reprinted from indystar.com
December 1, 2009
Guard commander said exposure to carcinogen in Iraq caused his cancer
By Jason Thomas
jason.thomas@indystar.com
A funeral is set today for a retired Indiana National Guard commander who testified in October that exposure to a lethal carcinogen in Iraq caused his cancer.
Lt. Col. James C. Gentry, 52, Williams, Ind., died of lung cancer Wednesday. His death is a poignant marker in a pending federal lawsuit; his life inspired a federal bill working its way through Congress.
Maj. Gen. R. Martin Umbarger, Indiana's top National Guard general, will attend the service at noon at Kraft Funeral Service in New Albany in Southern Indiana.
"He was a very good person who cared for his soldiers and his family," Lt. Col. Deedra Thombleson, the Indiana National Guard's public affairs officer, said of Gentry, who retired in February 2008 after 22 years of service. "He came forth and talked about the issues, hoping it would draw attention to what he and his soldiers had gone through."
Gentry, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, last spring joined a federal lawsuit filed in December 2008. It accuses Texas-based KBR and several related companies of concealing the risks faced by 136 Indiana National Guard soldiers potentially exposed to a cancer-causing agent, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The suit originally was filed on behalf of 16 Indiana soldiers but has grown to 47 plaintiffs, including the family of a soldier, David Moore, Dubois, Ind., who died of a lung disease in 2008.
Most of the plaintiffs served with a Tell City unit sent to Iraq with the Indiana National Guard's 1st Battalion, 152nd Infantry Regiment, based in Jasper. For three months beginning in May 2003, the unit provided security for KBR employees charged with rebuilding the Qarmat Ali water-pumping plant near Basra.
The lawsuit says sodium dichromate, an industrial chemical normally used to remove pipe corrosion, contained heavy doses of the toxin and had been spread around the site, possibly by fleeing loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein.
The carcinogen, hexavalent chromium, is known to heighten the risk for cancer of the lungs and respiratory tract and is one of the most dangerous carcinogens rated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said Mike Doyle, the Houston-based lead attorney on the lawsuit.
Gentry, who commanded more than 600 soldiers, did not smoke.
The Indiana lawsuit is one of five across the country involving several hundred soldiers potentially exposed to the carcinogen, according to Doyle. Lawsuits have been filed in Oregon, West Virginia and Pittsburgh. In all, more than 600 troops from Indiana and three other states could have been exposed, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The Indiana suit claims many soldiers who served at the plant are developing rashes and other health problems.
"I don't know what kind of impact it will have on the lawsuit, but it's a terrible loss for his family and Indiana and the soldiers who served with him," Doyle said of Gentry's death.
The original complaint claims KBR had early indications of a chemical risk before the soldiers arrived.
"KBR's commitment to the safety and security of all employees, the troops and those we serve is the company's top priority," Heather L. Browne, the company's communications director, said in a statement. "KBR did not knowingly harm troops."
The last of Gentry's two depositions in the case came in October at his Southern Indiana home, where he had hoped to live out his retirement with his wife, LouAnn.
"His wife," Thombleson added, "does not want his death to be in vain."
A few weeks after the deposition, U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., spoke with Gentry on the phone. His story and that of his fellow soldiers stirred Bayh to write the Health Care for Veterans Exposed to Chemical Hazards Act of 2009, which is now with the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
The legislation would make affected soldiers eligible for medical examinations, laboratory tests, hospital care and nursing services. It also would recognize a veteran's own report of exposure and include it in a Department of Defense registry.
Passage of the legislation would be a fitting tribute to a soldier who gave all, those who knew Gentry say.
"He was just a great people person and cared about his soldiers," Thombleson said. "His loyalty to his soldiers, even when he passed away, was still there."
Additional Facts
What's next
The Indiana lawsuit is set for trial Sept. 27 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana in Evansville.
Showing posts with label increased risk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label increased risk. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Father of soldier who committed suicide is on a quest for answers
From the El Paso Times:
'There's no way he could do what he did without being pushed to the limit'
By Ramon Bracamontes and Chris Roberts / El Paso Times
Posted: 08/31/2009 12:00:00 AM MDT
Pvt. Keiffer P. Wilhelm EL PASO -- Adrian Wilhelm, the father of a 19-year-old Fort Bliss private who killed himself four weeks ago in Iraq, is fueled by anger.
He's angry at the army. He's angry at Fort Bliss and at the 1st Armored Cavalry.
Most of all, he is enraged at the four soldiers who are charged with abusing his son, Pvt. Keiffer P. Wilhelm, through excessive physical training. It is this abuse, Adrian Wilhelm said, that probably caused his son to kill himself Aug. 4.
A Navy veteran, the elder Wilhelm said he wants to make sure nothing like this ever happens again to a U.S. soldier.
Adrian Wilhelm is publicly talking about his son, but the Army is not. And Adrian Wilhelm is trying to piece together exactly what happened in Iraq, as his son had only been there four days.
"The Army has sealed everything and stopped all communication," Wilhelm, 40, said from his home in Plymouth, Ohio. "I just can't understand what happened. I can't comprehend that these guys in a unit, as friends, go over there and beat on their own. I am fueled by anger and I'm not going to let this go."
Pvt. Wilhelm joined the Army in December and was assigned to a unit at Fort Bliss. He killed himself in southern Iraq, his father said. The army's official statement said he died of injuries from "a noncombat-related incident."
Two weeks after his death, on Aug. 20, four other Fort Bliss soldiers were charged with cruelty and maltreatment of subordinates. One of the subordinates was Keiffer Wilhelm.
Army says there is no direct evidence that the soldiers' alleged misconduct caused Wilhelm's death.
The four soldiers remain overseas and are awaiting a military hearing, which will be in Iraq. They were not arrested or detained, but were put on "present for duty" status and moved to a different base. They have been assigned military legal counsel.
Maj. Myles B. Caggins, public affairs officer for the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, said no date for a hearing has been set because the Pvt. Keiffer P. Wilhelm investigation continues.
Wilhem and the four accused of abusing him were with the 2nd Battalion, 13th Cavalry Regiment. Approximately 200 soldiers were in the unit.
Adrian Wilhelm is trying to figure out why his son was targeted.
"I just don't understand how my son could be so happy one day and ready to deploy with his friends to Iraq to train Iraqi soldiers, and then this happens. It is still surprising."
Keiffer Wilhelm possessed a strong personality, his father said. Keiffer, a wrestler in high school, had survived boot camp and had lost weight.
"If he had any quirks it is that he was a nice guy and he would not stop making you laugh," Adrian Wilhelm said. "Somehow, no matter what, there was always another joke ready to come from him."
The last time Adrian Wilhelm saw Keiffer alive was on May 7 during a family wedding in Arizona. Keiffer seemed happy, excited to be deploying. He was talking about buying a car in El Paso and an iPhone, his father said.
"There's no way he could do what he did without being pushed to the limit," Adrian Wilhelm said. "There has to be a way to stop this from ever happening again."
According to the Army, suicides among soldiers are on the rise and have surpassed the suicide rates for civilians, when compared on a per capita basis. The Army confirmed 128 suicides last year and an additional 15 suspected suicides among active-duty soldiers and the National Guard.
The rate of suicides is 20.2 per 100,000 in the Army. The suicide rate for civilians is 11 per 100,000 people.
In 2008, Fort Bliss had six confirmed suicides.
One of them was Spc. Manny Zavala, 26, who hanged himself Dec. 3 at his El Paso apartment.
"He spoke in a letter he left that he had this pain and he didn't know how to take care of it and he was sorry for what he was going to do," said the soldier's mother, Rosario Zavala. Her son was a Fort Bliss combat medic who had never deployed.
Manny Zavala had talked to the Fort Bliss medical staff about his problems.
"Three months prior, he had gone to get help and they gave him tranquilizers," his mother said.
She could see his pain.
"I would say, 'Hijo, let's get some help.' But he would say 'No mom, I'm all right.'"
She thought things would be all right because her son had received a new assignment at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and was planning to live with his parents at home in Yuma.
"We fixed his room up," she said, her voice thickening with emotion. "But when he came home we had to bury him."
Army officials will only say that suicides are a problem they are trying to lessen. At Fort Campbell, Ky., all regular activity at the end of May was suspended to focus on suicide-prevention training. Fort Campbell, with 11 confirmed suicides, led the Army at that point. From January to March, the installation averaged a suicide per week.
Fort Bliss has had one confirmed suicide in 2009, officials said. Keiffer Wilhelm would be the second.
Ramon Bracamontes may be reached at rbracamontes@elpasotimes; 546-6142.
Chris Roberts may be reached at croberts@elpasotimes.com; 546-6135.
'There's no way he could do what he did without being pushed to the limit'
By Ramon Bracamontes and Chris Roberts / El Paso Times
Posted: 08/31/2009 12:00:00 AM MDT
Pvt. Keiffer P. Wilhelm EL PASO -- Adrian Wilhelm, the father of a 19-year-old Fort Bliss private who killed himself four weeks ago in Iraq, is fueled by anger.
He's angry at the army. He's angry at Fort Bliss and at the 1st Armored Cavalry.
Most of all, he is enraged at the four soldiers who are charged with abusing his son, Pvt. Keiffer P. Wilhelm, through excessive physical training. It is this abuse, Adrian Wilhelm said, that probably caused his son to kill himself Aug. 4.
A Navy veteran, the elder Wilhelm said he wants to make sure nothing like this ever happens again to a U.S. soldier.
Adrian Wilhelm is publicly talking about his son, but the Army is not. And Adrian Wilhelm is trying to piece together exactly what happened in Iraq, as his son had only been there four days.
"The Army has sealed everything and stopped all communication," Wilhelm, 40, said from his home in Plymouth, Ohio. "I just can't understand what happened. I can't comprehend that these guys in a unit, as friends, go over there and beat on their own. I am fueled by anger and I'm not going to let this go."
Pvt. Wilhelm joined the Army in December and was assigned to a unit at Fort Bliss. He killed himself in southern Iraq, his father said. The army's official statement said he died of injuries from "a noncombat-related incident."
Two weeks after his death, on Aug. 20, four other Fort Bliss soldiers were charged with cruelty and maltreatment of subordinates. One of the subordinates was Keiffer Wilhelm.
Army says there is no direct evidence that the soldiers' alleged misconduct caused Wilhelm's death.
The four soldiers remain overseas and are awaiting a military hearing, which will be in Iraq. They were not arrested or detained, but were put on "present for duty" status and moved to a different base. They have been assigned military legal counsel.
Maj. Myles B. Caggins, public affairs officer for the 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division, said no date for a hearing has been set because the Pvt. Keiffer P. Wilhelm investigation continues.
Wilhem and the four accused of abusing him were with the 2nd Battalion, 13th Cavalry Regiment. Approximately 200 soldiers were in the unit.
Adrian Wilhelm is trying to figure out why his son was targeted.
"I just don't understand how my son could be so happy one day and ready to deploy with his friends to Iraq to train Iraqi soldiers, and then this happens. It is still surprising."
Keiffer Wilhelm possessed a strong personality, his father said. Keiffer, a wrestler in high school, had survived boot camp and had lost weight.
"If he had any quirks it is that he was a nice guy and he would not stop making you laugh," Adrian Wilhelm said. "Somehow, no matter what, there was always another joke ready to come from him."
The last time Adrian Wilhelm saw Keiffer alive was on May 7 during a family wedding in Arizona. Keiffer seemed happy, excited to be deploying. He was talking about buying a car in El Paso and an iPhone, his father said.
"There's no way he could do what he did without being pushed to the limit," Adrian Wilhelm said. "There has to be a way to stop this from ever happening again."
According to the Army, suicides among soldiers are on the rise and have surpassed the suicide rates for civilians, when compared on a per capita basis. The Army confirmed 128 suicides last year and an additional 15 suspected suicides among active-duty soldiers and the National Guard.
The rate of suicides is 20.2 per 100,000 in the Army. The suicide rate for civilians is 11 per 100,000 people.
In 2008, Fort Bliss had six confirmed suicides.
One of them was Spc. Manny Zavala, 26, who hanged himself Dec. 3 at his El Paso apartment.
"He spoke in a letter he left that he had this pain and he didn't know how to take care of it and he was sorry for what he was going to do," said the soldier's mother, Rosario Zavala. Her son was a Fort Bliss combat medic who had never deployed.
Manny Zavala had talked to the Fort Bliss medical staff about his problems.
"Three months prior, he had gone to get help and they gave him tranquilizers," his mother said.
She could see his pain.
"I would say, 'Hijo, let's get some help.' But he would say 'No mom, I'm all right.'"
She thought things would be all right because her son had received a new assignment at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and was planning to live with his parents at home in Yuma.
"We fixed his room up," she said, her voice thickening with emotion. "But when he came home we had to bury him."
Army officials will only say that suicides are a problem they are trying to lessen. At Fort Campbell, Ky., all regular activity at the end of May was suspended to focus on suicide-prevention training. Fort Campbell, with 11 confirmed suicides, led the Army at that point. From January to March, the installation averaged a suicide per week.
Fort Bliss has had one confirmed suicide in 2009, officials said. Keiffer Wilhelm would be the second.
Ramon Bracamontes may be reached at rbracamontes@elpasotimes; 546-6142.
Chris Roberts may be reached at croberts@elpasotimes.com; 546-6135.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
The Forgotten Casualties
May 22-24, 2009
Falling Through the Cracks of the Army's Duty of Care
By TED NEWCOMEN
It was just another tragic headline in a Florida newspaper, "Area woman killed in Iraq – Father confirms his daughter is third casualty in past three months". The article went on to describe how Army SPC Oprah Nestling, aged 24, (for reasons of confidentiality - not her real name or age), had been killed in combat overseas in January 2006. She was the third service member from the newspaper’s catchment area to become a fatality in as many months. No details were provided by the Department of Defense and her father declined to make any further comment.
Nestling’s name also briefly appeared as one of sixty-two service fatalities listed during the month of January 2006 on the website of the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualty.org), along with the names of a number of marines who had been killed in the same IED (Improvised Explosive Device) attack.
However, a few days later her name was removed from the casualty list altogether and no further information appeared in the local paper. In the months that followed there was desultory 'chatter' on the internet speculating that there had been some sort of army cover-up. At the time lurid rumors were widespread about unexplained deaths of female military personnel both overseas and on bases in the US. Further investigation revealed that SPC Nestling had not been killed on active service in Iraq but was supposedly found slumped dead on the floor of a barrack room (not her own) at Ft.Bragg, North Carolina.
