US military suicide rate at record high

[luke]

US military suicide rate at record high

American troops are taking their own lives in the largest numbers since records began to be kept in 1980. In 2008, there were 128 confirmed suicides by serving army personnel and 41 by serving marines. Another 15 army deaths are still being investigated. The toll is another of the terrible consequences that have flowed from Washington's neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The army suicide rate is now higher than that among the general American population. The rate has been calculated as 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, compared with 19.5 per 100,000 civilians. This is a shocking statistic, as soldiers theoretically are screened for mental illnesses before enlistment and have access to counselling and health services that millions of ordinary people cannot afford.

As there is an average of 10 failed suicide attempts for each actual loss of life, the figures suggest that more than 1,600 serving army and marine personnel tried to kill themselves last year.

Army Secretary Pete Geren told the Associated Press that "we cannot tell you" why the number of military suicides was rising. It is indisputable, however, that it is linked to the stresses on soldiers caused by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, the army suicide rate was just 9.8 per 100,000. The last time it exceeded the civilian rate was in the late 1960s, at the highpoint of the US war in Vietnam.

An estimated 30 percent of soldiers who took their own lives in 2008 did so while on deployment. Another 35 percent committed suicide after returning from a tour of duty. In one reported case, a highly regarded marine pilot hanged himself just one month before he was scheduled to return to Iraq.

Dozens of men and women who have left the armed forces since serving in Afghanistan or Iraq also committed suicide in 2008. The Department of Veterans Affairs recorded 144 such cases. The suicide rate among veterans aged 20 to 24 was 22.9 per 100,000 in 2007—four times higher than non-veterans in the same age bracket. A hotline for veterans has received over 85,000 calls since mid-2007 and arranged some 2,100 suicide prevention interventions.

The rise in army suicides was registered despite an information campaign in the US military intended to end stigmas over seeking medical health for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression—psychological conditions that afflict tens of thousands of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans and in severe cases can trigger suicidal tendencies.

Veterans Affairs (VA) reported in January that 178,483 veterans of the two wars had been diagnosed with one or more mental illnesses between 2002 and September 2008. The conditions diagnosed included 92,998 cases of possible PTSD; 63,009 possible depressive disorders; 50,569 neurotic disorders; 35,937 cases of affective psychoses; 27,246 cases of drug abuse and 16,217 cases of alcohol dependency.

VA deputy director for mental health services, Antonette Zeiss, told the Air Force Times: "Most of these conditions would not have been present prior to being in the military. In VA, we assume that these are veterans coming to us who have had significant stresses as a result of their involvement with the military and the war."

The "significant stresses" would include killing; repeated exposure to scenes of death and injury; the constant threat of death or injury; and the dehumanising policing operations that American soldiers have been ordered to conduct against civilian populations. No-one who has taken part in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq could have returned completely unscathed by the experience.

The true extent of mental illness among war veterans is believed to be far worse than VA's figures. It has only treated around 400,000 of the 1.7 million men and women who have served. "We know there are guys who desperately need help who aren't coming to us," a spokesman told the Air Force Times. A Rand Corporation study last year estimated that 20 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans—some 350,000 people—were suffering from PTSD.

As many as 18 veterans of American wars take their own lives in the United States every day—more than 6,500 per year. Vietnam veteran advocates have estimated that suicide ultimately killed more of the soldiers who fought in that conflict than the actual war itself. The same trend is now surfacing among the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.

A recent case was the suicide of Specialist Larry Applegate on January 16. After an argument with his wife, during which shots were fired, Applegate barricaded himself inside his Colorado Springs home. Shortly after, he killed himself with a bullet to the head.

The Army Times reported that the 27-year-old soldier, who served in Iraq during 2006, had been under the supervision of a Warrior Transition Unit (WTU) since February 2008 for an undisclosed condition. WTUs were established in June 2007 after the exposure of substandard treatment of wounded troops at the Walter Reed Medical Centre. There are currently some 9,000 soldiers assigned to 36 WTUs across the US.

A total of 68 soldiers had died under WTU care by October 2008. More than half the deaths were ruled to have resulted from natural causes, but nine were determined to be suicides. Six others were classified as accidental deaths caused by "combined lethal drug toxicity".

[luke]

Horror and stresses of Iraq duty led US sergeant to kill comrades
Spate of violence is one of at least 120 murders committed by American veterans, while domestic violence, alcoholism and suicides are rife

Everyone – the father, the son, the army – agrees that three tours of Iraq drove ­Sergeant John Russell to the edge.

But what pushed him over, into shooting dead five of his comrades in an army that was his life for 16 years, is a matter of bitter dispute.

The military has suggested that ­Russell's work cannibalising and rebuilding robots used to set off roadside bombs brought him into regular contact with gruesome casualties, and that took a toll that exploded at Camp Liberty in ­Baghdad this week.

The army says it recognised signs of trauma in the 44-year-old sergeant, who was just a few weeks from leaving Iraq, and dispatched him for psychological assessment at a military stress centre in Baghdad. Russell got into a fight there, grabbed a gun and shot two doctors and three other soldiers dead.

That version of events has some of the familiar ring of accounts of traumatised soldiers driven to violence by violence. Ever since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, soldiers have been returning to the US and killing.

Veterans from the two wars have committed at least 120 murders beginning with a spate of killings of wives at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2002 and continuing with five murders at a military base in Colorado last year.

Alongside the killings has come a surge in domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction. Meanwhile suicides run at twice the rate of people outside the military. But back at his home in Sherman, Texas, Russell's family say it was not the combat but the army that drove the sergeant in an engineering unit over the edge. His father, Wilburn, 73, said the military was Russell's life and that amid the stresses of combat he had fallen out with his officers.

"I doubt very seriously if the truth is going to come out because of the circumstances. You see he faxed his wife the 6th of this month saying that he'd been threatened by a couple of officers, and it was the worst two days of his life," he said.

