U.S. special forces struggle with record suicides

U.S. special forces struggle with record suicides even after all these years of the DOD saying they were taking care of the men and women serving this country. Even after suicides and attempted suicides went up. Even after even the "toughest" of the tough suffered. Anyone know what is going to change? How to change it? Who is accountable for it?

Joe Miller, then an Army Ranger captain with three Iraq tours under his belt, sat inside his home near Fort Bragg holding a cocked Beretta 40mm, and prepared to kill himself.

Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann, 25, of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, killed himself June 28 (2011) at Lewis-McChord. Staff Sgt. Hagemann had orders to return to Afghanistan for a ninth tour of duty.

Crowley-Smilek, 28, a former U.S. Army Ranger who suffered from combat stress and physical injuries from service in Afghanistan, was dead; shot multiple times by a police officer outside the Farmington municipal offices on U.S. Route 2.

Staff Sgt. Charles Reilly, is a Special Forces soldier who has been deployed six times in the past decade. She said psychiatrists have diagnosed him with PTSD, and he's assigned to Fort Bragg's Warrior Transition Battalion, where soldiers recover from physical and mental wounds.

Sgt. Ben Driftmyer was discharged and betrayed. Survived.

"I had spent eight years serving the military. I never got in trouble. Never did anything bad. And I got treated like I was a piece of crap because of it," said Ben Driftmyer, discharged U.S. Army Sergeant and Cottage Grove resident. Driftmyer was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder by Eugene doctors after he was chaptered out from the special forces unit in Baghdad. He suffered several mental breakdowns during his service, but his discharge was classified as "other than medical." "Because the military didn't want to pay for me for the rest of my life," said Driftmyer.

Chief Petty Officer Jerald Kruse, served 19 years in the Navy. He was a SEAL, an elite warrior sent to fight in some of the toughest situations around the world, including in Iraq. “His problems really began in ’05. That’s when I really began to notice something was wrong,” she said. He drank excessively, stayed up all night and lashed out at her and their three kids.

Navy Cmdr. Job W. Price, 42, of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, died Saturday while serving as the commanding officer of SEAL Team 4, a special warfare unit based in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Navy SEAL Robert Guzzo returned from Iraq, he feared seeking treatment for PTSD would endanger his career.

U.S. special forces struggle with record suicides: admiral
Reuters
BY WARREN STROBEL
TAMPA, Florida
Thu Apr 17, 2014

(Reuters) - Suicides among U.S. special operations forces, including elite Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, are at record levels, a U.S. military official said on Thursday, citing the effects of more than a decade of "hard combat."

The number of special operations forces committing suicide has held at record highs for the past two years, said Admiral William McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command.

"And this year, I am afraid, we are on path to break that," he told a conference in Tampa. "My soldiers have been fighting now for 12, 13 years in hard combat. Hard combat. And anybody that has spent any time in this war has been changed by it. It's that simple."

It may take a year or more, he said, to assess the effects of sustained combat on special operations units, whose missions range from strikes on militants such as the 2011 SEAL raid that killed al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden to assisting in humanitarian disasters.
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