Noah Schachtman at Danger Room posts on a piece to be broadcast on CBS this evening.
Schachtman quotes from tonight’s CBS report:
Veterans aged 20-24, who are those most likely to have served during the War on Terror, are killing themselves when they return home at rates estimated to be between 2.5 and almost 4 times higher than non-vets in the same age group. (22.9 to 31.9 per 100,000 people as compared to just 8.3 per 100,000 for non-vets).
* Overall, those who have served in the military were more than twice as likely to take their own life in 2005, than Americans who never served. (18.7-20.8 per 100,000 as compared to 8.9 per 100,000).
…
The CBS News Investigative Unit, led by producer Pia Malbran, contacted all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for vets and non-vets dating back to 1995. Beyond the first-ever collection of raw nationwide numbers, Dr. Steve Rathbun, the acting head of the biostatistics department at the University of Georgia, did a detailed analysis of the numbers provided by state authorities for 2004 and 2005.
…Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America: “Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged.”