On Monday, Russell's commanding officer ordered the sergeant to turn in his gun and receive psychological ­counselling. Wilburn Russell says the order to give up his weapon would have been deeply humiliating for his son and that after his long service to the army, just when the sergeant needed it most, he was under the impression it was going to dump him.

"I believe the officers decided they wanted him out. At the stress centre they sit you down and tell you you're not the kind of person they want in the service. You're not worthy of being here. How dare you get those stripes. You're too stupid to be in the army. That kind of thing. Well, they broke him," he said.

"If the army turns against him, he doesn't have a life as far as he is concerned. He's ruined. He's done for. He's going to lose his house and probably his wife. He's going to lose everything."

There were other stresses in John Russell's life. He was paying $1,500 (£1,000) for the house his parents and son live in, and had fallen into debt. There were questions around the state of his marriage with his wife back in Germany. The US commander in Baghdad responded to the deadliest act of soldier-on-soldier killings in the war by ordering a comprehensive review of mental health services in Iraq.

But the challenge will be to understand Russell, and how the stresses of long tours in Iraq, the personal problems, the growing difficulties with his superiors fed into each other.

Veterans' groups say the army has been there before and that while the military is more attuned to the effects of combat and the stresses of serving in a war zone, it still falls far short of dealing with the problem.

A US army study of the mental health and morale of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq last year found that nearly one in five suffered from acute stress, depression or anxiety.

Soldiers, like Russell, on their third or fourth deployment were at significantly higher risk than those who spent less time in combat zones. Perhaps most shockingly, one in 10 soldiers had traumatic brain injury and only half were treated at the time it was sustained.

Another report, by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), said less than half of those suffering from psychological and neurological injuries were receiving sufficient treatment.

"Multiple tours and inadequate time at home between deployments are increasing combat stress," it said.

The army took little notice of the impact of 21st-century wars on its soldiers until a spate of murders in mid-2002 at the base in North Carolina by members of special forces recently returned from Afghanistan.

A month after returning from combat, Master Sergeant William Wright strangled his wife, buried her in a shallow grave and reported her missing.

Sergeant Rigoberto Nieves had been back for just two days when he shot his wife and himself. Sergeant Cedric Griffin stabbed his estranged wife at least 50 times before setting the house on fire.

Altogether four soldiers killed their wives. Two then killed themselves. In a fifth case a woman killed her husband, a special forces major.

Support groups for wives at Fort Bragg also reported a surge in domestic violence. The army study said that suicide rates among those recently returned from combat had risen sharply.

Private Joseph Dwyer caught attention across the US as an army medic photographed rescuing a wounded child during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The picture made front pages across the country and buttressed the popular US view of the invasion as a liberation and a good war. Dwyer returned home a national hero.

But the attention soon faded; he left the army and sank into addiction to alcohol and solvents between periodic bouts of treatment for post-traumatic stress. His wife left him, taking their young daughter.

The police found the 31-year-old former soldier's body after he died from an overdose of pills alone in a flat.

The military's instinct had been to cover up the scale of suicides.

Dr Ira Katz, head of mental health services for the Veterans Administration, denied there was a suicide epidemic when he told a congressional committee there had been 790 suicide attempts in all of 2007.

But then an email, written in February 2008 from Katz to a colleague, came to light. "Shh! Our suicide prevention co-ordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" Katz wrote.

IAVA says it is particularly concerned about discharged soldiers "who can lose their bearings outside the camaraderie and structure of the military".

Late last year the military launched an advertising campaign to try to persuade traumatised veterans to come forward using a young army sniper, Bryan Adams, who was shot in the hand and leg during a battle in Iraq.

After he returned, Adams sank into depression, drinking more, alienating friends, smashing up the furniture.

"Each day I felt myself getting more and more out of control, I would push the limits of what was legal and appropriate behaviour just for fun. I behaved as if no laws applied to me," he has written. That continued until his mother, a nurse, recognised her son's problems for what they were.

Adams got himself into college with the help of a grant and is now one of the faces of IAVA when it launched an advertising campaign on the one word slogan – Alone – to encourage veterans to share their experiences.

The army says it greatly increased awareness about combat stress in recent years. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defence for health affairs, earlier this year said that there was also a lessening of the stigma associated with some psychological diagnoses.

"Guys are telling us they would still much rather be diagnosed with traumatic brain injury than post-traumatic stress disorder," he said. "But we're getting at some of that stigma. We've reduced it a bit."

The military also launched a suicide watch programme earlier this year.

But veterans groups say that the military continues to fail service personnel, with less than one in four of those who show signs of being at risk from post-traumatic stress disorder, based on screening questions, referred for evaluation and treatment.

No one disputes that many of those in danger continue to slip through the net.

Recently there has been an escalation in crimes committed by soldiers based at Fort Carson, Colorado, where nine soldiers have been responsible for killings after returning from Iraq. Five of the killings have taken place in the last year alone.

[faceless]

Just from a quick scan of the article I'd say that it was the psychiatric staff who pushed him. And they probably did that out of apathy.

And the corporate machine grinds on...

[VivaGalloway]

The more of them dead the better.

[nekokate]

[luke]

Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in U.S. Military

Sexual assault of women serving in the U.S. military, while brought to light in recent reports, has a long tradition in that institution.

Women in America were first allowed into the military during the Revolutionary War in 1775, and their travails are as old.

Maricela Guzman served in the Navy from 1998 to 2002 as a computer technician on the island of Diego Garcia, and later in Naples, Italy. She was raped while in boot camp, but was too scared to talk about the assault for the rest of her time in the military.

In her own words she, “survived by becoming a workaholic. Fortunately or unfortunately the military took advantage of this, and I was much awarded as a soldier for my work ethic.”

