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Mortality rates in the military are actually lower than in the civilian world: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22694586

> Crude mortality rates are lower among U.S. military members than their civilian counterparts; service members must be healthy when they enter service and deaths from illnesses are relatively infrequent.

Suicide rates for veterans is on the high end, but comparable to other highly physical professions. Adjusted for age and gender, the suicide rate among veterans is 50% higher than for the population as a whole: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/suicide-rate.... That's on the high end, but not "high" in absolute terms: https://www.registerednursing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11.... (Scroll down to the chart showing suicide rates by profession for men versus women.) At 40-45 per 100,000, male veterans are about as likely to commit suicide as those in the arts and entertainment and installation/maintenance fields, and less likely than those in construction/resource extraction.




It's not mortality you should worry about, but life altering injury.

My stepdad, my next door neighbor, and 3 of my friends all have some kind of long term chronic injury caused by military service.

In fact I only know 1 guy well who's ex military who doesn't have at least a moderately severe problem related to his service.

Military service is either a noble sacrifice, or it's a good job. It can't be both simultaneously.


The worrying thing about those rates for veterans is that the spike is in younger people, which is not the normal pattern.

There may be a "cohort" effect. See this tweet for an example of this happening in the UK: https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1161940914308300801?...

If this is happening it's potentially really worrying, because risk usually increases with age. So we'd see an increase in rates of death as this high risk group ages into a higher risk group.




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