I’m Sorry But Isn’t that a good thing?

Posted: June 12, 2024 by datechguy in Uncategorized

I saw this headline at Hotair and my reaction was a tad different than you might expect:

Depressing: US Soldiers More Likely to Die by Suicide Than in Combat

and a bit from the piece:

One of the most alarming statistics reveals that U.S. soldiers were more likely to die by suicide than from combat industries. And it wasn’t by a small margin. Soldiers were nine times more likely to die in that manner.

Now maybe it’s just me, but if your soldiers are dying from suicide at a greater rate than by combat that means that you either:

  1. Are not fighting large scale wars when heavy combat causalities
  2. So effective at fighting wars that your troops are unlikely to get killed

I suspect that if you look at any major war from Vietnam back to the Revolution you won’t find a ratio like that.

What IS worrying is this figure from the same piece:

That still doesn’t come close to explaining the situation with the Army, however. Looked at based on per capita figures, the overall suicide rate for Americans went from 10.4 per 100,000 to 14.0 over the 21-year period measured. By comparison, the rate in the Army was 36.1 per 100,000 in 2021, and last year it reached 36.6. That’s not a minor difference. That’s more than two and a half times greater than what is seen in the general population. It’s also far more than should be written off as a coincidence.

If I may be so bold as to suggest I think this is yet another example of the costs of a post-Christian society. Once you remove the love of Christ from an equation, particularly a tough one and you’ll be surprised how a society, particularly a subset of a society engaged in dangerous work, reacts.

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