The New York Times recently reported that soldier suicides now outnumber actual combat fatalities. That’s such an incredibly tragic reality to consider that my immediate reaction is to just remind myself to breathe. How is it that the number of people who have survived the horror and chaos of war respond by ending the lives they so passionately protected for 12-15 months (or more, with the prevalence of multiple combat tours now not only a possibility, but a likelihood)? The more you read into the NYT article, the more you are faced with the utter failure of the military industrial complex to provide productive responses to this developing tragedy. I am forced to wonder if they are going about the very issue from the wrong assumptions. It is assumed, in our modern understanding of war and conflict, that after close contact with their own mortality and that of others, a frail, emotive human being can simply pick up their lives and move on after being deployed to modern combat.

To their credit, the military is trying their best to pacify the problem of suicide in their ranks with topical education and awareness. The equation the military is working from essentially boils down to: trauma of war + suicide prevention training = lowered suicide rate. However, this assumes that war is the starting point. This is not the case, nor should it be.

Violence is a result of human arrogance and ignorance, not some concept that is necessary to inter-national or inter-personal interaction. War represents a failure of both reason and imagination. It is primarily an effect to be avoided, not a cause to be pursued. It is true that, as a Christian apologist for nonviolence, I look at this problem with a certain bias, that men and women were never emotionally constructed to carry out the obscenity we today refer to as warfare (though there are a multitude of scientific studies that support my position). A proper perspective on war’s relation to the emotional repercussions is actually: no war = lowered suicide rate. Real simple.

War goes against our very nature as human beings, and we are one of only a few species in nature that conduct intra-species violence. It is not the fear of being killed, but the fear of having to kill, or believing that one has killed, that leaves irreparable scars. It stands to reason that when we subject members of our human family to such things as improvised explosive devices, “surgical” military strikes, or shock and awe, it tweaks their very humanity out of whack. The military ‘brass,’ despite their best efforts, are chasing ghosts (quite literally and quite tragically). Take it from someone who has grappled very directly with his own humanity and with being asked to dispose of the humanity of others; guilt-fueled suicides won’t decrease until our dependence upon violent conflict does. It’s not that complicated, but it is that necessary.

FOR FURTHER READING:

The New York Times article on military suicide rate: “After combat, victims of an inner war”

Soldier Suicides: Counting the forgotten casualties of war

Killology (science exploring the causes and effects of committing violence)

Logan Laituri is a veteran of the Iraq war and a conscientious objector who works actively in Christian Peacemaker teams. He currently lives in the Camden House New Monastic community in Camden, New Jersey. He was featured in “The Ordinary Radicals” discussing Christian non-violence.