Suitably Flip

Kossack Lust For War Dead Getting Goulish

The political site to which every major Democratic Presidential pays homage has long enjoyed the hobby of tallying fallen American soldiers in the Iraq War, but the practice has just taken a slightly more horrifying turn.

One of the site's diarists had the bright idea (promoted to the front page by one of the keepers) of including veteran suicides in the "Bush lied" death toll.

It's time to change of count of American war dead upward.

At least 430 American soldiers have committed suicide since returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan -- and that doesn't even include those who kill themselves before being discharged from the military or commit "suicide by cop."

Regardless, it's clear is that we need to change our count of casualties upward from 4,229 .U.S military deaths (3,842 in Iraq and 387 in Afghanistan) to closer to 5,000 -- possibly more when you consider those deaths that still haven't been counted.

(I assume ".U.S" is some kind of delightfully cynical upside-down-flag kind of protest of the fellow's country on the whole, and not a very bizarre typo.)

What the diarist, Aaron Glantz, is referring to is this AP story that dribbles out a few statistical morsels from an ongoing VA study of the incidence of suicide among veterans.  At first glance, the statistics are pretty daunting - could suicide really be inflating the true number of war-related deaths by more than 10%?

In a word, no.

Glantz neglects to excerpt one inconvenient line from the AP story.

The numbers, while not dramatically different from society as a whole, are reminiscent of the increased suicide risk among returning soldiers in the Vietnam era.

It goes without saying that any suicides are unspeakably tragic and assuming there's any statistically significant difference in the rate among veterans (which stands to reason), even if it's not "dramatically different", then the VA's study and any actionable recommendations that can be derived from it will surely be important work.

But collecting all these deaths into your count of casualties of war is not only opportunistically morbid, it's plainly incorrect.  There are more than 1.6 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Sadly, but undeniably, in any population that large, there are going to be many deaths and some are going to be suicides.  If you want to update your Bush death toll to reflect the uncounted veterans who took their own lives after returning home, the relevant figure will be the number of suicides in excess of the number to be expected by a similar population in civilian society.

This calculation, admittedly, is in itself a little morbid.  But it's exactly what the VA is doing and it serves a vital end, if our goal is to understand the true impact in order to better address it, rather than simply to prop up as many corpses as possible to bolster a political argument.

Until the government study is completed and made publicly available (or until the AP reveals more of the details), consider this a very rough (but certainly more candid) estimate of the uncounted war-related deaths owing to suicide.

Based on global troop deployment since 2001 (and estimates of the average tour length and percentage of personnel that are combat troops, that being the observed population), Americans have spent something like 250,000 person-years in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and 1.2 million person-years back home, including those who have been discharged since October 2001 after having served in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kuwait (the study is said to include at all combat troops discharges since 2001, regardless of theater).

Based on CDC data on the incidence of suicide among 25-44-year-olds in America (and accounting for the fact that men have suicide rate 4x that of women), the expected number of suicides to occur during that many person-years in an equivalent population of American civilians would be roughly 340.

If that's accurate, the large majority of the 430 tragic suicides these anti-war body counters are so eager to claim were not incremental.  Sadly, veterans die, like all Americans.  Some of war injuries, some of natural causes, some of stateside violence having nothing to do with military conflict.

Multiple studies make it clear that combat veterans suffer from a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress.  It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn that they suffer from higher suicide rates, which is why the VA study is important work, which hopefully will lead to ideas of how to improve the situation.  But one sickening side effect of such research appears to be equipping oddly bloodthirsty peaceniks with more data for them to misinterpret.

Comments

Kossack Lust For War Dead Getting Goulish

The political site to which every major Democratic Presidential pays homage has long enjoyed the hobby of tallying fallen American soldiers in the Iraq War, but the practice has just taken a slightly more horrifying turn.

One of the site's diarists had the bright idea (promoted to the front page by one of the keepers) of including veteran suicides in the "Bush lied" death toll.

It's time to change of count of American war dead upward.

At least 430 American soldiers have committed suicide since returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan -- and that doesn't even include those who kill themselves before being discharged from the military or commit "suicide by cop."

Regardless, it's clear is that we need to change our count of casualties upward from 4,229 .U.S military deaths (3,842 in Iraq and 387 in Afghanistan) to closer to 5,000 -- possibly more when you consider those deaths that still haven't been counted.

(I assume ".U.S" is some kind of delightfully cynical upside-down-flag kind of protest of the fellow's country on the whole, and not a very bizarre typo.)

What the diarist, Aaron Glantz, is referring to is this AP story that dribbles out a few statistical morsels from an ongoing VA study of the incidence of suicide among veterans.  At first glance, the statistics are pretty daunting - could suicide really be inflating the true number of war-related deaths by more than 10%?

In a word, no.

Glantz neglects to excerpt one inconvenient line from the AP story.

The numbers, while not dramatically different from society as a whole, are reminiscent of the increased suicide risk among returning soldiers in the Vietnam era.

It goes without saying that any suicides are unspeakably tragic and assuming there's any statistically significant difference in the rate among veterans (which stands to reason), even if it's not "dramatically different", then the VA's study and any actionable recommendations that can be derived from it will surely be important work.

But collecting all these deaths into your count of casualties of war is not only opportunistically morbid, it's plainly incorrect.  There are more than 1.6 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Sadly, but undeniably, in any population that large, there are going to be many deaths and some are going to be suicides.  If you want to update your Bush death toll to reflect the uncounted veterans who took their own lives after returning home, the relevant figure will be the number of suicides in excess of the number to be expected by a similar population in civilian society.

This calculation, admittedly, is in itself a little morbid.  But it's exactly what the VA is doing and it serves a vital end, if our goal is to understand the true impact in order to better address it, rather than simply to prop up as many corpses as possible to bolster a political argument.

Until the government study is completed and made publicly available (or until the AP reveals more of the details), consider this a very rough (but certainly more candid) estimate of the uncounted war-related deaths owing to suicide.

Based on global troop deployment since 2001 (and estimates of the average tour length and percentage of personnel that are combat troops, that being the observed population), Americans have spent something like 250,000 person-years in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and 1.2 million person-years back home, including those who have been discharged since October 2001 after having served in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Kuwait (the study is said to include at all combat troops discharges since 2001, regardless of theater).

Based on CDC data on the incidence of suicide among 25-44-year-olds in America (and accounting for the fact that men have suicide rate 4x that of women), the expected number of suicides to occur during that many person-years in an equivalent population of American civilians would be roughly 340.

If that's accurate, the large majority of the 430 tragic suicides these anti-war body counters are so eager to claim were not incremental.  Sadly, veterans die, like all Americans.  Some of war injuries, some of natural causes, some of stateside violence having nothing to do with military conflict.

Multiple studies make it clear that combat veterans suffer from a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress.  It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn that they suffer from higher suicide rates, which is why the VA study is important work, which hopefully will lead to ideas of how to improve the situation.  But one sickening side effect of such research appears to be equipping oddly bloodthirsty peaceniks with more data for them to misinterpret.