Suicides in Marine Corps Rise by 29%

From the Washington Post courtesy of Shattered Soapbox:

The Marine Corps suffered a 29 percent spike in suicides last year, reaching the highest number in at least a decade, with the demanding pace of military operations likely contributing to the deaths, the top-ranking U.S. Marine said yesterday.

Thirty-one Marines committed suicide in 2004, all of them enlisted men, not commissioned officers. The majority were younger than 25 and took their lives with gunshot wounds, according to Marine statistics. Another 83 Marines attempted suicide. There were 24 suicides in 2003, and there have not been more than 29 in any year in the last 10.

And

Marine commanders say the rise in suicides continues a worrisome three-year trend that is likely linked to stress from the sharply increased pace of war-zone rotations. At the same time, they said the increase in suicides is not directly related to service in Iraq or Afghanistan; since 2001 24 percent of the suicides have been committed by Marines who have been deployed there, the statistics show.

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Whether or not this has anything to do with combat stress, it is agonizingly clear that we're asking the military to do too much, and they're cracking under the strain. From National Guardsmen refusing to run convoys without enough armor, to soldiers shooting wounded unarmed Iraqi insurgents on the ground, to the stealth draft of the "ready reserve," to an upswing in military suicides, our boys are obviously at the breaking point. It's long past time to bring them all home.

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