Death Memorial

Daniel Ruf with his mother, Audrey

Daniel Ruf died at age 22 on July 21, 2009 in San Francisco’s Pacific Medical Center after working out with Marine Corps recruiters at In-Shape Gym on Tracy Boulevard to lose weight.

I was truly happy for the first time in my life at the age of 19, the day Danny was born. I raised Danny on my own. I guess in many ways we grew up together. We went through our share of life’s ups and downs but together we always could make it to the other end no matter what the struggle and we even managed to come out stronger and closer.

 The 22 years we had together were the best days of my life. He was so much fun. He grew up to be an amazing young man, a best friend to all who knew him and even those who did not… He truly cared about people and wanted to do what he could to help anyone who needed it. Danny was an amazing young man and the best kid a mom could wish for.

 Danny put himself through college by working 2 jobs; he even took the bus to college an hour away until we could get him a car. Danny never complained.  He made the most of every situation by enjoying the moment and time with friends. By the time Danny was 21 he was a GM Certified Mechanic and had his Associates Degree. This is quite an achievement for a boy raised by a single mom who can barely figure out where to put the oil. The economy caused the dealership to close down and Danny became unemployed for the first time, he was scared and not sure what to do. I pushed him to find work and I regret it with all my heart because he met a marine recruiter and was dead in 3 months at the age of 22.

 Danny signed up for the marines on May 1, 2009 with a boot camp date of July 13. Danny was a very muscular man weighing 215 pounds at 5ft9. The marines wanted him to weigh 190. They suggested water pills, laxatives, sauna suit in the sauna and while exercising under a sweat suit and a water only diet. He tried but 190 was an unachievable weight for Danny’s body type. If they had used the neck waist ratio to determine if he was over-weight Danny would not have been required to lose any weight. I found a receipt dated 3/7/09 filled out by the tailor at Jims Formal Wear’s for a tux showing Danny was 5 ft 9 with a weight of 220 over-arm of 57 inches, a waist of 36 inches and a 17 inch neck. This was at his heaviest weight…

 Danny became frustrated because he could not get his weight down even though he was dieting and working out and decided not to join the marines but did not want to let the recruiter down. Finally on July 6, 2009 Danny went in and told them he could not lose the weight and wanted to quit. They were angry and they told him that he had a tremendous opportunity to be “recon” which Danny loved …. and they gave him a new weight requirement of 199 and said they would check into an opening for July 27. So Danny said he would give it one more try.

 The next day they told Danny the 27th was full so he would need to be the 199lbs by July 20th (16lbs in 13 days). On July 14, Danny was 211lbs and the recruiter said that was not good enough and instructed Danny to report the next morning to the recruiter’s gym as his guest for one-on- one training and time in the sauna with the sauna suit under a sweat suit. The day before Danny and a friend had gone to buy movie tickets and the friend wanted to buy Danny a Subway sandwich. Danny did not want to eat but finally agreed and the recruiter actually came out of the recruiting office to the Subway and demanded to know what Danny was doing, reminding him he is on a no food water only diet until he makes weight.

 Danny came in my room on July 14 2009 and said, “Mom I don’t want to wear the sauna suit.”  I told him if the recruiter told him to do it he should listen because they know what will be best for him. I will never ever forget my words. I could have saved my son. He said, “Okay, mom,” and went to bed.

 The next morning we texted back and forth because he said he was not sure if the marines were right for him. He did not know if he could lose the weight and was worried about the 4 year commitment. He told me he was going to try his hardest and if he makes weight he will go and if not then we would just make a new plan, but he hates to fail. Danny said he was at 209lbs after breakfast that morning.
 I texted him, ”How was the sauna?” but never heard back.  The next call I received was from the local hospital telling me they found my number in his phone under “mom” and needed to know if I was Danny’s mom.  They said there was an accident and I needed to get there. I said I was coming from a city away. The lady said, “You need to leave right now.”  I knew then it was bad. I got to the hospital and they would not let me see Danny.  I had to go into a room and they explained that Danny was brain damaged but they did not know the extent because he was unconscious and on life support. I prayed, “Please God, I don’t care how brain damaged he is; please don’t take him from me. “  I know that was selfish but he was the best thing that ever happened to me and I could not imagine life without him.

