by Carl Osgood

The problem of mental illnesses and suicides among veterans of the Iraq war is generally being treated as an epidemic of individual cases brought on by their traumatic experiences and the inability, or refusal, of the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs to appropriately deal with them. Recent findings expressed in a number of news reports and research studies, combined with the counter-intelligence work of the LaRouche Youth Movement on the addiction of youth to video games should suggest another possibility, however. LaRouchePAC and EIR have already published a great deal of research showing that the deployment of internet social networking sites and mass market homicidal videogames is producing an entire generation of zombies, such as evidenced by recent school shootings such as the massacre at Virginia Tech, last spring, and more recently, in Finland. What happens when young people already immersed in the video game culture of murder and mayhem are indoctrinated into the military and deployed into a real war? (See: The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is the Devil in your Laptop?)

One effect, clearly, has been the widely reported high rates of mental illness among veterans of the Iraq war. Some experts estimate that as many as one-third of the 1.5 million service members who have deployed to Iraq will suffer some sort of mental illness. Mental illnesses often first manifest themselves as disciplinary problems, however, and commanders often treat them as such. National Public Radio's Daniel Zwerdling looked into this problem and reported, on Nov. 15, that the Army has kicked out 28,000 soldiers for "misconduct" or "personality disorder" since 2003, far more than have been discharged for those reasons in the four years prior to the invasion of Iraq. The result is that soldiers leave the Army with less than honorable discharges and are ineligible for veterans and retirement benefits, including medical and psychiatric care.

These veterans are obviously at higher risk of experiencing almost everything that can go wrong in a person's life. Most often, they end up in the justice system, but suicide is also a great risk, including among veterans who left the military honorably and with the full range of benefits. There has been anecdotal evidence for some years that suicide was a major problem among veterans of the Iraq war, especially if they were reservists, but there was no information to indicate the magnitude of the problem, until CBS News dug into it in a report broadcast just one day before the NPR report. CBS was unable to get definitive figures from the Pentagon or the Department of Veterans Affairs so it turned to the states. The data provided by 45 states added up to 6,256 suicides among veterans in the year 2005 alone, an average of 120 per week. Overall, veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide as non-veterans. Veterans aged 20 to 24, that is, young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, were two to four times more likely to commit suicide as non-veterans from the same age group. Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, called this an epidemic. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) added that these figures show that we have really failed those who have served our country.

In fact, the results of the CBS research should not have come as that much of a surprise. Earlier data cited in a new report from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, published in the December 2007 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, shows that the prevalence of significant depressive symptoms among veterans is 31 percent, 2 to 5 times higher than in the general U.S. population. The Michigan study also found that the highest suicide rate was among younger rather than older veterans. The study suggests that "mental health professionals treating depressed veterans must be cognizant of these higher risks among younger veterans, who are perhaps particularly suffering from recent combat exposure...." The study found the same result among depressed veterans with a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder, indicating "that younger veterans may be a particularly high risk group..."

At least one veterans advocate thinks that the CBS numbers may actually be low. David Pelkey, national director of American Combat Veterans of War, an organization of Vietnam combat veterans that helps Marines at Camp Pendleton, California work through their combat experiences, and himself a highly decorated Vietnam War combat veteran, described, in a Nov. 19 interview, how many young Marines take to the highways at high speed, on their motorcycles, in an effort to recapture the adrenaline rush of combat. He considers this suicidal behavior, even though, if a Marine dies in a motorcycle accident as a result of racing on the highway, it will not be recorded as such. He noted that in one month, this year, there were some forty motorcycle accidents involving Marines at Camp Pendleton, and the reaction of the Marine Corps was to bring California State Highway Patrol officials onto the base to lecture Marines about motorcycle safety. "What they need to do is get to the core issue, which is the combat stress issue," Pelkey said. "That's what's pushing the whole thing."

One crucial difference between today's generation of veterans and those of the Vietnam War is that, in the 1960's there were no video games. While methods of training soldiers to break down the natural resistance to killing another human being were already in place at the time of Vietnam, today's young recruit is likely to have already killed hundreds of virtual bad guys in video games before he ever picks up a military-issued rifle for the first time. "If you're continually around killing and destruction and stuff like that, it kind of singes your conscience a little bit," says Pelkey. While young Iraq war veterans are showing up in courtrooms across the country far too frequently, there have been no reports, yet, of any massacres, outside of the war zone, being attributed to a war veteran. What are the chances that among this population there is a time-bomb waiting to go off?