disobey:

More US soldiers are losing their lives to suicide than from enemy forces, the Pentagon reports this week.

According to findings released on Thursday by the US Department of Defense, the suicide rate for active duty soldiers so far in 2012 is around one per day. In just the first 155 days of the year, 154 soldiers have committed suicide, a statistic only made more ghastly by comparing it to the number of American troops killed by insurgency this year — the website iCasualties.org reports that only 139 US soldiers died in battle this year.

“We are very concerned at this point that we are seeing a high number of suicides at a point in time where we were expecting to see a lower number of suicide,” Jackie Garrick, head of the Pentagon’s newly established Defense Suicide Prevention Office, tells the Associated Press.

In other news, Jackie Garrick, head of the Pentagon’s newly established Defense Suicide Prevention Office, has been living under a rock and has never read a newspaper. Pentagon officials report that she may in fact have actually been joking, or under the influence of common-sense-inhibiting drugs when she released this statement.

(via azelie)