Yep…
…I still hate what they're doing to my Army...
The Defense Department's Medical Surveillance report from November examines "a large, widespread, and growing mental health problem among U.S. military members."Support the troops. Bring 'em home until we have a mission worthy of their service.
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The Army was hit hardest by the most common and long-lasting problems -- post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, alcohol dependence and substance dependence, according to the report.
Labels: Army, Deployments, Mental Health, PTSD, Withdrawal
posted by Shaun at
3:48 PM
2 Comments:
Using American armed forces for nation building has been shown not to work, at least as far back as the intervention in Somalia. The sad irony of the current situation is it was engineered by the last president named Bush; who campaigned against nation building, when he first ran for president.
The Federal government should seriously consider bringing home most of our troops from around the globe. It would save a ton of money in the Federal budget. But the truly sad fact of the matter is the military has become perhaps the ultimate jobs program.
It begs the question of what happens to people, if we start cashiering them out of the Army, Marines and Air Force, in the midst of this so-called "jobless recovery"? But given the alternative - continuing to send young men and women into situations where there can be no real winners - it's something that the current president needs to start thinking seriously about confronting. Otherwise, we're going to have ever more people with that Thousand Yard Stare.
The majority of our military personnel are not warriors. They are craftsmen, machine operators, technologists, medical professionals, actuaries and practitioners of many other civilian trades. These skills are contracted for and would add great value to our domestic economy if employed here. The ultimate domestic stimulus would be to bring the troops home and decommission a large contingent for domestic economic security, still employed under government auspices. A program of America building would stoke demand beyond any economists' wildest fantasy.
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