A few weeks ago, Army SSGT Jared Hagemann took his own life. This news, while tragic, is hardly unusual anymore. The real tragedy is that SSGT Hagemann committed suicide on the eve of his NINTH deployment, this one to Afghanistan. This is what happens when young men are thoughtlessly sent into combat and expected to repeatedly and seamlessly process horrors no rational human being should have to deal with. Soldiers are trained to fight and to kill; that’s the job, and a soldier knows and accepts that. What remains unknown is how frequent and regular exposure to mayhem, death, and destruction will impact the psyche of an individual soldier. Some will emerge relative unscathed, others will be forever changed and damaged. Whatever the case, there’s no rational excuse, and certainly no good reason, for deploying a soldier to a war zone nine times. Soldiers, like all of us, have their breaking point…and it would seem reasonable to assume that after eight deployments, even the most hardened combat veteran would be in need of some serious TLC.
How is it that the US Army can repeatedly order a soldier back into a combat theater without providing every available option for safeguarding that soldier’s mental health? Or is the Army OK with the idea of simply using up personnel until they’re no longer functional, are KIA, or take their own lives because they simply can no longer deal with the stress and the guilt? Two wars over ten years have stretched our fighting forces to and beyond the breaking point. Suicides among Army personnel set a record in July and in June , in part because of the increased stress placed on America’s combat troops, but also because the Army simple isn’t adequately addressing the problem. Even worse, there seems to be little recognition of the seriousness of this problem among those tasked with assessing readiness. We simply cannot keep sending the same soldiers back into the fray without an understanding of the long-term damage that will inevitably be done. No matter how well-trained and well-adjusted a soldier may be, at some level their actions come into conflict with a lifetime of being taught that killing is wrong. Some soldiers are better able to reconcile that conflict than others, but no matter what, the idea of eight deployments…and then ordering a soldier to prepare to deploy for a ninth time…is simply inhuman. No human being should be expected to shoulder that kind of burden, particularly in the macho culture of denial that surrounds mental health issues in the Army.
Today’s Army is certainly more aware of and better able to address mental health issues than when I was a Reserve officer in the early ’80s. That being said, too much of Army culture is still oriented towards the view that emotional problems are a sign of weakness, an indication of unmanliness that isn’t welcome in a combat environment. If we’re going to continue to expect our young to bear the burden of protecting our safety and security (if that’s even what the mission is anymore), then we owe it to them to provide them with every possible ounce of care and support that we can muster. If we can’t do that, then we have no business repeatedly sending our young people back into combat.
THEY DESERVE BETTER.
