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U.S.
Army Underreporting Suicides, Says GI Advocacy Group
19 November 2009
By Dahr Jamail
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 16 (IPS) - According to a
soldiers’ advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base
where an army psychiatrist has been charged with
killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage,
the official suicide figures provided by the Army are
“definitely” too low.
Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a
veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a
reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The
former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives
today.
“I see the ugly,” Luther told IPS. “I see soldiers
beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all
the time, and most folks don’t want to look at this,
including the military.”
Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of
the Soldier’s Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors,
knows about these types of internal problems in the
military because he has been through many of them
himself.
Luther told IPS that he believes the real number of
soldiers at Fort Hood committing suicide is being
dramatically underreported by the military.
“There are suicides of active-duty troops occurring
regularly both on and off base,” Luther said. “One of
them I knew personally since I served with him in Iraq
and he was one of my soldiers, and they still have him
listed as under investigation for suicide.”
“From what I know right now, there are at least three
suicides they are not reporting at all. Most notably,
there is a soldier who committed suicide that the Army
confirmed through a press conference, and this is not
being reported, and I’m working with the Pentagon to
try to find out why that is not being reported,” he
said. “The Army won’t even release his name.”
Yet Luther believes the situation is even worse.
“I definitely believe there are more than these. If
this is what they’ve hidden from us that we know of,
we can rest assured there are many, many more than
this. We filed a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to
get information from them [Army], but they bog you
down in red tape,” he said.
Due to the military’s continued attempts to mask the
true number of suicides in the ranks, along with an
ongoing refusal to make the radical policy changes
necessary to properly treat soldiers and psychiatric
care providers exposed to secondary post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD), Luther fears the worst for the
future.
“There will be more 5 November [referencing the recent
Fort Hood tragedy] attacks on fellow soldiers, and
they will likely be even more drastic,” he said.
“Everybody has to outdo someone, so the next are
likely to be worse. Violence breeds violence. I was
trained to be very violent in combat as a scout…we
killed or detained Iraqis before anyone else got
there. Two months ago I warned the Army’s Chain of
Command that before we had an attack by a soldier on
other troops when they come home, we needed to make
some dramatic changes.”
At the time of the interview, one week after army
psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s shooting rampage left
13 dead and over 30 wounded at Fort Hood, Luther
informed IPS that in the previous three days at Fort
Hood, “I’ve heard commanders tell soldiers requesting
psychological help that they are full of crap and
don’t have PTSD…so if we can’t implement these needed
changes quickly and rapidly we are going to have more
loss of life on U.S. soil by soldiers killing other
soldiers.”
While not on the scale of the recent shooting
incident, several other killings by soldiers have been
reported at Fort Hood over the last two years.
According to official military statistics, Fort Hood
already suffers the highest number of suicides among
Army installations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
While Luther believes the number is far higher, Army
officials at Fort Hood admit to at least 10 suicides
on the base from January to July of this year, and at
least 75 “confirmed” suicides since 2003.
Several years of repeated war-zone deployments are
taking their toll, as Army personnel are experiencing
record rates of PTSD, depression, other mental health
problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicides.
According to the Army Suicide Event Report, a total of
99 soldiers killed themselves in 2006, the highest
rate of military suicides in the 26 years the military
has been keeping statistics on suicides. More than a
quarter of them were by troops in combat postings in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The ?gure does not include
post-discharge suicides by military personnel.
In 2007, at least 115 suicides were reported by the
Army, another record. Last year set another record,
with at least 133 reported suicides, in addition to
there being a record number of suicides in the Marine
Corps that year.
The suicide rate for the Army for 2008 was calculated
roughly at 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, which for the ?rst
time since the Vietnam War is higher than the adjusted
civilian rate.
Thus far, 2009 is on pace to set another record for
the number of suicides in the Army.
Private Michael Kern, an active-duty Iraq war veteran
who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March
2007 to March 2008.
On Nov. 9, four days after the shooting spree at Fort
Hood, Kern told IPS, “The 20th Engineering Battalion
was hit hard in this rampage. They are scheduled to
deploy in January to Afghanistan, and lost a lot of
good folks on Thursday [Nov. 5]. I personally know a
soldier in that Battalion who attempted suicide last
night.”
Mental health problems and suicide appear to now be
systemic in the military.
By October 2007, data within the Army’s fifth Mental
Health Advisory Team report indicated that
approximately 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and
17 percent of those in Afghanistan were coping by
taking prescription antidepressants and/or sleeping
pills to cope.
In 2008, the Daily Telegraph of London reported that
two out of five suicide victims among troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan have been found to be on
antidepressants.
In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a
stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent 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.”
A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department
of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000
veterans who are receiving care from the VA are
attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans
kill themselves daily.
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