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The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war.”
    Goodell also described how the Marines have exploited young people, “Every single Marine I know goes to Iraq to help,” she said. “While I was there that is what I thought. That is why I volunteered. I thought I was going to help the Iraqis. I know better now. We did the dirty work. We were used by the government. The military knows that young, single men are dangerous. We breed it in Marines. We push the testosterone. We don’t want them to be educated.… We cannot question anyone. We do what we are told.”
    In corporate media, coverage of suicide rates among the troops, a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the war and occupations itself, is absent, though there has been basic acknowledgment that “the Army and the Marine Corps, which have borne the heaviest burden in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been hit the hardest, reporting a record number of suicides in 2008. This year (2009), the toll is on pace to climb even higher. When combined, the figures paint a stark portrait of loss. More than 2,100 members of the armed forces have taken their own lives since 2001, nearly triple the number of troops who have died in Afghanistan and almost half of all US fatalities in Iraq.” 3
    Post-traumatic stress disorder is also widely covered in the corporate media with the focus on the soldiers themselves and not on the US government’s position in these wars and occupations. Corporate media’s framing of the impact on soldiers never questions the US policy of maintaining a military empire of occupations and wars worldwide.
    A bipartisan group of senators is asking President Barack Obama to change the current “insensitive” policy of not sending condolence letters to families of service members who commit suicide. A lettersigned and sent May 25 by eleven senators—ten Democrats and one Republican—urged the president to “take immediate steps to reverse the long-standing policy of withholding presidential letters of condolence” to families of troops who killed themselves. 4
    In the January 2011 issue of
American Psychologist
, the American Psychology Association (APA) dedicated thirteen articles to detailing and celebrating a $117 million collaboration with the US Army, “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” (CSF), marketed as resilience training to reduce, if not prevent, adverse psychological consequences to soldiers who endure combat. Because of the CSF emphasis on “positive psychology,” advocates call it a holistic approach to warrior training.
    Criticism arose shortly after the initiative was announced—including ethical questions about whether soldiers should be trained to become desensitized to traumatic events. Psychologist Bruce Levine loudly warned politicians, military brass, and the nation that if soldiers and veterans discover that they have been deceived about the meaningfulness and necessity of their mission, it is only human for them to become more prone to emotional turmoil, which can lead to destructive behaviors for themselves and others.
    When asked during a National Public Radio interview whether CSF would be “the largest-ever experiment,” Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, “Well, we’re not describing it as an experiment. We’re describing it as training.” 5
    “It is highly unusual for the effectiveness of such a huge and consequential intervention program not to be convincingly demonstrated first in carefully conducted, randomized, controlled trials—before being rolled out under less controlled conditions,” wrote Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk, and Stephen Soldz in
Truthout
.
    The Obama administration has quietly put into practice an escalation of policy left over from the Bush