Military suicide rate

Discussion in 'Warfare / Military' started by Mushroom, Jan 14, 2018.

  1. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    I'll take your word for it.

    I was born with "fight" and I had to learn how to "flight" right when the chess game was not in my/your favor.
     
  2. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Depends on the situation. Training allows us to adjust our fight or flight reflexes to just "fight". However, in the process, it tends to open up the market for 'freezing' in certain situations. Not for long, could be a split second. But I listened to a well known Air Force doctor that explained the break down.
     
  3. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    If you freeze you die.

    If you didn't die then God loves you and you were lucky.
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2018
  4. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Hardly the case. Maybe in WW2. Not today.
     
  5. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    It seems to me that on an emotional level Moses was right when he said kids becoming soldiers should be at least 20 years old.

    Less than this and a kid just can't deal with the stress of war and battle as well as the aftermath.

    I suspect our sin today is sending-in kids under 20.

    Everyone should read the Bible and take it seriously -- even the talking snakes and talking donkeys.
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2018
  6. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    If you think so ... .
     
  7. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You haven't been around modern day IEDs from Islamic radicals, have you
     
  8. JakeJ

    JakeJ Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I agree that most children are not raised with the goal of leading them to being independently self reliant. Rather, they are pandered under the slogan of "enjoy your youth" - which also allows parents to be lazyass. They are fully unprepared for being an adult.

    By "weakness" I do not mean physical or even combat. Most in the military will never see combat and a large percentage are not in any direct combat potential role. However, as I noted, suicide runs high in the military including outside of having any relevancy to combat or physical danger. There was no mass numbers of suicide after WW1 or WW2.

    I do not believe most suicides are related to combat experiences or the horrors of war. Rather, they enter the military as if still children, though 18, and the military becomes their new "parent," a very strict parent of very strict structure they must follow. Children do very well with structure as no decisions are involved, while there is a greater sense of purpose and achievement.

    For veteran suicides, when the person left the military all that structure and discipline, all that guidance, purpose, sense of accomplishments and goals vanishes. The person has "nothing" and "no one." They have to completely run their own lives in every detail. No one forces them to even get out of bed. No one is telling them what they are to do today. Having never been taught self reliance, for the first time and suddenly the person is all on his/her own. To sink or swim.

    For most people who can't swim, if you threw the person in the deep end of a swimming pool most would thrash about making it to the edge - and be swimming soon thereafter. But a few would drown, even if 5 feet from the edge. That seems analogous to those who can't handle life after the military because - having not been trained across their childhood is self reliance and other adult skills they don't know how to swim, can't figure it out, so drown (suicide).
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2018
  9. JakeJ

    JakeJ Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Footage from Vietnam, the first truly videoed war, shocked the military. Most troops were draftees who did not want to be there, had virtually no training before being sent over there, and were rotated so fast few had any experience.

    What the footage showed was the extremely small percentage that would actually be aiming and shooting in a fire fight. Many would just freeze and curl up, try to hide or run. Others would shelter, maybe holding up their rifle and shooting with no chance of hitting anyone. Still others would be frantically pointing their rifle this way and that - if interviews absolutely certain they were shooting - but having never pulled the trigger. Only about 25% of draftees would do anything resembling aiming and firing.
     
  10. JakeJ

    JakeJ Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This is one reason whenever a police claim a person didn't act normal to a death or murder of a relative, spouse or child I never accept that reasoning. People react to stress in so many different ways - not just with sadness, fear, anger. Others go emotionally deep, as if turning off all emotions. Others will become overly logical, also abandoning emotions - so may refer to their deceased spouse or child in a detached sense, the person also trying to analyze the facts, not emotionally react to what has happened. For myself, for severe stress my nature is to take a 3rd eye perspective, rather than emotional reaction, to that the URGENCY is to figure it out logically rather than act driven by emotion - to turn off emotions as they just get in the way.

    The Marine I write of sometimes often said he did not care who was the biggest, strongest, could carry the most in his squad. In his view, what mattered was keeping their head under fire, tactical sense, devotion, ability to act as a team, cohesion to the squad and other psychological factors - combined with being willing and capable of accurate shooting under stress to kill the enemy. If the ONLY response a person would ever make to being shot at was to duck and hide, he didn't want that person. In one sense, sometimes their goal was exactly to get the insurgents to shoot at them so they knew where the insurgents were. He said they tended to open fire at a long range and just spray out AK47 auto fire, meaning odds of 1 in 10,000 of hitting any of them. But now they knew were the insurgents were and could hunt them down from that point.

    As I commented he is an unusual fella, the sort that goes looking for trouble because trouble can be exciting and enjoyable. Probably most people don't get a desired thrill out of being shot at - for which is now a contest of who is better at killing who. He versus the other guy, his team versus their team.

    There is only so much the military can do to prepare or test a person in regards to their first time in real combat.
     
  11. JakeJ

    JakeJ Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    To the contrary, military service is the best transition from youth to adulthood most people can make. Millions of men have been in the horrors of war and came out of it more mature and stronger than before. As for your cousin, there may have been an underlying flaw or weakness for which suicide may otherwise have come - or maybe not.

    The military turns boys (and girls) into men and women. For the vast majority, it is a life changing positive. But not for all.
     
