Navy Admiral Mike Mullen (ret.), former chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, told an audience in Aspen this weekend that military has “18
vets a day who are killing themselves in the United States” due to the
incomprehensible stresses of military life, which he said are
compounded by a public that is increasingly disconnected from the
ongoing wars.

Military suicides rose dramatically after the start of the Iraq war,
according to a recent study by the Army’s Public Health Command. That
same study found that in 2008, 1 in 5 U.S. soldiers voluntarily
submitted to a mental health evaluation, “implying a prevalent public
health problem.” Since then, the military’s suicide rate has continued
to climb, hitting a 10-year high in 2012, even though U.S. forces are
almost entirely withdrawn from Iraq.

As bad as that sounds, it gets worse: Those figures only account for
active duty soldiers, and not soldiers who have returned to private
life. If Mullen is correct, then the problem of military suicides is
even worse than previously known.

“If I’m a 5-year-old boy or girl in the family of one of these
deploying units for the army whose average deployment was 12 months at
a time, and my dad or mom – but mostly my dad – has deployed at this
pace, I’m now 15 or 16 years old, and my dad has been gone three, four
or five times,” Mullen explained during an appearance at the Aspen
Ideas Festival last weekend. “And my whole conscious life, from the
time when I was 5 and I started to figure out that there was something
out there, my whole conscious life has been at war. The United States
has never, never experienced that before. And we see incredible
stresses on families.”



War provides an excellent return for the 1% who have investments in
military hardware, not so much for the rest of us.