Guzman decided to dissociate from the military on witnessing the way it treated the native population in Diego Garcia. Post discharge, her life became unmanageable. The effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her rape had taken a heavy toll.

After undergoing a divorce, a failed suicide attempt and homelessness, she moved in with her parents. A chance encounter with a female veteran at a political event in Los Angeles prompted her to contact the veteran’s administration (VA) for help. She began seeing a therapist there who diagnosed her with PTSD from her rape.

She told IPS that the VA denied her claim nevertheless, “Because they said I couldn’t prove it … since I had not brought it up when it happened and also because I had not shown any deviant behaviour while in the service. I was outraged and felt compelled to talk about what happened.”

Like countless others, Guzman learned early that the culture of the military promoted silence about sexual assault. Her experience over the years has convinced her that sexual violence is a systemic problem in the military.

“It has been happening since women were allowed into the service and will continue to happen after Iraq and Afghanistan,” Guzman told IPS, “Through the gossip mill we would hear of women who had reported being raped. No confidentiality was maintained nor any protection given to them making them susceptible to fresh attacks.”

“The boys’ club culture is strong and the competition exclusive,” Guzman added, “To get ahead women have to be better than men. That forces many not to report rape, because it is a blemish and can ruin your career.”

She is not hopeful of any radical change in policy anytime soon, but, “One good thing that has come out of this war is that people want to talk about this now.”

More than 190,000 female soldiers have served thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan on the front lines, often having to confront sexual assault and harassment from their own comrades in arms.

The VA’s PTSD centre claims that the incidence of rape, assault, and harassment were higher in wartime during the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq than during peacetime. Thus far, the numbers from Iraq show a continuance, and increase, of this disturbing trend.

The military is notorious for its sexist and misogynistic culture. Drill instructors indoctrinate new recruits by routinely calling them “girl,” “pussy,” “bitch,” and “dyke.” Pornography is prevalent, and misogynistic rhymes have existed for decades.

Understandably, Department of Defense (DoD) numbers for sexual assaults in the military are far lower than numbers provided by other sources, primarily because the Pentagon only counts rapes that soldiers have officially reported. Even according to the Pentagon, 80 percent of assaults go unreported.

Pentagon spokesperson Cynthia Smith told IPS, “We understand this is very important for everyone to get involved in preventing sexual assault, and are calling on everyone to get involved, step in, and watch each others’ backs.”

According to the DoD Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for Fiscal Year 2007, “There were 2,688 total reports of sexual assault involving Military Service Members,” of which “The Military Services completed a total of 1,955 criminal investigations on reports made during or prior to FY07.”

The criminal investigations yielded the shockingly low number of only 181 courts martial. “We understand that one sex assault is too many in the DoD,” Smith told IPS, “We have an office working on prevention and response.”

A 1995 study published in the Archives of Family Medicine found that 90 percent of female veterans from the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq and earlier wars had been sexually harassed. A 2003 survey of women veterans from the period encompassing Vietnam and the 1991 Iraq attack, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that 30 percent of the women soldiers said they were raped.

In 2004, a study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, published in the journal of Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.

At the 2006 National Convention of Veterans for Peace in Seattle, April Fitzsimmons, who early in her career was raped by a soldier, met with 45 other female vets, and began compiling information.

“I asked for a show of hands of women veterans who had been assaulted while on duty, and half the women raised their hands,” Fitzsimmons told IPS, “So I knew we had to do something.”

She, along with other women veterans like Guzman, founded the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) to help military women who have been victims of sexual violence.

It is an uphill battle for women in the U.S. military to take on the system that clearly represses attempts to change it.

“When victims come forward, they are ostracised, doubted, and isolated from their communities,” Fitzsimmons told IPS, “Many of the perpetrators are officers who use their ranks to coerce women to sleep with them. It’s a closely interwoven community, so the perpetrators are safe within the system and can fearlessly move free amongst their victims.”

Fitzsimmons shared with IPS a view that underscores the gravity of the problem.

“The crisis is so severe that I’m telling women to simply not join the military because it’s completely unsafe and puts them at risk. Until something changes at the top, no woman should join the military.”

Two testimonies

April Fitzsimmons served in the Air Force from 1985 to 1989, as an intelligence analyst and intelligence briefer for a two-star general. Early in her military career, another solider sexually assaulted her.

Nineteen years old at the time of her rape, Fitzsimmons reported the assault, and named her perpetrator, who was removed from the base. However, she declined the offer of counselling “because there was a stigma attached to it,” she told IPS.

“Those who seek counselling are perceived to be at risk, as being too weak and vulnerable and it would have meant forfeiting my top-secret clearance to keep military intelligence classified,” she explained.

Another reason for maintaining silence on the matter was that Fitzsimmons was declared “airman (sic) of the year,” in the European command.

“I didn’t want to lose that,” she says, “I wanted the whole thing to go away.”

Fitzsimmons created a one-woman play, Need to Know, which has been running for six years. In the play, she addresses her own sexual assault in the military. When news of rapes and sexual assaults by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, against both other soldiers and Iraqis began to surface, Fitzsimmons became more active.

“After reading about the 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, who was raped by several soldiers, and about Suzanne Swift, a soldier who after being raped by another U.S. soldier went AWOL (absent without leave) rather than redeploy with the command that was responsible for allowing the rape to occur, I was convinced that there was a cycle of sexual violence in the military that was neither being seen nor addressed,” she says.

*

It is not difficult to ascertain the reason for so few sexual assaults being reported in the military. Jen Hogg of the New York Army National Guard told IPS, “I helped a woman report a sexual assault while she was in basic training. She was grabbed between the legs from behind while going up stairs. She was not able to pinpoint the person who did it.”

Hogg explained that her friend was afraid to report the incident to her drill sergeant, and went on to explain why, which also sheds light on why so many women opt not to report being sexually assaulted.

