Report: US Troop Morale in Afghanistan Lowest Since 2005

Local Editor

As fighting and casualties in Afghanistan's war sky rocketed lately, U.S. soldiers and Marines there reported plunging morale and the highest rates of mental health problems in five years.
The gloomy statistics in a new Army report released Thursday dramatize the psychological cost of a military campaign that U.S. commanders and officials say has reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency.

Military doctors said the findings from a battlefield survey taken last summer were no surprise given the dramatic increase in combat, which troops reported was at its most intense level since officials began doing mental health analysis in 2003.

"There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as the exposure to combat and seeing what war can do," Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said at a Pentagon news conference.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of troops surveyed for the report said they had seen a buddy killed, roughly half of soldiers and 56 percent of Marines said they'd killed an enemy fighter, and about two-thirds of troops said that a roadside bomb - the No. 1 weapon of insurgents - had gone off within 55 yards of them.

The report is a snapshot of the health of the forces in Afghanistan last year, drawn by a mental health team that polled more than 900 soldiers, 335 Marines and 85 mental health workers on the battlefield in July and August, as troops surged into the country under the Obama administration's new strategy for fighting the insurgency.