We are deploying thousands of soldiers a year who are not ready or able to cope with the stress of war. There was a similar shooting incident where 5 people were shot dead by a U.S. soldier in Baghdad at a stress counseling center in May.

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than "43,000 service members - two-thirds of them in the army or army reserve - were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed" to Iraq. In April 2008, the Rand Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, "Nearly 20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment."

Soldiers with PTSD may have recurrences years later even after apparently successful treatment. I have a friend who was a Viet Nam vet who's PTSD recurred after hurricane Iniki in 1992. We will have hundreds of thousands of veterans like my friend who will be carrying the burden of their service for the rest of their lives.

UPDATE

I'm sorry that this diary made the rec list when I became unable to comment. My life is not predictable.

I always try to go to original peer reviewed scientific sources for my environmental and science diaries because journalists can make errors in interpretation. In this case, we have an intractable problem unless we can access the data from a peer reviewed medical journal. We have journalists presenting different numbers based on unnamed military sources.

The New York Times gives unsourced information on the suicide rates which is different from the numbers provided in my first link.

However, the author of the Asia Times article has written a book on the topic after extensive investigation. He could be wrong, but the unsourced Times numbers don't provide a basis for refuting his numbers.

Since 2003, there have been 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Fort Hood, with 10 this year, according to military officials.

Democracy Now! cites the same number of suicides as the article I linked to. It clearly was not an error by Asia Times or IPS that caused the differing numbers on the suicide rates.

DAHR JAMAIL: Well, there is a thing called secondary trauma. And groups come back from Iraq and Afghanistan and do get counseling with the military, which started happening nearly as much as it needs to. When they do talk, they are sharing one horrendous story after another. And so, the folks I’ve been talking with for the book and then during the follow-up articles that I’ve been working on, you know, these are people coming back with severe trauma from the war, talking about stories of, like Michael said, that they’ve experienced killing children, killing unarmed Iraqis, killing—seeing their buddies killed and deeply traumatized, not sleeping at night, grinding their teeth, [inaudible] a lot, not knowing what to do with all of this. And then, of course, this is happening to them within an environment—for example, there’s one man that I write about in the recent article, Scott Wildman, who served a fifteen-month deployment in Iraq, came back home, couldn’t get treatment at all from the US military, and went AWOL to try to get help and some kind of relief, and then turned himself back in, and then basically found himself sitting in a legal limbo, where he was harassed by his commanders. Sometimes he would be sitting with some other Iraq war veterans who had PTSD, all of them talking amongst one another, and their commander would come in the room and call them a bunch of PTSD sissies, and just getting all kinds of harassment from the higher ranks. So, obviously this is a rampant problem. I’m seeing this everywhere I look, when I work on this topic and talk with returning veterans. And while the military has talked about doing things to rectify it, clearly it’s not enough. And Fort Hood is a great example. I mean, this is the largest military base on the planet. It’s the most heavily deployed base. And even before the incident last Friday, this is a base that, as of—by the end of July, which is the last month we have statistics from Fort Hood on suicides there, by the end of July this base was averaging over ten suicides a month, just at Fort Hood alone.

The New York Times article identifies the most important problem we should be trying to resolve - insufficient mental health services for our soldiers in need.

In July, two weeks after Sergeant Garza’s death, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, then the base commander, told Congress he was in dire need of more mental health professionals. "That’s the biggest frustration," he told a House subcommittee. "I’m short about 44 of what I am convinced I need at Fort Hood that I just don’t have." Among the medical personnel brought to Fort Hood to help deal with the growing mental health issues was Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who arrived in July. Major Hasan is accused in the attacks last week, but little is known about what might have driven him. "Our soldiers are coming back and not getting the help they need," said Cynthia Thomas, an Army wife who runs a private assistance center for soldiers in Killeen called Under the Hood Café. "Whether it’s self-medicating, anger or violence, these are the consequences of war, and you have to think about all the people affected by soldiers coming home, the parents, spouses, children, brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins."

I will continue to try to make sense out of the divergent numbers. I have e-mailed the author Dahr Jamail to try to resolve the issue of the differences in reported suicide rates. However, given that there is a huge divergence in the numbers of Iraqis who died because of the war there, an issue that has been discussed in the scientific literature for years, I have low expectations that I can resolve the suicide numbers. Determining that a single car auto accident, for example, is suicide, drunk driving or an accident caused by speeding, is a judgment call.

I will leave what I wrote as is, as the reflection of the source I used, until I can find a resolution to the problems with the data. The important issue is the mental health of our troops. Either set of numbers is too many suicides and too much PTSD. Our troops need more and better mental health services.

Again thanks for your comments. I'm sorry I was unable to respond sooner.