 Danny had followed the recruiter’s instructions. They told Danny to go into the dry sauna then exercise. After about 40 minutes Danny told the recruiter he did not feel well and they told him to sit down and drink some water. Danny slipped into a coma and when the EMT’s arrived Danny’s temperature was 108 degrees.

 Danny had a heavy sweat suit complete with zip up hoody  jacket with the sauna suit underneath and the only thing the recruiters did was throw water on Danny… they did not remove or unzip any of Danny’s clothes. The recruiter later admitted he had no medical training yet he instructed my son to follow these radical weight loss methods. They should have told my son the loss was impossible and instead of pushing,  ultimately killing my son to make their numbers. The recruiter knew he was wrong, he disposed of the sauna suit and Danny’s pants rather than returning them with Danny’s other things. The other missing item was the guest day pass from the gym. The EMT report did state that they removed a non breathable sauna suit.

 Each day Danny got more and more yellow and swollen. Danny was transported to another hospital in San Francisco where he was to have better care and we were hoping to get him a liver transplant. I have never known anyone who died so I had no idea that he was not going home with me. On the 6th day they came and told me that his organs are all shutting down and there is nothing further they could do. I called my parents and they told me “Well,  why would you care?  You were going to let him go to Afghanistan.”  He never regained consciousness.  I asked that he have pain medicine so he would not feel the life support stopping they said he did and we stopped the blood pressure first and he kept it beating and then after about 2 hours I said, “Okay, stop the breathing machine,” which was the only other life support and he continued for a total of 6 hours. He lived until I called my parents and put the phone to his ear and he heard them and then died seconds after the phone was hung up on July 21, 2009. The cause of death was multi-organ system failure, hyperthermia with dehydration, exercise with occlusive gear, mild cardiomegaly with myocycte hypertrophy.

 When I left the hospital it was all surreal. I still sometimes can’t believe this is my life now.  I wish I could be with him. I find it so hard to find reason to go on with my life. It is so empty. I know we will be together again one day so I try to focus on helping people and making sure to remind people to enjoy what they have because no one knows what the future holds.

 My son was not only strong physically but also had strength of mind. He had the determination, persistence and loyalty to his instructing recruiter to continue to working out as he was instructed by that recruiter (even after telling me the night before he was uncomfortable wearing the sauna suit the recruiter instructed him to wear) all the way to the point of collapse. Danny felt confident that the recruiter was committed to helping him succeed safely by passing on his knowledge and training one-on-one so in return Danny gave him every bit of strength he had.

 The reward for Danny’s devotion was a marine recruiter who came to the hospital to accuse Danny of taking drugs.  He wanted me to know that they may be called for court martial.  Meanwhile, I was at the hospital with my son on life support, who had not come out of a coma for days and had an unspecified amount of definite brain damage. The ultimate betrayal was when the recruiter denied everything under oath. What happened to the few, the proud, the marines?   I guess Danny was not a marine yet so they did not have to show him honor, truthfulness or respect. They did a toxicology test for 150 drugs using the blood from his first day in the hospital and there were no drugs or alcohol in his system other than what they EMT’s gave him. I knew he was not on any drugs. Danny hated drugs and did not want to be around anyone who did them.

 The other recruiter did return to the hospital ICU and told two of my friends that he was sorry for what happened to Danny and that he believed that the marines and Danny were both responsible for pushing too hard. He said Danny was a great kid and that he wanted to take them all out on his quad. I do respect that he had the integrity to come and own up to what happened.  Although later he could not recall making that statement.

 My life is forever changed. Now my days just change one to the next with no real anticipation or happiness. Danny meant everything, to me he was my reason to live. He was my whole world. He truly was my best friend and my family all rolled in one.

 Danny was not the kid who decided to use unsafe methods to quickly lose weight and join the marines like they would like people to believe.  Danny is another recruit killed by military negligence.  I want to make sure that no other mother ever has to go through what I have been through.  I want everyone to know that the recruiters are not all honest and they are not all trained to give the advice they give and you can die from extreme dieting, sauna suits, saunas and exercise.

