Four Times More GI Suicides than Killed in Battle—
Sep. 6 (EIRNS)–One of the more striking statistics compiled by the Watson Institute at Brown University on the costs of war is that, since 9/11, more than four times as many US soldiers and veterans have committed suicide than were killed in battle. There were 7,057 killed in battle, and 30,177 suicides, further demonstrating the horrendous toll on soldiers sent into senseless and illegal wars.
A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study in 2019 on suicides by active duty U.S. soldiers since 1840 shows that the lowest number of such suicides in the 20th Century were in 1944-45, the last two years of a horrendous, but just, war, at 5 per 100,000 service members. This increased to 18 per 100,000 in the last years of the Vietnam disaster, and set the record high of 29.7 per 100,000 in 2012 during the Iraq and Afghanistan endless wars, staying above 20 since then. Full story here.