The author, an Iraq War veteran, is the candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. To learn more about his campaign, click here. To learn more about other PSL candidates running in national and local elections, click here.
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Suicide figures for the military have consistently risen: 67 in 2004, 87 in 2005, 102 in 2006, and 115 in 2007. Col. Eddie Stephens, the army’s deputy director of human resources policy, predicted that “with four months left, we’re probably going to surpass 115” in 2008.
The figures show that the majority soldiers committing suicide are young and of low rank. The underlying factors in this grim statistic are twofold.
First, high school youths are among the top targets of recruiters. The U.S. military sponsors video game and paintball tournaments to entice young students with a fantasy world of glamorized combat. It has even gone so far as to create its own video game, “America’s Army.” The horrors that recruits as young as 17 will see in Iraq and Afghanistan are inconspicuously absent from the game.
Second, the fact that the majority of suicides are among low-ranking enlisted soldiers reflects the existing class divisions within the military. Enlisted soldiers are predominantly from poor and working class backgrounds, with a growing number not even having a high school diploma. Officers are generally of a more privileged stratum of college graduates.
In peacetime, the lives of officers and enlisted soldiers are vastly different, with the officers enjoying an extremely high standard of living, spending most of their time behind a desk. Enlisted soldiers are paid drastically less, live in substandard barracks and are responsible for all manual labor, such as mowing lawns and janitorial duties.
In wartime, however, the relationship between the enlisted soldiers and their officer bosses takes on a new, criminal dynamic. For officers, their career is furthered by the success of their unit. Enlisted soldiers are typically sent on missions that have no purpose other than to invite an attack. Sometimes called “draw fire” missions, soldiers are sent to patrol an area with known anti-occupation sentiments to intimidate and provoke the Iraqi people into a fight. While the enlisted soldiers are killed, maimed and traumatized on these pointless missions, their commanding officers have another battle to put on their promotion paperwork.
Other than being forced to take part in these types of missions, enlisted soldiers overwhelmingly bear the brunt of normal combat operations. The poor and working people in this country have always been the ones used as cannon fodder for the imperialist goals of the ruling class.
Across the board, experts attribute the rise in suicides to lengthy and frequent deployments. These deployments have no end in sight, with the occupation of Iraq planned to continue indefinitely and another potential troop surge in the horizon, this time in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military has responded to the suicide epidemic by planning to hire more mental health specialists and increasing the use of anti-depressants. These “solutions” aim to keep soldiers stable enough to continue to be deployed over and over again, ultimately exacerbating the resulting disabilities. The Pentagon has nothing to gain from properly caring for veterans—its only interest is having an unlimited supply of bodies it can ship to other countries to do its biding.
As long as we live under a system whose wheels are set in motion by profits alone, the military will be a used as a tool to secure foreign markets, regardless of the effect it has on soldiers or the peoples targeted by war. A complete overturn of this system and a restructuring of society are in order if we wish to see no more human lives thrown to waste on—or off—the battlefield.
