Contradiction in Valuation

The ant has made himself illustrious
Through constant industry industrious.
So what?
Would you be calm and placid
If you were full of formic acid?
--The Ant, Ogden Nash
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Last Wednesday the Pentagon released an analysis showing that behind combat death, more U.S. servicemembers die of suicide than any other form of death (Suicides #2 Cause of Death in the Military). The Army has the highest number, which is commensurate with the civilian rate.

Army Colonel Carl Castro, lead researcher into suicide prevention and treatment, said the Army was slow off the mark to respond to the need:

"We were slow to react (at first) because we weren't sure if it was an anomaly or it was a real trend," Castro said. "Then it just takes time to program the money and get the studies up and going."

Military suicide is not a new problem.

The U.S. Army has been in the kill business for 235 years. Ranger remembers a high suicide rate when he was at Fort Benning -- home of the Infantry -- in the early-mid 1970's, a rate probably exacerbated by the Reduction in Forces (RIFs) following the Army's drawdown in personnel following the Vietnam War.

If the suicides were broken down by MOS (military occupational specialty), the deaths would probably cluster around the combat arms, meaning more than 25% of non-combat deaths in the combat arms would be due to suicide, and that rate would exceed the rate in the general public. Suicide is probably not correlated to military service, per se, but rather to combat military experience. This is the crux of the matter. (The Navy had the lowest suicide rate, supporting Ranger's contention.)

Any organization that requires its personnel to willingly sacrifice their lives for the mission will suffer this problem of improper valuation of life. How to convince soldiers that we care about their individual lives during suicide prevention programs while at the same time training them for their next deployment, a mission that may violently end their lives or make them incapacitated for life. The two missions are in contradiction.

How can one conceive of his life as valuable when you know you are an asset easily replaced? We in the combat arms know that we may be killed doing our soldierly duty; that's part of the deal -- we know we are sacrificial lambs. But we all fear dying needlessly for concepts that have nothing to do with American or soldierly values.

The disconnect is that no organization can claim to value the individual lives of its members while making them swear allegiance to a (soldier - Ranger - Special Forces) creed that commits them to a doctrinally-required self sacrifice for the mission.

Suicide is a by-product of war. A soldier need not be a constitutional law scholar to understand the real message coming from the head shed.