Military Suicides Hit All Time-High
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WASHINGTON — Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007 at the highest rate on record, and the toll is climbing ever higher this year as long war deployments stretch on.
At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, up from 102 the previous year, the Army said yesterday.
Nearly a third of them died at the battlefront — 32 in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. But 26% had never deployed to either conflict.
“We see a lot of things that are going on in the war which do contribute — mainly the longtime and multiple deployments away from home, exposure to really terrifying and horrifying things, the easy availability of loaded weapons and a force that’s very, very busy right now,” a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general, Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, said.
