A Look At The Epidemic Of Military Suicides

‘We Pretend The Vets Don’t Exist’ -- Andrwe Swofford, The Daily Beast

Author and former marine Anthony Swofford gets to the bottom of an epidemic.

I was sitting next to Melissa, a call responder at the VA Crisis Hotline in Canandaigua, N.Y., when she looked at me and whispered, ‘He just said he thinks he should walk out into traffic on Interstate 5 and end it all, that life is not worth living.’

On the other end of the line was a young man who’d been out of the Marines for four months. He was unemployed and broke and hadn’t eaten all day. He’d driven his father’s truck from the middle of the country to Southern California to be near Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and his buddies. But most of them were either overseas again or separated from the Marine Corps. He’d taken to drinking and occasionally smoking pot. After four years of military service and two combat tours in Iraq, he couldn’t find a steady job. Now he sat at a rest area near Camp Pendleton, contemplating suicide.

Read more ....

My Comment: The section of this report that caught my attention was the following:

.... About 18 veterans kill themselves each day. Thousands from the current wars have already done so. In fact, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died by their own hand is now estimated to be greater than the number (6,460) who have died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

While these stats are mind numbing .... you just know that it is a problem that will only get worse with time.