Suicide and the Soldier

• When wars result in suicide numbers that exceed those killed in action (KIA) or missing in action (MIA), something is wrong and there should be a hue and cry demanding to know the reasons why. And we also should be questioning the reasons behind the secret decisions to send mentally and physically healthy soldiers "into harm's way", where they become preventable emotional and spiritual casualties.
• Minneapolis VA faulted for suicide policy lapses
• Will We Pay Our Debt to Our Vets?
• The Neurological, Psychological, and Spiritual Costs of War and Violence

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duty to Warn / Evergreene Digest

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A member of the Prior Lake VFW salutes the flag-draped coffin of Vietnam-era Marine Veteran Raymond Schwirtz. Joey McLeister, Star Tribune file


(August 28, 2012) Eleven years ago, the NeoConservative Cheney/Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld administration, with the enthusiastic support of the Radical Religious Right, started, by a series of treasonous lies, its so-called endless war on "terrorism", most of which, in actuality, had  been provoked by decades of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and blindly pro-Israel US foreign policies.

Since that perpetual war began in 2001, huge numbers of US military personnel have taken their own lives.  In 2009 alone, at least 330 active-duty servicemen and women were known to have committed suicide - more than the number of combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. And last month, July 2012, the suicide rate for active-duty soldiers exceeded one per day. Worse, the  Veterans Affairs reports that 18 American military veterans from all wars kill themselves each day!
 
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Related:

Minneapolis VA faulted for suicide policy lapses, Mark Brunswick, Minneapolis (MN) Star Tribune
It didn't follow up on despondent patient who killed himself while under the agency's care, the VA Inspector General's Office said.

Will We Pay Our Debt to Our Vets? Katie Drummond, the Fix

• Soldiers are coming home from our two wars with a staggering rate of invisible brain injuries—and the addictions that go with them. With treatment estimated to cost $1 trillion, will America really meet their dire needs?
• US Army Delays Counseling Program
• The Three Most Dangerous Words a Soldier Can Hear: “Support Our Troops”

The Neurological, Psychological, and Spiritual Costs of War and Violence, Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duty to Warn
"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder and it is the working class who fights all the battles, the working class who makes the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely sheds their blood and furnishes their corpses, and it is they who have never yet had a voice - in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class (the “plutocrats”) that invariably does both. They alone declare war. They are continually talking about patriotic duty. It is not their patriotic duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches." --Eugene Debs