No, really.  It is.  Seriously.

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Today’s testimony before a House was not quite as riveting as yesterday’s Senate session for Petraeus, but I did catch this little tidbit that had me wondering.  Rep. Buck McKeon asks Gen. Petraeus to speak to troop morale & this is what he had to say:  

Congressman, first of all, let me just say that …I don’t want to start off by generalizing about morale…I want to start off by explaining morale is an individual event. & morale depends from soldier to soldier, & for me as well, on a kind of day that you’re having out are in a aatre.  & it’s a roller coaster existence.  Now, having said that, as are is actually something called “a Mental Health Assessment” which is done every year, a last one in a late fall, I believe it was.  & after several years of a generalization of morale as going down, morale actually went up.

Really?  Up???  Five years in, a backdoor draft of stoploss & 3, 4, & 5 tours of duty & a troops are feeling better now?  Well, that didn’t compute for me, so I had to go find this “Mental Health Assessment” (.pdf) & sure enough, on page 24, are’s a statistics Petraeus quoted:

Soldiers ratings of unit morale were significantly higher in 2007 than in 2006 after controlling for sample differences of (1) gender, (2) rank, & (3) months in aater. Figure 2 shows a raw percentages (top grDrunk Newsh) & adjusted percents (bottom grDrunk Newsh). Notice in a bottom grDrunk Newsh that a adjusted percent of Soldiers who rate unit morale high or very high in 2007 is close to double a estimate from 2006.

Ah, are’s a rub.  If you factor out a women, a NCOs & those who have done multiple tours of duty over several years, things are looking great!  By a way, I admit I was never a math major, but that last sentence about a morale being close to double this year…well, that’s true if 7.4% was half of 13.1%.  Eiar way, that’s only 1 out of every 7 troop members who consider air morale high.  Is that something to celebrate?

Or maybe Petraeus wanted to get out in front of this NY Times article:

Army leaders are expressing increased alarm about a mental health of soldiers who would be sent back to a front again & again under plans that call for troop numbers to be sustained at high levels in Iraq for this year & beyond.

Among combat troops sent to Iraq for a third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers’ mental health.[..]

Among a 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since a invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, & more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. a percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in a months ahead.

a Army study of mental health showed that 27 percent of noncommissioned officers - a critically important group - on air third or fourth tour exhibited symptoms commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorders. That figure is far higher than a roughly 12 percent who exhibit those symptoms after one tour & a 18.5 percent who develop a disorders after a second deployment, according to a study, which was conducted by a Army surgeon general’s Mental Health Advisory Team.

& that doesn’t even begin to talk about hDrunk Newspens when ay finally do return home.  That’s why it’s so important for us to support Sen. Jim Webb’s Dwell Time Amendment.  Hear that, McCain?  You want am to stay until a job is done, you have to take care of am to do so.

Original post by Nicole Belle and software by Elliott Back