“During training, the position of authority the drill sergeant holds makes any and all reporting a daunting task, and most people are scared to even approach him or her,” Hogg told IPS, “In this case, the drill sergeant’s response was swift but caused resentment towards the female that made the report, because her identity was not hidden from males who were punished as a whole for the one.”

The incident displays another tactic used in the military to suppress women’s reportage of being sexually assaulted - that of not respecting their anonymity, which opens them up to further assaults.

“After this incident many of the males said harassing things to her as they passed her during training, so much so that she regretted having addressed the issue,” Hogg continued, “You can be ostracised as the woman who had dared to speak up. Women willing to speak up are trained to shut up, which results in an atmosphere of silence. After my experiences in basic and advanced individual training I never reported an incident again.”

Hogg herself faced verbal sexual harassment.

“When I removed my protective top in the heat I would often hear comments such as ‘where you been hiding them puppies’ in reference to my breasts.”

Based on her friends’ experience, Hogg did not even consider reporting.

To make matters worse, according to Department of Defense statistics, 84-85 percent of soldiers convicted of rape or sexual assault leave the military with honourable discharges. Not only are they not penalised, they are honoured.

---

theres also a comment from the article;

I am compelled to post here the comment I made at commondreams.org after reading this insightful and dead-on article. Thank you for your willingness to shine light on this horrible epidemic.

What is most tragic about this, is that in order to press this issue further in to the public forum, the very existence of women in the military must be reevaluated. As a woman and a former Marine, I would vehemently protest, discourage and counsel the decision of any woman to join the armed services. The emotional, physical and psychic abuse inflicted upon women is constant, brutal and immeasurable. The effects are forever.

I was harassed, groped, monitored, publically shamed, punished under false claims through Non Judicial Punishment, placed on house arrest many times for insignificant infractions, stalked, screamed at daily, assaulted, abused, bullied, endured death threats and survived in a constant state of adrenalyn enhanced hyper vigilance. I slept with the lights on every night with a club under my pillow.

In spite of years of counseling, occasional institutionalization, medication, loving support from friends and family and a lifetime since of taking care of myself, the psychic scars do not heal.

My story, as indicated in this article, is far from unique. My ability to recognize the horror that I survived and my willingness to be open and frank about it, however, is. To this day, I am received with snarling skepticism and rebuked if I suggest that my time in the military was anything but a patriotic adventure. It’s an impossible break in continuity to those who rigidly believe that our men and women in uniform can be anything but patriotic do-gooders.

I take responsibility for everything that I claim in this post. I also acknowledge that the military is populated by people who do take their responsibility to protect and defend our nation and the standards of behavior expected in theory under the UCMJ. They do far out number the predators, abusers, sociopaths and psychopaths that make life a horror for good women but their ability to over ride the harm done by abusers is tragically limited.

[modern]

Yes - quite harsh Viva...

[SpursFan1902]

Do you really think that Viva, or are you just trying to stir things up? If you really think it than by all means, you are allowed your opinion, however my guess is the latter, since you post short impact statements and wait for the fireworks...We've seen it all before...

[btaylo24]

It was a disgusting statement.... Don't need that sort of thing..
Barry

[faceless]

He's gone now. His account was closed as soon as I read his comment about gypsies - before I'd even seen this.

Just a wee nyaff wanting to stir up trouble for some petty little reason. At least, I hope he was just a wee nyaff trying to cause grief. If he actually believes the shit he posted then I predict that within a couple of years he'll say it in the wrong place at the wrong time and get at least a broken nose for his trouble.

[luke]

U.S. military: Heavily armed and medicated
Prescription pill dependency among American troops is on the rise

Marine Corporal Michael Cataldi woke as he heard the truck rumble past.

He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. It was the middle of the night, and he was facedown in the sands of western Iraq. His loaded M16 was pinned beneath him.

Cataldi had no idea how he'd gotten to where he now lay, some 200 meters from the dilapidated building where his buddies slept. But he suspected what had caused this nightmare: His Klonopin prescription had run out.

His ordeal was not all that remarkable for a person on that anti-anxiety medication. In the lengthy labeling that accompanies each prescription, Klonopin users are warned against abruptly stopping the medicine, since doing so can cause psychosis, hallucinations, and other symptoms. What makes Cataldi's story extraordinary is that he was a U. S. Marine at war, and that the drug's adverse effects endangered lives — his own, his fellow Marines', and the lives of any civilians unfortunate enough to cross his path.

"It put everyone within rifle distance at risk," he says.

In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent back to war theaters in distant lands with bottles of medication to fortify them.

According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000 a month in October 2003, not long after the Iraq war began.

In other words, thousands of American fighters armed with the latest killing technology are taking prescription drugs that the Federal Aviation Administration considers too dangerous for commercial pilots.

Military officials say they believe many medications can be safely used on the battlefield. They say they have policies to ensure that drugs they consider inappropriate for soldiers on the front lines are rarely used. And they say they are not using the drugs in order to send unstable warriors back to war.

Yet the experience of soldiers and Marines like Cataldi show the dangers of drugging our warriors. It also worries some physicians and veterans' advocates. "There are risks in putting people back to battle with medicines in their bodies," says psychiatrist Judith Broder, M. D., founder of the Soldiers Project, a group that helps service members suffering from mental illness.

Prescription drugs can help patients, Dr. Broder says, but they can also cause drowsiness and impair judgment. Those side effects can be dealt with by patients who are at home, she says, but they can put active-duty soldiers in great danger. She worries that some soldiers are being medicated and then sent back to fight before they're ready.

"The military is under great pressure to have enough people ready for combat," she says. "I don't think they're as cautious as they would be if they weren't under this kind of pressure."

Brought more than memories back
When Cataldi talks about what happened to him in Iraq, he begins with an in incident that took place on a cold January night in 2005, when he and five other Marines received a radio call informing them that a helicopter had disappeared. The men roared across the desert of western Iraq and found what was left of the chopper. Flames roared from the pile of metal. Cataldi, 20, was ordered to do a body count.

