re: Active Duty USAF Airman Self Immolates outside Israeli Embassy in Protest

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This dude could've been a cook in the service. He could have PTSD from cooking?

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Unless you know what you're talking about I would just be quiet. Yeah, being a cook doesn't sound hard on the surface. While I can't speak for the Air Force, in the Navy you aren't just a cook. If you are a CS on a destroyer, you are doing your primary job while also doing many secondary tasks that have nothing to do with your rate:

- You're in charge of doing the ship's laundry
- You have to get qualified to stand armed watches
- You have to get qualified in damage control
- You stand duty (where you can't ever leave the ship) once or twice a week to go along with your normal, 10-hour work day.
- When you stand duty you just aren't on the ship sitting around playing video games. You're also participating in drills and inspections, while also standing a roving watch topside for four hours, armed and armored, in extreme cold or extreme heat depending on the season. And if your duty day falls on a Saturday forget having much of a weekend. You're showing up to the ship at 0730 on Saturday morning and you're not leaving the ship until about 0900 or 1000 on Sunday morning.
- On top of that you are randomly going out to sea for days at a time with very little notice, for bullshite reasons, and are constantly bitched at by the crew for the quality (or lack thereof) of the food you serve them.
- And that's not even including the full, 10-month underways where you have other shite you have to do on top of your primary and secondary duties to keep the ship clean and operating. If you're lucky you might get six hours of sleep once or twice a week. Most Sailors only get about four or five hours on average.
- And when you finally pull into a foreign port for a little R&R, it's a coin toss on whether or not you get to leave the ship depending on if it's your duty section's turn to stand watch. So while you watch your buddies leave the ship to go enjoy a night on the town in Dubai, you're stuck standing an armed watch on the pier or on the ship in the dry, merciless heat of the desert.

That's why retention in the military is so low and why suicidal ideations are so high.