Army Suicides to Hit New High in 2009

by: Richard Allen Smith

Wed Nov 18, 2009 at 13:00:00 PM EST

We're also going to hear a lot about how a large amount of the suicides are due to PTSD or stress of repeated deployments and time away from family, and I'm sure a good deal of them are. But an interesting stat in the article linked above is that about one-third of those suicides were by Soldiers who had never deployed. So what is the problem?

If I had to guess, I'd say leadership. I'm not arguing that these Soldiers' officers and NCOs are responsible for their suicides, or that they somehow drove their Soldiers to take their own lives.

This is anecdotal, but the same problem I saw in my unit before I separated has been repeated to me by Vets and Soldiers from units all over the country. The last few months I spent in Afghanistan and Fort Bragg, nearly 60% of our unit was stop-lossed and not reenlisting. Every company commander in my battalion except one and every primary staff officer except one submitted their voluntary REFRAD packet before leaving country.  When our stop-loss was lifted, junior NCOs left en masse. Hell, I even knew a couple E-7s that got out rather than riding it out to retirement. I don't pretend to speak for any of these people, but I think its a safe assumption to say that repeated deployments and time away from their families was a major part of a lot of their decisions.

It's pretty easy to guess what happens when junior officers and NCOs leave the Army in a tsunami of separations.  It creates a leadership vacuum in the ranks that work the closest with young Soldiers. Soldiers who are too inexperienced to lead are then promoted too soon and given the charge of teaching, coaching and mentoring junior enlisted Soldiers.

I saw this happen in my unit. Soldiers who were E2s when we arrived in Afghanistan were Sergeants by the time we left.  If the Army looks close enough, I'm confident they will find that a good portion of that third who never deployed, and some of those that did, had leaders who were young, inexperienced and didn't know how to properly take care of their Soldiers.  Being a leader isn't solely giving orders and teaching your subordinates how to shoot, move and communicate. It's also about knowing your Soldiers, knowing what makes them tick, knowing what stresses them in their professional and personal lives so that you know  how to best address their concerns and lead them to be the best Soldiers they can be.

Without quality, experienced leaders who have the faith of their subordinates, those subordinates will have no one to turn too. They will not have confidence in the ability of their chain of command to help them. They will not feel comfortable taking their problems to their first line supervisor.  They will hold whatever their issues are close until the bottle breaks. Sometimes, this happens in the form of discipline issues are AWOL. In other cases, it leads to an incohesive and inefficient team. I'm willing to bet that if you scratch the surface, extreme cases lead to increased suicide numbers within the ranks. Simply put, when leaders don't know how to lead, things turn out badly.