Pentagon: Extended Tours Taking Toll on Soldiers

After dodging roadside bombs, IED's and snipers, our troops step into an increaseof mental health problems, suicides and divorce mainly due to the newly imposedtour extensions says pentagon study.

Soldiers and Marines who have served multiple deployments in Iraq aresuffering more mental health problems, suicides and divorces, according to aPentagon study released Friday that studied troops who served overseas lastyear.

Army soldiers show a higher rate of mental health and family problems thanMarines, but that is due to their longer tours of duty, according to the ArmySurgeon General's Mental Health Advisory Team, which has conducted threeperiodic reviews of troop morale, concerns and mental health issues since thewar in Iraq began in 2003.

Our military has been stretched sothin, that the results have become just as (if not more) stressful to thesoldiers than serving in combat.

Asked about the effect of deployment on their marriages, more soldiersreported unhappy marriages (30 percent) than in previous surveys. Similarly, 20percent of soldiers surveyed last year reported they were getting divorced, upfrom 15 percent among soldiers in Iraq in 2005.

The suicide rate for soldiers deployed to Iraq was 30 percent higher, 16 per100,000 people, than in the Army in general, which had a rate of 11 per 100,000people.

As for overall morale, about 20 percent of soldiers reported high or veryhigh morale and about 45 percent reported low or very low morale. Thatrepresented a slight decline and the study suggested that the length and pace ofdeployments was a factor. The study described overall morale for both soldiersand Marines as low.

So next time you hear one of the pro-warconservatives talk about how the soldiers are behind the war, tell them to turn Foxnews off and GOOGLEthe truth.

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