Failing Our Military Veterans
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
My Sunday column argues that we have let our veterans down. This column came to me in conversations with Ashley Gilbertson, an ace photographer for the Times who worked for years in Iraq and more recently has chronicled the struggles of veterans upon returning home. I was flabbergasted to learn from Ashley that more veterans kill themselves every year than the sum of all the soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since those wars combined.
I tried not to bog the column down with statistics, but I do want to acknowledge that the data are not terribly reliable. If anything, though, the suicide numbers are probably an undercount. That’s because suicides are always under-reported, partly to spare families grief and partly because some deaths (such as Ryan’s overdose) are ambiguous. It’s also because the veteran suicides are tabulated based on whether the death certificate lists the dead person as a military veteran, and some death certificates don’t include that information. So if anything, the veteran suicide numbers are even higher.
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http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/failing-our-military-veterans/