Military Suicides Hit Epidemic Levels
March 27,
2013 AFP
• Unimaginable stress, irrepressible memories,
psychoactive prescription drugs make lethal combination
By Pat Shannan
With what
must be one of the strangest
statistics in the history of wartime, the
Pentagon has released the fact that more
soldiers are dying overseas by committing
suicide than from combat wounds —about one a day. July 2012 was the worst on record, a month that saw 38 soldiers take their own lives and with 349 recorded for
the year. These figures have doubled in the
past decade.
More
alarming yet is the report that America’s returning vets are committing suicide at the unprecedented rate of more than 20 each day—“one every 65 minutes,” reported Daily News of New York
City—but there is no official answer as to why
this happening.
Is it the
post-traumatic stress from repeated tours in war zones or Big Pharma’s drugs
that are being used to
treat it?
Using
figures from the National Violent Death Reporting System, Portland State University noted
that male veterans kill themselves twice as
often as their civilian counterparts and that female veterans are three times more likely to commit suicide than civilian
women.
Figures gleaned from the two wars showed while
6,460 died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan in the
past 11 years, those United States soldiers who died
by their own hand is estimated to be greater
than that. Approximately 2.3M Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 800,000 of those service members have been deployed multiple times.
Writer
Anthony Swofford, who sounded this alarm last year said, “I was in danger of becoming
such a statistic,” after serving four years in the
Marines and seeing combat action in Kuwait during the
Gulf War.
“I know
the suicidal temptation that can accompany the isolation and loneliness veterans experience after the high of combat and the brotherhood of arms fades in the rearview mirror,” he said. “It took
nearly two decades to find my way free of the
morass.”
Even the
doctors trained to psychologically soothe the mental stress of the combat-worn
are not immune to the mental impact of war. Captain Peter Linnerooth was one of those Army
psychologists who counseled hundreds of soldiers for the shock and grief of seeing their friends
blown apart, for insomnia and the nightmares of hearing the screams from the
horribly burned Iraqi children and, of course,
for suicidal tendencies.
Linnerooth
was so good at what he did his Army
comrades dubbed him “The Wizard.” For more
than a year during some of the bloodiest times
in Iraq, he met with soldiers 60 to 70 hours a week. Sometimes he’d hop on
helicopters or join convoys but usually he
counseled in his tiny tent “office” at Camp
Liberty in Baghdad.
Then,
after six years in the Army and a solid 15 months of enduring that grueling
regimen, Linnerooth came home to
teach at Mankato State in Minnesota but could not escape his own demons. Soon,
his depression took a disastrous turn, and he nearly
died from an overdose of pills. A year later, he left
a note before putting a bullet in his own head and was dead at 42.
Pat Shannan is an AFP contributing editor and
the author of several best-selling videos and books.
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