Audrey Ruf

Military Matters Podcast: Interview With Audrey Ruf

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Army: Recruiters not at fault in Vermilion man’s death

VERMILION — A U.S. Army Recruiting Command investigation found that recruiters were not at fault in the death of 20-year-old Army recruit Glenni “Glenn” Wilsey V, who died of a heart attack while dieting to enlist in the Army, but one recruiter admitted giving Wilsey a waist band against Army policy.

Wilsey’s mother, Lora Bailey, declined to discuss the report, saying she did not want to jeopardize other investigations into her son’s March 3 death.

However, in an email this week, Bailey indicated that she plans to meet in the “near future” with U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo, and Maj. Gen. David L. Mann, who ordered the investigation.

“I do believe the investigation was done with integrity and no bias on the part of Major General Mann and his staff,” Bailey wrote in the email. “The investigation has brought up several issues which need to be addressed before I am able to release anything.”

Read the entire story here.

submitted by Lora Bailey

Online Petition for Glenni Wilsey

If you would like to sign the online petition re Glenni Wilsey's case, click here.

Please sign this petition if you agree with protecting the MEDICAL RIGHTS of our future recruits!!!

Lora Bailey

To listen to an interview with Lora Bailey, go to http://www.talktainmentradio.com/The-Truth-Has-Changed/9564814?date=2011_04 and click on the 4/27/11 archived broadcast.

Soldier who took overdose on eve of Iraq trip 'feared having to shoot children'

A young soldier was so traumatised by the prospect of his first Iraqi posting, he took an overdose which killed him.

Private Jason Chelsea couldn't come to terms with the thought that he might have to "shoot children" carrying suicide bombs.

He was so afraid, on the eve of the tour of duty with the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment he took a lethal quantity of paracetamol and iron tablets.

Unknown to Jason, they were a particularly destructive combination and he died from multi-organ failure following severe damage to his liver.

But as he lay dying, he repeatedly told medical staff: "I never wanted to die."

A donor organ had been found - despite the national shortage - as he battled for life in the renal unit at St James' Hospital, in Leeds, but he was by then too ill to face surgery.

Following the 19-year-old's death in August 2006, a Ministry of Defence Board of Inquiry was held into the circumstances behind his death.

And although the hearing remains confidential, it has been discovered it makes several recommendations about changes to Army procedure.

Jason, who was dyslexic, had also complained about bullying by some soldiers during his five and half year training.

He had been angry and insulted after hearing some say they wouldn't want to get into battle with him "in case he got them killed."

And he had self harmed, "superficially" slashing his wrists on two earlier occasions, after heavy drinking sessions, while on service.

An inquest was told he died after taking a fatal overdose of prescription drugs but Coroner Jennifer Leeming recorded a verdict of accidental death after hearing he had phoned for an emergency ambulance himself immediately after ingesting the pills at the family home in Wigan, Lancashire.

"Within a very short period of time after taking the tablets Jason had summoned the ambulance himself to take him to hospital and this was clearly not the action of someone who wanted to end his life," Mrs Leeming told Bolton Coroner's Court.

"This act could more consistently be described as a cry for help from a fragile young man about to serve in Iraq and faced with some financial problems and clearly finding it difficult to cope with these matters.

"Due to the fact that he had been drunk, perhaps these were out of proportion in his mind."

His mother, Kerry, told the hearing that her son originally wanted to be a chef but had joined the armed forces - against her wishes - after a recruitment road show landed at his school.

Jason, she said, was always the first to comfort neighbours in distress and was always there when anybody had problems.

But he was increasingly concerned about his impending tour of duty and what may be expected of him in Iraq.

She said this showed itself in his heavy drinking which, with his father Tony, she had tried her best to control.

She said: "Before he joined the army Jason didn't drink and his dad doesn't drink at all and I am only a very light drinker on social occasions.

"But when I asked him why he did drink so much now he said that that was army life and you would be the odd one out if you didn't do it - he didn't want to be left behind.

