There's no armor, it turns out, for conscience.
So
our men and women are coming home from the killing fields wounded in
their heads, used up, greeted only by the military's own meat grinder
of inadequate health care and intolerance for "weakness."
It's time to take care of your troops, America. We are mired in violence and gun lust, post traumatic stress and substance abuse; outward anxiety and inward extremism. Maj. Nidal Hassan is one of us.
Eight years we've been at war now. The youngest victim of Hassan's murderous rampage was but 11 when the towers fell. For years, Maj. Hassan listened to the horrors of the occupations which resulted, and it made him crazy, as it made me crazy. Then they told him it was his turn to go, as they told me it was my turn.
As the Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands
of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is
increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly,
one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent
without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.
U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Chancellor Keesling died in Iraq on June 19, 2009, from “a non-combat related incident,” according to the Pentagon. Keesling had killed himself. He was just one in what is turning out to be a record year for suicides in the U.S. military.
The Senate Armed Services Committee hearings Wednesday on the rising suicide rate among U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan revealed some frightening new data, but did little to investigate the underlying causes of what is emerging as one of the darkest, most disturbing legacies of the wars.
Last year the Army had its highest suicide rate on record -- 140 soldiers. But new data from the Army on Wednesday showed the number jumping even higher. Forty-eight soldiers have already killed themselves so far this year.