Delay & obfuscation by military authorities
Fast forward a year and a half and the Army was still refusing to make available any information about Nestling’s death following requests submitted thru the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The reason given was that an active investigation of the case was still in progress.
To read the entire story, click here.
Falling Through the Cracks of the Army's Duty of Care
By TED NEWCOMEN
It was just another tragic headline in a Florida newspaper, "Area woman killed in Iraq – Father confirms his daughter is third casualty in past three months". The article went on to describe how Army SPC Oprah Nestling, aged 24, (for reasons of confidentiality - not her real name or age), had been killed in combat overseas in January 2006. She was the third service member from the newspaper’s catchment area to become a fatality in as many months. No details were provided by the Department of Defense and her father declined to make any further comment.
Nestling’s name also briefly appeared as one of sixty-two service fatalities listed during the month of January 2006 on the website of the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualty.org), along with the names of a number of marines who had been killed in the same IED (Improvised Explosive Device) attack.
However, a few days later her name was removed from the casualty list altogether and no further information appeared in the local paper. In the months that followed there was desultory 'chatter' on the internet speculating that there had been some sort of army cover-up. At the time lurid rumors were widespread about unexplained deaths of female military personnel both overseas and on bases in the US. Further investigation revealed that SPC Nestling had not been killed on active service in Iraq but was supposedly found slumped dead on the floor of a barrack room (not her own) at Ft.Bragg, North Carolina.
Delay & obfuscation by military authorities
Fast forward a year and a half and the Army was still refusing to make available any information about Nestling’s death following requests submitted thru the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The reason given was that an active investigation of the case was still in progress.
To read the entire story, click here.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
EDITORIAL: Enemy in the mirror
The Army has a bigger problem than private guns
Suicide is the third-leading noncombat cause of death in the U.S. military, according to Defense Department data. On at least one Army post, the response was a misguided effort to require some soldiers to register personal firearms.
The Army would not tell us how many soldiers have used private weapons to kill themselves. In the general population, firearms account for about half of all suicides nationwide each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, owning a firearm doesn't raise the risk of playing Russian roulette, just as owning a private car doesn't increase the risk of intentionally driving off a cliff in desperation like Thelma and Louise. There is an underlying intention that manifests from what physicians call "suicidal ideation," which is the process of thinking about and planning to end one's life.
Some overzealous Army commanders appear to categorize private gun ownership, rather than depression and desperation, as the problem. In March, soldiers in Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., were told they would have to start registering their privately owned arms with their command. Post spokesman Cathy Gramling told us that the order came from the "subordinate unit commander." The soldiers also were told to provide the storage location of their personal weapons along with information on their state-issued concealed carry permits. Ms. Gramling told us the commander who spearheaded the effort thought he was acting within his authority to address "a number of negligent discharges of privately owned weapons." The program has since been suspended.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Suicide is the third-leading noncombat cause of death in the U.S. military, according to Defense Department data. On at least one Army post, the response was a misguided effort to require some soldiers to register personal firearms.
The Army would not tell us how many soldiers have used private weapons to kill themselves. In the general population, firearms account for about half of all suicides nationwide each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, owning a firearm doesn't raise the risk of playing Russian roulette, just as owning a private car doesn't increase the risk of intentionally driving off a cliff in desperation like Thelma and Louise. There is an underlying intention that manifests from what physicians call "suicidal ideation," which is the process of thinking about and planning to end one's life.
Some overzealous Army commanders appear to categorize private gun ownership, rather than depression and desperation, as the problem. In March, soldiers in Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., were told they would have to start registering their privately owned arms with their command. Post spokesman Cathy Gramling told us that the order came from the "subordinate unit commander." The soldiers also were told to provide the storage location of their personal weapons along with information on their state-issued concealed carry permits. Ms. Gramling told us the commander who spearheaded the effort thought he was acting within his authority to address "a number of negligent discharges of privately owned weapons." The program has since been suspended.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
UK military loses in court over troop protection
LONDON (AP) — Britain's second-highest court ruled Monday that soldiers at war are covered by European human rights law, a decision that could compel the military to give troops on the battlefield better equipment and medical care.
The case centered on the death of a British soldier, Pvt. Jason Smith, 32, who died of heatstroke while serving in Iraq in 2003. An inquiry found that the military failed to recognize and take appropriate steps to address the difficulty Smith had adjusting to Iraq's climate.
The court upheld an earlier ruling stating that British soldiers serving in military operations are protected by European human rights laws that enshrine the right to life. Sending soldiers into conflict with inadequate equipment could violate that right, the court said.
Smith's mother, Catherine, said she hoped the ruling would prevent similar deaths.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
The case centered on the death of a British soldier, Pvt. Jason Smith, 32, who died of heatstroke while serving in Iraq in 2003. An inquiry found that the military failed to recognize and take appropriate steps to address the difficulty Smith had adjusting to Iraq's climate.
The court upheld an earlier ruling stating that British soldiers serving in military operations are protected by European human rights laws that enshrine the right to life. Sending soldiers into conflict with inadequate equipment could violate that right, the court said.
Smith's mother, Catherine, said she hoped the ruling would prevent similar deaths.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Suicidal Soldiers
The murder of five U.S. soldiers by their comrade exposes the depth of the military's mental health troubles. Elspeth Reeve on why the culture of humiliation and stigma makes matters worse.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
This is a story about "unit watch" submitted by Richard Stites.
Read the entire story by clicking here.
This is a story about "unit watch" submitted by Richard Stites.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
US Soldiers Being Killed by Psychiatric Drugs
“I believe there are many more soldiers and Marines who have died in their sleep just like the four in West Virginia,” said Mr. White, a retired high school principal. “I think what we have found is just the tip of the iceberg, but we need more national publicity to help us find others who have lost loved ones and are looking for answers.”
Washington Times
EXCLUSIVE: After death of son, dad takes cases to Capitol Hill
HURRICANE, W.Va.
Andrea Billups and Audrey HudsonThursday, November 13, 2008
A West Virginia man whose son survived the battlefields of Iraq only to die in his sleep at home is crusading to find other military families whose loved ones also have died after taking drugs prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Washington Times
EXCLUSIVE: After death of son, dad takes cases to Capitol Hill
HURRICANE, W.Va.
Andrea Billups and Audrey HudsonThursday, November 13, 2008
A West Virginia man whose son survived the battlefields of Iraq only to die in his sleep at home is crusading to find other military families whose loved ones also have died after taking drugs prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Read the entire story by clicking here.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Friday, July 18, 2008
Electrical Risks at Iraq Bases Are Worse Than Said
The New York Times
July 18, 2008
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.
During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.
And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.
Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”
The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.
But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering. His death, caused by poor electrical grounding, drew the attention of lawmakers and Pentagon leaders after his family pushed for answers.
Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general have begun investigations, and this month senior Army officials ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR.
“We consider this to be a very serious issue,” Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in an e-mail message, while declining to comment on the findings in the Army documents.
Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, would not comment about a company safety study or the reports of electrical fires or shocks, but she said KBR had found no evidence of a link between its work and the electrocutions. She added, “KBR’s commitment to the safety of all employees and those the company serves remains unwavering.”
In public statements, Pentagon officials have not addressed the scope of the hazards, instead mostly focusing on the circumstances surrounding the death of Sergeant Maseth, who lived near Pittsburgh.
But the internal documents, including dozens of memos, e-mail messages and reports from the Army, the Defense Contract Management Agency and other agencies, show that electrical problems were widely recognized as a major safety threat among Pentagon contracting experts.
It is impossible to determine the exact number of the resulting deaths and injuries because no single document tallies them up. (The records were compiled for Congressional and Pentagon investigators and obtained independently by The Times.)
The 2007 safety survey was ordered by the top official in Iraq for the Defense Contract Management Agency, which oversees contractors, after the October 2006 electrical fire that killed two soldiers near Tikrit. Paul Dickinson, a Pentagon safety specialist who wrote the report, confirmed its findings, but did not elaborate.
Senior Pentagon officials appear not to have responded to the survey until this May, after Congressional investigators had begun to ask questions. Then they argued that its findings were irrelevant to Sergeant Maseth’s electrocution.
In a memo dated May 26, 2008, a top official of the Defense Contract Management Agency stated that “there is no direct or causal connection” between the problems identified in the survey and those at the Baghdad compound where Sergeant Maseth died.
But in a sworn statement, apparently prepared for an investigation of Sergeant Maseth’s death by the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, a Pentagon contracting official described how both military and KBR officials were aware of the growing danger from poor electrical work.
In the statement, Ingrid Harrison, an official with the Pentagon’s contracting management agency, disclosed that an electrical fire caused by poor wiring in a nearby building two weeks before Sergeant Maseth’s death had endangered two other soldiers.
“The soldiers were lucky because the one window that they could reach did not have bars on it, or there could have been two other fatalities,” Ms. Harrison said in the statement. She said that after Sergeant Maseth died, a more senior Pentagon contracting official in Baghdad denied knowing about the fire, but she asserted that “it was thoroughly discussed” during internal meetings.
Ms. Harrison added that KBR officials also knew of widespread electrical problems at the Radwaniya Palace Complex, near Baghdad’s airport, where Sergeant Maseth died. “KBR has been at R.P.C. for over four years and was fully aware of the safety hazards, violations and concerns regarding the soldiers’ housing,” she said in the statement. She added that the contractor “chose to ignore the known unsafe conditions.”
Ms. Harrison did not respond to a request for comment.
In another internal document written after Sergeant Maseth’s death, a senior Army officer in Baghdad warned that soldiers had to be moved immediately from several buildings because of electrical risks. In a memo asking for emergency repairs at three buildings, the official warned of a “clear and present danger,” adding, “Exposed wiring, ungrounded distribution panels and inappropriate lighting fixtures render these facilities uninhabitable and unsafe.”
The memo added that “over the course of several months, electrical fires and shorts have compounded these unsafe conditions.”
Since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, tens of thousands of American troops have been housed in Iraqi buildings that date from the Saddam Hussein era. KBR and other contractors have been paid millions of dollars to repair and upgrade the buildings, including their electrical systems. KBR officials say they handle the maintenance for 4,000 structures and an additional 35,000 containers used as housing in the war zone.
The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include accusations of overbilling, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted.
Officials say the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day.
Government officials responsible for contract oversight, meanwhile, were also unable to keep up, so that unsafe electrical work was not challenged by government auditors.
Several electricians who worked for KBR have said previously in interviews that they repeatedly warned KBR managers and Pentagon and military officials about unsafe electrical work. They said that supervisors had ignored their concerns or, in some cases, lacked the training to understand the problems.
The Army documents cite a number of recent safety threats. One report showed that during a four-day period in late February, soldiers at a Baghdad compound reported being shocked while taking showers in different buildings. The circumstances appear similar to those that led to Sergeant Maseth’s death.
Another entry from early March stated that an entire house used by American troops was electrically charged, making it unlivable.
Since the Pentagon reports were compiled, more episodes linked to electrical problems have occurred. In late June, for example, an electrical fire at a Marine base in Falluja destroyed 10 buildings, forcing marines there to ask for donations from home to replace their personal belongings.
On July 5, Sgt. First Class Anthony Lynn Woodham of the Arkansas National Guard died at his base in Tallil, Iraq. Initial reports blamed electrocution, but his death is being investigated because of conflicting information, according to his wife, Crystal Woodham, and a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard.
July 18, 2008
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — Shoddy electrical work by private contractors on United States military bases in Iraq is widespread and dangerous, causing more deaths and injuries from fires and shocks than the Pentagon has acknowledged, according to internal Army documents.
During just one six-month period — August 2006 through January 2007 — at least 283 electrical fires destroyed or damaged American military facilities in Iraq, including the military’s largest dining hall in the country, documents obtained by The New York Times show. Two soldiers died in an electrical fire at their base near Tikrit in 2006, the records note, while another was injured while jumping from a burning guard tower in May 2007.
And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.
Electrical problems were the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq, according to an Army survey issued in February 2007. It noted “a safety threat theaterwide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.”
The Army report said KBR, the Houston-based company that is responsible for providing basic services for American troops in Iraq, including housing, did its own study and found a “systemic problem” with electrical work.
But the Pentagon did little to address the issue until a Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, was electrocuted in January while showering. His death, caused by poor electrical grounding, drew the attention of lawmakers and Pentagon leaders after his family pushed for answers.
Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general have begun investigations, and this month senior Army officials ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR.
“We consider this to be a very serious issue,” Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in an e-mail message, while declining to comment on the findings in the Army documents.
Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, would not comment about a company safety study or the reports of electrical fires or shocks, but she said KBR had found no evidence of a link between its work and the electrocutions. She added, “KBR’s commitment to the safety of all employees and those the company serves remains unwavering.”
In public statements, Pentagon officials have not addressed the scope of the hazards, instead mostly focusing on the circumstances surrounding the death of Sergeant Maseth, who lived near Pittsburgh.
But the internal documents, including dozens of memos, e-mail messages and reports from the Army, the Defense Contract Management Agency and other agencies, show that electrical problems were widely recognized as a major safety threat among Pentagon contracting experts.
It is impossible to determine the exact number of the resulting deaths and injuries because no single document tallies them up. (The records were compiled for Congressional and Pentagon investigators and obtained independently by The Times.)
The 2007 safety survey was ordered by the top official in Iraq for the Defense Contract Management Agency, which oversees contractors, after the October 2006 electrical fire that killed two soldiers near Tikrit. Paul Dickinson, a Pentagon safety specialist who wrote the report, confirmed its findings, but did not elaborate.
Senior Pentagon officials appear not to have responded to the survey until this May, after Congressional investigators had begun to ask questions. Then they argued that its findings were irrelevant to Sergeant Maseth’s electrocution.
In a memo dated May 26, 2008, a top official of the Defense Contract Management Agency stated that “there is no direct or causal connection” between the problems identified in the survey and those at the Baghdad compound where Sergeant Maseth died.
But in a sworn statement, apparently prepared for an investigation of Sergeant Maseth’s death by the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, a Pentagon contracting official described how both military and KBR officials were aware of the growing danger from poor electrical work.
In the statement, Ingrid Harrison, an official with the Pentagon’s contracting management agency, disclosed that an electrical fire caused by poor wiring in a nearby building two weeks before Sergeant Maseth’s death had endangered two other soldiers.
