Iraq Veterans vulnerable to commit suicide

then pjdude, I'm not understand your point at all. What does it have to do with suicides vs battle fatalities?

 

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I dont get it. I thought they were designed to kill.

 

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more soldiers coming home with bad shit having happened to them means more soldiers who might want to off themselves

 

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WHAT!? what does that have to do with ammo that isn't meant to kill, only hurt.

 

What are you saying, that they are shooting themselves or something?

 

it means more slodiers are comming how with bad memories and stuff war screws people up. the more bad things happening to a person the more likely they are going to break. we don't take that great care of our veterns so getting wounded than coming home and being treated like crap will probably cause a fair amount of people to break. and my commenting on ammo designed to hurt coupled with we do a prewtty good job of keeping our soldiers alive means alot of people coming home have suffered a lot more tramua than in previous wars meaning they are more likely to break mentally. meaning they are more likely to commit sucide

 

I'm not saying they don't come home with issues. Some do kill themselves. I'm saying I don't believe more Iraq vets have killed themselves than have died in battle.

I don't see what the weapons or ammo have to do with it.

 

I don't know specific numbers but younger vets are more likely to kill themselves than older vets, at least among those who are depressed (the opposite of what you see in the general population).

http://www.med.umich.edu/depression/news/071030-vaumstudy.htm

 

it means less people dying on the battlefield and coming home with ratios so it makes it possible that more than 3700 or so that died in iraq is less than solier sucides. i'm not saying that it is. i am just saying it is possible

 

I thought he was arguing that more people are surviving in this conflict because getting shot doesn't necessarily mean getting killed. That may be one factor, since people who are paraplegic (for example) are significantly more likely to kill themselves than are people who aren't.

 

Well then how many are comming back wounded?

 

am I reading this wrong then?

 

The official rate is a little below 30,000 but there is some evidence that it's really higher since some wounds (like brain injuries from concussions) are going untreated.

http://icasualties.org/oif/woundedchart.aspx

The rate of amputees is about twice as high as in WW II through Vietnam and there's also a very high rate of traumatic brain injury.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/a...n_rate_for_us_troops_twice_that_of_past_wars/

I live near Walter Reed hospital and it's pretty common to see young men (and women) with one or more amputations in the area.

However, it does look like amputees are getting good counseling and have a low suicide rate--I'm not sure about others.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october082007/military_amputees_100807.php

 

I don't think you're reading it wrong but from what I can see these data are about vets in general not just from Iraq. Now the fact that the rates are higher among younger vets and also that the rates have gone up in the past couple years suggest that a good proportion are vets from the Iraq & Afghanistan wars.

 

Or the rates have gone up because we now watch for suicides and not 'accidental discharge of a weapon'

 

What? Rounds designed to wound and spall on impact are banned under the Hague Conventions. You don't see rank and file riflemen loading up with JHP ammo; everything the military uses (outside of SOF) is FMJ. A 5.56 NATO will spall on impact due to its high velocity and thin jacket, but the spalling effect is NOT a metric of its design. Anyway, once those things spall they create a bigger shock channel and a hell of a lot more trauma than they otherwise would if they punched straight on through. They aren't designed to wound; they're designed to save space and weight taken up by a bigger cartridge while retaining lethality.

Also, most of the 5.56 we load up with nowadays is tungsten cored stuff designed to punch through walls and vehicles better without losing lethality or getting radically deflected off course.

 

But most of these suicides are Stateside--I think there were only 17 suicides of soldiers in Iraq last year (if I remember correctly)--so these are being counted by coroners as suicide and they won't do that if there's much room for doubt.

 

Baron Max: If only 25% is realy on the front line: Why the hell did you sent the other 75% for? To play cards? Is that maybe why you made a mess out there? I think you miscalculated!

Orleander: It is funny to me that you don't understand. It only takes a bit of empathy (not sympathy) to imagine what it would be like to live in constant severe stress. 24hours a day, 365 days a year. You see the most horroble things and then you are supposed to return back to society and 'pick up your life again'. How do you think that that is possible when you are 22??

 

for the lucky bastards on this forum that can read/speak Dutch here is the online article where I refered to: http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/993/Ge...pidemie-onder-Amerikaanse-ex-militairen.dhtml

 

My friend was mentally ill and suicidal (and autistic) even before he entered the Army. Part of this problem is that the Armed Forces are so desperate to get recruits that they overlook all kinds of character flaws. In my friend's case, the Army recruiters even tried to cover up his outdated drug conviction, which wouldn't have mattered, except that the backround check turned it up. So they had to rewrite the "application" to include it, and he got in.

He's an ideal candidate for PTSD, except that his responses are usually the opposite of what one would expect of a normal person, so maybe this will be a good experience.