Jason Scheuerman was a soldier who was suffering with severe depression and was caught with his rifle in his mouth, about to commit suicide while serving in Iraq. What did the United States Army brass do? They punished him and threatened him with Court Marshal, imprisonment and the possibility of being sodomized. What did Jason Scheuerman do in response to this punishment? He successfully committed suicide. In my opinion, his U.S. Army superiors are completely to blame. They could have made sure that Jason received the help recommended for him by the doctors who had evaluated him. They chose instead to deprive him of this help and to punish him physically and mentally. Have his superiors received any demotions or other punishment because of their actions toward Jason? Of course not.
If you serve below officer level in the U.S. Armed Forces, you are considered to be an expendable piece of machinery by your superiors, and if you have a physical or mental illness or injury, your superiors consider you to be defective. It's time to take this "defective" thought process out of the military and begin nailing some butts to the wall for causing the deaths of people like Jason Scheuerman.
