U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan

With local governments tight for money, letting the police officer numbers drop, having a trained soldier on the premises could be a very smart move... truly a militia not one somebody has to SEND TO YA BY GOV'T ORDER.

That is exactly what it looked like , from the very beginning . Another generation horribly abused .

Sorry for your loss. It sounds like he was a victim of the war. PTSD is real and these fine folks need all of our help and support.

Great question.

I really do respect and honor the US soldiers. Im sorry but, oppressed1, yes, ww2 was fought with honor, courage, and valiancie! But, the Iraq/Middle eastern war...Was a cowards war, built on profit from big corporations that bought our politicians. Some soldiers came to the realisation that the Iraq war was nothing but a scam, and after they witness innocent children and other people being brutally and with out reason flat out murdered. Ofcourse it is goin to have an impact on there conscience.

Actually, yes you do kill women and children. It has been documented. You also torture innocent combatants and civilians in illegal prisons. However, even the twenty-something males that you kill have done nothing wrong. THEY'RE INSURGENTS NOT TERRORISTS. Drop an Army in my backyard and drive tanks around my town and believe me my friends and I would go all out McGuyver building IEDs every way we could.

Get it! They're illegal wars for Imperialism and profit! Not a single act of terrorism on American soil has ever been proven to have originated by Middle-Eastern Muslims. Israel is guilty of far more serious acts against America and may have been behind most of the attacks blamed on Muslims. The soldiers, most of them, are figuring this out. These wars are for Halliburton, KBR, and Wall Street and have absolutely nothing to do with American freedom. Unless you are talking about the freedom we have lost due to our enemies in Washington. Freedoms Lost is the name of these wars while WWII stood for freedoms defended.

Obama forgot to tell the truth the other night in the State of the Union address. The truth is that America is financially falling apart and will never be able to recover for one reason and one reason only.

KILLING FOREIGNERS IS VERY VERY EXPENSIVE!

HOW MANY ROADS COULD BE RE-BUILT IN AMERICA FOR EVERY BOMB DROPPED IN AFGHANISTAN?

THE BANKS NEEDED YOUR MONEY DURING THE BAILOUT FOR ONE REASON!

TO FUND MORE WARS!

Some of you do. Oh and don't forget rape.

46 per cent of the victims whose gender could be determined were female and 39 per cent were children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/5161326/Number-of-wome...

A suicide, each suicide, counts a lot more than one vote. One suicide, each suicide, is the sum total of a lot more than the letters used to spell PTSD.

PTSD is real. I had it most of my life caused by two early head concussions, one a fall out of a moving car in a curve before seat belts. Automakers were fighting them off at the time actually. But the actual ACT that ends in a completed (successful) suicide cannot be dismissed as some simple, canned answer medical condition.

To do that is to dishonor the deceased man, or woman.

People who give in to the siren song and do dismiss it as a medical condition are weak, having difficulty facing the valueless issues as you Monkey_Films have done in your above comments.

US soldiers have been thrown into a cage with hungry lions.

Whatever you say is ok with me. I got mine in Vietnam, that's why I mentioned it. I think about these kids everyday. To think that they chose to no longer live among us is frightening.

Soldiers aren't chosen for being theologians having a firm Bible knowledge. So when a soldier kills or sees killed people, parents or their children, they've been taught Evolution so in that respect they suffer guilt of permanently having ended a life. They have walked into another person's timeline and stopped it cold.

That would be quite unbearable to many men and women but I would think especially women as being the life bearers of our species.

But if the soldier has a very clearcut idea why they are in the situation to begin with and feel their deeds necessary & honorable for "those back home" then it can be rationalized out. That's what Vietnam lacked and what these wars today have lacked for also.

The only other choice is to quit, but that would heap shame on their family and lose all the perks and income and status in the community their service there represents, the livelihood of so many at home both parents and children.

All this is is a vise and a meat grinder. The military chaplains are enablers to the whole mess => themselves being bought men too. If they quit they lose their future just as the soldier loses his. Actually suicide is the logical choice... because it keeps the family members back home an income I imagine.

Their children will have the eyeglasses and dentist work they will need, the wife holds her head up a lot better than being married to a quitter, although in real time she would likely obtain a divorce and destroy the entire family unit.

In the end we all know what these wars are about. Politics and weapons manufacturer money the field a place to test new weapons on whoever they get aimed at. The first war we were told a bald-faced lie, that saving Iraq would guarantee the United States a hefty payback of crude oil, so soldiers thought they were really doing an important and necessary objective that would have a great positive result.

It all turned out a big lie, then other lies had to be layered on top of that lie, til the lie has reached high into the desert skies. All the soldiers appear to have done is make a few people rich who should be busted down in rank.

I was always taught that a person who commits suicide would not be brought back in the resurrection [during Christ's Thousand Year Kingdom Reign soon to commence]. Not everyone agrees with that. Who knows? Jesus might hold them very highly for refusing to kill.