The pilot's body was still on fire, so he shoveled dirt on it to douse the acrid flames. He picked up a man's left boot in order to find the dog tag every Marine keeps there. A foot fell to the ground. "People were missing heads," Cataldi remembers. "They were wearing the same uniform I was wearing."

The final death toll from that crash of a CH-53E Super Stallion was 30 Marines and one sailor.

For days, Cataldi couldn't escape the odor of burning flesh. "I had the smell all over my equipment," he says. "I couldn't get it off ."

When he returned to his stateside base at Twentynine Palms, California, he knew he'd brought more than memories back from Iraq. He would cry for no reason. He flew into fits of rage. One night he woke up with his hands around the throat of his wife, Monica, choking her.

"It scared the crap out of me," he says.

He went to see a psychiatrist on base. "He said, 'Here's some medication,' " Cataldi recalls. The prescribed drugs were Klonopin, for anxiety; Zoloft, for depression; and Ambien, to help him sleep.

Later, other military doctors added narcotic painkillers for the excruciating pain in his leg, which he'd injured during a training exercise. He was also self-medicating with heavy doses of alcohol.
Those prescriptions didn't stop the Marine Corps from sending Cataldi back to Iraq. In 2006, he returned to the same part of the Iraqi desert to do the same job: performing maintenance on armored personnel carriers known as LAVs. He also took his turn driving the 14-ton tanklike vehicles, one of which was armed with a 25 mm cannon and two machine guns and loaded with more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

Marine Major Carl B. Redding says he can't talk about the medical history of any Marine because of privacy laws. He says the Corps has procedures to ensure that service members taking medications for psychiatric conditions are deployed only if their symptoms are in remission. Those Marines, he says, must be able to meet the demands of a mission.

But it's difficult to square those regulations with Cataldi's experience. His medications came with written warnings about the dangers of driving and operating heavy machinery. The labels don't lie.

One night, Cataldi took his pills after his commander told him he was done for the day. Five minutes later, however, plans changed, and he was told to drive the LAV. He asked the Marine sitting behind him to help keep him awake. "I said, 'Kick the back of my seat every 5 minutes,' and that's what he did."

Cataldi says he managed on the medications — until his Klonopin ran out. The medical officer told him there was no Klonopin anywhere in Iraq. So the officer gave him a drug called Seroquel. That's when Cataldi says he started to become "loopy."

"I'd go to pick up a wrench and come back with a hammer," he says. "I wasn't able to do my job. I wasn't able to fight."

Soldiers on medication
Soldiers have doped up in order to sustain combat since ancient times. Often their chosen drug was alcohol. And Iraq isn't the first place U. S. military doctors have prescribed medications to troops on the front. During the Vietnam war, military psychiatrists spoke enthusiastically about some newly psychiatric medicines, including Thorazine, an anti-psychotic, and Valium, for anxiety. According to an army textbook, doctors frequently prescribed those drugs to soldiers with psychiatric symptoms. Anxiety-ridden soldiers with upset bowels were sometimes given the antidiarrheal Compazine, a potent tranquilizer.

But the use of those drugs in Vietnam became controversial. Critics said it was dangerous to give soldiers medications that slowed their reflexes, a side effect that could raise their risk of being injured, captured, or killed. That risk was real. In a report supported by the U. S. Navy 14 years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam, researchers looked at the records of all Marines wounded there between 1965 and 1972. Marines who'd been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons before being sent back to battle were more likely to have been injured in combat than those who hadn't been hospitalized.

Critics of medication use in Vietnam also said that a soldier traumatized by battle may not be coherent enough to give his consent to take the drugs in the first place. Plus, a soldier would risk court-martial if he refused to follow orders, they said, making it unlikely he could make a reasoned decision about taking the medications.

After the war, the practice of liberally giving psychiatric drugs to warriors fell out of favor. In War Psychiatry, a 1995 military medical textbook, a U. S. Air Force flight surgeon warned about the use of psychiatric drugs, saying they should be used sparingly.

"Sending a person back to combat duty still under the influence of psychoactive drugs may be dangerous," he wrote. "Even in peacetime, people in the many combat-support positions... would not be allowed to take such medications and continue to work in their sensitive, demanding jobs."

Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, M. D., M. P. H., a psychiatrist and the medical director of the strategic communication directorate in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, acknowledges that writing more prescriptions for frontline troops was a change in direction for the Pentagon. "Twenty years ago," she says, "we weren't deploying soldiers on medications."

Today it's not uncommon for a soldier to arrive in Iraq while taking a host of prescription drugs. The Pentagon explained its new practice in late 2006, stating that there are "few medications that are inherently disqualifying for deployment."

According to Colonel Ritchie, military officials have concluded that many medicines introduced since the Vietnam War can be used safely on the front lines. Military physicians consider antidepressants and sleeping pills to be especially helpful, she says. Doctors have also found that small doses of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, can help treat nightmares, she says, even though the drug is not approved for that use.

Two months after the new drug policy was issued, President Bush ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in an attempt to quell the violence. This surge in American military presence in Iraq increased the pressure on Pentagon officials to quickly redeploy soldiers and Marines just back from war.

Surveys of behavioral-health professionals offer hints about what has happened as soldiers are medicated and then sent back to fight. In last year's surveys, carried out by teams sent to Iraq and Afghanistan by the Army Surgeon General, a staff member reported that there had been "quite a few [evacuations for] psychotic breakdowns."

"Many of these soldiers are sent to Afghanistan," the staff member said, "despite a doctor saying they shouldn't go or leaders knowing they shouldn't deploy."

To meet its needs, the army has also begun accepting more people with existing medical or psychiatric conditions. A recent study by U. S. Army medical staff found that 10 percent of new recruits reported a history of psychiatric treatment.

