The rash of suicides among Army troops, including reservists, abated for the first time in four years in 2011, the service reported Thursday. The total of 278 was a 9% drop from the year before. But the toll continued to climb in the active-duty force, rising from 159 in 2010 to 164 last year.
A pair of leading indicators of …
Ever since Battleland raised this issue with then-top-Army doc Lieut. General Peter Schoomaker four years ago, there’s been a whirring debate over changing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to Post-Traumatic Stress, or some other less-stigmatizing label. The logic is pretty simple: in the nooks and crannies of our brains where bad …
Alex Lemons, a former Marine sergeant who deployed to Iraq three times – including once as scout sniper – reflects on the video of four Marines urinating on the corpses of three dead Taliban in Afghanistan:
This is all …
The tragic news last week that ranger Margaret Anderson was shot and killed in Mount Rainier National Park by Benjamin Colton Barnes brought with it national attention and a litany of sensational headlines. (What came first,
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On November 14th, two weeks before he was supposed to go home, Spc. David Emanuel Hickman became the last American service member to be killed in Iraq. While on a regular “presence patrol” in Baghdad, his vehicle was struck …
Over at Time’s Ideas blog, a pair of academics urges that women be compelled to register for the draft. Military recruiters use such registration lists to prospect for young talent. That, in turn, would put more females in …
No single man has made gays in the military look worse than Army PFC Bradley Manning: alleged leaker of hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. Anyone found guilty of intentionally weakening our nation’s security is deplorable and deserves harsh punishment. The one thing still irking me about …
We’ve reported on a couple of disturbing cases recently where U.S. troops of Asian heritage supposedly killed themselves after being hazed by their so-called comrades in war zones. When we reported that the Army believed that …
Sure it’s a coincidence: the same day the U.S. military formally ends its military mission in Iraq, the Army releases the lowest monthly suicide number in recent memory. But there it was, late Thursday, in the standard suicide …
Battleland’s own Ron Capps has just been tapped to create a writing program to help troops wrestling with post-traumatic stress. The program will be part of the research and therapy at the National Intrepid Center of …
“Prior to 2008...the cremated remains were…turned over to a contractor for incineration, as was the industry standard. If there was any residual matter, it was handled in accordance with the processes at the time…we did not direct the contractor to put any residual material in the landfill.”
So of all the elements that can cushion a soldier’s return to civilian life from Afghanistan and Iraq, what’s the most important? Well, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, it’s a soldier’s faith, or …
