Suicidal Tendencies: A Complex Situation

Everyday millions of people commit suicide, and the only story that you will read about their death is in the obituary columns.Suicide is a serious issue. For the US Military, suicide has become a serious problem. In Iraq alone in 2008, there were forty-one successful suicides of US service members serving in theater. That was forty-one suicides too many.

In May of 2009, a soldier killed himself in Iraq. Every death has a story behind it. This one is no different. The soldier was deployed and a half a world away from his family and home. As many others before him, he went to a local phone center to call home to his wife. He dialed his home number as he had done so before. The phone rang three times and then his wife picked up the phone. She seemed a little distracted. She had seemed very distant for the past few weeks. He imagined this was normal since they were so far apart. After there conversation was done, she hung up.

As he sat the phone down, he remember that he forgot to ask her a question. He dialed her back again. This time a man’s voice answered the phone. Naturally, he was stunned because it was around ten at night back home. He asked what the man was doing there. The man simply replied,”I live here with my girlfriend. Who the hell is this?” He thought for a second that he might have dialed the wrong number until he heard his wife’s voice in the background asking who was on the phone. Quickly, he asked the man who his girlfriend was. The man replied with his wife’s name and still questioned who the caller was. Finally, the soldier revealed his identity to the man whose only reply was “Oh, shit!”

Before another word could be said, the soldier placed the phone down and walked out of the calling center. He had trusted his wife so blindly. After several months of living in a desolate waste land, he was already stressed to his breaking point. The incident had just pushed him over edge. While standing in the open lot in front of the calling center, he pulled out a magazine for his rifle. He inserted the magazine in the weapon and turned the rifle upward pointing it at the roof of his mouth. Without noise or a single word, he squeezed the trigger and was gone forever.

The story seems to occur more often than it should in deployed environments. Evidently, the wife should not have had an affair. We all can concur that. The military was not at fault for the soldier’s death. Countless services are made available to service members to try to prevent suicides. The military is not on trial here. There is no organization in the world that has tried harder to prevent suicides of its members. The ethical dilemma is that every service member has a four hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy called SGLI (Service members group life insurance). The beneficiary of the policy will most likely be the soldier’s wife whose actions were the leading cause in his suicide.

There really is no right answer in the situation. There is no quick fix for the problem. The problem is that situations like these happen all the time. There is no way of holding the spouse liable for his or her actions. In the end, the spouse makes away with the insurance, his deployment pay, and numerous other benefits as a result of her infidelity. Justice is blind, but in a story like this, justice is also handcuffed and helpless.,