It won't be long we will find out. Jesus said the last would be first and the first would be last. What he meant by that is the last ones to die before Armageddon would be resurrected first and then the dead would be sequentially raised back working back in time, a reversal of order you see.

If the suicides are resurrected it is very important the family he left behind does what it takes to be there with him or her. Otherwise they might do the same thing again, except that time it would indeed be permanent death.

And that would be a terrible shame to happen.

...Except that at the end of WWII (and the Nuremberg trials)... the US government recruited several high ranking Nazis into it's own establishment. It's well documented. Why would we destroy the Nazis and then recruit them into our own government?

I have friends that are soldiers... and I certainly don't want our soldiers to die... but WWII was not fought out of benevolence on our part. There was more going on. It was a power grab.

The men who fought did so with courage, and for a good cause (including members of my family)... but our government wasn't motivated in the same way. It was a segue to furthering control and power. I know this isn't a very popular view, and will probably get me voted down, but it's the truth. A major growth spurt in our military industrial complex happened because of this war... factories were converted to making war machines, and many men and women gave time and their lives to further this cause, whatever it was... and look what we've become... the very thing we were fighting against: Tyrants.

Afghanistan shouldn't have harbored terrorists.

What terrorists? Read the 9/11 Commission report. No Muslims were ever proven to have taken part in 9/11. Israeli Mossad agents were captured videotaping the event from the George Washington Bridge. The United Arab Emirates have been proven to have been involved.

However! Bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" have never been linked to 9/11!

Al Qaeda does not exist. Al Qaeda means, literally, 'The File'. Why? Because Al Qaeda was the name that the CIA used for 'the file' containing the names of Middle-Eastern operatives for the CIA. Bin Laden was one of them, YES, a CIA operative. Most of the other men named mysteriously after 9/11 had CIA and FBI ties.

Yes, insurgents fight us in these countries. But, these are not terrorists that were involved in attacking us. These are people who don't like foreign armies taking control of there country.

Yes, even in these times of propaganda and censorship combined with modern McCarthyism, I will state the un-speakable.

I don't blame them. If you get shot fighting for oil on a foreign land by someone defending their country, it's your fault. Don't call them terrorists. Call them patriots because that is what they truly are.

Al Qaeda means "the base" not "the file."

Yes, translated it means 'the base' but as I stated, 'the base' is a computer file of CIA operatives. So, essentially when they say that Al Qaeda was responsible, the illiterate masses in America think they are talking about Muslim terrorists when they actually mean that the CIA was responsible. It's kind of an inside joke on the American people.

On the day after the July 7th, 2005 bombings on London transport, former foreign secretary Robin Cook MP wrote what turned out to be his penultimate newspaper column for the Guardian. In it he revealed something about al-Qaeda that perhaps he shouldn't have.

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.

As far as I know, this was the first time publicly, in the anglophone world, that the al-Qaeda name had been explained as referring to a computer database.

In the francophone world, a colourful former French military intelligence officer, Pierre-Henri Bunel, had had a book published in 2004, "Proche-Orient, une guerre mondiale?", extracts of which appeared [in French] on a French conspiracy website. The extract went into some detail of how al-Qaeda originally referred to a computer database of Islamist fighters. But, AFAIK, it was not until after Robin Cook had revealed the same in the Guardian, and after his death a month later, that an English translation of Bunel's words appeared on the web. It's a rough translation, which doesn't read well. But the basic outline of his account accords with what Cook had revealed.

Here's my suspicion: that Robin Cook knew nothing about P-H Bunel's book or article, and that his knowledge of the origin of the Qaeda name stemmed solely from his time at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In other words, that both men had, independently of each other, revealed that, as they understood it, the designation 'al-Qaeda' had originally referred to a computer database. And, according to Bunel, that that name had been operative at least by the mid-'80s.

MI5 the government published its 'narrative' of the July 7th bombings [.pdf]. Annex 3 of the whitewash was a chronology of the development of modern jihadism. Extract:

c1984 Radical preacher Abdullah Azzam set up an organisation called Maktab al-Khidmat (MAK) "Bureau of Services" to disseminate propaganda about jihad in Afghanistan. Usama bin Laden (UbL) joins.

1989 Withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. UbL returns to Saudi Arabia. Decision by MAK to continue to support jihadist causes. Thinking around "the base" or "foundation" (translation: Al Qaida) for further operations articulated.

1988-89 UbL disagreement over focus of the cause and starts to form Al Qaida. [...]

So, MI5's version of the aetiology of the 'Qaeda' name makes no mention of computer databases, or its use by western intelligence agencies before 1989, and it repeats previous explanations as to its origins. So, either Cook and Bunel were wrong, or they were right but wrong to reveal it. And while Bunel is a peripheral figure lacking credibility, Robin Cook was neither.

Very interesting points you raise. I will look into this more. Thank you for the information.