As it approaches its tenth year, our nation’s longest war is showing signs of waning. Meanwhile, our soldiers are falling apart.
"I feel like people with my symptoms are becoming the majority of the Army," says a major from the New York area who recently started taking Effexor, an antidepressant, and a variety of sleep meds after a second tour in Iraq. "Feeling anxious when you don’t have a reason to, being a little depressed, having low-grade anhedonia, not sleeping well, this is the new normal for those of us who’ve been repeatedly deployed."
The Army’s own research confirms that drug and alcohol abuse, disciplinary infractions, and criminal activity are increasing among active-duty service members. Most ominously, a growing number of soldiers can’t handle the strains of war at all. Until three years ago, the suicide rate of the Army, the branch with by far the most men and women in this war, was actually lower than the American population’s - a testament to the hardiness of our troops, given that young men with weapons are, at least as a statistical matter, disproportionately prone to suicide. But in 2008, the Army suicide rate surpassed that of the civilian population’s, and the Marines’ surpassed it shortly thereafter. So grim is the problem that this summer, the Army released a remarkably candid suicide report. "If we include accidental death, which frequently is the result of high-risk behavior (e.g., drinking and driving, drug overdose)," it concluded, "we find that less young men and women die in combat than die by their own actions. Simply stated, we are often more dangerous to ourselves than the enemy."
In other words, nearly as many soldiers are dying at home today as are dying abroad.
For most of the past decade, the Army has downplayed the collateral damage this war has had on our soldiers’ nerves. Until The Nation brought the practice to light last spring, the Army sometimes assigned the label of �personality disorder� to those suffering from post-traumatic stress, often rendering them ineligible for disability; Warrior Transition Units have continually earned harsh scrutiny, most recently from the Army’s inspector general himself. Under the direction of Peter W. Chiarelli, the four-star general and vice-chief of staff, the Army has at least made an effort to lend some transparency to its troubles and to address them more aggressively. The problem is that the Army woke up to its mental-health crisis quite late, and the more closely Chiarelli looks into the issue, the more confounding it seems to be to solve.
For starters, the United States has never had an all-volunteer corps of soldiers who’ve spent a whole decade in battle - men and women who, by turns, have repeatedly subjected themselves to the horrors of war and the trials of reintegration back home. "Don’t ever underestimate what three, four, five deployments does to you," Chiarelli tells me this November, as we fly down to Fort Stewart, Georgia, whose 3rd Infantry Division was just returning from Iraq. "It’s uncharted territory, as far as I’m concerned." Even without repeated deployments, the life cycle of a soldier is a model of brutal compression and, therefore, almost certain to cause distress. "At 24 years of age," says a striking footnote on page one of the Army’s suicide report, "a Soldier, on average, has moved from home, family, and friends and resided in two other states; has traveled the world (deployed); been promoted four times; bought a car and wrecked it; married and had children; has had relationship and financial problems; seen death; is responsible for dozens of Soldiers; maintains millions of dollars’ worth of equipment; and gets paid less than $40,000 a year."
Now consider what happens when this cycle repeats itself for a decade.
"Moving, divorce, death, financial turmoil," says Lily Burana, author of the memoir I Love a Man in Uniform. "Those are the top stressors in a life. And this is what you get every freaking year in the Army."
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