Pentagon Denies Increase in Troops' Suicides a Result of War

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted August 28, 2007.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, I find every new report about suicides among this generation of soldiers particularly painful. So I was surprised the other day to find myself laughing out loud reading about how poor Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army Surgeon General's office, got stuck with the awful job of announcing, with a perfectly straight face and no irony whatsoever, that, although the suicide rate among soldiers has reached a 26-year record high, Pentagon studies still haven't found a connection between soldier suicides and the war.

They looked. What's a Pentagon to do?

And I think it was rather too kind of the media not to call attention to the fact that, as this year's designated goat, poor Elspeth had to stand up on her hind legs and try to sound sincere while once again parroting the official line that these poor dead kids are to blame for their own deaths. Year after year, they let their "personal relationships" get all messed up; they let their "legal and financial problems" get out of control; and they let "work stress" get them down. (Hmm…work stress…?)

The United States invaded Iraq in March of 2003 and by August, so many American soldiers had killed themselves that a mental health advisory team was sent to investigate. Their report, MHAT I (yes, more coming), confirmed a suicide rate three times greater than the statistical norm for the armed forces. It also acknowledged that a third of the psychiatric casualties being evacuated "departed theater with suicide-related behaviors as part of their clinical presentation." Red flag? Nope. The team's conclusion was that soldiers were killing themselves for the same reasons that soldiers "typically" kill themselves: marital, legal, financial problems, what they referred to as "underdeveloped life coping skills." There was a supplement to the report that was intended to assess the general health and well-being of soldiers. The supplement listed things that soldiers most often identified as combat "stressors," and, well, those were about what you might expect. They mentioned "seeing dead bodies or human remains, being attacked or ambushed, and knowing someone who was seriously injured or killed." Somehow none of these "stressors" made it into the team's final opinion as to why these kids were killing themselves.

So now every year they send another team of experts to Iraq, and every year they file another report (MHAT I, II, III, IV and counting), and every year some poor spokesgoat has to stand up and tell a bunch of grownups that it's these kids and their personal problems, not the war, that motivates these young people with their whole lives ahead of them to end it.

Well, every year except for 2004, when the rate dropped a lot, and everyone started crowing about how all the new suicide prevention measures were working, and they looked real good until the numbers for 2005 came in, and someone noticed that in 2004 they had used a different definition of a suicide. Tricky. That year they only counted the deaths involving guns.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, mental health, afghanistan, suicide

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

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