"He told me he used to drink vodka and gin because it wouldn't show on his breath so much and after he died we found empty spirits bottles hidden in the garage.

"After the overdose, when he came around the next morning, he told me that he really didn't want to go to Iraq and he was scared at having to maybe shoot children or adults because he said he didn't want to kill anybody.

"Basically I think he had just got himself in a state over it all.

"He also said that some boys had been nasty to him because he took a while to pick up the things he had to learn because he was dyslexic.

"He used to do the ironing and polishing the boots of friends and they would then help teach him the marching and the academic side of things in return."

Army company second in command Captain Steven Caldwell said that Kingsman Chelsea hadn't done anything "to raise the alarm" with his behaviour because a lot of young soldiers were "socially undeveloped" before they progressed.

He pointed out that operationally not every soldier was called upon to kill, and said the media had to shoulder some of the blame for "focussing on the negative" which, he acknowledged, had left some soldiers feeling "doomed."

He insisted their training did adequately prepare young soldiers for the psychological side of battle theatre situations.

Damned Weaklings: The Army's Abuse of Its Own Extends Far Beyond Walter Reed

Published on Thursday, May 3, 2007 by The Washington Spectator

by JoAnn Wypijewski

Accidents,” Alexander Cockburn once wrote, “are normalcy raised to the level of drama.” The same may be said for scandal, the shocking event that turns out not to have been so shocking after all once the tape is rewound, the warning signs exquisitely detailed and the “big picture” filled in. The scandal du jour is the rampage of Cho Seung-Hui, a “quiet” boy, “no trouble at all” until he killed 32 people at Virginia Tech and others began to recall that, why yes, there were those creepy actions and creepier plays, those diagnoses of mental illness, the telltale trail of every scared, sick loner who one day snaps, adding his victims to the 30,000 Americans killed with guns in far more ordinary circumstances each year.

“Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people,” Cho said in his video. It is as if he had been reading from the scripts of school-shooters past, every one of whom had been taunted as a wuss, or rejected by a girl, or was lonely and withdrawn, or had written harrowing stories of mayhem and slaying. Like them, Cho was finally notable for his orgy of slaughter and the demented aspect of his immortality fantasy; otherwise, he merely supplied the latest dramatic uptick in the long-running saga of the marriage of weakness and cruelty.

Today Cho; yesterday Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The injured soldiers at the center of that earlier scandal certainly qualify as weak and defenseless people, except that the object of fascination while they dominated the 24/7 churn of cable news was not their career as killers or the preparations that readied them to kill. They were the victims in the scandal. About the perpetrator, Walter Reed, the question “How could this have happened?” was not answered with any of the searching examination the press brings to the biography of mass murderers. Naturally, we aren’t meant to think of soldiers as trained killers or of any military installation as part of an institution of mass murder. It might help if we did. Certainly it would help aspiring recruits better understand what they are getting into, and help wounded veterans understand why they would be degraded as soon as they’d outlived their usefulness to the trade.

The truth is, a system dedicated to transforming psychologically healthy people into people capable of performing what in any other setting is considered a pathological act can’t help behaving badly-not all the time or in all of its realms, not monolithically so that everyone associated with it is scathed. But inevitably the ends deform the means, and inevitably someone pays. No one is talking about it, but what happened at Walter Reed to soldiers injured in war is not shocking at all if one ponders what happens at Army posts to soldiers injured in basic training.

“LIKE BEING INCARCERATED”-Basic training is one of those regimens of cruelty that people have come to accept as normal. The Army has officially eliminated some of its most abusive practices, along with its theory of “breaking them down to build them up,” the classic humiliation of recruits by a drill sergeant, designed to make them into soldiers capable of acting as a unit, following orders and killing. This reshaping remains essential; it is simply meant to be accomplished with more respect now. In all events, weakness is to be despised, which means that the 15 to 37 percent of men and the 38 to 67 percent of women who sustain at least one injury due to the rigors of basic training at Fort Sill, Fort Knox, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood or Fort Benning are in trouble.

