by Jacob G. Hornberger

December 22, 2025

As with American young people, the suicide rate among current and former military personnel continues to rise. The way I figure it is that when young people are checking out of life early, that’s a surefire way to know that there is something dreadfully wrong with that society. I believe that the same holds true for a nation’s military personnel — those who ostensibly devote their lives to the defense of the United States.

The common perception is that soldiers who commit suicide are suffering from PTSD — that is, from the mental and emotional problems arising from the overall horror of combat and war.

That might well be a factor but I don’t believe it is the biggest factor. I have long contended that the biggest factor leading soldiers and former soldiers to take their own lives is guilt — deeply seated guilt arising from the wrongful killing of other human beings.

The New York Times recently published an article describing the concept of “moral injury” that arises from soldiers who participate in the wrongful killing of people. The article was written in the context of the U.S. military’s recent killing of, now, more than 100 people on the high seas near South America.

Ever since the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state, the notion has been as follows: The national-security establishment has to kill massive numbers of people overseas to keep America safe. During the Cold War, the aim was to kill communists and suspected communists, who supposedly were coming to get us. After the 9/11 attacks, the aim became to kill terrorists and suspected terrorists, who also were supposedly coming to get us. Also added to the list of threats to national security were illegal immigrants, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, China, Russia, Iraq, and others.

In the process, the U.S. government became, as Martin Luther King observed, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. It is impossible to know exactly how many people the U.S. government has killed in the last 70 years, but it’s got to range in the millions, which is nothing to scoff at.

The notion has always been that these killings of foreigners through such things as sanctions, embargoes, support of friendly dictatorial regimes, invasions, occupations, coups, wars of aggression, and state-sponsored assassinations would have no effect on the American people, especially if large numbers of American soldiers didn’t lose their lives in the process. Americans could continue to live their lives normally, go to work, take vacations, raise their families, and so forth and just block out of their minds that the national-security establishment was having to kill people to keep Americans safe.

As I have long contended, the notion that the U.S. government could become the greatest purveyor of violence in the world and, at the same time, that this would not have an adverse impact on the American people was pure myth and fantasy. As I have long maintained, the massive number of killings of foreigners has seeped into the subconsciousnesses of off-kilter people here in the United States, somehow igniting them to kill people irrationally here at home.

But I have also maintained that American soldiers were not immune from having participated in those wrongful killings. Consider, for example, the U.S. invasions, occupations, wars, death, and destruction that the U.S. government unleashed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. government never had the authority to invade either country. For one thing, for a war to be legal under U.S. law, Congress had to have declared war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Congress never did that. For another thing, Afghanistan was not required under international law to comply with President Bush’s unconditional extradition demand for Osama bin Laden. Moreover, there was never any justification whatsoever for invading Iraq.

Thus, U.S. soldiers never had any moral, legal, or constitutional justification for killing even one person in Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans always assumed that this would be no problem for them if we just kept thanking American soldiers for their service in supposedly keeping us safe. But the human conscience will not be so easily satisfied. Many of those soldiers were devout Christians with well-formed consciences. By violating God’s sacred commandment against killing, those consciences undoubtedly began eating away at such soldiers like an acid.

Yet, those soldiers were never encouraged to get to the root of their depression and anxiety, which was massive guilt arising from the wrongful killing of other human beings. Instead, they were told that they simply were suffering from PTSD. By not addressing the root cause of their dysphoria,  soldiers and ex-soldiers continued suffering emotionally and psychologically from deep, unresolved guilt or “moral injury.”

It’s no different with the drug-war killings near Venezuela. Drug laws are criminal offenses. So are terrorism offenses. Under our system of government, U.S. officials are not permitted to kill people for simply having allegedly violated criminal laws. U.S. law requires that U.S. officials arrest criminal suspects and accord them a trial before inflicting punishment on them.

It is undisputed that the U.S. military, which has been charged with enforcing U.S. drug laws and terrorism laws on the high seas, could easily have taken the 100-plus people they have killed into custody and charged them with criminal offenses. There was no reason to just kill them.

But President Trump and the Pentagon know that nothing legally bad is going to happen to any soldier who participates in these killings. They aren’t going to be prosecuted for murder or a war crime. Anyway, Trump can issue pardons to all of them.

But a pardon or a promise of no criminal prosecution will not relieve those soldiers of the deep guilt of having wrongfully engaged in the killing of other human beings. That’s why the suicide rate among America’s military personnel will continue to increase, just as the suicide rate among American young people will continue to rise, and just as the off-kilter killings will continue to besiege our society. Whether Americans want to face it or not, it’s just one of the prices we pay for living under the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.