In an article in the journal Military Medicine, Jeffrey Hill, M. D., and his colleagues wrote about soldiers who had made suicidal or homicidal threats at a base in Tikrit, Iraq. Of 425 soldiers evaluated for psychiatric treatment, they reported, about 30 percent had considered killing themselves in the previous week, and 16 percent had thought about killing a superior or someone else who was not the enemy.

Each of these soldiers poses a dilemma for physicians, they wrote, because of his or her duty "to conserve the fighting strength" — the motto of the U. S. Army Medical Department. Doctors must try to avoid sending these soldiers home, but they must also recognize the dangers of keeping them in Iraq, where weapons are everywhere.

‘He was a good kid’
When Travis Virgadamo arrived from his army unit in Iraq for a visit with his family in July 2007, he hesitated to tell his grandmother, Katie O'Brien, what he had seen. "'I've seen little children killed,'" she remembers him saying. "'You can't imagine what it's like, Grandma. You just can't.'"

Virgadamo, shy and quiet as a boy, had grown up wanting to be a soldier. "It was his dream," O'Brien says. "He was a good kid. He would do anything for you."

Soon after entering the army, however, Virgadamo began to have problems. In boot camp he became angry and suicidal, prompting an army doctor to write him a prescription for Prozac, his grandmother says. Not long after that, he was sent to Iraq. One day as men in his unit were cleaning weapons, the commander sent Virgadamo for some gun oil, O'Brien says. When he didn't return, they went to look for him. They found him with a gun in his mouth.

Virgadamo was sent home to Pahrump, Nevada, to be with his family for 10 days. Then he would be returned to Iraq. O'Brien learned that he was sent to a class meant to help him, and that he had been given a new medication instead of Prozac. The day he supposedly completed his class, O'Brien says, his commander gave him his gun back.

That night he used it to kill himself.

"They all knew he was in a very serious situation," O'Brien says. "He was a danger to the other soldiers as well as to himself."

She is furious that the army gave him Prozac. She points out that the labeling of Prozac, Zoloft, and similar antidepressants state that the drugs have been shown to increase suicidal behavior in people age 24 and younger — a group that includes large numbers of American soldiers.

Virgadamo was 19 when he died.

"It was so unnecessary," she says. "We can't bring him back."

The U. S. Army's suicide rate is now at an all-time high. Colonel Ritchie says officials are studying the reasons for the increase, including the possible role of medications. Soldiers taking antidepressants have killed themselves, she says, but so far there is no evidence that the risk is higher for those taking the drugs.

Instead, the army has found, soldiers who committed suicide often had personal problems, such as troubled marriages or financial difficulties. Repeated deployments can strain family relationships. "The army has been at war for a long time," Colonel Ritchie says, "and everyone is kind of tired."

‘No condition to leave’
At age 26, with a new wife and child, Michael R. De Vlieger never seemed to have enough money. He had resorted to selling his blood plasma for extra cash when he noticed the recruiting station next door to the donation center. That was in November 2004. Fifteen months later he was on the ground in northern Iraq, a gunner with the 101st Airborne.

Not long after he landed in Iraq, roadside bombs blew apart two Humvees from his platoon, killing nine soldiers, including men he knew well.

The next month, as he manned a Humvee on patrol passing through a crowded market, grenade-throwing insurgents jumped from behind the fruit stands. One antitank grenade landed under the vehicle. The blast didn't pierce its metal, but the force drove De Vlieger's knee through the door.

He was later evacuated by helicopter and returned to Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, to recuperate. But his personality had changed. He began to drink heavily, and flew into rages. One day, he attacked his wife's dog.

"I had lost so many friends and went through a near-death experience," he says. "I wasn't who I was when I left."

He was updating his will and preparing to return to Iraq when he broke down. His wife, Christine, found him awake in the middle of the night, rocking while babbling incoherently. Frightened, Christine called his squad leader, who took him to the base emergency room. Doctors then sent him to a nearby private psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for 16 days, receiving medications to calm his panic and treat his blood pressure and depression. The doctors released him with four prescriptions.

A noncommissioned officer in charge of De Vlieger's unit's stateside operations told him that day that he had to leave immediately for Iraq. Less than 18 hours after being released from the hospital, De Vlieger was on a plane heading for the Middle East. "I was in no condition to leave," he says. "I'm an infantryman. If I'm screwed up in my head, it could cost my life or the lives of the men with me."

Pentagon policy requires that service members with psychiatric conditions be stable for at least 3 months before they can be deployed. Colonel Ritchie says she can't comment specifically on any soldier's medical history, but agrees that sending someone to Iraq just hours after leaving a psychiatric hospital would violate the policy.

DeVlieger says the medications altered his thinking — a side effect he didn't want to deal with at war. He threw the pills away.

"I had a weapon, entire magazines filled with rounds. It's not like it would have been difficult for me to commit suicide," he says. "I don't believe it was safe."

Military physicians can be swayed by the aggressive promotional efforts of the pharmaceutical industry just like civilian doctors often are. The military has rules that limit the handouts doctors can take from drug companies. A doctor can go to a dinner paid for by a drug company, but the meal's value can't be more than $20, and the value of all gifts received from a company over the course of a year can't exceed $50.

The drug companies have devised ways of working around those limits.

When thousands of military and federal health-care professionals met in November for the annual meeting of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States (AMSUS), more than 80 pharmaceutical companies and other health-care firms were on hand. The companies helped pay for that San Antonio event in exchange for the opportunity to set up booths in the convention hall, where sales reps pressed doctors to prescribe their products or to use their medical equipment and devices.

The 6-day meeting included a celebration; 15 military and federal doctors and other health professionals received awards that included cash prizes provided by various drug companies.

Colonel Steven Mirick, the association's deputy executive director, says the companies didn't choose the recipients of the awards or influence the meeting's agenda or the educational courses offered. He also said that AMSUS had followed the strict government rules concerning the funding of those awards. Doctors would have to pay a much higher registration fee, he says, if the companies were not allowed to contribute.

