Homegrown Boy discovers the military suicide rate ... a few years too late

Offensive is when you turn the issue of military suicides into a diatribe to be used in the health care debate, as Homegrown Boy does today at Resolute Determination:

That’s right we have failed. The New York Times – see for all of you liberals who swear I’m a troglodyte, I am literate and do on ocassion read more then the comics – reports today that one transportation unit in Iraq has had two suicides among them since returning to America.

Since returning to America.

Yet there is a push in the socialist health bill to give free health care – that means you and I pay for it – to illegal aliens; yet we have two Americans dead because they couldn’t get enough help?

To reinerate, these two men fought to keep us free so we can scream inanities on blogs and host shows on channel 28 and bleat incessantly about our beliefs yet …….. not enough help was there for them.

Illegals will get surgery if the bill passes.

Yet our soliders commit suicide in the country they fought to protect.

Be you pro or anti the war we need to be ashamed for we have failed.

Apparently he was reading only the comics over the past 3-4 years a military suicide rates have skyrocketed to the point where the military suicide rate now exceeds the suicide rate for the general population.

For the details, and the military's own incomprehension, see this from six months ago:

American troops are taking their own lives in the largest numbers since records began to be kept in 1980. In 2008, there were 128 confirmed suicides by serving army personnel and 41 by serving marines. Another 15 army deaths are still being investigated. The toll is another of the terrible consequences that have flowed from Washington's neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The army suicide rate is now higher than that among the general American population. The rate has been calculated as 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, compared with 19.5 per 100,000 civilians. This is a shocking statistic, as soldiers theoretically are screened for mental illnesses before enlistment and have access to counselling and health services that millions of ordinary people cannot afford.

As there is an average of 10 failed suicide attempts for each actual loss of life, the figures suggest that more than 1,600 serving army and marine personnel tried to kill themselves last year.

Army Secretary Pete Geren told the Associated Press that "we cannot tell you" why the number of military suicides was rising.

The SecArmy may not know why military suicides are rising, but the grunts on the ground, in the air, and in the water could tell you pretty damn easily.

Homegrown boy is moved to immediate patriotism:

I’ll call the VA myself and see what they need. Then we’ll see who wants to really help and who wants to *itch. I’ll even send out a list.

But note two things: (a) he intends to use your participation/non-participation as a litmus test of patriotism; and (b) it somehow does not occur to HGB that thousands of us--vets, war criticizers, and other volunteers--have been working with our returning soldiers for the past eight years before he figured out there was a need.

Excuse me. I feel the need to hock something bitter out of the back of my throat.