what's it about?

The article is a little deceptive in trying to make its point. It adds in the 22 suicides committed by Iraq war veterans to boost the number of suicides over the number of casualties. The veterans were not vulnerable to combat death, by definition. If you consider only suicides among active duty personnel - not reservists who are home performing civilian jobs - the rate is 22 suicides per 100,000 (1,430,895 active duty service members; 301 suicides). This is a bit above the suicide rate for young American adults in the same age bracket (12.7 per 100,000 among adults aged 20 to 24). But the "young American adults" is a population evenly mixed between male and female, and active duty personnel are overwhelmingly male. The male suicide rate for males in that bracket was 17.6 per 100,000 in 2001; last year it was 25.3 per 100,000 in the Israeli general population. So the number doesn't seem to me to be that far out of line with what you'd see in the general populace anyway. Add in that volunteers to the military are likely to be from difficult backgrounds; these aren't kids deciding between college and Iraq, for the most part. For most of them, college requires Iraq. What strikes me is something else. 462 soldiers lost in combat is much more comparable to homicides of law enforcement personnel in America, than deaths in a war theater like Vietnam. I think if you extrapolated the homocide rate of LEO's in the larger cities (like Detroit, Miami, etc.) across the whole of the country the rates would be comparable (right now it is depressed by the rarity of such crime outside of places like Detroit). Army training has become much more similar to police academy than to preparation for young men to fight in a foreign war. I am continually floored when I talk to people who've gone through boot camp in the last few years; I am from a military family, and we all just shake our heads in disbeliefs. "You have a card saying you feel bad that you can show a drill sargeant and he can't yell at you then???" When I went through boot camp, drill sargeants were allowed to hit us, and it was absolutely necessary for the mission. We are holding a very large reserve law enforcement contingent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and intentionally dehumanizing them to abusing people. Not hard to see why. Another $3 trillion dollars to the deficit this year and next? China and Russia have already stopped buying treasuries? The Fed *must* be the only buyer of all of that paper - $800 billion in the first round of "quantitative easing"?