GI Rights News

Thank You for Your Service=?UTF-8?B?Pw==?=

2011-07-23T09:54:00.001-07:00

Thank You for Your Service?

by Laurence M. Vance, lewrockwell.com
July 19th 2011

It is without question that Americans are in love with the military. Even worse, though, is that their love is unqualified, unconditional, unrelenting, and unending.

I have seen signs praising the troops in front of all manner of businesses, including self-storage units, bike shops, and dog grooming.

Many businesses offer discounts to military personnel not available to doctors, nurses, and others who save lives instead of destroy them.

Special preference is usually given to veterans seeking employment, and not just for government jobs.

Many churches not only recognize veterans and active-duty military on the Sunday before holidays, they have special military appreciation days as well.

Even many of those who oppose an interventionist U.S. foreign policy and do not support foreign wars hold the military in high esteem.

All of these things are true no matter which country the military bombs, invades, or occupies. They are true no matter why the military does these things. They are true no matter what happens while the military does these things. They are true no matter which political party is in power.

The love affair that Americans have with the military – the reverence, the idolatry, the adoration, yea, the worship – was never on display like it was at the post office the other day.

While at the counter shipping some packages, a U.S. soldier, clearly of Vietnamese origin in name and appearance, dressed in his fatigues, was shipping something at the counter next to me. The postal clerk was beaming when he told the soldier how his daughter had been an MP in Iraq. Three times in as many minutes I heard the clerk tell the soldier – with a gleam in his eye and a solemn look on his face – "Thank you for your service." The clerk even shook the soldier’s hand before he left.

I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing, and I am no stranger to accounts of military fetishes in action.

Aside from me not thanking that soldier for his service – verbally or otherwise – I immediately thought of four things.

One, what service did this soldier actually render to the United States? If merely drawing a paycheck from the government is rendering service, then we ought to thank every government bureaucrat for his service, including TSA goons. Did this soldier actually do anything to defend the United States, secure its borders, guard its shores, patrol its coasts, or enforce a no-fly zone over U.S. skies? How can someone blindly say "thank you for your service" when he doesn’t know what service was rendered?

Two, is there anything that U.S. soldiers could do to bring the military into disfavor? I can’t think of anything. Atrocities are dismissed as collateral damage in a moment of passion in the heat of battle by just a few bad apples. Unjust wars, we are told, are solely the fault of politicians not the soldiers that do the actual fighting. Paul Tibbets and his crew are seen as heroes for dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Before he died, Tibbets even said that he had no second thoughts and would do it again. I suspect that if the United States dropped an atomic bomb tomorrow on Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing everyone and everything, and declaring the war on terror over and won, a majority of Americans would applaud the Air Force crew that dropped the bomb and give them a ticker-tape parade.

Three, why is it that Americans only thank American military personnel for their service? Shouldn’t foreign military personnel be thanked for service to their country? What American military worshippers really believe is that foreign military personnel should only be thanked for service to their government when their government acts in the interests of the United States. Foreign soldiers are looked upon as heroic if they refuse to obey a military order to shoot or kill at the behest of their government as long as such an order is seen as not in the interests of the United States. U.S. soldiers, however, are always expected to obey orders, even if it means going to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Libya under false pretenses.

And four, what is a Vietnamese man – who most certainly has relatives, or friends or neighbors of relatives, that were killed or injured by U.S. bombs and bullets during the Vietnam War – doing joining the U.S. military where he can be sent to shoot and bomb foreigners like the U.S. military did to his people?

And aside from these four things, I’m afraid I must also say: Sorry, soldiers, I don’t thank you for your service.

I don’t thank you for your service in fighting foreign wars.I don’t thank you for your service in fighting without a congressional declaration of war.I don’t thank you for your service in bombing and destroying Iraq and Afghanistan.I don’t thank you for your service in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.I don’t thank you for your service in expanding the war on terror to Pakistan and Yemen.I don’t thank you for your service in occupying over 150 countries around the world.I don’t thank you for your service in garrisoning the planet with over 1,000 military bases.I don’t thank you for your service in defending our freedoms when you do nothing of the kind.I don’t thank you for your service as part of the president’s personal attack force to bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise bring death and destruction to any country he deems necessary.

Thank you for your service? I don’t think so.

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The Revolution that Wasn't, and Rethinking the Good War. His latest book is The Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Original Page: http://lewrockwell.com/vance/vance250.html

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Sexual Violence Against Women in the US Military: The Search for Truth and Justice

2011-07-17T19:20:00.001-07:00

Sexual Violence Against Women in the US Military: The Search for Truth and Justice

towardfreedom.com | Jul 14th 2011 12:20 PM

An investigation into the alleged suicide of US Army Private Lavena Johnson points to a larger story of sexual violence against women in the military.

