Quote:

In 2009, more than twice as many US servicemen and women committed suicide than were killed in combat in Iraq (334 and 149, respectively). A year earlier, military doctors found that, each month, roughly 1,000 veterans were trying to take their own life. More than 100 veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have completely snapped after returning home and ended up killing others. A third of their victims were girlfriends, wives or other family members.

ttp://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,685442,00.html#ref=nlint

We always here about "our" servicemen and women killed in combat. That seems to be the only statistic that matters, and yet in every extended combat operation, the indirect casualties of war trivialize those counted in the official military statistics.

Those whom you mentioned in your article, Jayne, are just one category: soldiers who lose their sleep and happiness over having had to kill someone else; soldiers who cannot get the stream of human blood out of their minds and dreams that they were forced to witness; soldiers who have lost their closest friends in combat and feel guilty because they couldn't save them.

And yet, even this second category of victims of war pales by comparison with all those millions and millions, unnamed and unnumbered, on the other side, who either lost their lives, or their family, or their home, or were separated from their loved ones; those who cannot send their children to school any longer, because it has become too dangerous; those who saw their neighborhood degenerate into a swamp of senseless violence and lawlessness.

And what for? For the last drops of oil that will be gone anyway before long.

Ratchet down the melodrama, Francois. People try to kill themselves all the time- there was just one here in Hawaii. A new private that had never deployed and wasn't going to anytime soon at all. She was young and away from home for the first time, dealing with a long distance relationship, and one thing led to another.

Some suicides are due to the 'horrors of war', but that's a very small percentage. Many of the rest revolve around family stress that prolonged deployments enhances, and the rest are just the result of...well, any other suicides you can imagine.

It's fun to think it's because of atrocities that these poor people have been forced to commit, but not realistic.

You're really naive about the stress effects of combat deployments, aren't you, Lucas?

Every human being has only so much psychological stress they can tolerate and overcome. When that limit is reached for whatever reason, their mental health collapses. And that collapse affects many people around them. It has a destrucive ripple effect on their spouses, siblings, employers, neighbours, and children.

When thousands - hundreds of thousands - of young adults are reaching their personal limit several decades ahead of when they otherwise would AS A DIRECT RESULT OF COMBAT EXPERIENCE, the direct personal effects of that mental health collapse on themselves, their families, their job prospects, their families, their community - including the very real budgetary considerations of policing communities with large numbers of disturbed veterans with guns - are beyond calculation. Children who grow up with needs unmet because a parent's mental illness (whatever its cause) absorbs all the energy in the family - even in the rare cases where there is no overt, covert or accidental abuse - are at very high risk of future mental and physical health problems, and likely to be ill-equipped for parenthood in their turn, thus perpetuating a generations-long downward progression in the family.

And you the taxpayer/employer/coworker as well as your family, your community, your schools and your children are going to be paying for those effects one way and another for the next fifty to one hundred years regardless of how much you may wish to make light of the suffering of veterans now.

They volunteered, most during a time of war, knowing at an intellectual level at least what they were getting into. Some of the troops live for war, some are destroyed by it, just the name of the game. It's hard to feel sorry for a volunteer who didn't have to make that choice. They are paid well for the job they do with better benifits than most of their fellow citizens.

Yeah, they did choose to do it. Okay, it's not much of a choice when the alternative is not going to university, but it's still there.

Plus however much money you throw at this, there's no easy cure. What's the alternative? Stop having wars?

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Quote:

In 2009, more than twice as many US servicemen and women committed suicide than were killed in combat in Iraq (334 and 149, respectively). A year earlier, military doctors found that, each month, roughly 1,000 veterans were trying to take their own life. More than 100 veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have completely snapped after returning home and ended up killing others. A third of their victims were girlfriends, wives or other family members.

I've been thinking over the maths here.

I don't know whether this article includes reserves or just active personel, so I'm going to do both.

Total active personel = 1,473,900
US suicide rate per 100,000 = 11.1

1,473,900 / 100,000 = 14.739
14.739 x 11.1 = 163.6

If we're counting only active personel then the military has double the suicide rate of society at large.

Total reserves = 1,458,500
Reserves + active personel = 2,932,400

2,932,400 / 100,000 = 29.324
29.324 x 11.1 = 332.25

In other words the military has had approximately 1.75 more suicides than probability dictates would be found in an equivalent sized group taken at random from the population.

It's harder to work out the murder stats, largely because I can't find figures for the number of troops that have passed through Iraq and Afghanistan since the begining. The murder rate per 100,000 in the general population is 5.4, however, if anyone wants to have a bash.

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Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

that's not bad considering the massive amounts of stress they can be under and not all personal have deployed, not even half.

Originally Posted by Jayne B

You're really naive about the stress effects of combat deployments, aren't you, Lucas?

I've been deployed twice.

Originally Posted by Lucas

I've been deployed twice.

"Deployed" doesn't mean "faced combat", so that answer doesn't mean very much.

Plenty of people in a warzone can be "active: without every encountering violence or being required to carry it out. Whatever may be garnered from the total number of active personnel, only a subset of them will have actually been involved in real combat against a live enemy. Artillery crew, for example, may well be killing people but don't actually get to see the results, and are pretty unlikely to come under attack. It would be much more meaningful to take the numbers for infantry alone; it's they who have to do the up-close-and-personal stuff.