A year ago I visited Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where the son of a friend had suffered stress fractures during basic training and was then in the post’s Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program. PTRP is where the Army, desperate for bodies in a time of war, puts broken enlistees whom it is committed neither to curing nor to releasing, nor even to respecting as soldiers and human beings. Basic training takes nine weeks; PTRP can warehouse soldiers for months, in anticipation of the time they manage to recuperate, pass the grueling PT (physical training) test and go on to battle-readiness; or fail the test, try again, stumble through the bureaucratic labyrinth until the point at which they are chaptered out or medically discharged. As trainees, all have yet to be granted “permanent party” status in the Army. In the military hierarchy, this makes them lower life-forms, which is how they were being treated at Fort Sill.

It was Family Weekend when I visited, and the PTRP command was on its toes because for weeks my friend, Pat deVarennes, had been writing a blog exposing the routine abuses of injured soldiers there. As a result of her persistence, the Army had initiated an investigation into the actions of a drill sergeant who had kicked a soldier in his bad knee, sending him to the floor screaming, and who had punished and terrorized the soldiers in numerous other ways. That weekend these men, on crutches and painkillers, wearing casts or moving gingerly, were not being called “fakers,” “lady men,” “shitsacks,” “malingerers”-the names that, at other times, were regularly hurled at them. The command met with parents and wives and told them their loved ones would be getting individualized medical attention, something many had not had for months, and reassured them that the soldiers’ well-being was their chief concern.

A week later, on March 19, 2006, one of those soldiers, Pfc. Matthew Scarano, 21, was found dead in his bunk. He had been in the program for more than a year with a shoulder injury and excruciating pain. It was unlikely he would ever be fit for battle, but he could not get out. Shortly before he died he wrote to deVarennes: “I liken being here to being incarcerated. And it often helped during the bleaker points in PTRP history to think of it as such: I’m far from being any kind of expert on the subject, but perhaps it was a psychological self-defense mechanism to try to perceive what was going on as being punitive in nature.”

Over the months of Scarano’s confinement to the program, his shoulder got worse, and so did he. “The Army has me on Ambien, seroquel, tylox and oxycontins. I also get trazadone to take the edge off,” he wrote his family. At the time of death he was on Fentanyl, described in medical literature as an analgesic patch 80 times more potent than morphine. The Army said an overdose had killed him, and then, although his injured comrades said that dispensing drugs was as strictly controlled as every other aspect of life in PTRP, it essentially blamed the dead man as a doper and the others as slackers for not reporting his drug problem. In fact, some had reported it, and nothing happened. His condition, moreover, was hardly a secret to the command, since often he was so zoned out he could barely stand in formation.

After Scarano’s death, the Army initiated an investigation and issued policy changes. It had done something similar two years earlier when another PTRP inmate, Pvt. Jason Poirier, 22, died in the same Fort Sill barracks from acute methadone intoxication. It’s doubtful that the adjustments since Scarano’s death will do any more than those after Poirier’s to alter fundamentally the treatment of injured soldiers.

FEAR OF REPRISAL-Immediately after Scarano’s death I published a story in CounterPunch detailing the abuses at Fort Sill and sent it to every mainstream journalist I knew urging them to follow up. Readers wrote in droves telling me of their own PTRP experiences at other posts. Some sent the story to their Representatives, and Scarano’s father was calling for a Congressional inquiry. Nothing happened. Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times wrote an excellent piece on the case, and in it Army officials chalked up the 21-year-old’s unfortunate end to lessons learned.

A year later letters continue dribbling into my e-mail box. “Ft. Sill still doing it,” read the subject line of a February letter from a woman who said her nephew was sick with pneumonia and asthma and had been kicked in the chest by a drill sergeant. When I asked for more information, she didn’t reply. “You must never use our names,” wrote a mother whose son had been in Fort Benning’s PTRP last year and was then forced to do basic training twice. Actually, she never gave me the names, not of herself or her son or the soldier he said had committed suicide while he was there. People don’t want to give names to journalists for the same reason they don’t complain to the higher-ups, which makes challenging higher-ups on their behalf difficult.

