So
Brooks is pleased by
Sebastian Junger's article from last May in Vanity Fair, which
starts by stating the American military has the highest post-traumatic stress disorder rate in its history, and probably the world. But then he notes there is no statistical relationship between suicide and combat. Vets who worked far from the violence are just as likely to commit suicide. Over the decades, combat deaths have dropped while PTSD rates have risen. The Israeli Army, which sees a lot of trauma, has a rate as low as 1 percent.
Obviously, to Brooks, that's a sign of our "lack of community" here in the selfish every-man-for-himself States, unlike that warm, loving, united Israel where there's no alienation because everybody's just so
totally committed to togetherness, though what Junger was interested in is naturally something else, that is the effectiveness of the IDF in dealing with traumatic stress in a way the US fails to do, through a swift forward treatment (of the kind, as it happens,
pioneered by the Wehrmacht in World War II:
