Asking for help in the Army is asking for punishment

Asking for help in the Army is asking for punishment
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
March 25, 2014

The military wants us to believe that suicides have nothing to do with them. The latest study found that one out of five had mental illness before they enlisted. They want us to believe that soldiers were already psychologically damaged. If we take it at face value then we do not ask the most important questions of all. What is wrong with their mental health evaluations? If the testing has allowed in so many with suicidal thoughts, didn't they think they would be endangering the rest of the soldiers?

These soldiers the military claims were not deployed were also trained on the failure called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program that was supposed to make them mentally tough. How good of a program can it be when it couldn't even take care of soldiers that never faced combat?

Then there is the Pre-deployment Health Assessment.

The Pre-DHA must be completed within 60 days prior to deployment. Part 1 of the Pre-DHA consists of a self-assessment questionnaire and can be accessed online through the My Medical portion of AKO under the Self Service tab. Part 2 is completed through a one-on-one confidential interview with a qualified health care provider. The Pre-DHA is not complete until it is signed by a health care provider.

The truth is, they were tested and retested and retested. The truth is billions have been spent on "prevention" "mental health" and the list goes on but in the end, suicides increased and they can't explain any of this because they will hold no one accountable for any of this. Blaming the troops is just easier than investigating what the truth is.
Blaming the troops is easy way out

After three combat tours, Sgt. Dennis Tackett was kicked out of the Army for punching a man in the face while drunk. It didn’t matter that he had been diagnosed with PTSD (by the Army) and had tried to get help (from the Army) for the drinking it led to. It didn’t matter that he was in the late stages of a medical discharge that would get him out soon anyway — with benefits. What mattered to the commanding general at Fort Carson, Colo., who spoke to him that day in November 2012 was that he had tried to fight the discharge with the help of a pair of civilian watchdogs, Georg-Andreas Pogany and Robert Alvarez.

“If you had not gotten involved with those advocates, it would have gone differently,” Tackett remembers the commander, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, telling him. Anderson is now commander of Fort Bragg, N.C.

A recording obtained by Al Jazeera America suggests Tackett and soldiers like him were retaliated against because of an increasingly rancorous relationship between commanders at Fort Carson and the civilian advocates.

In 2012 Fort Bliss Major General Dana Pittard wrote this, “I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess. Be an adult, act like an adult, and deal with your real-life problems like the rest of us.”

A year later it was Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno saying, "Some of it is just personal make-up. Intestinal fortitude. Mental toughness that ensures that people are able to deal with stressful situations."

After blaming the soldiers, he then blamed the families. "But it also has to do with where you come from. I came from a loving family, one who gave lots of positive reinforcement, who built up psychologically who I was, who I am, what I might want to do. It built confidence in myself, and I believe that enables you to better deal with stress. It enables you to cope more easily than maybe some other people."

When Kristofer Goldsmith tried to kill himself six years ago, the Army responded by kicking him out of the military for misconduct.

Goldsmith is on Capitol Hill this week trying to make sure other troops’ cries for help aren’t similarly ignored.

“People know the statistics about military and veterans suicide,” the 28-year-old Iraq War veteran said. “But if I can put a face and a name to what has been going on, maybe it’ll make a difference.”

The cries for help are ignored. The data is not just ignored, it is hidden. The Department of Defense stopped releasing the Suicide Event Report. The last one was released in 2012 for 2011 even though the highest number on record was 2012. The DOD has not released the suicide report for Army, Army National Guards and Army Reservists on a monthly basis the way they used to. The truth is, no one really knows.

We don't know for a fact how many enlisted personnel are committing suicide, attempting suicide in the military or how many veterans are going through the same crisis situations. The other fact that needs to be added into all of this is there has never been a time when so many "efforts" have been made to save their lives and prevent suicides.

But as the Department of Veterans Affairs study put the number of veterans committing suicide at 22 a day, we ignore the fact that this study is not complete. We ignore the fact that there are at least 1,000 a month within the VA system attempting suicide. We also ignore the fact that most of the bad conduct discharges leave these men and women with nothing including help from the VA. Think about what happened last year and know what they don't want you to think about.

The number of enlisted soldiers forced out for drugs, alcohol, crimes and other misconduct shot up from about 5,600 in 2007, as the Iraq war peaked, to more than 11,000 last year.

"The number of Marines who left after court-martial has dropped from more than 1,300 in 2007 to about 250 last year."

"The number of officers separated from service since 2000 due to a court-martial ranged from a low of 20 in 2001 to a high of 68 in 2007. For enlisted airmen, the number ranged from a high of nearly 4,500 in 2002 to a low of almost 2,900 in 2013

The Navy went through a similar process. When the decision was made to cut the size of the 370,000-strong naval force in 2004, the number of sailors who left due to misconduct and other behavior issues grew. In 2006, more than 8,400 sailors left due to conduct issues.

Here is just one example of what all of this ends with.
UPDATE
This is from Huffington Post

The last 11 years have proven to be tough on the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. The cost of war is being reflected off the battlefield as well with veterans taking their own lives at an alarming rate. Alyona Minkovski explains. Originally aired on March 24, 2014