One of the most shocking and disturbing facts related to the fallout from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is the number of suicides among active duty U.S. military personnel has now surpassed the number of troops killed in action (Williams.) This number reflects the fact that essentially 22 soldiers committed suicide every day, or one every 65 minutes. This worrying trend has been increasing since 2005. In addition, the suicide rate among American soldiers is twice as high as before the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many social scientists have developed ideas about the causes of suicide: individual dynamics, social factors, or a combination of the two. Emile Durkheim, in his historical work on suicide, developed four different categories of suicide: fatalistic, selfish, anomic and altruistic. This article will discuss the issue of suicides among military personnel, using the framework of Durkheim's suicide theory and focusing on the fatalistic, egoistic, and anomic categories to explain this alarming phenomenon. Durkheim's theory of suicide illustrates his approach as a positivist theorist; he firmly believed that sociology should be studied scientifically in the same manner as those used by other natural sciences in order to establish the field as credible. Essentially, this involved establishing cause and effect associations using hypothetical and deductive reasoning. In his study of suicide, Durkheim attempted to explain how the field of sociology could uniquely describe elements of society and human behavior in a way different from that offered by other disciplines. His beliefs regarding suicide involved his belief that suicide could occur as... middle of paper ... for this specific population in this group. The result has been an alarming increase in suicide, caused by a multitude of factors but which can be explained by Durkheim's suicide framework: fatalism, anomie and selfishness, which put all these vulnerable soldiers and veterans at high risk of suicide. do harm. As Durkheim described it, these troops are vulnerable to selfish suicide due to their sense of detachment from people and society as a whole; fatalistic suicide due to their extensive experiences witnessing death and injury; and anomic suicide, due to the feeling that the structure of society has become chaotic due to what they experienced in the theater of combat, also returns in a world filled with unemployment, personal and financial stress and a lack of resources needed to resolve the military's problems.