1. The Happy Warrior – by Richard Schoch/Philosopher’s Magazine

More than fifty American soldiers have killed themselves in Iraq, and nearly all the suicides have occurred after George W Bush declared “mission accomplished” from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. (This is not a uniquely American phenomenon: the death of the first female British soldier in Basra was ruled a suicide.) Compared to the total number of deaths on either side, fifty is a small number. Statistically, though, it is alarmingly high. At the height of the soldier suicides, US forces in Iraq were killing themselves at a rate 70% higher than the general population: 17.3 suicides per 100,000 soldiers, 10.1 suicides per 100,000 civilians. Death by self-inflicted wound (almost always a bullet to the head) accounted for about seven percent of all US military fatalities in Iraq in 2003. Nor do the suicides end when the troops come home. At least seven soldiers have killed themselves after returning to the United States, including two hospitalised veterans who hanged themselves at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Washington, DC. At Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, two soldiers committed murder-suicides last year by shooting their wives before turning their guns upon themselves.

Officially, there's no problem. Such is the predictable and reassuring conclusion – reassuring, that is, for Donald Rumsfeld – of the Defense Department's first-ever mental health survey conducted in a combat zone. After interviewing more than 700 soldiers in Iraq, the Pentagon's psychiatric swat team recommended, in a report whose publication was delayed for three months by bureaucratic in-fighting, that one way to stop soldiers killing themselves was to increase the stockpile of anti-depressants and sleeping pills. The military- pharmaceutical complex has arrived.

But other Army psychiatrists – no pushovers, their job is to get anxious soldiers back to the frontlines – have admitted that there is a problem: the suicide rate in Iraq is higher than that in either the Second World War, Korea, or even Vietnam. In those wars the suicide rate fell over time because, presumably, a soldier's survival instinct took over once the initial shock of being thrown into battle wore off. In Iraq, what's happened is just the opposite: the suicide rate increased after the formal cessation of hostilities in 2003. Undeniably, more and more soldiers are struggling to cope, and suicide is only the most extreme response to the stress and trauma that they face. Nearly 1,000 American soldiers have been evacuated from Iraq for mental health reasons. And since the US army is now all-volunteer – in those earlier wars, troops were drafted – each recruit undergoes psychological screening. Those judged likely to experience mental trauma from combat duty – and to harm themselves as a consequence – are weeded out. Thus, the GIs who committed suicide were, according to the Army's own experts, psychologically “fit”.

Regardless of how one feels about the war,