Senior Airman Michael Kearns had been back from Iraq for only two months when he was pulled over on a Florida highway for going more than 120 miles per hour on his new Suzuki. He knew his motorcycle riding was reckless, but after living through daily mortar attacks on his base in Iraq, he said he needed the adrenaline rush.
“When you get here, there’s nothing that’s very exciting that keeps your pulse going,” Airman Kearns, 27, said in a recent interview.
His experience is so common that the United States military, alarmed by a rising suicide rate and the record number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who die in highway accidents back home, is asking a provocative new question: Nearly a decade into two bloody wars, are the armed forces attracting recruits drawn to high-risk behavior?
“In January 1990, you could join the military and think, ‘You know, I’m probably not going to get deployed,’ ” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who has done research on the gap between the military and civilian society. “So on the margins it is reasonable to expect that there might have been a few more people in the pre-9/11 period who said, ‘I have no interest in war and there are other reasons for me to join.’
“By 2005, there were very few, or nobody, like that,” he said. “Or if you were like that, you were a fool. The evidence was staring you in the face that you would be deployed in ground combat.”
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