“The soldiers were lucky because the one window that they could reach did not have bars on it, or there could have been two other fatalities,” Ms. Harrison said in the statement. She said that after Sergeant Maseth died, a more senior Pentagon contracting official in Baghdad denied knowing about the fire, but she asserted that “it was thoroughly discussed” during internal meetings.
Ms. Harrison added that KBR officials also knew of widespread electrical problems at the Radwaniya Palace Complex, near Baghdad’s airport, where Sergeant Maseth died. “KBR has been at R.P.C. for over four years and was fully aware of the safety hazards, violations and concerns regarding the soldiers’ housing,” she said in the statement. She added that the contractor “chose to ignore the known unsafe conditions.”
Ms. Harrison did not respond to a request for comment.
In another internal document written after Sergeant Maseth’s death, a senior Army officer in Baghdad warned that soldiers had to be moved immediately from several buildings because of electrical risks. In a memo asking for emergency repairs at three buildings, the official warned of a “clear and present danger,” adding, “Exposed wiring, ungrounded distribution panels and inappropriate lighting fixtures render these facilities uninhabitable and unsafe.”
The memo added that “over the course of several months, electrical fires and shorts have compounded these unsafe conditions.”
Since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, tens of thousands of American troops have been housed in Iraqi buildings that date from the Saddam Hussein era. KBR and other contractors have been paid millions of dollars to repair and upgrade the buildings, including their electrical systems. KBR officials say they handle the maintenance for 4,000 structures and an additional 35,000 containers used as housing in the war zone.
The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include accusations of overbilling, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted.
Officials say the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq that companies like KBR were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the operations. Some of the electrical work, for example, was turned over to subcontractors, some of which hired unskilled Iraqis who were paid only a few dollars a day.
Government officials responsible for contract oversight, meanwhile, were also unable to keep up, so that unsafe electrical work was not challenged by government auditors.
Several electricians who worked for KBR have said previously in interviews that they repeatedly warned KBR managers and Pentagon and military officials about unsafe electrical work. They said that supervisors had ignored their concerns or, in some cases, lacked the training to understand the problems.
The Army documents cite a number of recent safety threats. One report showed that during a four-day period in late February, soldiers at a Baghdad compound reported being shocked while taking showers in different buildings. The circumstances appear similar to those that led to Sergeant Maseth’s death.
Another entry from early March stated that an entire house used by American troops was electrically charged, making it unlivable.
Since the Pentagon reports were compiled, more episodes linked to electrical problems have occurred. In late June, for example, an electrical fire at a Marine base in Falluja destroyed 10 buildings, forcing marines there to ask for donations from home to replace their personal belongings.
On July 5, Sgt. First Class Anthony Lynn Woodham of the Arkansas National Guard died at his base in Tallil, Iraq. Initial reports blamed electrocution, but his death is being investigated because of conflicting information, according to his wife, Crystal Woodham, and a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard.
Suspect Soldiers: Did Crimes in US Foretell Violence in Iraq?
by Russell Carollo
Before Army Sgt. 1st Class Randal Ruby was accused in Iraq of beating prisoners and of conspiring to plant rifles on dead civilians, he amassed a 10-year criminal record in Colorado and Washington state for assaulting his wife and in Maine for a drunken high-speed police chase, for which he remains wanted.
Before Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes stabbed an Iraqi private to death, angering the soldier’s unit of coalition soldiers, he was hospitalized after threatening suicide in high school, accused of assault, disorderly conduct and trespassing, and, in the months leading up to deployment, twice linked to drug use.
Before Army Spc. Shane Carl Gonyon was convicted of stealing a pistol at Abu Ghraib prison, he was convicted twice on felony charges and arrested four times, once for allegedly giving a 13-year-old girl marijuana in exchange for oral sex. He enlisted weeks after his release from a federal prison in Oregon.
A yearlong examination of military and civilian records by The Sacramento Bee involving hundreds of troops who entered the services since the Iraq war began identified 120 cases of people whose backgrounds should have raised the suspicions of military recruiters, including felony convitions and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.
Of those, 70 later were involved in controversial or criminal incidents in Iraq.
Ruby, Holmes and Gonyon were among those cases.
“These guys are out there carrying weapons, fighting on the streets with drugs in their pockets,” said Tressie Cox, whose son, Lee Robert, had a history of drug and mental problems before he was charged with selling drugs in Iraq. “Shame on my son, but shame on all you people out there who are policing this and allowing this to continue to happen.”
The 70 were among the tens of thousands of military personnel recruited or retained as the armed services, entering the sixth year of the Iraq war, lowered educational, age and moral standards and granted a growing number of waivers to applicants whose backgrounds previously would have barred them from serving.
From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of Army recruits receiving so-called “moral conduct” waivers more than doubled, from 4.6 percent to 11.2 percent. Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service - akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.
“How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?” asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.
That soldier, Eli C. Gregory, was convicted in an attempted home invasion and of felony theft in Alabama, making him ineligible to legally possess a firearm there. Yet the military gave him a rifle and sent him to Iraq, where he was convicted by the Army of assault and battery on a fellow soldier and discharged.
Gregory, who returned to Alabama after his court-martial, said during an interview that he still cannot legally possess a firearm in the United States.
The military defended its recruiting policies, including granting more waivers for past conduct.
“Standards in our society have changed over the years; we are a reflection of those changes,” said Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command. “Considering offering a waiver to otherwise qualified recruits is the right thing to do for those Americans who want to answer the call to duty.”
Earlier this month, the Department of Defense announced a new system to categorize waivers by the severity of prior offenses to allow the services to analyze the link between waivers and future military behavior.
The examination looked at only a fraction of the 1.4 million people in uniform and was conducted largely without benefit of sophisticated criminal databases available to the military.
Still, The Bee linked dozens of soldiers and Marines with criminal records and other questionable backgrounds to misconduct in the military. In some cases, past misconduct appeared to forshadow future behavior.
“Criminal history is the best predictor of future behavior,” said Shawn Bushway, a criminology professor at the University of Albany, N.Y., School of Criminal Justice. “Any time you lower your standards, you’re going to raise the risk. No question about it.”
Nine months before the death of the first of three Iraqis that Army sniper Michael A. Hensley was accused of murdering, members of a San Diego-area family witnessing his actions in Seward, Alaska, were so concerned about what they saw that they videotaped him.
The family, sharing a third-floor hotel room in Seward, awakened to screams from the parking lot below and peered out to see Hensley threatening a woman inside a Jeep, pounding on the vehicle with his fists.
“He obviously wasn’t stable, just from seeing him the 20 minutes I did,” said Alex Elling, who was 18 when he videotaped the incident.
Hensley “had bloody knuckles, and the windshield of the Jeep was broken,” a Seward Police Department report said. Hensley, who had previously served six months’ probation on a drunken-driving conviction in Georgia, pleaded no contest to the Alaska charges of disorderly conduct.
In Iraq, the military found Hensley guilty of planting an AK-47 on the body of an Iraqi he was accused of killing, but not guilty in any of the three killings.
In the months surrounding his enlistment into the Army in 2000, Ricky Allen Burke was the subject of two court cases for unpaid debt, and, according to Monticello, Ky., Police Chief Ralph Miniard, he was involved in two vehicle accidents. His wife, who left him before their second anniversary, claimed in a domestic violence petition filed in March 2000 that he threatened to kill her, causing her to flee to a police station.
Two months later, court records say, Burke confronted his wife again at a relative’s house, and police cited him for violating the domestic violence order.
A domestic violence conviction could have triggered a federal law precluding Burke from possessing a firearm. But seven days after he enlisted, the criminal case was continued, one of several continuances before it was dismissed in 2002.
Three years later in Iraq, Burke shot and killed a wounded insurgent he claimed had moved toward a weapon. But soldiers contradicted his story in statements to investigators.
“(Burke) said to me, ‘Let me shoot him. Let me shoot him. I got payback coming,’ ” Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein said, adding that he repeatedly ordered Burke not to fire since the insurgent was injured and Nein saw no weapon nearby.
Despite the testimony against him, Burke was found not guilty of the killing by a military court.
In December, the National Guard quit granting felony waivers. The Guard’s chief recruiting officer, Col. Mike Jones, was quoted in the Army Times calling the previous policy “a risk,” but he later told The Bee an increased number of applicants made the policy no longer necessary.
Of the more than 120 soldiers and Marines with questionable pasts examined by The Bee, at least 18 had felony arrests or convictions or histories of mental illness. At least eight of the 18 later were connected to incidents in Iraq, and a ninth fatally shot himself while on guard duty in Kuwait.
The military refused to disclose who required waivers to enter the military, citing privacy, but waivers were not required of all convicted felons.
Gregory, the Alabama felon prohibited from possessing a firearm, said he was allowed to join without a waiver because he was convicted of stealing less than $500, so the Army didn’t technically consider the crime a felony. The Army confirmed that it does not require waivers for some felonies in which the crime loss is less than $500, but a spokesman noted that a felony waiver is required for larger amounts.
Spc. Shane Gonyon had four felony arrests and two convictions, but he had only to lie to avoid rejection.
Shortly after he was discharged from the Air Force in Wyoming for drunken driving in 1998, Gonyon was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of pointing a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol at a homeless man who had accused him of theft.
The following year, he admitted to stealing more than $10,000 in equipment from an Air Force base, and months later, he was accused of providing marijuana to a 13-year-old girl in exchange for oral sex, triggering a felony charge that resulted in a guilty plea to misdemeanor child endangering.
Nineteen days after he walked away from a federal prison, Gonyon applied for the Michigan National Guard, claiming he had worked at a wood supply company during the period when he actually was incarcerated. He was accepted the following month, in January 2003.
Since Gonyon had previously served in the military, the Guard didn’t require a complete background check. That practice also ended earlier this year, after a guardsman with a past felony conviction shot and killed four civilians.
Gonyon wasn’t confronted about his criminal record until 2006, after an incident at Abu Ghraib prison, where he processed detainees. In late March or early April 2006, Gonyon stole a 7 mm pistol from a translator. He was caught trying to mail it to the United States.
“I deliberately concealed my arrest(s) and convictions,” Gonyon told a court-martial panel, which convicted him of theft and other charges.
The military is required to screen applicants for drug or alcohol abuse, mental health history and prior criminal conduct.
Recruiters, however, are not required to call former employers, research all information held by law enforcement agencies, check civil court files or, unless a security clearance is involved, attempt to contact relatives, former spouses, schoolteachers and neighbors - all techniques used by law enforcement agencies to screen applicants.
Such checks could uncover applicants not necessarily fit for service, even though they lack serious criminal convictions.
The additional checks might find criminal defendants not prosecuted in exchange for agreements to join the military, for instance, or defendants in criminal cases who had their charges dropped or reduced in exchange for providing information to police.
When the military did its standard criminal background check on David Crawford, who entered the Army at age 18 in 2006, he had only a minor juvenile record, Cincinnati police said. A request to police for a more thorough check would have revealed much more.
“I would have told them he was a suspect in a murder case,” said police Spc. John Horn, who questioned Crawford about the killing days before he left for boot camp. “When I interviewed him in September 2006, he admitted, because he was sniffling, that he was on a three-day cocaine binge.”
Crawford was arrested by Cincinnati officers for the crime when he returned from boot camp in 2006, and the following year, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 28 years to life.
Asked why someone like Delano Holmes was allowed to deploy to Iraq, Marine Capt. Brett Miner, a prosecutor at Holmes’ court-martial, said: “We’re kind of short on bodies.”
Indianapolis police records show that on Jan. 13, 2002, when Holmes was 16, officers dispatched an ambulance to his high school after Holmes threatened to kill himself.
Fifteen months later, Holmes was arrested for disorderly conduct at an Indianapolis mall and banned from returning there for a year. He returned 10 minutes later and was arrested on a trespassing charge.
Then, on April 14, 2004, a college student told police that Holmes had shoved him onto a bed and hit him in the forehead during a dispute over a vehicle.
Weeks later Holmes left for boot camp in San Diego.
In the months leading up to his 2006 deployment to Iraq, civilian police found Holmes in a pickup containing marijuana residue and drug paraphernalia. In a separate incident, the military disciplined him for failing a drug test given to members of his unit preparing to deploy to Iraq.
Section 6210.5 of the Marine Corps Separation and Retirement Manual says Marines confirmed to have used illegal drugs “will be processed” for separation. A Marine Corps spokeswoman said the regulation does not give a time limit for completing that separation process, but she acknowledged that commanders had not even started the process for Holmes.
Three months after he deployed, Holmes was standing guard at an outpost in Fallujah when he pulled out a 13¼-inch bayonet and repeatedly stabbed Pvt. Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin, whose Iraq army unit was serving alongside U.S. Marines. An autopsy found Hassin suffered 17 stab wounds, 26 cuts and a severed spine.
Holmes then fired Hassin’s AK-47 rifle to make it appear he had killed him in self-defense, the prosecutor told The Bee. Defense attorneys said the fight started when Hassin refused to put out a cigarette, which Holmes feared might alert insurgents.
A military panel at Camp Pendleton, Calif., found Holmes guilty of negligent homicide and making a false statement and sentenced him to 10 months in jail or, in effect, time served.
Holmes did not testify during his military trial, but read a statement. He stood silent for several minutes, turning pages in a notebook. Then his eyes filled with tears so large that they could be seen falling on the lectern from across the room.
Between sobs and silence, he finally spoke, calling himself a warrior and a Christian.
“I believe we are all products of our experiences,” Holmes said. “God gave me more than I could handle.”
Holmes’ criminal record was not part of his court-martial, and media accounts identified him as a college student. The prosecutor acknowledged in a subsequent interview that he was aware of Holmes’ record.
“I think that his character for violence was a contributing factor to the death of Private Hassin,” Capt. Miner said.
COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES
For years the military was warned about applicants with criminal backgrounds.
A 1996 Pentagon study of more than 100,000 California recruits found that those with arrest records left the service at a rate 70 percent higher than those without such histories. A 2003 study warned that destructive behavior by troops with criminal histories or troubling backgrounds “could have the most serious consequences.”
An October 2007 Army study shows that although recruits requiring conduct waivers re-enlisted at a higher rate, were promoted to sergeant faster and received more awards, they had a higher rate of desertion, misconduct and failure to complete alcohol rehabilitation.
Hassin, the Iraqi soldier killed by Holmes, had a relative assigned to the same post. His death angered the Iraqi soldiers serving with the Marines there.