Aggressive corporate promotion is one reason behind the army's fast-rising use of narcotic painkillers. Manufacturers of narcotics like OxyContin and Actiq have spent millions in recent years to convince doctors that the drugs aren't as addictive or as dangerous as most people believe. Before such corporate marketing campaigns, many doctors hesitated to prescribe narcotics unless a patient was suffering from a serious, pain-inflicting condition — terminal cancer, for instance. Drugmakers expanded the market by encouraging docs to prescribe narcotics to people suffering from more moderate pain, and by downplaying the drugs' addictive potential.

These same manufacturers fund organizations like the American Pain Society. The society's noble goal of eliminating pain has made it the perfect conduit for drug marketing.

Military doctors agreed with the American Pain Society that pain treatment should be more accessible. In 1999, the Department of Defense and the Veterans Health Administration began a campaign called "Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign," a motto that had been created and trademarked by the society. Doctors treating active-duty service members and vets were urged to test and treat pain just as they would blood pressure and body temperature.

The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs also issued a guideline in 2003 that directed doctors on how to prescribe narcotic painkillers for chronic pain. Chronic pain can be related to conditions ranging from arthritis to the phantom-limb pain experienced by amputees. "Repeated exposure to opioids in the context of pain treatment only rarely causes addiction," the guideline noted.

That statement is controversial. In a study at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in Boston, 22 percent of patients taking narcotics for long-term treatment showed signs of abusing the drugs. The army has plenty of firsthand evidence of how addictive the painkillers can be. At Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, officials charged more than a dozen soldiers with illegally using and distributing narcotics, including drugs they'd reported picking up at the base's pharmacy for little or no cost. Many of the soldiers had suffered injuries in Iraq or in training but had later begun abusing the painkillers reportedly prescribed by army doctors.

One problem is that injured soldiers in pain are often also suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which makes them vulnerable to abusing alcohol or drugs. A soldier taking a narcotic can start using it to escape more than his pain.

Cataldi, who's now out of active duty, says that when he returned from his first tour of Iraq, both he and a friend were taking painkillers for injuries. They couldn't seem to get enough of the drugs, he says.

"We'd find pills on the floor," he says, "and just take them."

Narcotics can make patients dizzy and unable to function. Their labels warn about performing "potentially hazardous tasks."

Staff Sergeant Jack Auble took Oxy-Contin, Percocet, and Vicodin for a serious back injury as he worked in Camp Stryker, in Baghdad. Prior to that tour, he had been in the process of being medically discharged from the army after 20 years of service because of severe osteoporosis in his spine. Then he was sent to Iraq.

Auble's job in Baghdad was to monitor a computer that showed in real time what was happening on the battlefield. But the side effects of the drugs made his job impossible, he says. He frequently lost track of what people said to him and the positions of troops in the field. At times, he says, he dozed off in his chair.

"I could not do the job," Auble says. "My judgment was clouded all the time."

After 3 months in Baghdad, Auble's pain worsened. The army evacuated him to a hospital outside Iraq. At 44, he is now retired with a permanent disability, and walks with a cane.

According to Colonel Ritchie, painkillers can help soldiers do their jobs by reducing pain, which allows them to concentrate. "But these medications are lethal in overdose and can't be used carelessly," she says, adding that if side effects interfere with a soldier's ability to perform, he or she is moved to another job or sent back to a home base.

"It doesn't do the soldier or the army any good," she says, "if he can't do his mission."

The army is adding safeguards to reduce the chance that soldiers will become addicted to painkillers, she notes. And the guideline informing doctors that the drugs rarely cause addiction is being rewritten.

Cataldi now works as a mechanic in Riverside, in Southern California. He lives with his wife, 2-year-old daughter, and 10-year-old stepson in an apartment at the foot of a mountain. On his living-room wall hang framed photos of his grandfather and uncles dressed in their USMC uniforms.

Doctors at the V. A. still aren't sure how to help Cataldi. His current diagnoses include PTSD and traumatic brain injury that might have been caused by several concussions he suffered in training and in Iraq. He also still feels intense pain in his leg. He shows a visitor snapshots taken at the funerals of some of his buddies. He goes to the kitchen, bringing back four bottles of medications, including Klonopin, the drug he blames for creating a needless ordeal in Iraq. He fears he'll be on Klonopin for the rest of his life. When he tries to stop taking it, he spaces out and isolates himself.

"If I had never been put on medications and just had counseling, I'd be a lot better off ," he says.

from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30748260/

[luke]

US Military Suicides at Record Level

A top US military officer has confirmed Army suicides will reach a new record annual high. General Peter Chiarelli, the US Army Vice Chief of Staff, said Tuesday the number of soldiers to take their own lives in 2009 has already matched last year’s record of 140. The figure does not include an additional seventy-one soldiers who killed themselves this year after leaving active duty.

Gen. Peter Chiarelli: “We are almost certainly going to end the year higher than last year. Obviously we would prefer not to have another suicide this year or in the years that follow. But we know that will not be the case. This is horrible, and I do not want to downplay the significance of these numbers in any way.”

[luke]

Suicide Claims More US Military Lives Than Afghan War

American military personnel are continuing to take their own lives in unprecedented numbers, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wars drag on. By late November, at least 334 members of the armed forces had committed suicide in 2009, more than the 319 who were killed in Afghanistan or the 150 who died in Iraq. While a final figure is not available, the toll of military suicides last year was the worst since records began to be kept in 1980.

The Army, National Guard and Army Reserve lost at least 211 personnel to suicide. More than half of those who took their lives had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army suicide rate of 20.2 per 100,000 personnel is higher than that registered among males aged 19 to 29, the gender age bracket with the highest rate among the general population. Before 2001, the Army rarely suffered 10 suicides per 100,000 soldiers.

