Suicide Out of Control in the Military

Numbers released yesterday are showing that more soldiers committed suicide in January than those who lost their lives in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. This is absolutely astonishing to me.

From CNN:

The Army said 24 soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in January alone -- six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, according to statistics released Thursday.

The Army said it already has confirmed seven suicides, with 17 additional cases pending that it believes investigators will confirm as suicides for January.

If those prove true, more soldiers will have killed themselves than died in combat last month. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 16 U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq in January.

The reaction to suicide in the military has been slow coming. After a number of suicides among military recruiters in the Houston area, this is what the Pentagon offered several months later.

The U.S. Army is establishing a suicide prevention board to examine the mental health of its recruiters around the country after the fourth suicide in three years by Houston, Texas-based recruiters, according to Army officials.

And rather than dealing with this problem head-on, they tried to do it the old-fashioned military way...by covering it up.

Let's hope this isn't the way the Pentagon deals with yesterday's report.