“They took it pretty personal,” Capt. Javier Torres testified at Holmes’ court-martial. “After the incident, the Iraqis did not want to assume (their) post.”
In another well-publicized incident, Army Spc. Mario L. Lozano Jr. fueled anti-war protest across Italy when he mistakenly shot and wounded an Italian journalist and killed her bodyguard at a checkpoint in Iraq. The shooting of Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent, and journalist Giuliana Sgrena, whose freedom Calipari had help secure, bolstered anti-war sentiment in Italy credited with helping elect a new government, which pulled its troops from Iraq in late 2006.
Though the shooting was the subject of hundreds of news accounts, including a “60 Minutes” segment, and described in two books, The Bee uncovered criminal records on Lozano not previously made public.
In 1994, for instance, a man who repossessed Lozano’s car told Hollywood, Fla., police that Lozano threatened him.
“My Rottweiler was barking,” Lozano explained in an interview. “I look out my window, and there’s a guy rolling the car back. So I came out. I grabbed a bat.”
Lozano joined the Army in 1998. Two years later, his wife dialed 911 and told Hollywood police that Lozano had hit her in the face with his open hand because she had been seeing another man.
“I’ve never done anything like that to any female,” Lozano responded. He left after the incident and was back at his military post in Alaska in a day, he said, because “I know that … even if she dials 911 and hangs up, the cops are going to come.”
A domestic violence conviction could have ended Lozano’s military career, but with Lozano in Alaska, records indicate, authorities had trouble pursuing the case. His wife subsequently filed for divorce.
In Alaska, Fairbanks police twice sought Lozano regarding threats to a man there, he was accused of writing bad checks, and eventually owed child support of more than $5,500, prompting a Florida court to take legal action.
Lozano left the active duty Army in 2001 but joined the National Guard in July 2003. Less than two years later, he was sitting atop a Humvee parked near a road leading to the Baghdad airport, manning an M-240B belt-fed machine gun that can fire 10 large-caliber rounds per second.
Lozano said he shone large lights on the vehicle carrying the Italians before firing, but Sgrena’s book, “Friendly Fire,” said the illumination and the shots came simultaneously.
An Italian court threw out the murder charge against Lozano, his attorney said, after realizing the United States is allowed to prosecute its own soldiers.
Lozano blamed the journalist for the shooting. “If it wasn’t for her, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “It was her idea to go over there and mingle with terrorists.”
Lozano said he left the Guard after commanders refused to let him deploy to Afghanistan.
“They got like 5,000 Italian soldiers over there,” he said. “They don’t want to create no kind of problems.”
MILITARY HISTORIES
Like Lozano, several other soldiers and Marines linked to incidents in Iraq had questionable histories - obtained not as civilians, but as members of the armed services. They, too, were nonetheless deployed.
Three years after Randal Ruby joined the Army in 1985, civilian police near his post at Fort Lewis, Wash., arrested him on a charge of assault after Tacoma police officers reported finding him pacing amid belongings scattered across his living room. The officers reported that the left side of his wife’s face was swollen.
Six months later, Ruby’s wife again called officers, who found her scalp and forehead red from an apparent attack, and, in 1991, she obtained a restraining order after alleging Ruby “struck me several times.”
Ruby was transferred to Fort Carson, Colo., and civilian police were called to the couple’s home after his wife accused him of choking her.
He filed for bankruptcy protection in 1997, the same year he led three police officers in Maine on a high-speed chase that ended when he lost control of his pickup and crashed.
Ruby was indicted in that case on charges of eluding an officer, drunken driving, speeding more than 30 mph over the limit and driving without a license.
A warrant remained outstanding when he deployed to Iraq, where he was accused in 2006 of “drop kicking” one detainee and allowing a translator to beat another with a Kevlar vest.
“What was Sergeant Ruby doing when he (the detainee) started crying after he beat him in the head with a Kevlar?” a defense attorney asked Sgt. Justin Stubblefield during a military proceeding in 2007.
“He was laughing,” the soldier responded.
Soldiers, including Ruby’s driver, testified that the unit kept AK-47 rifles, known as “packages,” in Humvees to plant on civilians killed by mistake. Once, Pfc. Nathan Huhn testified, Ruby ordered a “package” after telling his men to open fire and calling in an airstrike on an area populated by civilians.
Once the firing started, Huhn testified, “We maneuvered up there and still didn’t see nobody … a crowd of women, children and men, but nobody with weapons or like that. Sgt. Ruby told Staff Sgt. (Armando) Cardona (Jr.) to go ahead and send the package.”
Cardona testified: “I grabbed an AK, walked up around my truck, looked for a spot” to throw it, then realized he couldn’t reach across a canal.
Ruby, who said in an interview that he ordered his men to stop firing as soon as he realized civilians were in the area, was charged with nine offenses but found guilty of only one: disrespecting a superior.
That superior, Lt. Neale Shank, was found dead in a suspected suicide weeks before Ruby’s court-martial.
Ruby was sentenced to a reprimand, in which a general wrote: “Your behavior is a disgrace to the Army.”
Now retired and living in Kentucky, Ruby denied ever planting weapons, and said his soldiers were pressured to testify against him, especially after Shank’s death. He also maintained that his civilian charges “have nothing to do with Iraq.”
“I never robbed a bank or a 7-Eleven or smoked dope or any of that stuff that they’re letting kids in the military for today because there’s no draft,” Ruby said. “I served my country honorably.”
© 2008 McClatchy
Before Army Sgt. 1st Class Randal Ruby was accused in Iraq of beating prisoners and of conspiring to plant rifles on dead civilians, he amassed a 10-year criminal record in Colorado and Washington state for assaulting his wife and in Maine for a drunken high-speed police chase, for which he remains wanted.
Before Lance Cpl. Delano Holmes stabbed an Iraqi private to death, angering the soldier’s unit of coalition soldiers, he was hospitalized after threatening suicide in high school, accused of assault, disorderly conduct and trespassing, and, in the months leading up to deployment, twice linked to drug use.
Before Army Spc. Shane Carl Gonyon was convicted of stealing a pistol at Abu Ghraib prison, he was convicted twice on felony charges and arrested four times, once for allegedly giving a 13-year-old girl marijuana in exchange for oral sex. He enlisted weeks after his release from a federal prison in Oregon.
A yearlong examination of military and civilian records by The Sacramento Bee involving hundreds of troops who entered the services since the Iraq war began identified 120 cases of people whose backgrounds should have raised the suspicions of military recruiters, including felony convitions and serious drug, alcohol or mental health problems.
Of those, 70 later were involved in controversial or criminal incidents in Iraq.
Ruby, Holmes and Gonyon were among those cases.
“These guys are out there carrying weapons, fighting on the streets with drugs in their pockets,” said Tressie Cox, whose son, Lee Robert, had a history of drug and mental problems before he was charged with selling drugs in Iraq. “Shame on my son, but shame on all you people out there who are policing this and allowing this to continue to happen.”
The 70 were among the tens of thousands of military personnel recruited or retained as the armed services, entering the sixth year of the Iraq war, lowered educational, age and moral standards and granted a growing number of waivers to applicants whose backgrounds previously would have barred them from serving.
From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of Army recruits receiving so-called “moral conduct” waivers more than doubled, from 4.6 percent to 11.2 percent. Others, The Bee found, were able to enlist because they had no official criminal record of arrests or convictions, their records were overlooked or prosecutors suspended charges in lieu of military service - akin to a now-defunct Vietnam-era practice in which judges gave defendants a choice between prison and the military.
“How in the hell can they legally possess a gun?” asked Montgomery County, Ala., Sheriff D.T. Marshall, when questioned about a soldier from his county.
That soldier, Eli C. Gregory, was convicted in an attempted home invasion and of felony theft in Alabama, making him ineligible to legally possess a firearm there. Yet the military gave him a rifle and sent him to Iraq, where he was convicted by the Army of assault and battery on a fellow soldier and discharged.
Gregory, who returned to Alabama after his court-martial, said during an interview that he still cannot legally possess a firearm in the United States.
The military defended its recruiting policies, including granting more waivers for past conduct.
“Standards in our society have changed over the years; we are a reflection of those changes,” said Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command. “Considering offering a waiver to otherwise qualified recruits is the right thing to do for those Americans who want to answer the call to duty.”
Earlier this month, the Department of Defense announced a new system to categorize waivers by the severity of prior offenses to allow the services to analyze the link between waivers and future military behavior.
The examination looked at only a fraction of the 1.4 million people in uniform and was conducted largely without benefit of sophisticated criminal databases available to the military.
Still, The Bee linked dozens of soldiers and Marines with criminal records and other questionable backgrounds to misconduct in the military. In some cases, past misconduct appeared to forshadow future behavior.
“Criminal history is the best predictor of future behavior,” said Shawn Bushway, a criminology professor at the University of Albany, N.Y., School of Criminal Justice. “Any time you lower your standards, you’re going to raise the risk. No question about it.”
Nine months before the death of the first of three Iraqis that Army sniper Michael A. Hensley was accused of murdering, members of a San Diego-area family witnessing his actions in Seward, Alaska, were so concerned about what they saw that they videotaped him.
The family, sharing a third-floor hotel room in Seward, awakened to screams from the parking lot below and peered out to see Hensley threatening a woman inside a Jeep, pounding on the vehicle with his fists.
“He obviously wasn’t stable, just from seeing him the 20 minutes I did,” said Alex Elling, who was 18 when he videotaped the incident.
Hensley “had bloody knuckles, and the windshield of the Jeep was broken,” a Seward Police Department report said. Hensley, who had previously served six months’ probation on a drunken-driving conviction in Georgia, pleaded no contest to the Alaska charges of disorderly conduct.
In Iraq, the military found Hensley guilty of planting an AK-47 on the body of an Iraqi he was accused of killing, but not guilty in any of the three killings.
In the months surrounding his enlistment into the Army in 2000, Ricky Allen Burke was the subject of two court cases for unpaid debt, and, according to Monticello, Ky., Police Chief Ralph Miniard, he was involved in two vehicle accidents. His wife, who left him before their second anniversary, claimed in a domestic violence petition filed in March 2000 that he threatened to kill her, causing her to flee to a police station.
Two months later, court records say, Burke confronted his wife again at a relative’s house, and police cited him for violating the domestic violence order.
A domestic violence conviction could have triggered a federal law precluding Burke from possessing a firearm. But seven days after he enlisted, the criminal case was continued, one of several continuances before it was dismissed in 2002.
Three years later in Iraq, Burke shot and killed a wounded insurgent he claimed had moved toward a weapon. But soldiers contradicted his story in statements to investigators.
“(Burke) said to me, ‘Let me shoot him. Let me shoot him. I got payback coming,’ ” Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein said, adding that he repeatedly ordered Burke not to fire since the insurgent was injured and Nein saw no weapon nearby.
Despite the testimony against him, Burke was found not guilty of the killing by a military court.
In December, the National Guard quit granting felony waivers. The Guard’s chief recruiting officer, Col. Mike Jones, was quoted in the Army Times calling the previous policy “a risk,” but he later told The Bee an increased number of applicants made the policy no longer necessary.
Of the more than 120 soldiers and Marines with questionable pasts examined by The Bee, at least 18 had felony arrests or convictions or histories of mental illness. At least eight of the 18 later were connected to incidents in Iraq, and a ninth fatally shot himself while on guard duty in Kuwait.
The military refused to disclose who required waivers to enter the military, citing privacy, but waivers were not required of all convicted felons.
Gregory, the Alabama felon prohibited from possessing a firearm, said he was allowed to join without a waiver because he was convicted of stealing less than $500, so the Army didn’t technically consider the crime a felony. The Army confirmed that it does not require waivers for some felonies in which the crime loss is less than $500, but a spokesman noted that a felony waiver is required for larger amounts.
Spc. Shane Gonyon had four felony arrests and two convictions, but he had only to lie to avoid rejection.
Shortly after he was discharged from the Air Force in Wyoming for drunken driving in 1998, Gonyon was arrested in Colorado on suspicion of pointing a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol at a homeless man who had accused him of theft.
The following year, he admitted to stealing more than $10,000 in equipment from an Air Force base, and months later, he was accused of providing marijuana to a 13-year-old girl in exchange for oral sex, triggering a felony charge that resulted in a guilty plea to misdemeanor child endangering.
Nineteen days after he walked away from a federal prison, Gonyon applied for the Michigan National Guard, claiming he had worked at a wood supply company during the period when he actually was incarcerated. He was accepted the following month, in January 2003.
Since Gonyon had previously served in the military, the Guard didn’t require a complete background check. That practice also ended earlier this year, after a guardsman with a past felony conviction shot and killed four civilians.
Gonyon wasn’t confronted about his criminal record until 2006, after an incident at Abu Ghraib prison, where he processed detainees. In late March or early April 2006, Gonyon stole a 7 mm pistol from a translator. He was caught trying to mail it to the United States.
“I deliberately concealed my arrest(s) and convictions,” Gonyon told a court-martial panel, which convicted him of theft and other charges.
The military is required to screen applicants for drug or alcohol abuse, mental health history and prior criminal conduct.
Recruiters, however, are not required to call former employers, research all information held by law enforcement agencies, check civil court files or, unless a security clearance is involved, attempt to contact relatives, former spouses, schoolteachers and neighbors - all techniques used by law enforcement agencies to screen applicants.
Such checks could uncover applicants not necessarily fit for service, even though they lack serious criminal convictions.
The additional checks might find criminal defendants not prosecuted in exchange for agreements to join the military, for instance, or defendants in criminal cases who had their charges dropped or reduced in exchange for providing information to police.
When the military did its standard criminal background check on David Crawford, who entered the Army at age 18 in 2006, he had only a minor juvenile record, Cincinnati police said. A request to police for a more thorough check would have revealed much more.
“I would have told them he was a suspect in a murder case,” said police Spc. John Horn, who questioned Crawford about the killing days before he left for boot camp. “When I interviewed him in September 2006, he admitted, because he was sniffling, that he was on a three-day cocaine binge.”
Crawford was arrested by Cincinnati officers for the crime when he returned from boot camp in 2006, and the following year, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 28 years to life.
Asked why someone like Delano Holmes was allowed to deploy to Iraq, Marine Capt. Brett Miner, a prosecutor at Holmes’ court-martial, said: “We’re kind of short on bodies.”
