‘Unjustifiable US wars worldwide to blame for rising military suicides’

Data released by the Pentagon on Thursday revealed that military suicides surged this year to a record high among active-duty troops. The Army, Navy and Marine Corps all saw the rate of suicides go up as well as the overall numbers, the figures revealed.

Commenting on the revelations, Scott Bennett, a former US military psychological warfare officer, said on Press TV’s The Debate show that US soldiers take their own lives because the “very corrosive policies in the US military” make them unable to cope with reality.

Americans, who had joined the US military “to serve and protect their country, to feel like they are doing a noble, heroic Captain America sort of service,” find out that the US military’s reality is something else, according to Bennett.

Bennett said he himself had joined the military after the September 11, 2001 attacks to defend the United States against terrorism.

The former intelligence officer said when he entered the military, he found out that the 9/11 attacks were false flag operations planned and executed by American and Israeli elements as a pretext to launch the so-called US war on terror, which, he said, was in reality a plot to conquer the globe.

Bennett added that more military personnel are gradually discovering the truth, seeing themselves as fighting an unjustifiable war, killing women and children abroad, while their own family institutions are falling apart at home.

Washington initiated the so-called war on terror with the intention of capturing the world and achieving global hegemony at the expense of US soldiers’ lives, said the analyst, adding that many soldiers have been disillusioned after finding out this fact.

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“The reality in the service is quite different than what the fantasy is,” Bennett explains. “There is a tremendous amount of boredom, very poor officers, the leadership in the military is a shadow of what it once was … and you now have very corrosive policies in the US military that contradict any moral identity,”

Bennett also cited an alarming rise in drug abuse among US military personnel as another reason for the soaring number of suicides among soldiers who fail to cope with the moral identity crisis, poverty and traumatic experiences in the war abroad.

He said soldiers try to resolve their moral confusion and depression by taking anti-depressant drugs and sleeping pills, but they eventually become addicted to the drugs and “these soldiers become so depressed that they kill themselves.”

In turn, Julian Boykins, founder of the Young Republicans of Southern Maryland, who was also joining the show, said the soldiers’ separation from their families and a lack of proper training aimed at facilitating their psychological recovery on their return to their homes were the main reason for the soaring rate of suicides.

He added, “You look at realities versus what they were told …. If the truth got out about what was going on, you would have a lot more people skeptical about joining the military.”