More Suicides Than Casualties at the Front

The war in Afghanistan is getting close to 4,000 days; so far, according to official sources, 1,984 American soldiers have died in combat. That’s an average of almost one death every two days. What the Taliban hasn’t achieved, the desperation caused by combat has: This year, an average of one soldier has died by his own hand every day, according to information from the Pentagon that was revealed by the Associated Press. In 155 days, up to June 4, there were 154 suicides.

That is 50 percent more than the casualties suffered on the war front. They occur in Afghanistan, where the war is still alive, and especially when the soldiers return home and face a new life in which the army doesn’t provide everything and in which the job market closes them out because it is still suffering from the effects of the recent economic crisis. Together with suicide, sexual abuse, physical aggression and drug addiction plague the punished war veterans.

Pentagon doctors and psychiatrists have tried for decades to discover the causes of the soldiers’ high suicide rate. They have found plenty of reasons: attacks suffered at the front, post-traumatic stress disorder, abuse of painkillers and other medications and the economic problems that they encounter when they return to their families. In fact, the majority of suicides are of soldiers who served at the front, rather than those who have never been deployed.

The figure of 154 suicides up to June 4 is an 18 percent increase compared to 2011, and 25 percent compared to 2010. This increase in itself is bad news for the Department of Defense, but it is even worse given the fact that more soldiers died by suicide than on the war front in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009. There are a total of 1.4 million men and women in uniform in the United States armed forces.

There are some who think that wars are necessary. Others think of them as political decisions. Commanders-in-chief and presidents start them, defend them, criticize them or end them. In those long processes, there are many civilian victims in the invaded countries; rightfully, much is said about them and their suffering. The soldiers that fight them, a million Americans since the 2001 attacks, are left more in the shadows and, in general, end up left on their own. In total, the number of suicides in the United States armed forces is 20 for every 100,000, double that of civilian suicides.