Indianapolis police records show that on Jan. 13, 2002, when Holmes was 16, officers dispatched an ambulance to his high school after Holmes threatened to kill himself.
Fifteen months later, Holmes was arrested for disorderly conduct at an Indianapolis mall and banned from returning there for a year. He returned 10 minutes later and was arrested on a trespassing charge.
Then, on April 14, 2004, a college student told police that Holmes had shoved him onto a bed and hit him in the forehead during a dispute over a vehicle.
Weeks later Holmes left for boot camp in San Diego.
In the months leading up to his 2006 deployment to Iraq, civilian police found Holmes in a pickup containing marijuana residue and drug paraphernalia. In a separate incident, the military disciplined him for failing a drug test given to members of his unit preparing to deploy to Iraq.
Section 6210.5 of the Marine Corps Separation and Retirement Manual says Marines confirmed to have used illegal drugs “will be processed” for separation. A Marine Corps spokeswoman said the regulation does not give a time limit for completing that separation process, but she acknowledged that commanders had not even started the process for Holmes.
Three months after he deployed, Holmes was standing guard at an outpost in Fallujah when he pulled out a 13¼-inch bayonet and repeatedly stabbed Pvt. Munther Jasem Muhammed Hassin, whose Iraq army unit was serving alongside U.S. Marines. An autopsy found Hassin suffered 17 stab wounds, 26 cuts and a severed spine.
Holmes then fired Hassin’s AK-47 rifle to make it appear he had killed him in self-defense, the prosecutor told The Bee. Defense attorneys said the fight started when Hassin refused to put out a cigarette, which Holmes feared might alert insurgents.
A military panel at Camp Pendleton, Calif., found Holmes guilty of negligent homicide and making a false statement and sentenced him to 10 months in jail or, in effect, time served.
Holmes did not testify during his military trial, but read a statement. He stood silent for several minutes, turning pages in a notebook. Then his eyes filled with tears so large that they could be seen falling on the lectern from across the room.
Between sobs and silence, he finally spoke, calling himself a warrior and a Christian.
“I believe we are all products of our experiences,” Holmes said. “God gave me more than I could handle.”
Holmes’ criminal record was not part of his court-martial, and media accounts identified him as a college student. The prosecutor acknowledged in a subsequent interview that he was aware of Holmes’ record.
“I think that his character for violence was a contributing factor to the death of Private Hassin,” Capt. Miner said.
COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES
For years the military was warned about applicants with criminal backgrounds.
A 1996 Pentagon study of more than 100,000 California recruits found that those with arrest records left the service at a rate 70 percent higher than those without such histories. A 2003 study warned that destructive behavior by troops with criminal histories or troubling backgrounds “could have the most serious consequences.”
An October 2007 Army study shows that although recruits requiring conduct waivers re-enlisted at a higher rate, were promoted to sergeant faster and received more awards, they had a higher rate of desertion, misconduct and failure to complete alcohol rehabilitation.
Hassin, the Iraqi soldier killed by Holmes, had a relative assigned to the same post. His death angered the Iraqi soldiers serving with the Marines there.
“They took it pretty personal,” Capt. Javier Torres testified at Holmes’ court-martial. “After the incident, the Iraqis did not want to assume (their) post.”
In another well-publicized incident, Army Spc. Mario L. Lozano Jr. fueled anti-war protest across Italy when he mistakenly shot and wounded an Italian journalist and killed her bodyguard at a checkpoint in Iraq. The shooting of Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent, and journalist Giuliana Sgrena, whose freedom Calipari had help secure, bolstered anti-war sentiment in Italy credited with helping elect a new government, which pulled its troops from Iraq in late 2006.
Though the shooting was the subject of hundreds of news accounts, including a “60 Minutes” segment, and described in two books, The Bee uncovered criminal records on Lozano not previously made public.
In 1994, for instance, a man who repossessed Lozano’s car told Hollywood, Fla., police that Lozano threatened him.
“My Rottweiler was barking,” Lozano explained in an interview. “I look out my window, and there’s a guy rolling the car back. So I came out. I grabbed a bat.”
Lozano joined the Army in 1998. Two years later, his wife dialed 911 and told Hollywood police that Lozano had hit her in the face with his open hand because she had been seeing another man.
“I’ve never done anything like that to any female,” Lozano responded. He left after the incident and was back at his military post in Alaska in a day, he said, because “I know that … even if she dials 911 and hangs up, the cops are going to come.”
A domestic violence conviction could have ended Lozano’s military career, but with Lozano in Alaska, records indicate, authorities had trouble pursuing the case. His wife subsequently filed for divorce.
In Alaska, Fairbanks police twice sought Lozano regarding threats to a man there, he was accused of writing bad checks, and eventually owed child support of more than $5,500, prompting a Florida court to take legal action.
Lozano left the active duty Army in 2001 but joined the National Guard in July 2003. Less than two years later, he was sitting atop a Humvee parked near a road leading to the Baghdad airport, manning an M-240B belt-fed machine gun that can fire 10 large-caliber rounds per second.
Lozano said he shone large lights on the vehicle carrying the Italians before firing, but Sgrena’s book, “Friendly Fire,” said the illumination and the shots came simultaneously.
An Italian court threw out the murder charge against Lozano, his attorney said, after realizing the United States is allowed to prosecute its own soldiers.
Lozano blamed the journalist for the shooting. “If it wasn’t for her, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “It was her idea to go over there and mingle with terrorists.”
Lozano said he left the Guard after commanders refused to let him deploy to Afghanistan.
“They got like 5,000 Italian soldiers over there,” he said. “They don’t want to create no kind of problems.”
MILITARY HISTORIES
Like Lozano, several other soldiers and Marines linked to incidents in Iraq had questionable histories - obtained not as civilians, but as members of the armed services. They, too, were nonetheless deployed.
Three years after Randal Ruby joined the Army in 1985, civilian police near his post at Fort Lewis, Wash., arrested him on a charge of assault after Tacoma police officers reported finding him pacing amid belongings scattered across his living room. The officers reported that the left side of his wife’s face was swollen.
Six months later, Ruby’s wife again called officers, who found her scalp and forehead red from an apparent attack, and, in 1991, she obtained a restraining order after alleging Ruby “struck me several times.”
Ruby was transferred to Fort Carson, Colo., and civilian police were called to the couple’s home after his wife accused him of choking her.
He filed for bankruptcy protection in 1997, the same year he led three police officers in Maine on a high-speed chase that ended when he lost control of his pickup and crashed.
Ruby was indicted in that case on charges of eluding an officer, drunken driving, speeding more than 30 mph over the limit and driving without a license.
A warrant remained outstanding when he deployed to Iraq, where he was accused in 2006 of “drop kicking” one detainee and allowing a translator to beat another with a Kevlar vest.
“What was Sergeant Ruby doing when he (the detainee) started crying after he beat him in the head with a Kevlar?” a defense attorney asked Sgt. Justin Stubblefield during a military proceeding in 2007.
“He was laughing,” the soldier responded.
Soldiers, including Ruby’s driver, testified that the unit kept AK-47 rifles, known as “packages,” in Humvees to plant on civilians killed by mistake. Once, Pfc. Nathan Huhn testified, Ruby ordered a “package” after telling his men to open fire and calling in an airstrike on an area populated by civilians.
Once the firing started, Huhn testified, “We maneuvered up there and still didn’t see nobody … a crowd of women, children and men, but nobody with weapons or like that. Sgt. Ruby told Staff Sgt. (Armando) Cardona (Jr.) to go ahead and send the package.”
Cardona testified: “I grabbed an AK, walked up around my truck, looked for a spot” to throw it, then realized he couldn’t reach across a canal.
Ruby, who said in an interview that he ordered his men to stop firing as soon as he realized civilians were in the area, was charged with nine offenses but found guilty of only one: disrespecting a superior.
That superior, Lt. Neale Shank, was found dead in a suspected suicide weeks before Ruby’s court-martial.
Ruby was sentenced to a reprimand, in which a general wrote: “Your behavior is a disgrace to the Army.”
Now retired and living in Kentucky, Ruby denied ever planting weapons, and said his soldiers were pressured to testify against him, especially after Shank’s death. He also maintained that his civilian charges “have nothing to do with Iraq.”
“I never robbed a bank or a 7-Eleven or smoked dope or any of that stuff that they’re letting kids in the military for today because there’s no draft,” Ruby said. “I served my country honorably.”
© 2008 McClatchy
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Veteran Suicides: 18 every day, 1,000 attempts per month
Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day.
One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.
These are statistics that most Americans don't know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties. In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.
The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.
That's because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded soldiers.
"Shh!" begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA's Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.
"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the e-mail concludes.
Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz's resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA) convened a hearing titled "The Truth About Veteran's Suicides" and called Katz and VA Secretary James Peake to testify.
"That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue about what we should do about new information," Katz said in response to Filner's questions. "The e-mail represents a healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when it's appropriate to disclose and make public information early in the process."
Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a "cover-up.""We should all be angry about what has gone on here," Filner said. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that's not criminal negligence, I don't know what is."
It's also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren't the only government statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the class action lawsuit. Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.
Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not revealed on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly reports on the numbers of American troops "wounded" in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories "injured" (10,180) and "ill" (28,451).
All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but by splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public consciousness.
Here's another number that we don't often hear discussed in the media: 287,790. That's the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.
Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty figures out of our government?
Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to the real, human costs of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading neoconservative thinker and Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a "cakewalk."Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert the war would "go relatively quickly, (ending in) weeks rather than months."
Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them remains. This is why the VA's head of mental health wrote "Shh!" telling a spokesperson not to respond to a reporters' inquiry.
But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain that's mounting after five years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care. In its study, the RAND Corporation wrote that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril, noting post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury "can have far reaching and damaging consequences."
"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality.
Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."
"These consequences can have a high economic toll," RAND said. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."
Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets worse. It's not too late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; it's not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen and women who've experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify the disability claims process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As the Rand study shows, this isn't only in the best interest of veterans, it's in the best interest of our country in the long run.
To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest information about the true human costs of the Iraq War.Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month. More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas.
These are statistics that most Americans don't know, because the Bush administration has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, the government has tried to present it as a war without casualties. In fact, they never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones.
The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense vs. Peake, went to trial last month at a Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides are still filing briefs until May 19 and waiting for a ruling from Judge Samuel Conti, but the case is already having an impact.
That's because over the course of the two week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis effecting wounded soldiers.
"Shh!" begins one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA's Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that 1,000 veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month.
"Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?" the e-mail concludes.
Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz's resignation. On May 6, the Chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA) convened a hearing titled "The Truth About Veteran's Suicides" and called Katz and VA Secretary James Peake to testify.
"That e-mail was in poor tone but the content was part of a dialogue about what we should do about new information," Katz said in response to Filner's questions. "The e-mail represents a healthy dialogue among members of VA staff about when it's appropriate to disclose and make public information early in the process."
Filner was nonplused and accused Katz and Peake of a "cover-up.""We should all be angry about what has gone on here," Filner said. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that's not criminal negligence, I don't know what is."
It's also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren't the only government statistics the Bush Administration was forced to reveal because of the class action lawsuit. Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.
Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not revealed on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon regularly reports on the numbers of American troops "wounded" in Iraq (currently at 31,948) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories "injured" (10,180) and "ill" (28,451).
All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but by splitting the numbers up the sense of casualties down the public consciousness.
Here's another number that we don't often hear discussed in the media: 287,790. That's the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Veterans Administration as of March 25th. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but obtained by Veterans for Common Sense using the Freedom of Information Act.
Why all the secrecy? Why is it so hard to get accurate casualty figures out of our government?
Because the Bush Administration knows if Americans woke up to the real, human costs of this war they would fight harder to oppose it.
Think back to 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, when leading neoconservative thinker and Donald Rumsfeld aide Ken Adelman predicted the war would be a "cakewalk."Or consider this statement from Vice President Dick Cheney. Two days before the invasion, Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert the war would "go relatively quickly, (ending in) weeks rather than months."
Today, those comments are gone but the motivation behind them remains. This is why the VA's head of mental health wrote "Shh!" telling a spokesperson not to respond to a reporters' inquiry.
But all the shhing in the world cannot stop the horrible pain that's mounting after five years of war in Iraq and nearly seven years of war in Afghanistan.
Unpleasant Facts According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care. In its study, the RAND Corporation wrote that the federal government fails to care for war veterans at its own peril, noting post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury "can have far reaching and damaging consequences."
"Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risks for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, overeating, and unsafe sex and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality.
Individuals with these conditions also tend to miss more work or report being less productive," the report said. "These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend the consequences of combat trauma across generations."
"These consequences can have a high economic toll," RAND said. "However, most attempts to measure the costs of these conditions focus only on medical costs to the government. Yet, direct costs of treatment are only a fraction of the total costs related to mental health and cognitive conditions. Far higher are the long-term individual and societal costs stemming from lost productivity, reduced quality of life, homelessness, domestic violence, the strain on families, and suicide. Delivering effective care and restoring veterans to full mental health have the potential to reduce these longer-term costs significantly."
Bush and Congress have the power to stop this problem before it gets worse. It's not too late to extend needed mental health care to our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans; it's not too late to begin properly screening and treating returning servicemen and women who've experienced a traumatic brain injury; and it is not too late to simplify the disability claims process so that wounded veterans do not die waiting for their check. As the Rand study shows, this isn't only in the best interest of veterans, it's in the best interest of our country in the long run.
To start with, the Bush Administration needs to give us some honest information about the true human costs of the Iraq War.Aaron Glantz, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the author of two upcoming books on Iraq: The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans (UC Press) and Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (Haymarket). He edits the website WarComesHome.org.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
VA Tried to Conceal Extent of Attempted Veteran Suicides, Email Shows
By Jason Leopold
(The Intelligence Daily) -- Top officials at the Veterans Administration tried to conceal information from the public about the sudden increase of attempted suicides among veterans that were treated or sought help at VA hospitals around the country, a previously undisclosed internal VA email indicates.
The email was disclosed Tuesday in a federal trial at a courthouse in Northern California where two veterans advocacy groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the VA alleging that a systematic breakdown at the VA has led to an epidemic of suicides among war veterans. These groups claim the VA has turned away veterans who have sought help for posttraumatic stress disorder and were suicidal. Some of the veterans, the lawsuit claims, later took their own lives.
