Army studies whether recruits drawn to high-risk behavior

WASHINGTON — Senior Airman Michael Kearns had been back from Iraq for two months when he was pulled over on a Florida highway for going more than 120 mph 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," Kearns, 27, said recently.

His experience is so common that the U.S. 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 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.

The military says the people who enlist have always included adrenaline junkies, which recruiters say is a good thing when troops are needed to jump out of airplanes and go on raids in Afghanistan.

But military researchers say they have been compelled to take a deeper look at the psychological demographic of an all-volunteer force during the most prolonged period of combat in U.S. history.

"We've never been at war for as long as we've been, and we don't know the effects of that," said Bruce Shahbaz, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and one of the three main authors of a recent Army suicide report.

Beyond that, Shahbaz said, the Army wants to know whether risk-takers are more likely to commit suicide or die in accidents, and whether a predisposition to risk-taking is increased by combat.

To try to find answers, the Army and the National Institute of Mental Health this fall are beginning a five-year study of 90,000 active-duty soldiers and all new Army recruits, 80,000 to 120,000 a year.

The recruits are to answer confidential surveys that Shahbaz said might include questions on whether they own motorcycles, use drugs or like to bungee-jump. There also will be tests to measure reactions to stress and an in-depth look at a recruit's family background and genetics.

"It will give us an assessment of someone's cognitive style and whether they have a history that draws them to high-risk behaviors," said Thomas Insel, the institute's director.

Researchers acknowledge that in focusing so much on recruits, they are slighting what many say is the biggest reason for the high military suicide rate, the stress of repeated wartime deployments. But in one of the more surprising statistics cited in the Army's suicide report, 79 percent of the soldiers who committed suicide in recent years had had only one deployment, or had not deployed at all.

"For us to blame this thing just on the war would be wrong," Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the Army, said in July.

The suicide report concluded that much of the fault was with commanders who disregarded the mental-health problems of their troops, but it also blamed the Army for not winnowing out enough of the recruits with records of substance abuse and crime.

From roughly 2005 to 2007, when a strong economy sent potential soldiers looking elsewhere for jobs with better pay, the Army lowered its recruiting and retention standards to meet the demands of two wars.

As a result, the report said, tens of thousands of recruits were granted waivers for the kind of behavior, including felonies, which would have kept them out of the service in earlier years. Whatever the survey finds, the military says it has to do a better job of managing the risk-takers of any kind within its ranks.

"A soldier who dies bungee-jumping on a weekend because he needs that adrenaline rush is no less painful to the Army than a soldier who commits suicide," Shahbaz said.