Top general: Mental fitness vital for soldiers

FORT JACKSON -- The nation's combat-stressed military can take a lesson from Masters champion Phil Mickelson, whose emotions and mental toughness were exposed during his weekend victory, the Army's top general said Monday.

"Phil Mickelson didn't win the Masters because he was in great physical shape. He won it because he was very mentally strong," said Gen. George W. Casey after touring the Army's newest program to promote mental fitness.

Casey spent several hours Monday at the Army's newest school, telling its first class of soldier-students that they must understand that mental and physical fitness go hand in hand.

Even battle-toughened soldiers should expect "our discussion about mental fitness to be open and frank and to contribute to our definition of what success is," Casey said.

Mickelson won his third Masters on Sunday. At the end, television viewers saw him tearfully embrace his wife Amy, who has been battling breast cancer, and later discuss the difficulty of dealing with that pressure during the past year.

Casey said he used the case of Mickelson with the school's newest class of battle-hardened sergeants.

The four-star general acknowledged that he's been openly questioning whether the program, which opened its doors last week to teach resilience amid combat stress, was "too touchy-feely" for such combat veterans.

"What I do know, is our soldiers all want to be better, and this is an opportunity for them to be better," Case said.

The program is called Master Resilience Training and is designed to help soldiers deal with emotional, social and psychological stress. The Army is attempting to counter problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder and a record number of suicides that have come with repeated deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There should be about 1,000 trainers who have taken the program by the end of this year, and there should be one sergeant or officer who has taken the 10-day program in each battalion by then.

Asked how he will be able to judge whether the program is working, Casey said he hoped to see such things as reductions in divorces and cuts in the record numbers of suicides, which in recent years has reached its highest mark in three decades.

The Army is "wrestling hard" with how to judge the program's impact, he added.

Casey said he knows that getting more time between deployments also will help cut stress on soldiers and their families.

He said he hoped to get at least 70 percent of soldiers into a one-year deployment for every two years at home by 2011.

The general said the military and society in general has to come to grips with talking openly about mental health issues.

"We need to break down barriers so soldiers and people can get the treatment they need," Casey said.

"I think by the end of this year, we are going to start getting traction and we'll build on that from here," the general said.