DeVarennes spoke up because she was scared that if she didn’t, someone might die at Fort Sill. Her son had told her about a soldier who came into PTRP with a broken finger. It didn’t heal properly for some reason and ended up deformed, his hand at less than 100 percent and his ability to do push-ups impaired. He was in PTRP for about nine months trying, and failing, to pass the PT test. One day, he cut himself all over with a razor, smeared himself with excrement, marched naked out of the barracks and was put in a psych ward on suicide watch. Afterwards, no doubt pumped with antidepressants, he was made to try the test one more time, and to fail one more time, before officials moved to discharge him.

He didn’t die. Neither did deVarennes’s son, Pvt. Richard Thurman. Richard got stress fractures and couldn’t run, it was determined, because he had flat feet. Once upon a time flat feet disqualified one from military service. After months in the netherworld of PTRP, Richard still couldn’t run but was cleared for active duty. He is now in Iraq.

WOUNDED, UNWANTED-I thought of Scarano and the others when I read the stories about Walter Reed. The Washington Post’s riveting account of February 18 included the story of Cpl. Jeremy Harper, 19, who had seen three of his buddies die in Iraq and was at Walter Reed for severe PTSD. He refused his medals and kept to his room in the dark, heavily medicated, which everyone noticed. On New Year’s Eve 2004 he was seen wandering in the lobby of one of the Walter Reed buildings, looking for a ride home to West Virginia. The next morning he was found dead in his bed of alcohol poisoning.

After the Post’s story came out, a familiar sequence of firings, testimony and reform commenced. In April the House passed the Wounded Warrior Assistance Act to streamline administrative processes, create a toll-free hotline for complaints, increase the number of VA doctors, etc. In March it passed the Veterans Suicide Prevention Act (suicide is epidemic, and psychological services are grossly strained). The Senate initiated similar measures. About nine Congressional investigations are under way; the president has appointed a special committee, and his 2008 budget increases VA health spending by 9 percent. Being a bureaucracy, the military should benefit some from such bureaucratic adjustment.

Different protocols may have saved Scarano and Harper through more rigorous control of their medications. On some deep level, though, the weakling who would never make a warrior and the weakling who recoiled from the warrior’s reality, rejecting its wretched honors and demands, were done in long before the toxins killed them. Fighters who would not, or could not, fight, they flouted the institution’s sacred principle by their very being. It had to punish them.

“At the military’s upper levels, abuse is widely believed to be not only desirable but absolutely necessary to have a disciplined, effective military and keep everyone in line,” a former Army enlisted man, Tim Moriarty, wrote to me. “Instilling in someone the ‘fear of God’ (or rather, the fear of the Army) is the first thing one encounters when joining the Army. It’s a lesson drilled down deep into the psyche, and it’s meant to last for life, or at least the duration of one’s enlistment.”

And the essence of that fear? It is the knowledge, another former soldier, called Morley, explained, “that the people in front of you [i.e., the enemy] and the people in back of you pointing a revolver at you to keep you from running away [i.e., your own command] are all trying to kill you, and they succeed all too frequently with your friends and buddies. But you can’t desert to the enemy, because all combat troops shoot prisoners, no matter what is said in the books, because prisoners are like the wounded, someone has to look after them.” And no warrior institution wants to.

After the Walter Reed scandal broke, the media fastened on the mold in Building 18, the rodents and bad food and nightmare of paperwork. But it was the Post’s description of formation, the 7 a.m. lineup of injured soldiers, necessary to “maintain some discipline,” that most unnerved me. Every morning, regardless of weather, the injured assemble. Umbrellas are forbidden, uniforms required. Some soldiers “are so gorked out on pills that they seem on the verge of nodding off.” Shades of Scarano. They are reminded to keep warm, and avoid beating their spouse and children. Sometimes they are berated for the condition of their rooms or their uniforms or their attitude. There were no soldiers with missing limbs or concave skulls or rearranged faces at Fort Sill, but the condescension and barely concealed cruelty were the same. For the injured soldier, formation enacts the military’s ritual of belonging while expressing its disdain. In this single act the institution tells them that it is taking care of them and that it hates having to do so.

