updated: Sun February 3, 2008

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/01/military.suicides/


We are doing a project in Graphic Design II , where we pick a human rights issue to make a poster for, this girl chose this topic...she was told it wasn't a human rights issue, OK, but that's not what this is about. How come I never saw this (something you would think is important) on the Television, or used in the Democratic Campaign?

She told me that they would never put something like this on TV, it would kill any momentum the war had going for it and that the news is really "staged" ( I rolled my eyes on the news is staged, but she does have a point.)

for 2007 the average was 5 attempted suicides a day.

My questions to you guys:

Do you think its wrong to hide these kind of things from people?

What do you think about soldiers trying to kill themselves? What do you think they signed up out of desperation and realised their mistake?

Tell me these are guys in the Army or some other branch besides the Marine Corps.

I can't see a Marine doing this, but if you throw a bunch of under trained civilians in camo over into a war zone then I suppose the feelings will get the better of some of them.  Did anyone ever get the scoop on why they want to die?  Obviously they're not afraid to die in the first place... so it's not the stress of thinking you might get shot.  Maybe they're afraid of being captured and tortured...

Anyways, as for your question... Yes, I think it's perfectly okay to hide those kinds of things in war time.  And I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe that information like that can halt a campaign's momentum.  Perhaps if we knew sooner there would have been a much larger push to bring back our troops, which isn't a bad thing at all though in this case... It's hard to say what the better option is.  We know the "enemy" isn't going to pursue us in mass force when we start falling back, but say if it was any side in a war like WWII, information like that leaking out about a country's forces definitely would have crippled their momentum, and when a formidable, massive enemy figures something out like that, they'll just become that much more relentless.  imo, when it comes to the outcome of a war bigger pictureness, hiding this sort of behavior is probably in good interest.