Is The U.S. Army Losing Its War On Suicide?

A U.S. Marine pulls security near a poppy field in Peyo as Marines and Afghan soldiers patrol through the village in the Bala Baluk district in Afghanistan's Farah province, March 29, 2010. The Marines are assigned to Marine Special Operation Command Marines. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Nicholas Pilch

From Time Magazine:

From the invasion of Afghanistan until last summer, the U.S. military had lost 761 soldiers in combat there. But a higher number in the service — 817 — had taken their own lives over the same period. The surge in suicides, which have risen five years in a row, has become a vexing problem for which the Army's highest levels of command have yet to find a solution despite deploying hundreds of mental-health experts and investing millions of dollars. And the elephant in the room in much of the formal discussion of the problem is the burden of repeated tours of combat duty on a soldier's battered psyche.

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My Comment: As long as our wars continue .... and they probably will in the far future .... this number can only go up. My only surprise is that I thought that the number was much higher than 817 .... around 2,000 .... not 817.

Still .... as I learned from my Godfather's suicide (he was a World War 2 Russian vet who committed suicide in 1963) .... these totals will continue to rise well after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over, and the damage that it causes to families and their children will last a life time.