The Navy lost at least 47 active duty personnel in 2009, the Air Force 34 and the Marine Corp, which has been flung into some of the bloodiest fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, 42. The Marine suicide rate has soared since 2001 from 12 to at least 19.5 per 100,000.

For every death, at least five members of the armed forces were hospitalised for attempting to take their life. According to the Navy Times, 2 percent of Army; 2.3 percent of Marines and 3 percent of Navy respondents to the military’s own survey of 28,536 members from all branches reported they had attempted suicide at some point. The “Defense Survey of Health-Related Behaviors” also found “dangerous levels” of alcohol abuse and the illicit use of drugs such as pain killers by 12 percent of personnel.

The trigger for a suicide attempt varied from case to case: relationship breakdowns, financial problems, substance abuse, tensions with other members of their unit, a traumatic event. What is clear, however, is that military service has seriously impacted on the physical and mental health of the victims.

The suicide figures for serving personnel are only one indication. The most alarming statistics are those on mental illness related to the hundreds of thousands of veterans of the two wars who have left the military and sought to reintegrate into civilian life.

While there is no exact figure, studies estimate that as many as 20 to 30 percent of veterans suffer some degree of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), hindering their ability to hold down jobs, maintain relationships, overcome substance abuse and, in some cases, maintain their will to live. The worsening economic conditions facing working people in the US are aggravating the difficulties.

A survey last year found that at least 15 percent of former soldiers in the 20 to 24 age bracket were unemployed. An article by the Florida Today site on January 3 reported that 450 of the 800 homeless in Brevard County were Iraq or Afghanistan veterans. Shelters in California are reporting twice as many requests for assistance from new veterans compared with 2007. At the current rate, they will eventually outnumber the more than 100,000 homeless Vietnam vets.

A study of veterans with PTSD published last August by the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that 47 percent had had suicidal thoughts before seeking treatment and 3 percent had attempted to kill themselves. The US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) has been compelled to substantially upgrade its services. Since its 24-hour, seven-days a week suicide hotline was belatedly established in July 2007, it has counselled over 185,000 veterans or their families and claims to have prevented at least 5,000 suicides. It now has 400 counselors dedicated to suicide prevention though even the Pentagon admits far more are needed.

People who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan make up a growing proportion of the 6,400 veterans that VA estimates take their own lives each year. A 2007 CBS study put the rate among male veterans aged 20 to 24 at four times the national average—more than 40 per 100,000 per year.

The suicide estimates do not include the hundreds of young veterans who die each year in auto accidents, many of which are linked with excessive speed or driving under the influence and kill or injure others as well. In 2008, veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan were 75 percent more likely to die in an auto accident than non-veterans and 148 percent more likely to die in a motorcycle crash. Suicide statistics also do not count deaths that are classified as accidental drug-related overdoses.

American society will continue to pay for the harm caused by the Iraq and Afghan wars for decades to come. There is a growing medical consensus that a significant factor in PTSD is actual physical damage to the brain. Developments in vehicle and body armour, combined with advances in medical treatment, have enabled thousands of soldiers to survive bomb blasts that might have taken their lives in earlier conflicts. They survive with trauma to their brain however.

The Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury estimated in early 2009 that between 45,000 to 90,000 veterans of the two wars had been left with “severe and lasting symptoms” of brain injury. Overall, the Defense Department estimates that as many as 20 percent of veterans had suffered some degree of brain injury due to bomb blasts while in Iraq or Afghanistan—a staggering 360,000 men and women.

[luke]

Rumsfeld 'Ignored' US Military Rape Problem
A group of American servicemen and women has named former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld and current secretary Robert Gates in a military rape and sexual assault lawsuit.

More than a dozen women and two men are seeking compensation after claiming they were raped, assaulted and harassed while serving in the US Armed Forces.

They accuse Mr Gates and Mr Rumsfeld for failing "to take reasonable steps to prevent plaintiffs from being repeatedly raped, sexually assaulted and sexually harassed by federal military personnel".

Many of the claimants say they faced mocking and retribution among colleagues for reporting the alleged crimes and they were forced to continue living and working alongside their attackers.

In one incident an army reservist claimed two male colleagues raped her in Iraq and videotaped the attack, which was then circulated to colleagues.

Although she complained to authorities and was bruised from her shoulders to elbows from being held down, she says charges were not filed because the commander determined she did not act like a rape victim and did not struggle enough.

The lawsuit alleges her attackers include an army criminal investigator and an army National Guard commander.

It also asks for a third party to handle complaints as individual commanders have too much say in how allegations are handled.

"The problem of rape in the military is not only service members getting raped, but it's the entire way that the military as a whole is dealing with it," said Panayiota Bertzikis. a claimant in the lawsuit who claims she was raped in 2006.

Ms Bertzikis, who is now the executive director of the Military Rape Crisis Centre, said authorities did not take substantial steps to investigate her claim.

The now 29-year-old said she was forced to live on the same floor as her alleged attacker, where she endured name-calling from colleagues.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in a statement that sexual assault is a wider societal problem and Mr Gates has been working to ensure the military is doing all it can to prevent and respond to it as a "command priority".

"That means providing more money, personnel, training and expertise, including reaching out to other large institutions such as universities to learn best practices," said Mr Morrell.

The military had already planned to roll out a new hotline victims can call in April, said Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith.

Speaking to Sky News on Tuesday, Mr Rumsfeld said his biggest regret as secretary of defence was the number of soldiers killed during the war in Iraq.

The servicemen's lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Virginia and seeks monetary damages.

However, those involved say their aim is to overhaul the military's judicial system regarding rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20110216/twl-rumsfeld-ignored-us-military-rape-pr-3fd0ae9.html

[faceless]

if they didn't even care it was happening to their own people, you can imagine what they thought about the genuinely innocent victims