And circumspection aside, it's always hard to peer into someone's life with scanty data. SMs aren't exactly a randomly-selected slice of the population, not even if you restrict age, sex, and SES characteristics. Particularly for line duty MOS. 18/
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One of the toughest challenges was to explain to people that these unobservable characteristics makes generating a reference group a bit of a challenge. To whom do you compare junior enlisted Soldiers? College kids? Minimum wage drones? 19/
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Luckily, I didn't have to go very far. I could compare Soldiers to Soldiers. Turns out that within the population, there were a couple of characteristics that DRASTICALLY increased suicide risk for young [male] Soldiers. And they had fuck-all to do with home life. 20/
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Judging by some of your feedback, many of you do not know what MOS means. Military Occupational Specialty is sort of your job in the Army (we use NEC in the Navy). A Soldier will have a Primary MOS, and maybe a secondary MOS and some Additional MOS too. 21/
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However, Soldiers' MOS are only loosely related to the job slot they fill. The Duty MOS is attached to the unit, and often units will have vacancies that can only be filled with the available personnel (this is the Guard here, not the regular Army; relocation is hard) 22/
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The point here is that there are loads and loads of, say, infantrymen who are assigned to, say, ordinance. This gave me a novel way to split subgroups. This helped me get around the above-mentioned selection problems. Duty assignments are closer to random. 23/
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Closer than just enlistment, anyhow. I had a suspicion that a few MOS were over-represented in the suicide db, but that db only listed the Soldier's PMOS/SMOS, not the DMOS. So I looked at the last available DMOS. 24/
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I got some results here. After this correction, a list of combat-related MOS strongly stood out. Pretty much the jobs eligible for hostile fire pay. Which is fine, since that's the bulk of the end strength anyway. But in a horse race between P/SMOS and DMOS, DMOS ruled. 25/
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This naturally made me curious. Maybe there was something going on at the unit level that stoked Soldiers' sense of isolation or anxiety or whatever. I refined my inquiry. 26/
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Replying to @Spivonomist
I've just made a guess at what you've found, but I'll keep it to myself until you get to the reveal (and afterwards, too).
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when I read Spiv's threads I'm always unclear if they're real or performance art
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New conversation
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It’s all really happening
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