The organizations who filed the lawsuit, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, want a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat veterans who show signs of PTSD and are at risk of suicide and overhaul internal system that handles benefits claims. PTSD is said to be the most prevalent mental disorder arising from combat.
The Feb. 13., 2008, email, disclosed in federal court Tuesday, was sent to Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director by Ev Chasen, the agency’s chief communications director.
Chasen sought guidance from Katz about interview queries from CBS News, which reported extensively on veterans suicides last year.
“Is the fact that we’re stopping [suicides] good news, or is the sheer number bad news? And is this more than we’ve ever seen before? It might be something we drop into a general release about our suicide prevention efforts, which (as you know far better than I) prominently include training employees to recognize the warning signs of suicide,” Chasen wrote Katz in an email titled "Not for CBS News Interview Request."
Katz’s response is startling. He said the VA has identified nearly 1,000 suicide attempts per month among war veterans treated by the VA. His response to Chasen indicates that he did not want the VA to immediately release any statistical data confirming that number, but rather suggested that the agency quietly slip the information into a news release.
“Shh!” Katz wrote in his response to Chasen. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”
The February email was sent shortly after the VA gave CBS News data that showed only a total of 790 attempted suicides in 2007 among veterans treated by the VA. In an email sent to the network Monday after Katz's email was disclosed in court, he denied a "cover-up" and said he did not disclose the true figures of attempted suicides because he was unsure if it was accurate.
In a December email Katz sent to Brig. Gen. Michael J. Kussman, the undersecretary for health at the Veterans Health Administration within the VA, that roughly 126 veterans of all wars commit suicide per week. He added that data the agency obtained from the Center for Disease Control showed that 20 percent of the suicides in the country are identified as war veterans.
The “VA’s own data demonstrate 4-5 suicides per day among those who receive care from us,” Katz said in the email he sent to Kussman.
Pehaps underscoring just how underprepared the VA was for the number of PTSD cases to emerge from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, documents released to support the plaintiffs’ allegations show that prior to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq the VA believed it would likely see a maximum of 8,000 cases where veterans showed signs of PTSD.
Last week, the RAND Corporation released a study that said about 300,000 U.S. troops sent to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from major depression or PTSD, and 320,000 received traumatic brain injuries. Since October 2001, about 1.6 million U.S. troops have deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers have completed more than two tours of duty meaning they are exposed to prolonged periods of combat-related stress or traumatic events.
“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Terri Tanielian, a researcher at RAND who worked on the study. “Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation. Unfortunately, we found there are many barriers preventing them from getting the high-quality treatment they need.”
Those are statistics Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, has been warning lawmakers about for several years.
“The scope of PTSD in the long term is enormous and must be taken seriously. When all of our 1.6 million service members eventually return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the current rate of 20 percent, VA may face up 320,000 total new veterans diagnosed with PTSD,” Sullivan told a Congressional committee in July 2007. If America fails to act now and overhaul the broken DoD and VA disability systems, there may a social catastrophe among many of our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. That is why VCS reluctantly filed suit against VA in Federal Court...Time is running out”
Sullivan has urged Congress to enact legislation to immediately overhaul the VA.
“Congress should legislate a presumption of service connection for veterans diagnosed [with] PTSD who deployed to a war zone after 9/11,” Sullivan told lawmakers last year. “A presumption makes it easier for dedicated and hard-working VA employees to process veterans’ claims. This results in faster medical treatment and benefits for our veterans.”
Yet despite Sullivan’s dire predictions and calls for legislative action the issue has not been given priority treatment by lawmakers. Instead, Congress continued to fund the war in Iraq to the tune of about $200 billion and will likely pour another $108 billion into Iraq later next month.
Meanwhile, a backlog of veterans’ benefits claims continue to pile up at the VA.
The VA said it has hired more than 3,000 mental healthcare professionals over the past two years to deal with the increasing number of PTSD cases, but the problems persist.
VA Says Vets Not ‘Entitled’ to Healthcare
In opening statements Monday, Richard Lepley, a Justice Department attorney, said the VA runs a "world-class health care system."
But Gordon Erspamer, the lead attorney representing the two veterans groups, said the VA has arbitrarily denied coverage to thousands of vets, that it takes nearly a year to decide whether it will provide coverage to veterans suffering from PTSD, and takes as long as four years for the VA to address veterans appeals cases.
“Seeking help from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs... involves a two-track system,” says a copy of the plaintiff’s trial brief filed in federal court last week.“A veteran will go to the Veterans’ Health Administration for diagnosis and medical care; and a veteran goes to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration to apply for service-connection and disability compensation...
“VA is failing these veterans as they move along both of these parallel tracks. They are not receiving the healthcare to which they are entitled (and where they do receive it, it is unreasonably delayed) and they are not able to get timely compensation for their disabilities, which means that they have no safety net. These two problems combine to create a perfect storm for PTSD veterans: they receive no treatment, so their symptoms get worse; and they receive no compensation, so they cannot go elsewhere for treatment. The failings of these two separate but interrelated systems are what this action seeks to address.”
The lawsuit the groups filed alleges that numerous VA practices stemming from a 1998 law violate the constitutional and statutory rights of veterans suffering from PTSD by denying veterans mandated medical care.
Justice Department attorneys had argued in court papers filed last month that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were not "entitled" to the five-years of free healthcare upon their return from combat as mandated by Congress in the "Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act." Rather, the VA argued, medical treatment for the war veterans was discretionary based on the level of funding available in the VA's budget.
But during a court hearing hearing last month before U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti, Dr. Gerald Cross, the Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Health, Veterans Health Administration, said that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were not only entitled to free healthcare, but he said "there is no co-pay."
Soldier’s Suicide Warnings Ignored
Chris Scheuerman, a retired Special Forces masters sergeant, testified before a Congressional committee last month that there is an urgent need for mental healthreform in the military.
Scheuerman said his son, Pfc. Jason Scheuerman, went to see an Army psychologist because he had been suicidal.
The Army psychologist wrote up a report saying Jason Scheuerman “was capable of (faking) mental illness in order to manipulate his command,” according to documents the soldiers father turned over to Congress.
“Jason desperately needed a second opinion after his encounter with the Army psychologist,” Chris Scheuerman testified in mid-March before the Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee.
“The Army did offer him that option, but at his own expense. How is a PFC (private first class) in the middle of Iraq supposed to get to a civilian mental health care provider at his own expense?” he said. “I believe a soldier should be afforded the opportunity to a second opinion via teleconference with a civilian mental health care provider of their own choice.”
Jason Scheuerman shot himself with a rifle on July 30, 2005. The 20-year-old’s suicide note was nailed to the close in his barracks. It said, “Maybe now I can get some peace.”
Investigative journalist Jason Leopold is the author of the bestselling memoir, News Junkie. Visit http://www.newsjunkiebook.com/ for a preview.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
(The Intelligence Daily) -- Top officials at the Veterans Administration tried to conceal information from the public about the sudden increase of attempted suicides among veterans that were treated or sought help at VA hospitals around the country, a previously undisclosed internal VA email indicates.
The email was disclosed Tuesday in a federal trial at a courthouse in Northern California where two veterans advocacy groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the VA alleging that a systematic breakdown at the VA has led to an epidemic of suicides among war veterans. These groups claim the VA has turned away veterans who have sought help for posttraumatic stress disorder and were suicidal. Some of the veterans, the lawsuit claims, later took their own lives.
The organizations who filed the lawsuit, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, want a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat veterans who show signs of PTSD and are at risk of suicide and overhaul internal system that handles benefits claims. PTSD is said to be the most prevalent mental disorder arising from combat.
The Feb. 13., 2008, email, disclosed in federal court Tuesday, was sent to Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director by Ev Chasen, the agency’s chief communications director.
Chasen sought guidance from Katz about interview queries from CBS News, which reported extensively on veterans suicides last year.
“Is the fact that we’re stopping [suicides] good news, or is the sheer number bad news? And is this more than we’ve ever seen before? It might be something we drop into a general release about our suicide prevention efforts, which (as you know far better than I) prominently include training employees to recognize the warning signs of suicide,” Chasen wrote Katz in an email titled "Not for CBS News Interview Request."
Katz’s response is startling. He said the VA has identified nearly 1,000 suicide attempts per month among war veterans treated by the VA. His response to Chasen indicates that he did not want the VA to immediately release any statistical data confirming that number, but rather suggested that the agency quietly slip the information into a news release.
“Shh!” Katz wrote in his response to Chasen. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”
The February email was sent shortly after the VA gave CBS News data that showed only a total of 790 attempted suicides in 2007 among veterans treated by the VA. In an email sent to the network Monday after Katz's email was disclosed in court, he denied a "cover-up" and said he did not disclose the true figures of attempted suicides because he was unsure if it was accurate.
In a December email Katz sent to Brig. Gen. Michael J. Kussman, the undersecretary for health at the Veterans Health Administration within the VA, that roughly 126 veterans of all wars commit suicide per week. He added that data the agency obtained from the Center for Disease Control showed that 20 percent of the suicides in the country are identified as war veterans.
The “VA’s own data demonstrate 4-5 suicides per day among those who receive care from us,” Katz said in the email he sent to Kussman.
Pehaps underscoring just how underprepared the VA was for the number of PTSD cases to emerge from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, documents released to support the plaintiffs’ allegations show that prior to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq the VA believed it would likely see a maximum of 8,000 cases where veterans showed signs of PTSD.
Last week, the RAND Corporation released a study that said about 300,000 U.S. troops sent to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from major depression or PTSD, and 320,000 received traumatic brain injuries. Since October 2001, about 1.6 million U.S. troops have deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many soldiers have completed more than two tours of duty meaning they are exposed to prolonged periods of combat-related stress or traumatic events.
“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Terri Tanielian, a researcher at RAND who worked on the study. “Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation. Unfortunately, we found there are many barriers preventing them from getting the high-quality treatment they need.”
Those are statistics Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, has been warning lawmakers about for several years.
“The scope of PTSD in the long term is enormous and must be taken seriously. When all of our 1.6 million service members eventually return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, based on the current rate of 20 percent, VA may face up 320,000 total new veterans diagnosed with PTSD,” Sullivan told a Congressional committee in July 2007. If America fails to act now and overhaul the broken DoD and VA disability systems, there may a social catastrophe among many of our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. That is why VCS reluctantly filed suit against VA in Federal Court...Time is running out”
Sullivan has urged Congress to enact legislation to immediately overhaul the VA.
“Congress should legislate a presumption of service connection for veterans diagnosed [with] PTSD who deployed to a war zone after 9/11,” Sullivan told lawmakers last year. “A presumption makes it easier for dedicated and hard-working VA employees to process veterans’ claims. This results in faster medical treatment and benefits for our veterans.”
Yet despite Sullivan’s dire predictions and calls for legislative action the issue has not been given priority treatment by lawmakers. Instead, Congress continued to fund the war in Iraq to the tune of about $200 billion and will likely pour another $108 billion into Iraq later next month.
Meanwhile, a backlog of veterans’ benefits claims continue to pile up at the VA.
The VA said it has hired more than 3,000 mental healthcare professionals over the past two years to deal with the increasing number of PTSD cases, but the problems persist.
VA Says Vets Not ‘Entitled’ to Healthcare
In opening statements Monday, Richard Lepley, a Justice Department attorney, said the VA runs a "world-class health care system."
But Gordon Erspamer, the lead attorney representing the two veterans groups, said the VA has arbitrarily denied coverage to thousands of vets, that it takes nearly a year to decide whether it will provide coverage to veterans suffering from PTSD, and takes as long as four years for the VA to address veterans appeals cases.
“Seeking help from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs... involves a two-track system,” says a copy of the plaintiff’s trial brief filed in federal court last week.“A veteran will go to the Veterans’ Health Administration for diagnosis and medical care; and a veteran goes to the Veterans’ Benefits Administration to apply for service-connection and disability compensation...
“VA is failing these veterans as they move along both of these parallel tracks. They are not receiving the healthcare to which they are entitled (and where they do receive it, it is unreasonably delayed) and they are not able to get timely compensation for their disabilities, which means that they have no safety net. These two problems combine to create a perfect storm for PTSD veterans: they receive no treatment, so their symptoms get worse; and they receive no compensation, so they cannot go elsewhere for treatment. The failings of these two separate but interrelated systems are what this action seeks to address.”
The lawsuit the groups filed alleges that numerous VA practices stemming from a 1998 law violate the constitutional and statutory rights of veterans suffering from PTSD by denying veterans mandated medical care.
Justice Department attorneys had argued in court papers filed last month that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were not "entitled" to the five-years of free healthcare upon their return from combat as mandated by Congress in the "Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act." Rather, the VA argued, medical treatment for the war veterans was discretionary based on the level of funding available in the VA's budget.
But during a court hearing hearing last month before U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti, Dr. Gerald Cross, the Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Health, Veterans Health Administration, said that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were not only entitled to free healthcare, but he said "there is no co-pay."
Soldier’s Suicide Warnings Ignored
Chris Scheuerman, a retired Special Forces masters sergeant, testified before a Congressional committee last month that there is an urgent need for mental healthreform in the military.
Scheuerman said his son, Pfc. Jason Scheuerman, went to see an Army psychologist because he had been suicidal.
The Army psychologist wrote up a report saying Jason Scheuerman “was capable of (faking) mental illness in order to manipulate his command,” according to documents the soldiers father turned over to Congress.
“Jason desperately needed a second opinion after his encounter with the Army psychologist,” Chris Scheuerman testified in mid-March before the Armed Services Committee’s Military Personnel Subcommittee.
“The Army did offer him that option, but at his own expense. How is a PFC (private first class) in the middle of Iraq supposed to get to a civilian mental health care provider at his own expense?” he said. “I believe a soldier should be afforded the opportunity to a second opinion via teleconference with a civilian mental health care provider of their own choice.”
Jason Scheuerman shot himself with a rifle on July 30, 2005. The 20-year-old’s suicide note was nailed to the close in his barracks. It said, “Maybe now I can get some peace.”
Investigative journalist Jason Leopold is the author of the bestselling memoir, News Junkie. Visit http://www.newsjunkiebook.com/ for a preview.
--submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Friday, February 15, 2008
Army: 3 ODs, 4 suicides in unit for wounded
By Pauline Jelinek - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Feb 15, 2008 9:41:05 EST
There have been at least three accidental drug overdoses and four suicides among soldiers in special units the Army set up last summer to help war-wounded troops, officials said late Thursday.
