the CBS five-month study found that vets were "more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets." Chillingly, though the Veterans Affairs Department estimates that "some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year,' that's a lowball estimate. Said Keteyian: "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."
Update, 5:30pm: CBS has just released some of those numbers: "At least 120 Americans who served in the U.S. military killed themselves per week in 2005, CBS News learned in a five-month investigation into veteran suicides. That's 6,256 veteran suicides in one year, in 45 states."
- I'm not very good at statistics but do those numbers mean that more vets return home from war and commit suicide than have died in the war each year?
3 comments:
Hopefully I can get this comment to go through. Was having problems with blogger yesterday.
Has veteran suicide always been high? If not, what over the years has changed I wonder? War has always been nasty but is it worse now than it was say in WW2?
Before we were drug into this mess, there were some voices out there saying that we needed to decide as a country if we were willing to support our military men and women (and their families) coming back wounded in mind, body, or spirit. Better battlefield medical treatment = fewer deaths, but more men and women coming back with lost limbs.
I think they deserve the best treatment for as long as they live.
Then there's the *little* problem of our country's aging infrastructure. Money spent in Iraq or at home. So many things we should have been allowed to consider before doing this.
I think we, as a nation and a military, went into this crap so unprepared. Maybe going into war is always that way?
It just makes me so sad. The Washington Post really covers the lives of these soldiers/vets pretty well. More are surviving battle - when they would have died in previous wars. But to come home just to commit suicide....is a disgrace to this country. I wonder what would happen if we had a draft?
Post a Comment