Blaming John’s Death on Jane (or vice versa)

Posted on August 17, 2007 in Occupation of Iraq PTSD Suicide

To put yesterday’s article in more perspective, the United States has a suicide rate of 11.0 per 100,000 people. The Army says that its suicide rate is 17.3 per 100,000. Neither figure includes provocations designed to attract lethal fire.

In classic form, the Army declines to put the blame on the stresses of being deployed in an unpopular war in a hostile land. Instead, it blames it on the girl back home who won’t stand by her man:

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is “failed intimate relationships, failed marriages.”

She said that although the military is worried about the stress caused by repeat deployments and tours of duty that have been stretched to 15 months, it has not found a direct relationship between suicides and combat or deployments.

“However, we do know that frequent deployments put a real strain on relationships, especially on marriages. So we believe that part of the increase is related to the increased stress in relationships,” she said.

“Very often a young soldier gets a ‘Dear John’ or ‘Dear Jane’ e-mail and then takes his weapon and shoots himself,” she said.

Never mind that the victim has been under a mountain of stress. The blame must be put on the hair that pushes him into the rock.

In fairness to the Army — which is predominantly men — its current suicide rate is below the male suicide rate for 2002 of 17.6 deaths per 100,000. On the other hand, when considering the costs of deployment stress and the general effects of war, the numbers do not include those who have been discharged, the classic sufferers of [[post traumatic stress disorder]].

It may be that the military is stuck in a political cauldron stirred by an administration which is constantly trying to justify an increasingly unpopular war. Colonel Ritchie can’t connect the dots because those higher in command want the cause of the deaths to be something else. Her job is not the job of a civilian doctor: she can’t advise taking the soldiers out of the war — she must find a way to return them. She can’t talk about suicide by enemy because it is both hard to track and politically inexpedient because it will only raise the numbers. So she sticks to the bullet and the blade.

As usual the problem glares at us like an angry monkey. Deployments and redeployments in the war that doesn’t look like it is going to end bite into the neck of our soldiers. They’re stuck in the political mess that Bush built. When they come home, many will find themselves in shock after being discharged from the buddy system that the Army uses to preserve morale. They will wonder why they were made to fight in this evil war. And they will ask themselves why they didn’t resist.

When I spent some time in former [[Yugoslavia]], I heard this kind of story: a man would return from the front after being put to the task of ethnically cleansing a few of the opponents. (I heard this both of [[Croatia|Croats]] and [[Serbia|Serbs]].) He would call his family into the living room and drop a live hand grenade.

When this starts happening after this war, you can’t doubt that the military brass will find a family fight or an-end-of-love letter to explain what occurred. The only way we can curtail this bringing of the war back to our country is to end the war. Bring ’em home, alive and as mentally sound as the terror of the war so far allows.

[tags]war, Iraq ,post traumatic stress, PTSD, bipolar disorder, Afghanistan, military intelligence, psychiatry, psychology, Army, US Army[/tags]