News From the Cause
Army suicides see a spike: (EXPRESS-NEWS, SAN ANTONIO)
August 18, 2011
Melissa Dixon sees a lot of the war in the tattoos she draws on soldiers returning from the war zone to Fort Hood.
Some get tattoos in her Killeen shop to mark their kills, the lives of fellow troops they've saved or bombs they've disabled.
Beneath it all are waves of stress born of combat.
“Some of them have issues with their wives or their loved ones, where they're fighting, or one will have a friend commit suicide,” said Dixon, 31. “I had one guy who had to deal with a friend's family because he had just committed suicide and they were both in the service together.”
As the 10th anniversary of war nears, the Army continues to be plagued by suicides, roughly two-thirds of them veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The latest numbers offer little encouragement despite years of effort. Army Lt. Col. Steve Warren said 32 active-duty soldiers in July likely had killed themselves — the highest number for any month since it started tracking the problem in 2009.
This year, the number of suicides is down slightly from 2010 among active-duty and reserve-component GIs. Last year the Army lost a record 300 active-duty and reserve troops to suicide. Of those, 109 active-duty troops had one or more deployments. Sixty-five of 145 reservists had served up to four war-zone tours.
Big posts like Fort Hood and Fort Bragg, N.C., that have sent large numbers of troops to war continue to have the most suicides. At Fort Hood, seven soldiers killed themselves this year through July. At Fort Bragg, the number is nine.
One suicide has been logged this year at Fort Sam Houston.
“Our suicide rates in the Army Reserve are trending about where they were this time last year, which I guess the good news is it doesn't seem to be increasing, the bad news is it doesn't seem to be decreasing,” said the Army Reserve's commander, Lt. Gen. Jack Stultz, said.Click here to view more
