By Joseph Bobrow
Founder and President, the Coming Home Project
Let me tell you a story from the book, Outliers: In the 1950’s a physician discovered a small town in eastern Pennsylvania where there was no heart disease under age 65, no suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, peptic ulcers, and very little crime. People died …
They say war and football are alike in a lot of ways, but deep down we know that’s not true. Perhaps it’s those fundamental differences that explain why two scandals that came to light this week have been handled so differently by their respective overseers.
About 140 miles north of the Pentagon, in the pleasant little college …
The U.S. military and American society are drifting apart. It’s tough inside the civilian world to discern the drift. But troops in all the military services sense it, smell it — and talk about it. So do their superiors. We have a professional military of volunteers that has been stoically at war for more than a decade. But as the …
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The rates of suicide in the United States Army began to rise in 2004, and continued climbing until 2010. Then the suicide rate in the active duty finally started to level off, but continues to rise in National Guard soldiers. It remains twice as high as it was prior to the wars in …
This isn’t the way a Navy aviator is supposed to leave his vessel, especially when it’s a behemoth like the 100,000-ton USS Harry S Truman. But on Tuesday morning, about 10 a.m., Captain Tushar Tembe collapsed as he was leaving the ship he had commanded for the past three months as it was undergoing maintenance in Norfolk. He died …
Two Air Force researchers are suggesting it’s not the soldiers who kill themselves who should shoulder all the blame for their deaths. We – all of us, society writ large – may also be responsible.
“There appear to be systemic factors that play an important role in the rise in military suicides,” says George Mastroianni, …
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Friday is Veterans Day, and, like clockwork, the Pentagon has rolled out a 75-second video of new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta – an Army vet himself — thanking all who have served. Do these celluloid Hallmarks mean anything? Most troops I speak with never see them; this one had …
The military has been seeking the causes of a spike in military suicides for the last several years so it can begin knocking it down. New evidence just coming to light makes clear that the frequency of military deployments may play a role. John Nagl, of the Center for a New American Security, and I discuss this persistent challenge …
Combat is often seconds of terror surrounded by months of boredom. So troops play video games, visit the gym – and paint graffiti. OK. So it’s not what we think of when we think of graffiti. It’s more informational graphics, depicting unit insignias and other stuff that helps weld units together. The U.S. military is currently …
The nation is always expressing gratitude and thanks for all that military families do (did you know we’re in the middle of Military Family Appreciation Month?). In typical bureaucratic fashion, Congress ordered the Defense Department to certify that appreciation by creating a Family Readiness Council, designed to let the brass …
Only one in three military veterans wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq wars says he or she is getting the help they believe they need from the federal government. That’s the grim bottom line in a new report out Tuesday from the Pew Research Center:
Veterans badly hurt in the post-9/11 era also are more likely than other veterans,
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TIME has just posted photographs of some of Washington’s most famous desks, past and present. This one caught our eye: it’s the desk of Adm. Mike Mullen, when was serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The USELESS stamp was all in fun…mostly,” says Navy Capt. John Kirby, Mullen’s long-time spokesman. “He wanted it …
Winslow Wheeler is a Capitol Hill veteran who has turned himself into a pain-in-the-military-industrial-complex. He’s persistent and precise, two qualities that make what he says worth hearing. He issued some charts Monday (click on them to enrage) in what will no doubt be a vain effort to calm the howls now emanating from certain …
