Mullen: 18 Veterans Kill Themselves Every Day In The U.S.

Excellent piece today at  The Raw Story in which Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks about the strains that America's most recent wars have caused on military families and the startling rate of suicide among Veterans and active-duty troops.

“We've got 18 vets a day who are killing themselves in the United States,” said Mullen, while also discussing  the overall impact on children whose parents have been gone on multiple deployments, for much of their childhoods.  Here's Mullen:

“If I’m a 5-year-old boy or girl in the family of one of these deploying units for the army whose average deployment was 12 months at a time, and my dad or mom – but mostly my dad – has deployed at this pace, I’m now 15 or 16 years old, and my dad has been gone three, four or five times. And my whole conscious life, from the time when I was 5 and I started to figure out that there was something out there, my whole conscious life has been at war. The United States has never, never experienced that before. And we see incredible stresses on families.”

You can read the entire story at The Raw Story.