Do you know the story of US Army Private Lavena Johnson and her alleged suicide? If you get most of your news from the mainstream media, probably not, considering the mainstream media has mysteriously cowered from her story of how a loving and happy 19-year-old suddenly killed herself in 2005 while serving in Iraq.

But now that the Cold Case Investigations Research Institute of Philadelphia has agreed to tackle the case, perhaps the story of Lavena and the mysterious deaths of other US female soldiers on bases in Afghanistan and Iraq will finally become recognized by a much larger audience.

Each year the Cold Case Investigations Research Institute (CCIRI) takes on a high-profile cold case. Past investigations have looked into the murders of Tu Pac and Chandra Levy, for instance.

So far, CCIRI has had their own ballistic and forensic experts and a psychologist who is an expert on suicides, take a good look at the military’s investigative file and autopsy photos. All have serious doubts Lavena took her own life.

“There’s no question the military’s [investigation and conclusion of suicide] has problems,” says Sheryl McCollum, director of CCIRI. “If there are any signs of murder, you can’t automatically call it a suicide.”

But while the CCIRI has found the courage to take on this potential military cover-up, major media such as CBS News’s 60 Minutes and ABC News have attempted to report on Lavena’s death, but backed away from airing the story, even though both CBS and ABC spent thousands of dollars on Lavena, sending multiple teams to the home of the Johnsons. 60 Minutes also paid to have Lavena’s body disinterred for a second autopsy, this according to Lavena’s father, Dr. John Johnson of St. Louis.

“No one will touch Lavena’s story with a ten-foot pole,” says Dr. Johnson about the mainstream and corporate media.

He believes the Pentagon has a choking grip on a media industry that has become so financially injured, if 60 minutes or ABC News were to air stories such as Lavena’s, the military would pull advertising from those channels, he says.

“The military sure as heck don’t want to admit black female soldiers are being raped and murdered because they’re having a hard time recruiting and retaining black females,” he told Toward Freedom. “Major media stories of brutally raped black female soldiers would devastate recruiting.”

Indeed, the Pentagon has tried to intimidate reporters and editors working on stories about Lavena. Essence magazine, for example, was threatened to have their military ad dollars pulled if they ran a story on Lavena. The magazine eventually caved to the Pentagon running a watered-down story as the editors reportedly said their survival depended on military advertising, which in Essence’s case, is seeking young black women recruits, such as Lavena.

Nonetheless, Lavena’s family continues their effort to raise awareness about a daughter who loved serving her country and lived for making a difference to help others.

The US military was her destiny, says her father; she’s third generation Army. So it was no surprise to her family when the former violin-playing honor student was ordered to Iraq in 2005.

Though she always maintained a positive attitude, on July 18th, 2005, Lavena’s spirit took a tremendous turn for the worse, claims the military. On that afternoon, says the military, her brand new boyfriend of two months broke up with her via email from his home in Kentucky.

Scorned, she printed out the e-mails and retreated to her barracks at Joint Base Balad, this according to the military. Later that night she changed out of her camos and put on a jogging suit. She took the break-up e-mails and put them in a pocket, slung her M-16 over her shoulder as most soldiers did on this base and headed out to buy snacks at a military store – with a male friend the military refuses to name.

Once at the store, Lavena used her debit card to buy a six-pack of soda and M&Ms. The pair returned to the barracks, claims the military, but sometime after this Lavena left one more time, making her way to an empty tent owned by the contractor Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), formally a subsidiary of Haliburton.

Just 24 hours before this fateful night, says her mother, Lavena called her with a global phone. Her daughter sounded happy, says the mother, as they made plans for her homecoming at Christmas and Lavena told her, “Don’t decorate the tree without me.”

But within the KBR tent, just one day after making plans for Christmas, Lavena was distraught beyond any hope after the breakup with her boyfriend – this according to the military. So Lavena found a can of aerosol, lit the break-up e-mails on fire, and lit the tent on fire. The military says Lavena then took her M16 and pulled the trigger. The happy soul and young life of Private Johnson was gone; a suicide.

This was the military’s official version of Private Johnson’s “non-combat related death”. This official version of what was deemed a suicide was based on an investigation by the US Army’s investigative arm, the US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID).

Soon after CID’s conclusion, the Armed Services Committees in the Senate signed-off. Case closed.

The story of Private Lavena Johnson, however, is far from over, as attested by the CCIRI’s decision to take on her case. What’s more, Lavena’s father says he has one simple reason to keep the pressure on the military: The evidence showing his daughter didn’t take her own life, but instead was murdered and possibly raped, is too great to take lying down, and the story of her being a jilted girlfriend simply a cover.

