Soldiers are trained to have personality disorders - lean, mean killing machines.  (Whether it has always been so, I don’t know.) But the military might question its training programs? Does a person ‘catch’ a personality disorder, like catching a cold, and then like a cold it goes away?

I remember, and they can still be seen, Nam vets wandering the streets of our major cities - unemployed and unemployable, derelicts mentally and emotionally lost. For many of those vets the ‘disorder’ never left.

“Culture of Stigma Is a Key Cause of Military, Veteran Suicides”—http://tinyurl.com/StigmaMilitary—highlights countering stigma as an essential response to this tragedy. It challenges military leadership to go beyond merely issuing orders about stigma and, in addition, to actually change its policies and practices. The military could take a huge step forward, for instance, by reviewing recruitment, promotion, and retention practices that discriminate against people with common and treatable mental illnesses and by pro-actively instituting policies to avoid retaining or promoting officers and NCOs who have a record of intolerance or ignorance about the mental health needs of service members.

Franklin Cook, Editor and Publisher
“Suicide Prevention News and Comment”
http://tinyurl.com/SPNAC-about

Overprescribing of antidepressants probably has something to do with this too.

DEAD MEN WALKING

US dead - 4,000
Iraq dead - 2.8 million - 1.4 m Iraq War, 1m by sanctions, 400k by GW1.

Seven hundred civilian dead for every dead service person. Mostly women, children and the elderly.

Not really cricket.

Suicide - PTSD, aka guilt for murder / guilt for association with murder.

How long can any warrior live with the stupidity of an illegal war? With the atrocity? With the war crimes those warriors are “ordered” to commit?