A team of pharmacists and other military officials met early this week at the Pentagon to look into the deaths in so-called “warrior transition units” — established to give sick, injured and wounded troops coordinated medical care, financial advice, legal help and other services as they attempt to make the transition toward either a return to uniform or back into civilian life.
The Army said officials had determined that among those troops there have been 11 deaths that were not due to natural causes between June and Feb. 5.
That included four suicides, three accidental overdoses of prescribed medications, three deaths still under investigation and one motor vehicle accident, the Army said.
“Army medical and safety professionals continue to remind soldiers and their families of the importance of prescription-drug safety precautions, including following the printed directions and information for each medicine,” the Army said of the overdoses in a statement Thursday.
Noting the death of actor Heath Ledger, Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker last week first disclosed the issue of drug overdoses in the 35 special transition units, which care for more than 9,500 soldiers.
“This isn’t restricted to the military, alone, as we all saw the unfortunate death of one of our leading actors recently,” Schoomaker told Pentagon reporters. He made his comments the day after The New York medical examiner announced that Ledger, the 28-year-old “Brokeback Mountain” star, died Jan. 22 from an accidental overdose — the effects of taking several types of painkillers and sedatives.
Schoomaker didn’t have statistics with him at the time and said he didn’t know whether the number of overdoses among soldiers was on the rise. He said the series of deaths in the new units was noticed and getting attention partly because the units concentrate the Army’s temporarily disabled and ill troops into special groups, thus making it possible for leaders to track and tabulate their health issues more closely and carefully than ever before.
He made the comment about overdoses when asked to comment on recent Army suicide figures. Preliminary figures show that, as of last month, officials had confirmed 89 suicides last year among all active duty and activated National Guard and Reserve — and that another 32 deaths were still under investigation. If all are confirmed, the total of 121 would be nearly a 20 percent increase over 2006.
Statistics show accidental overdoses have become a national problem, with the deaths from accidental ingestion of multiple prescription drugs now exceeding deaths from illegal drugs, Schoomaker said.
The transition units are part of deep and numerous changes the Army has made in its medical system since shoddy outpatient housing and bureaucratic delays were exposed last year at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Posted : Friday Feb 15, 2008 9:41:05 EST
There have been at least three accidental drug overdoses and four suicides among soldiers in special units the Army set up last summer to help war-wounded troops, officials said late Thursday.
A team of pharmacists and other military officials met early this week at the Pentagon to look into the deaths in so-called “warrior transition units” — established to give sick, injured and wounded troops coordinated medical care, financial advice, legal help and other services as they attempt to make the transition toward either a return to uniform or back into civilian life.
The Army said officials had determined that among those troops there have been 11 deaths that were not due to natural causes between June and Feb. 5.
That included four suicides, three accidental overdoses of prescribed medications, three deaths still under investigation and one motor vehicle accident, the Army said.
“Army medical and safety professionals continue to remind soldiers and their families of the importance of prescription-drug safety precautions, including following the printed directions and information for each medicine,” the Army said of the overdoses in a statement Thursday.
Noting the death of actor Heath Ledger, Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker last week first disclosed the issue of drug overdoses in the 35 special transition units, which care for more than 9,500 soldiers.
“This isn’t restricted to the military, alone, as we all saw the unfortunate death of one of our leading actors recently,” Schoomaker told Pentagon reporters. He made his comments the day after The New York medical examiner announced that Ledger, the 28-year-old “Brokeback Mountain” star, died Jan. 22 from an accidental overdose — the effects of taking several types of painkillers and sedatives.
Schoomaker didn’t have statistics with him at the time and said he didn’t know whether the number of overdoses among soldiers was on the rise. He said the series of deaths in the new units was noticed and getting attention partly because the units concentrate the Army’s temporarily disabled and ill troops into special groups, thus making it possible for leaders to track and tabulate their health issues more closely and carefully than ever before.
He made the comment about overdoses when asked to comment on recent Army suicide figures. Preliminary figures show that, as of last month, officials had confirmed 89 suicides last year among all active duty and activated National Guard and Reserve — and that another 32 deaths were still under investigation. If all are confirmed, the total of 121 would be nearly a 20 percent increase over 2006.
Statistics show accidental overdoses have become a national problem, with the deaths from accidental ingestion of multiple prescription drugs now exceeding deaths from illegal drugs, Schoomaker said.
The transition units are part of deep and numerous changes the Army has made in its medical system since shoddy outpatient housing and bureaucratic delays were exposed last year at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Returned from Iraq and still at war
February 1, 2008
ERIC RUDER explains how the politicians are failing the soldiers they sent to war.
THE YOUNG men and women sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan who manage to return home physically intact tend to count themselves among the fortunate. But they soon learn that the struggle to return to the lives they left behind has just begun for them.
A small but growing segment of veterans is losing that battle. They find themselves confronted by inner demons--reliving memories of the horrors of war, dwelling on the loss of fallen comrades, and tormented by nervous systems that seem stuck in a constant state of high alert after all those months in the field.
Any number of indicators show the consequences of these hidden scars--substance abuse, unemployment, homelessness, suicide and murder.
A New York Times investigative series found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who committed or were charged with murder after returning from war. A third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives; a quarter were fellow servicemembers; and the rest were acquaintances or strangers.
During the six years before and six years after the war in Afghanistan began, homicides committed by active-duty personnel and recent veterans increased by 89 percent--from 184 to 349--according to the Times.
What stuns advocates for these troubled veterans, however, is the speed with which veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are showing up in these categories.
After a happy homecoming, 28-year-old Peter Mohan broke his collarbone in a car crash, touching off a downward spiral. When he moved to be closer to his wife, who had taken a new job, he suddenly found himself without friends--and privately warring with the post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his military service.
He couldn't find a job. He turned to drinking and flirted with suicide. And when his wife felt she had exhausted her ability to help him and asked him to move out, he ended up in a homeless shelter.
“While many Vietnam veterans began showing manifestations of stress disorders roughly 10 years after returning from the front, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown the signs much earlier,” the Associated Press reported.
The disproportionate number of veterans among the homeless is a well-established trend, dating from the Vietnam years. “Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation's homeless,” according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has identified about 1,500 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were homeless at some point in 2006--a small but growing proportion of the 336,000 veterans who were homeless that same year.
The VA contends it's doing what's necessary to help these veterans. It spends about $265 million annually on programs for homeless veterans. But compared to the $8 billion a month the U.S. is spending to put soldiers on the battlefield, the money for such programs--about 0.3 percent of annual war spending--is tiny.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE VA has also failed to address the epidemic of suicide among veterans--a fact starkly revealed by a CBS News investigation that found the Department of Defense grossly understates the number of veterans who take their own lives.
The Pentagon only acknowledges 130 self-inflicted fatalities among U.S. military personnel in Iraq since 2003, but the U.S. Army alone reported 97 suicides in 2006. CBS News found that there were at least 6,256 suicides by veterans of all eras in 2005--an average of 120 a week.
Veterans of all ages were twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide, but among 20- to 24-year-olds, the suicide rate for veterans was two to four times higher.
“The Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides,” wrote Penny Coleman, the widow of a Vietnam veteran who committed suicide and author of a book entitled Flashback: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War.
“They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call 'accidental non-combat deaths' to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have 'personal problems.'”
Politicians try to muzzle antiwar critics with the charge that they don't “support the troops”--at the same time that the military and political establishment has failed to address the basic needs of returning troops.
In reality, it's the antiwar movement that stands for both the immediate withdrawal of troops from harm's way--and increased funding for health and other services that veterans deserve and desperately need.
ERIC RUDER explains how the politicians are failing the soldiers they sent to war.
THE YOUNG men and women sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan who manage to return home physically intact tend to count themselves among the fortunate. But they soon learn that the struggle to return to the lives they left behind has just begun for them.
A small but growing segment of veterans is losing that battle. They find themselves confronted by inner demons--reliving memories of the horrors of war, dwelling on the loss of fallen comrades, and tormented by nervous systems that seem stuck in a constant state of high alert after all those months in the field.
Any number of indicators show the consequences of these hidden scars--substance abuse, unemployment, homelessness, suicide and murder.
A New York Times investigative series found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who committed or were charged with murder after returning from war. A third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives; a quarter were fellow servicemembers; and the rest were acquaintances or strangers.
During the six years before and six years after the war in Afghanistan began, homicides committed by active-duty personnel and recent veterans increased by 89 percent--from 184 to 349--according to the Times.
What stuns advocates for these troubled veterans, however, is the speed with which veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are showing up in these categories.
After a happy homecoming, 28-year-old Peter Mohan broke his collarbone in a car crash, touching off a downward spiral. When he moved to be closer to his wife, who had taken a new job, he suddenly found himself without friends--and privately warring with the post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his military service.
He couldn't find a job. He turned to drinking and flirted with suicide. And when his wife felt she had exhausted her ability to help him and asked him to move out, he ended up in a homeless shelter.
“While many Vietnam veterans began showing manifestations of stress disorders roughly 10 years after returning from the front, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown the signs much earlier,” the Associated Press reported.
The disproportionate number of veterans among the homeless is a well-established trend, dating from the Vietnam years. “Veterans have long accounted for a high share of the nation's homeless,” according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has identified about 1,500 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were homeless at some point in 2006--a small but growing proportion of the 336,000 veterans who were homeless that same year.
The VA contends it's doing what's necessary to help these veterans. It spends about $265 million annually on programs for homeless veterans. But compared to the $8 billion a month the U.S. is spending to put soldiers on the battlefield, the money for such programs--about 0.3 percent of annual war spending--is tiny.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE VA has also failed to address the epidemic of suicide among veterans--a fact starkly revealed by a CBS News investigation that found the Department of Defense grossly understates the number of veterans who take their own lives.
The Pentagon only acknowledges 130 self-inflicted fatalities among U.S. military personnel in Iraq since 2003, but the U.S. Army alone reported 97 suicides in 2006. CBS News found that there were at least 6,256 suicides by veterans of all eras in 2005--an average of 120 a week.
Veterans of all ages were twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide, but among 20- to 24-year-olds, the suicide rate for veterans was two to four times higher.
“The Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides,” wrote Penny Coleman, the widow of a Vietnam veteran who committed suicide and author of a book entitled Flashback: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War.
“They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call 'accidental non-combat deaths' to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have 'personal problems.'”
Politicians try to muzzle antiwar critics with the charge that they don't “support the troops”--at the same time that the military and political establishment has failed to address the basic needs of returning troops.
In reality, it's the antiwar movement that stands for both the immediate withdrawal of troops from harm's way--and increased funding for health and other services that veterans deserve and desperately need.
Monday, January 14, 2008
US war veterans bringing death back home
Dominic Brock
More than 120 US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have committed or been charged with a murder since arriving home from war, the New York Times has found.The newspaper discovered 121 murder cases involving the recent veterans, with combat trauma, stress, alcohol abuse and family troubles often leading to the killings.
Three quarters of the veterans were still in the army when they committed the killings, most of which involved the use of guns. Other murders involved stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings.
The Times found an 89 per cent increase in homicides involving military personnel in the six years since war broke out, compared to the previous six-year period. This was despite there being fewer troops stationed in the US in the past six years, and an overall drop in homicide rates in the country.
Severe depression was a key element in many of the incidents. Thirteen veterans committed suicide after the killings, with others expressing a death wish after being caught.
Joshua Pol, a former soldier convicted of vehicular homicide, told a judge at court in 2006, “To be honest with you, I really wish I had died in Iraq.”The Pentagon did not keep track of such killings, and declined to comment on the Times’ story.
http://livenews.com.au/Articles/2008/01/13/US_war_veterans_bringing_death_back_home
-- submitted by Patti Woodard
A major story on this topic appeared in the New York Times. You can find it here.
More than 120 US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have committed or been charged with a murder since arriving home from war, the New York Times has found.The newspaper discovered 121 murder cases involving the recent veterans, with combat trauma, stress, alcohol abuse and family troubles often leading to the killings.
Three quarters of the veterans were still in the army when they committed the killings, most of which involved the use of guns. Other murders involved stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings.
The Times found an 89 per cent increase in homicides involving military personnel in the six years since war broke out, compared to the previous six-year period. This was despite there being fewer troops stationed in the US in the past six years, and an overall drop in homicide rates in the country.
Severe depression was a key element in many of the incidents. Thirteen veterans committed suicide after the killings, with others expressing a death wish after being caught.
Joshua Pol, a former soldier convicted of vehicular homicide, told a judge at court in 2006, “To be honest with you, I really wish I had died in Iraq.”The Pentagon did not keep track of such killings, and declined to comment on the Times’ story.
http://livenews.com.au/Articles/2008/01/13/US_war_veterans_bringing_death_back_home
-- submitted by Patti Woodard
A major story on this topic appeared in the New York Times. You can find it here.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
In June, the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health acknowledged "daunting and growing" psychological problems among our troops: Nearly 40 percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of National Guard members are presenting with serious mental health issues.
They also reported "fundamental weaknesses" in the U.S. military's approach to psychological health. That report was followed in August by the Army Suicide Event Report (ASER), which reported that 2006 saw the highest rate of military suicides in 26 years. And last month, CBS News reported that, based on its own extensive research, over 6,250 American veterans took their own lives in 2005 alone -- that works out to a little more than 17 suicides every day.
That's all pretty bleak, but there is reason for optimism in the long-overdue attention being paid to the emotional and psychic cost of these new wars. The shrill hypocrisy of an administration that has decked itself in yellow ribbons and mandatory lapel pins while ignoring a human crisis of monumental proportion is finally being exposed.
On Dec. 12, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, called a hearing on "Stopping Suicides: Mental Health Challenges Within the Department of Veterans Affairs." At that hearing suggestions were raised and conversations begun that hopefully will bear fruit.
But I find myself extremely anxious in the face of some of these new suggestions, specifically what is being called the Psychological Kevlar Act of 2007 and use of the drug propranalol to treat the symptoms of posttraumatic stress injuries. Though both, at least in theory, sound entirely reasonable, even desirable, in the wrong hands, under the wrong leadership, they could make the sci-fi fantasies of Blade Runner seem prescient.
The Psychological Kevlar Act "directs the secretary of defense to develop and implement a plan to incorporate preventive and early-intervention measures, practices or procedures that reduce the likelihood that personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other stress-related psychopathologies, including substance use conditions. (Kevlar, a DuPont fiber, is an essential component of U.S. military helmets and bullet-proof vests advertised to be "five times stronger than steel.") The stated purpose of this legislation is to make American soldiers less vulnerable to the combat stressors that so often result in psychic injuries.
