Say Anything Blog

Actually, you’re not just a little less likely to take your own life, but a lot less likely; men tend to take their own lives at a higher rate than women.

I can’t commend war as a passtime, of course, but my goodness....just because these guys went into journalism because they couldn’t do math doesn’t mean that they can’t run their figures by someone who can.  Yeesh.

Comparing historical military suicide rates has some validity.

Comparing historical military suicide rates to the general population without controlling the many variables,(age gender health religion employment income etc.) is not valid.

Look into the data. How many of these suicides are troops who have served in combat in the last 7 years? And how many are veterans who exited service prior to the current combat operations? How many had prior problems to their service? How many committed suicide for reasons entirely unrelated to their service?

Entirely anecdotal, I admit from the start, 3 vets I knew have committed suicide in the last 8 months. All combat vets. All separated from service for over 20 years. All 3 included in this data set.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Still the rate does not meet the national average civilian suicide rate. As much as I want to address this with a sarcastic response to civilian life under a Democratically controlled congress as to that serving in the military, I will abstain. However, to this day, with the spike that is noted, the military rate is still exponentially smaller than what the left side of the blogosphere has claimed and repeated, hoping it would become an accepted fact, in the past. Must suck to be on teh left side today.

"we should select our leaders on principle first, electability second.”

A young man whose wisdom far exceeds his years

Comparing historical military suicide rates has some validity.

Agree.  But the validity does not say anything about the Iraq or Afghanistan and PTSD having an effect on soldiers.  that is what the MSM and Dems want the stats to say, but they don’t.

What the stats say is that extended deployments lead to relationship problems.  Relationship problems lead to suicides.  This is a common truth.  The military exists to deploy.  It trains to prepare to deploy.  And when it does deploy, it takes a hell of a toll on servicemembers.  Regardless of whether the deployment is a West-Pac or a 1 year deployment to Okinawa or a 3 year overseas deployment with your family to Germany.  Deployment is deployment and deployments lead to relationship problems and suicides.

So the issue isn’t Iraq, it is deployments.  And Iraq is causing more frequent deployments, true.  But we have to look at the mission of the military.  The mission is to be ready to deploy whenever and for however long is necessary.  Suicide numbers are only one indicator of deeper personnel problems.  But every servicemember serves voluntarily.  The MSM wants to talk about stoploss measures, but for the most part, the attrition rate is still relatively low.  Retention and recruitment are high.  115 suicides in an army of 520,000 active duty and another 520,000 National Guard and Reservists. We have to realize that each of the 115 is a unique person and because the sample size is very small, even small increases or decreases are magnified.

I never could see the logic of patent suicide in a combat zone when you have an enemy ready, willing and able to do the honors for you on a daily basis.

I would imagine combat comes with stress, but modern-day combat seems particularly tricky.

In great-granddad’s wars Spanish-American, WWI, and as recently as WWII, if you saw the enemy, he was wearing a uniform, usually conglomerated together into something called the enemy line and you could—and indeed were expected—to shoot him.

But after getting fought to a standstill in Korea, commies changed their tactics and the face of modern warfare.

The enemy would no longer dress like the enemy (except in special occasions, such as when they had overwhelming local superiority) but would adopt Mao’s doctrine of swimming like fish in a sea of civilians (e.g. hiding as and among non-combatant civilians)

They would use indiscriminate ambush weapons (mines and boodytraps) which would also kill and maim countless civilians and their all-important animals.  To this day, there are substantial numbers of amputees in Angola, Namibia, Afghanistan and Vietnam due to the communist method of indiscriminate mine warfare.

It should be noted that Western mine warfare differs substantially from Soviet / Chi-Com mine warfare doctrines.  Allied minefields are meant to slow down and channelize enemy troops, essentially to cover broad swaths of unattended areas.  But the minefields are to be mapped, delineated and marked.  We even use mines which will disarm themselves after a period of time.

Not so communists.  The take ill-trained peasants, give them some rudimentary military training and a heck of a lot of political indoctrination, instruct them to plant mines and booby-traps along paths, roads, bridges and raillines, used by enemy troops and civilians alike, and let some hapless victim to pay the price.  No mapping, no warnings, no going back after the war and cleaning them up or self-disarming.

They would also use ambush tactics: strike—then break contact and slink away into the underbrush.

These tactics, as violative of the Rules of War as they may be, also created a tremendous amount of anger, stress and frustration in the troops.  They wanted to fight, to engage the enemy in a stand-up fight and destroy them in detail.

Almost always, whenever the commies did that, they got waxed.  The Tet Offensive ended up as a massive military loss for the Commies, but the domestic Commie media reported it as a victory for the Left, and that became the reality for the folks at home.

Wedded to this frustration was now the fear that the individual troop would be held liable for an unlawful killing—even when justified by the terrain and situation.

Creating the anger and stress, and particularly the very natural urge to lash out, was a Communist tactic, provoking retribution by allied troops against the local populace, and creating a division between civilians and the domestic government / US troops.

I don’t know about any other troops, but if I felt the crying need to do myself in, it wouldn’t be via the means of putting a pistol in my mouth --- I’d prolly have some fun with it by wading into a dicey situation with an M-60 with ammo belts draped over my shoulder.

Why couldn’t these other guys be more creative on their way out?

...for great justice