"The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War"

James Rosen asked a question that everyone seems to want to know about war. Was it a mistake? He was asking about Iraq but the same question was asked about Vietnam. For politicians, they are all too ready to rush into sending troops and too reluctant to be viewed as timid or antiwar so debate is never serious enough before they commit others to risk their lives.

In a perfect world, they would understand the price they are asking others to pay and that price does not end when other politicians end the wars. Wars would be debated until everyone understood the reasons as well as the risks. No troops would be sent without all that is needed to end wars with a designated outcome instead of wishing for a better one but settling for it after the American people lost interests.

For the men and women they send, they don't really care about the reputation of a political person but they do care about the buddy they serve next to. They don't really care which contractor makes money because they are too worried about their families back home being able to pay their own bills. As for the reason they have to be where they are, that is "above their pay grade" as they say but they want to be right there as long as others are fighting. There is no mistake in any of that. There is no political issue for them.

No war has ever been simple.

The battles they fight back home have never been simple. They used to be fought in the privacy of their own homes but then it was easy to hide. No internet or Facebook to muck things up. They went, they came home and they suffered and died far too young. They battled the VA just as they do now. Nothing has changed and that is probably the only thing I can think of they didn't talk about in this interview.

Rosen interviews Yochi Dreazen about his book "The Invisible Front" and they got a lot right. It is a relief to hear a frank, honest discussion about what happens back here. Dreazen even addressed the high numbers during WWII. The only thing I can really complain about is that as you hear them talk about the numbers, how they went up and when, keep in mind that they went up after "efforts" were increased.

When more is being done to prevent something that is getting worse, there's a clue in there somewhere the military and politicians don't seem to grasp. Sad.

The Foxhole: Yochi Dreazen on PTSD, suicide, and other silent battles of the US Armed Forces
FOX News
James Rosen
February 17, 2015

Back in the days when he was an intrepid correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, spending a total of five years in Iraq and Afghanistan to cover the wars there, Yochi Dreazen started hearing voices. They were not the faraway sirens of ghosts or fear, but the voices, rather, of the men returning from battle with all their limbs and eyesight but still, somehow, not whole.

"I'm not the same person as I was when I left," they would tell him. "I look in the mirror, I don't recognize myself; I can see my wife look at me and she's seeing me differently. My children are scared of me. I can't sleep. I feel flashes of anger at waiters." As disturbing as these confessions were, for Dreazen, the messages grew even more ominous.

"Some of them said, 'I've thought about killing myself. I don't want to live like this.' And I would hear second-hand of people I knew, in some cases friends, who did kill themselves. And I was looking at the numbers and watching them tick higher and higher and higher."

And the numbers were eye-popping, as Dreazen – now managing editor of Foreign Policy – documents in his new book "The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War" (Crown, October 2014):

The military's suicide rate jumped more than 80 percent between 2002 and 2009, the first year that the percentage of troops who took their own lives was higher than the percentage of civilians who did so. In 2012 more soldiers died by their own hand than in combat. In 2013 the total number of military suicides since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan passed the 1,000 mark. In 2014 the Pentagon disclosed that the suicide rate for male veterans age thirty and younger had jumped 44 percent between 2009 and 2011, a startling figure that suggested that the number of younger soldiers choosing to take their own lives would continue to increase well into the future.
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