You might want to sit down for these unpleasant statistics.

According to an investigation by the “Hartford Courant“:

In 2005, 22 soldiers killed themselves, accounting for nearly one in five of all Army non-combat deaths. (25 in 2003.)

A number of them issued warnings to friends, family and the military itself.

Some had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, severe depression, or anxiety disorder.

Some had been redeployed to combat roles after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome resulting from earlier deployments.

In some cases they had been prescribed antidepressants with little or no health counseling.

At least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress.

Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.

Take Jeffrey Henthorn, from Choctaw, Oklahoma, who slashed his arm intentionally in November 2004, while he was stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas in the weeks leading up to his second deployment to Iraq. Soon after his deployment, in December, the soldier took his gun into a latrine in Kuwait and charged it. Fellow soldiers were concerned that this was a suicide attempt. Henthorn’s superiors seized his gun. Then his platoon sergeant gave the suicidal service member a half-hour pep-talk and handed him back his gun.

In an interview with the “Hartford Courant,” Henthorn’s father compares Iraq to Vietnam.

“All they care about is the numbers in the field,” said Warren Henthorn, trying to make sense of the death of his only son.

Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, the top psychiatry expert for the Army surgeon general admits that soldier numbers get factored into the mental-health equation.

“The challenge for us…is that the Army has a mission to fight,” she told the “Courant.” “And as you know, recruiting has been a challenge, and so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”

Recruiting challenges and intense wartime pressure to maintain troop levels are why so many soldiers with psychiatric problems are being deployed to war zones and kept there, say military experts like Stephen Robinson, the former longtime director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

“What you have is a military stretched so thin, they’ve resorted to keeping psychologically unfit soldiers at the front,” he told Lisa Chedekel and Matthew Kauffman of the “Courant.”

Yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, it was estimated that out of 103,788 returning veterans, 25 percent had a mental health diagnosis, and more than half of these patients had two or more distinct conditions. Those most at risk were the youngest soldiers and those with the most combat exposure, reports Dr. Karen H. Seal at the Veterans Administration Medical Center.

“Have soldiers always come home with messed up brains?” I asked Eric over dinner tonight, saddened by these statistics.

“I think what’s different in this war is that our medical technology is so good that soldiers are surviving what would have killed them in the past. And they are left with these horrendous images and memories. So even if helicopter dispatches and top-notch Army surgeons can save some guy whose hummer has been blasted, they can’t take away that horrifying moment. In other words, they can put all his parts back together again, but that doesn’t necessarily make him whole.”

I thought about Humpty Dumpty and his big fall. And I got even sadder.

Combat stress disorder—given its name by the American Psychiatric Association in 1985–has been there with every war. I read on some law professor blog (S. Elizabeth Malloy) that combat stress goes back as far as Homer’s Iliad, where Achilles is hurt in the Trojan War and acts out in rage. Combat stress was documented in the late 19th century after the Franco-Prussian war, after the Civil War (referred to as “nostalgia” or “soldiers heart”). Soldiers were said to suffer “shell shock” in World War I, and “combat fatigue” or “battle fatigue” in World War II and the Korean War.

But with this war, soldier survive some horrific scenes, traumatic stuff that continuously shoots arrows into their Achilles heel, and from which it is almost impossible to recover.

I think about my stress as a semi-working stay-at-home mom–the aggravation I feel when, say, my double stroller breaks as I’m three miles from home, and a little boy is throwing a holy fit because he’s got to go number two NOW, and after our family rushes to a public restroom, he doesn’t have to go anymore, until we walk fifteen minutes away from the bathroom and the urge returns, and this happens five times–and I multiply that by two million.

I’m frankly surprised that numbers of psychiatric problems aren’t higher.

And I’m not sure what to do about it, other than pray for these generous and brave hearts, that they might find the peace that they so deserve.