A blind eye on soldiers' suicides

A blind eye on soldiers' suicides
By James Carroll
June 30, 2008
'SUPPORT THE troops" is an American lie. This nation is grievously and knowingly failing the young men and women who wear the uniform of its military services, and nothing demonstrates that more powerfully than the suicides of soldiers. According to the Army's own figures, the rate of suicide among active duty personnel nearly doubled between 2001 and 2006. The number then grew even higher in 2007, when suicide ranked third as the cause of death among members of the National Guard. Even if proximate causes vary from war zones to home fronts, such data are anomalous, since suicide rates among soldiers historically go down during wartime, not up.

Veterans, too, are in trouble. In May, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health warned of "a gathering storm." Thomas Insel told the American Psychiatric Association that one in five of the 1.6 million soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan (or more than 300,000) suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome or depression. Potentially life-threatening mental disorders, including self-destructive behavior like addiction, raise the prospect, in Insel's words, of "suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths."

As America has steadily averted its gaze from the actualities of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so, too, has the nation refused to look at what is happening to those it sends to fight. Repeated deployments to war zones, combined with meager support upon returning home, are leaving many soldiers adrift. Each one who commits suicide, or attempts to (more than 2,000 last year), shows this. It would be presumptuous to draw conclusions from any single instance of such despair, but taken as a whole, these acts of self-destruction lay bare some difficult truths.

The war in Iraq, in particular, is an exercise in the obliteration of meaning. The war's essence is its lack of essence. The war's catch-22 is that its stated goal is social order, while the American presence itself creates disorder. Our troops know this. They arrive in the war zone with every intention of protecting an innocent population from the enemy, only to discover that the enemy and the population are indistinguishable. "Insurgents" often turn out to be, not ideologues, much less "terrorists," but only cousins of those already killed. Victims and victimizers are alike. Suspicion is ubiquitous. No one trusts Americans. Such contradictions make the war controversial in the United States, but in Iraq they make the soldiers' situation intolerable.
click post title for more