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Here is some very bad news. There is no way to make this feel good. And we have no difficulty explaining why the American military has been suffering an epidemic of suicides. This comes to us from the Epoch Times:
The U.S. Army lost 176 active duty soldiers to suicide in 2021, figures show.
According to combined data from the Defense Suicide Prevention Office and a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, that’s the highest number of active duty Army member suicides on record since 1938.
Might this have something to do with the new woke policies instituted by the Biden administration? Might it have something to do with the new policy whereby military commanders make themselves into junior Staasi officers, the better to hunt down the white supremacists in the ranks
Might it have something to do with the policy of removing any soldier who refused to take the Covid vaccine, thereby undermining group cohesion and morale?
In any rate, this problem has been festering for nearly a decade, if not more:
Suicide rates within all military branches have continued to rise since 2015.
Compounding this trend is the number of U.S. soldiers and veterans who have taken their own life in post-9/11 wars.
Brown University published a study indicating that 30,177 active duty members and veterans have committed suicide. By comparison, the number of soldiers actually killed in post-9/11 war operations is 7,052.
What is causing this problem? We do not have to look very far for the solution. The American military no longer cares about winning wars, or even about achieving a strategic purpose. The political class has taken over the military and is using it for its own purposes, that is, to make itself look tough:
Dr Tracy Latz is an integrative psychiatrist and author with 35 years of experience dealing with suicide risk and PTSD suffering patients. She told The Epoch Times feelings of a lack of purpose also contribute to the problem.
“Veterans I have seen over the past few years report feeling like they and their comrades were used primarily as pawns for governmental political power rather than feeling [a] sense of real purpose in their duties.”
Well said, and surely true.
Naturally, the therapists in the military do not understand the problem, and besides offering therapy pets, they are offering mental health care, the kind that might be appropriate for college students. It comprises Super Bowl parties and shared meals.
No kidding.
Combined with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and United Service Organizations (USO), free tools like crisis hotlines for military members struggling with mental health are available 24 hours a day.
The USO also offers services to deployed military members like Super Bowl parties, shared meals, and movie nights to help increase social connectivity and reduce feelings of isolation while overseas.
Latz noted that people suffering from PTSD could be dealing with an array of symptoms like poor sleep, flashbacks, and intrusive memories of the trauma they experienced.
The truth is, either the military will have a defined mission and will be allowed to complete its defined mission, or the problem of soldier suicides will persist. One place to start is: fewer lawyers making combat decisions. The Clinton administration filled the Pentagon with armies of lawyers, people whose preference was to fight wars where no one got hurt.
Now, legalism prevails and we are more interested in diversity and coedification than we are in winning wars.
3 comments:
"“Veterans I have seen over the past few years report feeling like they and their comrades were used primarily as pawns for governmental political power rather than feeling [a] sense of real purpose in their duties.”
Reminds me of something said by German WWI veteran in Remarque's great but neglected novel, The Road Back:
"They told us it was for the Fatherland, and they meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry.–They told us it was for honour, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes..They stuffed the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism…And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can’t you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without knowing it!…The youth of the world rose up in every land believing that it was fighting for freedom! And in every land they were duped and misused; in every land they have been shot down, they have exterminated each other."
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/54294.html
Pawns indeed being sent all over the world to kill and be killed for the benefit of a corrupt ruling elite.
Lawyers may fancy themselves warriors, but they ain’t. The problem is that lawyers are administrators (at best) or crusaders (at worst). And then lawyers fancy themselves as smarter than soldiers. And then lawyers try to tell soldiers what to do. And then lawyers are able to avoid all accountability for their decisions, while the soldiers are court-martialed for transgressions in the nasty, foggy and brutal realities of war. Compared to warfighting, lawyering is a parlor game. Lawyers take no/little risk themselves.
Who shall we pay attention to?
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt
-IAC
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