Am I alone in being concerned that a lot of us middle-aged nobodies are going to pull through from social distancing but our nation’s pool of future military leaders are this fragile?
I have to assume there are underlying reasons for the suicide that go deeper than isolation. Normal people don’t off themselves just because they’re isolated for a week. Even John McCain was tougher than that.
I guess “natural selection” has crossed off two fighter pilots that would have cracked under pressure. Insensitive, I know, but we’re talking about national defense here.
When I went through Infantry OCS fifty-odd years ago, it seemed, at the time, that the entire program was structured to cause you to commit suicide. Or resign.
The times have changed.
Are these women cadets? All writing studiously avoids the question.
Are women suicides disproportionate?
Real questions “journalism” won’t touch.
These are seniors at the Air Force Academy? It sounds like the Air Force has not trained them for the reality of war and for what participation in a war might be like. Snowflakes. You’re better off without them becoming Officers if the off themselves like that because they had to sit in a dorm room for a couple of days.
I wonder if the Wiccan prayer circle is also off limits? A national embarrassment.
The commander should’ve doubled down and closed the chow hall. Two MREs a day
“... punished for violating the social distancing measures with marching practice.”
In my day, we called it “tanning your rifle”.
There are no suicides from isolation. There is no collateral damage from lockdown.
All is well.
All will be well, somehow.
Death toll, models, projections and most of all “grim”
Don’t be a flubro.
They would have handled being captured by the enemy real well
And don’t kid yourself a USAF chow hall is pretty nice. I got to eat in one one time. Some weird circumstances had our Marine unit pass-through one one morning. As we went down the line with a tray, the guy literally asked how we wanted our eggs cooked... and nobody verbally berated us.
Almost felt creepy, as in “why are you treating us so nice?”.
But it's hard to imagine any Academy "student" committing suicide simply because of enforced isolation.
They would have handled being captured by the enemy real well
“You can attack the mainline U.S., there’s a snowflake behind every blade of grass.”
There must be some other reason than just the social distancing causing the suicide.
How can the cadets handle other stressful situations thrust upon them?
No wonder that the military has a bunch of spoiled children as officers, hope they never get captured in a war. Who is picking these babies?
Suicides? Cmon!! Clearly those that did this were not properly vetted for miltary service. How are some of these officer candidate wanna bes there now going act during the Pilot, escape and evasion course???
This is an honest question. Was suicide as much an issue for the military during WWII, and just kept quiet?
Silveria is by far the worst superintendent in the history of USFA. He’s a complete leftist who is only concerned about his own image and being liked by the media. The grad community by and large cannot stand him and General Edmondson, the Commandant is not far behind. The last Commandant, General Goodwin, was railroaded by Silveria because she actually wanted to instill a more disciplined and demanding environment for the cadets. The fact that she had a wife, while not the preferred model of an AF family, had nothing to do with the fact that she actually wanted to return USAFA to a more disciplined institution.
Sad. Many of these have no genes of the Greatest Generation. Diversity is not our strength. It waters down everything about us.
What would the wimps do if captured by an enemy during a conflict? We saw a good example of what to expect with Gary Powers a few years back cried like a baby, and spilled is guts. People like that should not be in the USA military!
Maybe they should make isolation a new requirement for future classes of all officer wanna be.
Frankly, they need to return to the harsh physical and psychological training of over 50 years ago - the type their forebears went through who survived the wretched North Vietnamese prison camps. That was before they started admitting women into the Academies. The program has notably "softened" since then. Now it seems their greatest institutional goals revolve around avoiding sexual harassment and discrimination - not winning wars.