I was going to say that was suspiciously low…
The rate of suicide attempts among the Lincoln strike group’s sailors was roughly consistent with that of the entire active duty Navy in 2024, the most recent year for which the Pentagon has released suicide data. That year, the Navy saw 356 suicide attempts among its estimated 337,000 active duty sailors.
It being the same rate as active navy is a huge red flag it’s a bullshit number.
If they had said “same rate as deployed sailors” it wouldn’t be as obvious of a lie. But still unlikely.
Either not all attempts got reported at every level (they never do) or there is a real number that made it to the top and this guy lied.
“SAD” (suicidal and depressed) isn’t uncommon on land, but massively scales up even on a short couple weeks at sea. Months with no end in sight…
It’s getting everyone to some extent.
What happens when service members attempt? Like their careers are obviously over, but like, do you just throw them in the brig and hope they don’t bang their head against the wall?
What happens when service members attempt? Like their careers are obviously over
Nope
Most of the time people pretend it just didn’t happen…
Ah. Yes. There’s no way that could have unintended consequences
Those are the intended consequences…
A suicide makes the command look bad, but so does attempts. So they don’t report attempts, and hope the person keeps it together while at that command.
All that matters is the metrics because that’s all that goes up the chain of command. So they hide attempts that are hidable, even people saying they’re gonna do it. I had a buddy that bought the shotgun, told medical, and they told him to wait two weeks and see if the thoughts went away before he could get any type of treatment.
Like, that was nuclear engineering school and about as bad as it could get, but the command was 100% willing to roll the dice on him not following thru, even tho less than 2 months before that a security guard (also active duty) had blew his brains out with his AR15 5 feet from our training building door.
It’s like fight club, there is an acceptable number of deaths, and they did the math and realized a suicidal person would eventually flunk out and that didn’t count as a black mark against the command like a suicide did. By their math, it was better to say “X students tried to kill themselves” than “X students had to leave training from the stress of the program”.
Because they’d have to fix the amount of stress in training if they were honest about what was really happening
Same shit happens anywhere stress is applied, and that’s the whole time someone’s out to see.
What happens when the suicidal turns murder then? That’s happened on numerous occasions on bases in the states?
When I was in the US Navy on a long deployment I beat the shit out of multiple people, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
The solution for that was I was allowed to talk to a psychiatrist from the German military who happened to be on the ship, because that wouldn’t document anything officially.
His advice was it was a six month deployment and would eventually be over. Which honestly is all he could do. I was “essential to ship movement” and he belonged to another countrys military. Super cool dude tho, and talking once a week really did help
But we were in an environment where everything was metal and a fistfight or even grappling could easily become manslaughter…
Hell, within 24 hours of my first time out to sea I picked up two people to break up their fistfight and threw them both acrossthe engine room at the same time, and my next watch a guy pulled a knife on me but I got him to back down.
They truly don’t give a fuck, and if worst case scenario had happened I think it would have been covered up as an accident.
Like, engine rooms are always rougher, but I was fighting people 3-4 pay grades above me in sleeping quarters and cafeteria with the “normies” and literally never got in trouble or had anyone in my chain of command even mention it, with the exception of us getting to be able to cut in the chow line after one incident… I was even fucking with officers, both in my chain of command and the random junior ones that wanted to act tough not turning sideways in the narrow hallways.
I was not in a good place mentally, but everyone was fine rolling the dice.
It’s been a minute since I was in, but shit like that doesn’t change. Because every new generation comes up in the same environment, if they don’t like it they don’t re-enlist. It’s institutional inertia
A reminder that suicide is never the answer.
Especially if you’re part of the military. There’s bigger fish out there that put you in this situation. And that pain is temporary.