On the face of it, the bill sounds logical and even compassionate. After all, our soldiers are supplied with physical armor -- at least in theory. So why not mental? My guess is that the representatives who have signed on to this bill are genuinely concerned about the welfare of troops and their families. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., is the bill's sponsor, and I have no reason to question his genuine commitment to mental health issues, both within and outside of the military. Still, I find myself chilled at the prospects. To explain my discomfort, I need to go briefly into the history of military training.
Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. "Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli," says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, "and this maximizes soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely -- and understandably -- suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat."
By military standards, operant conditioning has been highly effective. It's enabled American soldiers to kill more often and more efficiently, and that ability continues to exact a terrible toll on those we have designated as the "enemy." But the toll on the troops themselves is also tragic. Even when troops struggle honorably with the difference between a protected person and a permissible target (and I believe that the vast majority do so struggle, though the distinction is one I find both ethically and humanely problematic) in war "shit happens." When soldiers are witness to overwhelming horror, or because of a reflexive accident, an illegitimate order, or because multiple deployments have thoroughly distorted their perceptions, or simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time -- those are the moments that will continue to haunt them, the memories they will not be able to forgive or forget, and the stuff of posttraumatic stress injuries.
And it's not just the inherent conscientious objector our military finds inconvenient: current U.S. military training also includes a component to desensitize male soldiers to the sounds of women being raped, so the enemy cannot use the cries of their fellow soldiers to leverage information. I think it not unreasonable to connect such desensitization techniques to the rates of domestic violence in the military, which are, according to the DoD, five times those in the civilian population. Is anyone really surprised that men who have been specifically trained to ignore the pain and fear of women have a difficult time coming home to their wives and families? And clearly they do. There were 2,374 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in 2005, a 40 percent increase over 2004. But that figure represents only reported cases, and, as Air Force Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, commander of DoD's Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response pointed out, "Studies indicate that only 5 percent of sexual assaults are reported."
I have thought a lot about the implications of "psychological Kevlar" -- what kind of "preventive and early-intervention measures, practices or procedures" might be developed that would "reduce the likelihood that personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder." How would a soldier with a shield against moral response "five times stronger than steel" behave?
I cannot convince myself that what is really being promoted isn't a form of moral lobotomy.
I cannot imagine what aspects of selfhood will have to be excised or paralyzed so soldiers will no longer be troubled by what they, not to mention we, would otherwise consider morally repugnant. A soldier who has lost an arm can be welcomed home because he or she still shares fundamental societal values. But the soldier who sees her friend emulsified by a bomb, or who is ordered to run over children in the road rather than slow down the convoy, or who realizes too late that the woman was carrying a baby, not a bomb -- if that soldier's ability to feel terror and horror has been amputated, if he or she can no longer be appalled or haunted, something far more precious has been lost. I am afraid that the training or conditioning or drug that will be developed to protect soldiers from such injuries will leave an indifference to violence that will make them unrecognizable to themselves and to those who love them. They will be alienated and isolated, and finally unable to come home.
Posttraumatic stress injuries can devastate the lives of soldiers and their families. The suicides that are so often the result of such injuries make it clear that they can be every bit as lethal as bullets or bombs, and to date no cure has been found. Treatment and disability payments, both for injured troops and their families, are a huge budgetary concern that becomes ever more daunting as these wars drag on. The Psychological Kevlar Act perhaps holds out the promise of a prophylactic remedy, but it should come as no surprise that Big Pharma has been looking for a chemical intervention.
What they have come up with has already been dubbed "the mourning after pill." Propranalol, if taken immediately following a traumatic event, can subdue a victim's stress response and so soften his or her perception of the memory. That does not mean the memory has been erased, but proponents claim that the drug can render it emotionally toothless.
If your daughter were raped, the argument goes, wouldn't you want to spare her a traumatic memory that might well ruin her life? As the mother of a 23-year old daughter, I can certainly understand the appeal of that argument. And a drug that could prevent the terrible effects of traumatic injuries in soldiers? If I were the parent of a soldier suffering from such a life-altering injury, I can imagine being similarly persuaded.
Not surprisingly, the Army is already on board. Propranolol is a well-tolerated medication that has been used for years for other purposes.
And it is inexpensive.
But is it moral to weaken memories of horrendous acts a person has committed? Some would say that there is no difference between offering injured soldiers penicillin to prevent an infection and giving a drug that prevents them from suffering from a posttraumatic stress injury for the rest of their lives. Others, like Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, object to propranolol's use on the grounds that it medicates away one's conscience. "It's the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain or guilt," he says. Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says. "That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that a young soldier could believe it will."
It doesn't take a neuroscientist to see the problem with both of these solutions. Though both hold the promise of relief from the effects of an injury that causes unspeakable pain, they do so at what appears to be great cost. Whatever research projects might be funded by the Psychological Kevlar Act and whatever use is made of propranolol, they will almost certainly involve a diminished range of feelings and memory, without which soldiers and veterans will be different. But in what ways?
I wish I could trust the leadership of our country to prioritize the lives and well-being of our citizens. I don't. The last six years have clearly shown the extent to which this administration is willing to go to use soldiers for its own ends, discarding them when they are damaged. Will efforts be made to fix what has been broken? Return what has been taken? Bring them home?
Will citizens be enlightened about what we are condoning in our ignorance, dispassion or indifference? Or will these two solutions simply bring us closer to realizing the bullet-proof mind, devoid of the inconvenient vulnerability of decent human beings to atrocity and horror? And finally, these are all questions about the morality of proposals that are trying to prevent injuries without changing the social circumstances that bring them about, which sidestep the most fundamental moral dilemma: that of sending people to war in the first place.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
-- submitted by Lois Vanderbur
In June, the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health acknowledged "daunting and growing" psychological problems among our troops: Nearly 40 percent of soldiers, a third of Marines and half of National Guard members are presenting with serious mental health issues.
They also reported "fundamental weaknesses" in the U.S. military's approach to psychological health. That report was followed in August by the Army Suicide Event Report (ASER), which reported that 2006 saw the highest rate of military suicides in 26 years. And last month, CBS News reported that, based on its own extensive research, over 6,250 American veterans took their own lives in 2005 alone -- that works out to a little more than 17 suicides every day.
That's all pretty bleak, but there is reason for optimism in the long-overdue attention being paid to the emotional and psychic cost of these new wars. The shrill hypocrisy of an administration that has decked itself in yellow ribbons and mandatory lapel pins while ignoring a human crisis of monumental proportion is finally being exposed.
On Dec. 12, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, called a hearing on "Stopping Suicides: Mental Health Challenges Within the Department of Veterans Affairs." At that hearing suggestions were raised and conversations begun that hopefully will bear fruit.
But I find myself extremely anxious in the face of some of these new suggestions, specifically what is being called the Psychological Kevlar Act of 2007 and use of the drug propranalol to treat the symptoms of posttraumatic stress injuries. Though both, at least in theory, sound entirely reasonable, even desirable, in the wrong hands, under the wrong leadership, they could make the sci-fi fantasies of Blade Runner seem prescient.
The Psychological Kevlar Act "directs the secretary of defense to develop and implement a plan to incorporate preventive and early-intervention measures, practices or procedures that reduce the likelihood that personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other stress-related psychopathologies, including substance use conditions. (Kevlar, a DuPont fiber, is an essential component of U.S. military helmets and bullet-proof vests advertised to be "five times stronger than steel.") The stated purpose of this legislation is to make American soldiers less vulnerable to the combat stressors that so often result in psychic injuries.
On the face of it, the bill sounds logical and even compassionate. After all, our soldiers are supplied with physical armor -- at least in theory. So why not mental? My guess is that the representatives who have signed on to this bill are genuinely concerned about the welfare of troops and their families. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., is the bill's sponsor, and I have no reason to question his genuine commitment to mental health issues, both within and outside of the military. Still, I find myself chilled at the prospects. To explain my discomfort, I need to go briefly into the history of military training.
Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. "Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli," says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, "and this maximizes soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely -- and understandably -- suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat."
By military standards, operant conditioning has been highly effective. It's enabled American soldiers to kill more often and more efficiently, and that ability continues to exact a terrible toll on those we have designated as the "enemy." But the toll on the troops themselves is also tragic. Even when troops struggle honorably with the difference between a protected person and a permissible target (and I believe that the vast majority do so struggle, though the distinction is one I find both ethically and humanely problematic) in war "shit happens." When soldiers are witness to overwhelming horror, or because of a reflexive accident, an illegitimate order, or because multiple deployments have thoroughly distorted their perceptions, or simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time -- those are the moments that will continue to haunt them, the memories they will not be able to forgive or forget, and the stuff of posttraumatic stress injuries.
And it's not just the inherent conscientious objector our military finds inconvenient: current U.S. military training also includes a component to desensitize male soldiers to the sounds of women being raped, so the enemy cannot use the cries of their fellow soldiers to leverage information. I think it not unreasonable to connect such desensitization techniques to the rates of domestic violence in the military, which are, according to the DoD, five times those in the civilian population. Is anyone really surprised that men who have been specifically trained to ignore the pain and fear of women have a difficult time coming home to their wives and families? And clearly they do. There were 2,374 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in 2005, a 40 percent increase over 2004. But that figure represents only reported cases, and, as Air Force Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, commander of DoD's Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response pointed out, "Studies indicate that only 5 percent of sexual assaults are reported."
I have thought a lot about the implications of "psychological Kevlar" -- what kind of "preventive and early-intervention measures, practices or procedures" might be developed that would "reduce the likelihood that personnel in combat will develop post-traumatic stress disorder." How would a soldier with a shield against moral response "five times stronger than steel" behave?
I cannot convince myself that what is really being promoted isn't a form of moral lobotomy.
I cannot imagine what aspects of selfhood will have to be excised or paralyzed so soldiers will no longer be troubled by what they, not to mention we, would otherwise consider morally repugnant. A soldier who has lost an arm can be welcomed home because he or she still shares fundamental societal values. But the soldier who sees her friend emulsified by a bomb, or who is ordered to run over children in the road rather than slow down the convoy, or who realizes too late that the woman was carrying a baby, not a bomb -- if that soldier's ability to feel terror and horror has been amputated, if he or she can no longer be appalled or haunted, something far more precious has been lost. I am afraid that the training or conditioning or drug that will be developed to protect soldiers from such injuries will leave an indifference to violence that will make them unrecognizable to themselves and to those who love them. They will be alienated and isolated, and finally unable to come home.
Posttraumatic stress injuries can devastate the lives of soldiers and their families. The suicides that are so often the result of such injuries make it clear that they can be every bit as lethal as bullets or bombs, and to date no cure has been found. Treatment and disability payments, both for injured troops and their families, are a huge budgetary concern that becomes ever more daunting as these wars drag on. The Psychological Kevlar Act perhaps holds out the promise of a prophylactic remedy, but it should come as no surprise that Big Pharma has been looking for a chemical intervention.
What they have come up with has already been dubbed "the mourning after pill." Propranalol, if taken immediately following a traumatic event, can subdue a victim's stress response and so soften his or her perception of the memory. That does not mean the memory has been erased, but proponents claim that the drug can render it emotionally toothless.
If your daughter were raped, the argument goes, wouldn't you want to spare her a traumatic memory that might well ruin her life? As the mother of a 23-year old daughter, I can certainly understand the appeal of that argument. And a drug that could prevent the terrible effects of traumatic injuries in soldiers? If I were the parent of a soldier suffering from such a life-altering injury, I can imagine being similarly persuaded.
Not surprisingly, the Army is already on board. Propranolol is a well-tolerated medication that has been used for years for other purposes.
And it is inexpensive.
But is it moral to weaken memories of horrendous acts a person has committed? Some would say that there is no difference between offering injured soldiers penicillin to prevent an infection and giving a drug that prevents them from suffering from a posttraumatic stress injury for the rest of their lives. Others, like Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, object to propranolol's use on the grounds that it medicates away one's conscience. "It's the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain or guilt," he says. Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says. "That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that a young soldier could believe it will."
It doesn't take a neuroscientist to see the problem with both of these solutions. Though both hold the promise of relief from the effects of an injury that causes unspeakable pain, they do so at what appears to be great cost. Whatever research projects might be funded by the Psychological Kevlar Act and whatever use is made of propranolol, they will almost certainly involve a diminished range of feelings and memory, without which soldiers and veterans will be different. But in what ways?
I wish I could trust the leadership of our country to prioritize the lives and well-being of our citizens. I don't. The last six years have clearly shown the extent to which this administration is willing to go to use soldiers for its own ends, discarding them when they are damaged. Will efforts be made to fix what has been broken? Return what has been taken? Bring them home?
Will citizens be enlightened about what we are condoning in our ignorance, dispassion or indifference? Or will these two solutions simply bring us closer to realizing the bullet-proof mind, devoid of the inconvenient vulnerability of decent human beings to atrocity and horror? And finally, these are all questions about the morality of proposals that are trying to prevent injuries without changing the social circumstances that bring them about, which sidestep the most fundamental moral dilemma: that of sending people to war in the first place.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
-- submitted by Lois Vanderbur
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2007,
Printed on November 26, 2007
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.
Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue.
In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.
The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
--contributed by Patti Woodard
Posted on November 26, 2007,
Printed on November 26, 2007
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.
Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue.
In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.
The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
--contributed by Patti Woodard
Friday, November 16, 2007
120 US war veteran suicides a week
From correspondents in New York
November 15, 2007 09:47am
THE US military is experiencing a "suicide epidemic" with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.
At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 - an average of 17 a day - the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.
While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.
That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 - almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.
"Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,'' CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.
CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.
"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,'' Mike Bowman said.
"They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.''
There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to CBS.
"Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged,'' Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said on CBS.
The network said it was the first time that a nationwide count of veteran suicides had been conducted.
The tally was reached by collating suicide data from individual states for both veterans and the general population from 1995.
November 15, 2007 09:47am
THE US military is experiencing a "suicide epidemic" with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.
At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 - an average of 17 a day - the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.
While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.
That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 - almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.
"Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,'' CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.
CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.
"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,'' Mike Bowman said.
"They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.''
There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to CBS.
"Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged,'' Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said on CBS.
The network said it was the first time that a nationwide count of veteran suicides had been conducted.
The tally was reached by collating suicide data from individual states for both veterans and the general population from 1995.
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