    Last edited: Jan 26, 2018
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  12. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    If you avoid getting shot or blown up, it's also an EXCELLENT leadership builder
     
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  13. Nightmare515

    Nightmare515 Ragin' Cajun Staff Member Past Donor

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    Thats the problem. The military can only do so much to simulate a combat environment. They can't actually shoot at you in training and even back when they did shoot "over you" and make you crawl on the ground you still knew it was training and they weren't trying to kill you. The difference arises obviously when it becomes real and the person shooting at you is actively trying to kill you. There is no way to train for that part. Even the most realistic training scenarios cannot prepare you for that because at the end of the day you still know in the back of your mind that it's not real.

    I agree with you about folks act differently in stressful situations. One of my Privates was a goofball and he smiled at everything, even in the face of death. One time we got blown up in Afghanistan and I turn around to check on him and he's smiling and literally laughing out loud. I asked him if he was ok, his response was "Dude did we get just blown up? That was ****ing awesome! hahahaha" as he's bleeding....

    A short recording of that situation would have you thinking the kid just took a shot at a bar with his buddies by the way he was reacting. When in reality we had just gotten hit with a 100lb chemical IED. The other Private of mine remained basically stoic (as was his personality) and the other one froze up petrified in fear.

    Humans react to things differently. Nobody knows how they will react in a real combat zone when real bullets are flying your direction. I'll tell you what before my first deployment my only experience with gunshot wounds came from movies. I figured they might hurt but were no big deal from seeing stars like Sylvester Stallone grab their arm after getting shot and keep on going. It wasn't until that deployment when I saw with my own eyes exactly what happens to a human being after getting hit with a 7.62 round that I realized the movies weren't an accurate portrayal.

    I believe that movies and video games have painted a completely inaccurate portrayal of warfare to the uninformed. There is no romance in war, no reset button, no grabbing your arm and saying ouch after getting shot, etc. It is a terrible thing, and weapons do gruesome things to the human body that media rarely ever portrays accurately. It takes a certain type of person to remain calm and focused in such circumstances, and for a huge chunk of people it won't be "you", in spite of what so many will claim while having never actually been to war. Not saying "you" as in you but you as in a general sense as you said about the majority of soldiers in Vietnam.

    Lets face it, war goes against everything a human being was designed to do via evolution. You aren't supposed to run towards danger, you are designed by nature to run away from danger. You basically have to be reprogrammed to run towards danger and possible death and remain calm and focused. That is difficult to do and difficult to train somebody to do. You are basically overriding basic human nature at that point. And a decent chunk of the human population cannot be successfully reprogrammed to do that.
     
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  14. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Is all ranks.

    My former Brigade Commander, a 2 Star General killed himself days before he was to put on his 3rd star.

    Ahhh, so only certain type of people kill themselves, but the trash that joins

    Not hardly. I joined the Army at 42. And everybody has those stress issues with spouses.

    And the number that sees combat or has PTSD is remarkably low. Hell, we have people collecting from the VA for PTSD that never even graduated from their MOS school.

    But after reading one of your comments, I think I am done with this. Uninformed comments from racists generally show me I have nothing of interest from reading anything else from them.
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2018
  15. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    Jeeze you joined at 42 !!!

    Old man !!! That's lieutenant colonel age.
     
  16. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    Stay off roads.

    That rule has been around since the land mine was invented.
     
  17. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Yep, and am still serving today at 53. Is interesting when the majority in my unit are young enough to be my kids.
     
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  18. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    Well they will need to look up to you for mature guidance.

    Think of something.
     
  19. APACHERAT

    APACHERAT Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Pappy Mushroom.
     
  20. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Couldn't be more wrong where I was. The roads aren't the problem where we were. It's the fields, and near small structures like a shed or a car parked. This ain't the 60's :)
     
    Last edited: Feb 9, 2018
  21. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    Stay away from everything then.
     
  22. Nightmare515

    Nightmare515 Ragin' Cajun Staff Member Past Donor

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    Sort of difficult to do when you are ya know....there lol

    Thats the difficult part of fighting an enemy who intermixes with the civilian population and is almost indistinguishable from the civilian population. Can't really tell who is the bad guy. Stop driving on the roads and drive through a field and the farmer has put an IED there for you. Or the terrorists see that you no longer drive on the roads so they just put their bombs off the road now. Walk around a village and you aren't sure if that little kid running up to you just wants candy or if he has a grenade in his jacket. Not sure if the guy pushing the ice cream cart is actually just a guy trying to earn some money by selling ice cream to American troops or if he has packed that thing full of explosives.

    The list is long....I've seen everything from little kids to women to our own damn interpreters kill us.

    Insurgency is a royal pain in the ass.
     
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  23. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Then it's not any fun!
     
  24. yiostheoy

    yiostheoy Well-Known Member

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    Insurgencies starting with Viet Nam (old spelling -- two words -- means South Viet) have always been with imbedded hidden enemy irregulars.

    Same now in A-stan. Same back in Iraq.

    Nothing new.

    The antidote is hyper-vigilance and hyper-paranoia.
     
  25. ArmySoldier

    ArmySoldier Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You're going full circle. First it was stay off the roads, now you can't go to Nam without stepping in IEDs in the jungle? You tryina prove my point?
     

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