According to CBS News, more American military veterans are dying compared to the American soldiers dying in Iraq. The suicide rate among war veterans is more than double the rate for average Americans.
CBS
conducted a nationwide count of veteran suicides. The data were gathered from individual states for both veterans and the general population from 1995. The suicide rate among Americans as a whole was 8.9 for every 100,000 deaths, whereas the veterans' ratio stood at 18.7.
The figures were very high for young veterans aged between 20 to 24, almost four times the non-veteran average for people of the same age. This figure indicates a possible link to post-traumatic stress. Some veterans calls this as a “mental health epidemic.”
At least 6,256 US veterans took their lives in 2005 at an average of 17 a day. This statistic was compared to the total of 3,863 American military deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, an average of 2.4 deaths a day based on a report from Icasualties.org.
Currently there are 25 million veterans living in the United States. 1.6 million of them had served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One veteran summed it up well. Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said to CBS:
Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged,”
Mike Bowman, father of 23 year old Tim Bowman, who shot himself to death in 2005, said to CBS that military is covering up this suicide issue and don’t want to reveal the true casualties of the wars.
His mother, Kim Bowman, said her son came back from the Iraq war in a state of shock. There was no life in his eyes. After eight months, he committed suicide on Thanksgiving Day.
Another
study was posted last week by Omnithought here in DJ, that one in four homeless people are US military veterans, even though they make up only 11 percent of the general population. And many young soldiers are going to shelters and soup kitchens after completing their tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of having a good life, they scour food shelters, while they pay the private soldiers unit (like Blackwater) millions of dollars.
The Vietnam veterans were able to endure for quite some time before their damages were completely known, but the Iraq war is hardly finished and already they have identified 1,500 ex-servicemen as homeless.
The returning soldiers need good psychological counseling and medical treatments and also must be given solid jobs so they can live without any worries. They say the amount of money spent on overseas wars have reached
$1.6 trillion, so why are they not spending a portion on these soldiers who deserve the most?
When will the Congress wake up and solve this problem?
