The U.S. military “want[s] to understand white rage,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told members of Congress in 2021. Maybe he should have been more concerned about white powder and other drugs’ impact on the lives of our men in uniform.

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that, in 2021, at least twenty-seven soldiers died from fentanyl overdoses—the highest overdose death toll in the Army’s history. It marks the continuation of a worrisome trend. From 2015 to 2022, a total of 127 soldiers from the Army died from fentanyl overdoses, according to Army records obtained by the Washington Post. That figure is more than twice the number of Army service members killed in combat in Afghanistan over the same interval of time.

The anecdotes included in the Post’s report are heartbreaking. Staff Sgt. Kue Vue was just 25 years old when he died from fentanyl-laced cocaine in March of last year. Others were even younger. In 2016, Ari McGuire enlisted to be a paratrooper with the ultimate goal of becoming one of the Army’s elite soldiers by attending Ranger School. In 2019, McGuire died from “fentanyl toxicity,” according to the hospital where he passed. He was 23.

Before his death, according to the Post, McGuire sought treatment for his drug addiction, which started when he befriended an older staff sergeant with a reputation for using opioids. He went up the chain of command and spoke to “anyone that would listen,” the investigation into McGuire’s death reportedly read. But McGuire’s higher-ups allegedly failed to take “more aggressive steps” for McGuire’s rehabilitation “immediately following his confession to drug use and addiction.”

In the summer of 2019, it became clear to fellow soldiers at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, where he was stationed, that McGuire had relapsed. McGuire’s parents told the Post their son was “put on a wait list” for inpatient rehab. Until then, two sergeants performed regular wellness checks on McGuire and his room in the barracks. The day after the sergeants performed a wellness check, during which time McGuire expressed his excitement to start rehab, McGuire took a Lyft to the Wood Spring Suites hotel, entered, and quickly came back out and took the same Lyft back to the barracks. Before the Lyft got to the Fort Liberty gate, McGuire was unconscious; he later died at a nearby hospital.

Previously, Pentagon officials told lawmakers that the number of soldiers who died in 2021 of fentanyl overdoses was half the number that the Post now reports. Pentagon spokeswoman Jade Fulce, in the Post’s words, “blamed an accounting mistake.”

Across the branches of the military, 332 service members died from drug overdoses between 2017 and 2021. In that same period, more than 15,000 others have overdosed but survived.

Our nation’s military mirrors the virtues and vices of the people it’s sworn to protect, both cultural and physical. Our nation is in poor physical health, so fewer and fewer men are fit to serve. Our nation is in poor mental health, suffering from depression and anxiety, transgenderism and feminism—all mental scourges, albeit of very different kinds. And like the other groups at the commanding heights of our country, the U.S. military has been feckless in the face of these challenges. One can only imagine how feckless our top brass might be when they’re asked to face a rival nation on the battlefield.