Before he was cashiered as commander of Walter Reed, Gen. George Weightman told the Post that the reason injured soldiers stay so long in the military/medical limbo is that the Army needs to hold on to as many soldiers as it can. It patches up the damaged to send them back into battle, as Mark Benjamin reported in Salon from Fort Benning in March, redeploying troops who, doctors say, are medically unfit, altering medical profiles so that they can kill again. It pushes antidepressants on the psychically damaged in the field to keep up the numbers, as Lisa Chedekel and Matthew Kauffman stunningly detailed in the Hartford Courant last May. It displays the injured at basic training posts as a demonstration to the healthy of its caring, and as a warning.

On April 20, I received an e-mail from a 24-year-old new recruit from Illinois named Travis Meyers. He had arrived at Fort Sill on February 6, he said, and on his third day there he sat down with a member of post personnel for “a medical moment of truth.” Recruiters don’t bother to assess the medical fitness of the people they sign up. At basic training, Army personnel have to ask about pre-existing conditions, but once presented with a warm body in uniform they are loath to accept any truth that might send that body home. Meyers revealed that a doctor once told him he has heart disease. “The reason that I came forward,” he told me, “is because the push-ups that we were forced to do and the stress of being yelled at and degraded at any chance had made my chest start hurting extremely bad.” He said he had not taken the warning from his civilian doctor seriously before because the condition had never affected him in this way. After dueling EKGs and contradictory medical opinions, Fort Sill decided Meyers was fit for basic training.

“The medical moment of truth is ridiculous because they really don’t care,” Pvt. Travis Meyers wrote of his introduction to the Army at Fort Sill. “There was a kid that got shipped to basic [training] with two of the four valves of his heart closed. . . . I talked to a kid at the TMC-troop medical clinic-who had one of his instructors jump on his back and injure him, and it was done twice not just once. . . . There was a Drill Sgt. who kicked a kid in the ribs while he was trying to do push-ups.”

On March 5, Pvt. Travis Meyers went AWOL. When he wrote he said he was soon to turn himself in: “I’m scared, but not as scared as I would be to go through basic with the way my heart is.” His is a normal story, in which the prospect of prison is a step up.

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer living in New York City. She can be reached at jwyp@earthlink.net.

Malevolent Power at Fort Sill: The Army Slays Its Own (Counterpunch)

Army Acts to Curb Abuses of Injured Recruits (The New York Times)

Moral Waivers and the Military

--from the New York Times

Published: February 20, 2007

The Iraq war has plunged the Army into a vicious cycle of declining standards. Multiple, extended tours of duty have sapped morale and blighted recruiting. New plans for a larger overall force could reduce pressures but would also mean that recruiters would have to meet higher quotas.

To keep filling the ranks, the Army has had to keep lowering its expectations. Diluting educational, aptitude and medical standards has not been enough. Nor have larger enlistment bonuses plugged the gap. So the Army has found itself recklessly expanding the granting of “moral waivers,” which let people convicted of serious misdemeanors and even some felonies enlist in its ranks.

Last year, such waivers were granted to 8,129 men and women — or more than one out of every 10 new Army recruits. That number is up 65 percent since 2003, the year President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq. In the last three years, more than 125,000 moral waivers have been granted by America’s four military services.

Most of last year’s Army waivers were for serious misdemeanors, like aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and vehicular homicide. But around 900 — double the number in 2003 — were for felonies. Worse, the Army does no systematic tracking of recruits with waivers once it signs them up, and it does not always pay enough attention to any adjustment problems. Without adequate monitoring and counseling, handing out guns to people who have already committed crimes poses a danger to the other soldiers they serve with and to the innocent civilians they are supposed to protect.

There is a long and honorable history of young people who have had minor scrapes with the law joining the military and successfully turning their lives around. But those who have committed more serious crimes, especially those involving weapons, vehicular homicide or sexual abuse, should generally be denied moral waivers. And those who do qualify for waivers should be monitored, counseled and carefully supervised.

The fastest way to drop the rate of moral waivers would be for the Army to rebuild its recently tarnished reputation among less problematic young Americans. That will require an end to involuntarily extended tours of duty and accelerated, multiple redeployments into combat. The military is America’s face to much of the world. It ought to present the best face of American youth.