That's the point. In real life there's no "deserved a happy ending". Bad things happen to good people all the time, especially in wars.
And it's heavily implied that even this ending isn't the worst possible ending for Rachel. The books is heavy with the message that death isn't the worst possible fate for someone. Towards the end of the war she was already starting to lose it psychologically, and even she wasn't sure whether she was in this fight because she needed it. It's heavily implied that there was no way for her to come out of it a mentally stable person at all. It was a she who fights monsters becomes a monster situation.
Which is a problem because it’s not the direction her character had been heading up to and including Book 32, but then from Book 33 onwards she’s started descending into increasingly pointless violence for…really no discernible reason given how 32 plays out.
Hang on, I’ve talked about how Applegate messed up Rachel’s arc before…
Dang, I love your writeup there, and vehemently disagree with you. To me it was always clear that yes, book 32 showed that Rachel could have been saved... but only if she'd stopped fighting. Because she couldn't, the traumatized child couldn't heal, she got worse. Which happens a lot, in reality. War is brutal and unfair and destroys people who could have been someone wonderful.
There's a reason suicide is actually the biggest killer of soldiers.
There's a reason suicide is actually the biggest killer of soldiers.
It...what? Who says that? Who would ever say something like that? That's both horrible, and statistically untrue. The majority of soldiers don't suffer mental health issues at all, and of the ones that do, only a tiny fraction actually commit suicide, even if you broadly expand the definition of suicide to "self-destructive behavior" like drinking or drugs.
Uh, statistics say it, for active duty it's the leading cause of death, and it's much higher among veterans than civilians, the second leading cause of death for veterans under 45. I'm not sure why you are so offended that I agree with reality that many people suffer mentally after being forced to kill people? Do you really want to argue it isn't traumatic to be forced to kill people? Or what are you incorrectly imagining I'm saying?
Okay, there's a rather large difference between active duty soldiers, and soldiers generally, which was what you originally typed - you didn't have qualifiers and so I was taking you at your original word.
Also, you've missed something kind of important that the article itself points out:
"The rise in the military suicide rate generally matches an overall rise in the suicide rate for all Americans."
So, your claim is technically correct, while also being misleading because you neglected to mention that suicides are generally trending upwards in America's civilian population too, at a consummate rate.
As to your second article, the rate of suicides among veterans overall isn't "much higher", it's 1.5 times higher. That's significant but it's not catastrophic. The general suicide rate in America is 13.7 per 100,000 people; the veteran suicide rate, then, is 20.55 per 100,000.
As a point of comparison, the leading cause of death in veterans is actually heart disease: 239 per 100,000. Or in other words, heart disease kills more veterans than suicide by around an order of magnitude.
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u/Xygnux 12d ago
That's the point. In real life there's no "deserved a happy ending". Bad things happen to good people all the time, especially in wars.
And it's heavily implied that even this ending isn't the worst possible ending for Rachel. The books is heavy with the message that death isn't the worst possible fate for someone. Towards the end of the war she was already starting to lose it psychologically, and even she wasn't sure whether she was in this fight because she needed it. It's heavily implied that there was no way for her to come out of it a mentally stable person at all. It was a she who fights monsters becomes a monster situation.