While vets are our friends and neighbors, so are the kids and under-employed adults thinking of enlisting.
Yes, we don’t want to demonize anyone. But by the same token some of us don’t particularly want friends and neighbors to go to slaughter (or to slaughter others).
Of our 1.43 million active duty military, 84% of the Army and 94% of the Marine Corps are male. 75% of the military is White, 18% Black, and the rest a mix of other ethnicities. 52% are married. 93% have a high school diploma or GED. The greatest number of soldiers are between 21 and 30. However, of the 4300 who have died in Iraq so far, more than half were 18-24 and minorities accounted for 30% of the deaths. These are all characteristics of the new “professional” military consisting of all “volunteers.”
Some of this picture — of a white, older, married male military — is skewed by the fact that many men hadn’t completely thought through staying in the Reserves which, during the height of the Iraq war, accounted for almost half of all active duty personnel. A resulting “back door draft” forced many of these men to “re-enlist” against their will because there were not enough troops to wage the Iraq war.
In a CRS study of active duty deaths since 1980, only 10% of all deaths were due to hostilities. 52.6% were accidents, 17.53% illnesses, 13.72% suicides, and 4.8% were homicides. The mortality rate in the study ranges from 0.0495% in 2000 to 0.1214% in 2007.
But for each of the 45,706 deaths since 1980, there are 7 to 10 injuries for every death.
The 55,482,849 (!!) enlistments since 1980 have also resulted in millions of Americans with mental problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse problems; and who have had difficulty in keeping their marriages, families, and jobs afloat.
Forget for a second the $1.1 trillion that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost to-date.
The human and social costs of militarization are costing us more than we know.
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