August 16, 2007 – 7:27pm
By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) – Repeated and ever-longer war-zone tours are putting increasing pressure on military families, the Army said Thursday, helping push soldier suicides to a record rate.
There were 99 Army suicides last year _ nearly half of them soldiers who hadn’t reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is “failed intimate relationships, failed marriages.”