Despite the Army’s best efforts, USA Today reports, it can’t seem to stop what has become an epidemic of suicides at Fort Hood.
The Army reports 22 soldiers are believed to have killed themselves in the last year – nearly twice the number fatally gunned down in November 2009 by Maj. Nidal Hasan, an Islamist terrorist within the Army’s midst.
No one can understand what’s responsible for this tragedy, but the Army is treating symptoms through a massive psychological counseling program that began shortly after the Fort Hood massacre. Fort Hood now has one of the largest counseling staffs in the Army, we’re told, with some 170 behavioral health workers.
“Any time they’ve asked for it, the Army has done everything it can to provide assistance,” said Army Col. Christopher Philbrick, deputy commander of an Army task force on reducing suicides. He said it “has been very frustrating for us to figure out what we haven’t done right.”
While Fort Hood leads all Army bases in suicides, they are also up across the board, making 2010 a record year.
Now, I don’t want to politicize a tragedy like this, but let me offer some suggestions on what might be contributing factors:
- Nidal Hasan was a psychiatrist at Fort Hood. In other words, he was one of the people responsible for offering psychological counseling to soldiers there prior to his rampage. What does that suggest about the quality of psychological counseling the Army is offering at Fort Hood and elsewhere?
- The Army has been less than candid about what transpired at Fort Hood when Hasan went off like a time bomb – and every soldier understands why he was left in his position despite all the warning signs. It was a case of political correctness run amok. A deeply and obviously deranged psychopathic Islamist killer was promoted to major, assigned duties to counsel soldiers, given access to firearms and allowed to slaughter 13 men and women in cold blood on an Army base. Might this be expected to create some depression in the ranks – depression that might not be mollified by more of the same kind of counseling Hasan was offering?
- The Army has not learned the vital lessons of the Fort Hood massacre, and rank-and-file soldiers are bright enough to realize this. The chain of command hasn’t acknowledged what it is doing wrong when it allows the enemy inside the gate and gives that enemy responsibility and power. How would you feel if you were a soldier in this situation?
- One of the lessons the Army should have learned from the massacre was that it makes no sense to keep soldiers unarmed – turning the base into a virtual “gun-free zone.” Gun-free zones are the least safe places when a highly motivated serial killer is around. Why on earth would soldiers not be given access to firearms on an Army base? That is a scandal that has still not been answered. Any soldier or parent of a soldier should be incensed by such nonsensical policies.
One last hypothetical: I have heard directly from dozens and dozens of servicemen in the last year how angry they are about the impending demise of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals in the military. I have personally heard from dozens of enlisted men and women and dozens of officers who are deeply frustrated and determined to leave the service as quickly as they can. They sense this is a policy specifically designed to destroy the effectiveness of the U.S. military.
Should it really be a shock that our soldiers are killing themselves when our elected leaders are clearly attempting to kill the institution to which they volunteered to serve and risk their lives?
