"Human Beings Have Limits"

Blue Girl posted this yesterday at They Gave Us A Republic. It cannot be improved upon, so I am posting it in its entirety:

As the wars grind on, it gets harder and harder to come to grips with what is being asked of the 1% who serve, and the families they leave behind when they deploy. It would be hard anyway because I know what service entails and what it requires -- but it's compounded by the fact that my nephew is about to deploy for his third deployment to a war zone.

I remember how I reacted a few years ago when I heard about people preparing for their third and fourth tours of duty. I was livid, and started screaming that it is obvious that we need a draft.

That has never been more clear to me than it is after seeing this:

A soldier's widow says his fellow Army Rangers wouldn't do anything to help him before he took his own life - after eight deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army found Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann's body at a training area of Joint Base Lewis McChord a few weeks ago.

A spokesman for the base tells KOMO News that the nature of the death is still undetermined. But Staff Sgt. Hagemann's widow says her husband took his own life - and it didn't need to happen.

"It was just horrible. And he would just cry," says Ashley Hagemann.

Ashley says her husband Jared tried to come to grips with what he'd seen and done on his eight deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"And there's no way that any God would forgive him - that he was going to hell," says Ashley. "He couldn't live with that any more."

Ashley says her Army Ranger husband wanted out of the military.

"He just wanted to know what it felt like to be normal again," she says.

Staff Sgt. Hagemann had orders to return to Afghanistan this month for a ninth tour of duty.

Instead, on June 28, Ashley says her husband took a gun and shot himself in the head on base. She claims the Rangers never took his pleas for help seriously.

"There's no way that they should not have been able to pick up on it," Ashley says. "When he's telling them, he's reaching out ...." [emphasis added]

Jared Hagemann was born on November 5, 1985. He wasn't even 26 years old, but he had done eight tours of duty. He had literally been at war his entire adult life. He had no idea what "normal" is for a young man his age. His death was most certainly service-related and if his widow has to fight for benefits, the outcry should be long, loud and sustained until she is treated right and taken care of, because her husband absolutely died in the line of duty.

I am an atheist. I don't believe in magic sky wizards or the existence of hell or that there is any sort of life after death. But there is a part of me that hopes I'm wrong, because it there is anyone who deserves an eternity in hell, it's the bastards who send young men off for nine fucking deployments without giving it a second thought, while their own children stay safely out of harm's way.

I want to see limits placed on the number of combat tours any one American Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine can serve. Since the different branches deploy for different lengths of time, I think 24 months, total, is reasonable. If you look at the PTSD data, you can see that the risk ramps up with every deployment. Eight tours of duty for a man not yet 26 is just insane. There is no way in hell he was getting the support he needed to reintegrate into American life, hell he wasn't even getting adequate dwell-time at home. The math just doesn't work.

Until we give up on this "all volunteer force" -notion- nonsense that works only in peacetime (and then it should be classified for what it really is: a federal jobs program for the less-well-off and rural kids with few prospects after high school) and limit the amount of time our troops spend in war zones, every suicide prevention program the Army tries will fail. Because human beings have limits. And when they hit the wall, they stop. One way or another.