war that ended more than thirty years ago. I am sure the name of it will come back to me if I think about it long enough.
The study covered the period since 2001 and included tours of duty by service members of the [British A]rmy, [Royal N]avy and Royal Air Force in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Kosovo and Sierra Leone.
The report prompted immediate political criticism. The Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, said: "Our armed forces are suffering the consequences of massive overseas commitments caused in no small part by the illegal war in Iraq."
The [Labour] under secretary of state for defence, Derek Twigg, said the BMJ research would be studied to see how the number of troops who suffer from mental illness can be reduced. He insisted the military was not over-stretched.
Ah, the loyal Labour allies of the Republicans may still be infected with a certain inability to see reality. Yet new Prime Minister Gordon Brown, fresh off a visit to Washington in which he apparently kept his distance from our delusional Preznit, seems certain to pull all British troops back from combat before the end of the year.
If Bush knew what shame is, he might then have to experience some. No doubt his resistance will be stronger, once again, than the facts.
For further research: With what degree of reliability does the experience of British all-volunteer professional army project that of the US all-volunteer Reserve/professional army?
What proportion of the US military have served in war zones beyond 13 out of 36 months?
What is the impact of increased PTSD and alcoholism among a subset of their comrades in arms on the US armed services as a whole?
--for some reason the kos site is rejecting me with the following impenetrably incorrect message: 'Your HTML has the following error: Value (”http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,,2140805,00.htm”) for attribute href in tag a is not allowed.' so i cannot make the link to the original story live. but you can copy it.