According to military documents, Lavena’s commanding officer, James Woods, told investigators that before her suicide, she was always smiling and that he did not see any changes in her behavior.

Two ballistics experts, Donald Marion and Cyril Wecht, told the family that Lavena’s wounds were not consistent with an M16 and the alleged exit wound from the top of her head looks more like a wound caused by a 9 mm pistol.

The US military’s autopsy of Lavena had revealed a busted lip, broken teeth, scratch marks on her neck, but no serious injuries. Yet after she was raised from the grave for a second autopsy, new X-rays would reveal a broken neck. Even stranger, the second autopsy also showed the military had removed part of Lavena’s tongue, vagina and anus, and didn’t tell the Johnsons, or document this in the first autopsy.

As implausible and twisted as it sounds, the taking of body parts, in some cases the heart or brain or both, has occurred to other bodies of female soldiers whose death’s were ruled “non-combat related”.

Dr. Johnson believes the military took Lavena’s body parts so to hide what truly happened to his daughter: Military Sexual Trauma or MST.

“My daughter wanted to serve her country, and they’re going to insult her like this?” asked Dr. Johnson to this reporter. “The Army had the absolute chutzpah to say she killed herself. We believe she was raped and murdered by a contractor. If they had a daughter [that died mysteriously in a war zone] they would be acting the same way, there’s no doubt. And I’m not resting until something is done.”

Coincidentally, rape by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be an isolated thing committed by a rare predator. In July of 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, then 20 and working in Iraq, alleged she was gang-raped and beaten by fellow KBR employees and locked in a shipping container by managers after she sought out law enforcement. Jones and her lawyers, who lost a federal civil suit against KBR in July, said nearly 40 other female KBR employees who worked in Afghanistan and Iraq told them stories of rape, beatings and sexual harassment.

Besides a cold shoulder from the military, the Johnsons say Congress has hardly lifted a finger to help, either. A team of Congressional staffers did investigate Lavena’s death, but nothing official ever came of it.

One of the Congressional staffers, however, agreed to speak to Toward Freedom anonymously, saying when the Congressional team asked for Lavena’s autopsy photos, “the Army pushed back hard.” This staffer suggests if you believe the Army’s version of how Lavena died, you need to check your intelligence for a power outage. “The Army’s story is ridiculous,” scoffs the staffer.

Activists such as Army Ret. Col. Ann Wright, now a peace activist who’s currently sailing the Mediterranean with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, says there are many more suspicious deaths of female soldiers and the military’s explanation behind them is simply not believable.

In fact, says Wright, there are 20-plus female soldier deaths under scrutiny, nearly all have occurred on bases in Afghanistan or Iraq. Of these 20, the military reports 14 were suicides, which includes Lavena Johnson. And like the Johnsons, many of these families refuse to accept the military’s explanation, believing their daughters died at the hands of fellow soldiers or contractors.

This much is clear: The mysterious deaths of female soldiers coincide with an increase in reported sexual violence against women in the military during a time when women are joining like never before. In 1970, female soldiers made up 1 percent of the entire armed forces; today, that number has jumped to roughly 15 percent, nearly 200,000 in all. As the numbers of female troops grow, the U.S. Department of Defense’s own reports bear out the rising problem of military sexual assaults in war zones: up 26 percent from 2007 to 2008, and another 33 percent over the following year.

One reason these numbers are spiking, says Wright, is because male soldiers know they can get away with it. In a 2008 Government Accountability Office survey that found 50 percent of military sexual-assault victims never even reported the crime because they felt their commanding officers would ignore the charges or worse, silence them is some way.

In a war zone, the air of intimidation following a rape, says Wright, can be ratcheted to another level simply because the victim is surrounded by violence and confusion.

“They’ll say, ‘You’re going to be dead by tomorrow,’” Wright says. “‘Raping you is just the cost of war. We’ll just chalk it up (your murder) to unsafe security.’”

John Lasker is a freelance journalist from Columbus, Ohio.

Original Page: http://towardfreedom.com/women/2474-sexual-violence-against-women-in-the-us-military-the-search-for-truth-and-justice

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Court: 'Don't ask, don't tell' will stay in place

2011-07-17T19:00:00.001-07:00

Court: 'Don't ask, don't tell' will stay in place

staradvertiser.com | Jul 16th 2011

LOS ANGELES » The military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is back in place for the time being, with one major caveat: the government is not allowed to investigate, penalize or discharge anyone who is openly gay.

A San Francisco federal appeals court ordered the military to temporarily continue the controversial policy in an order late Friday, the court's response to a request from the Obama administration.

The order is the latest twist in the legal limbo gay service members have found themselves in as the policy is fought in the courts simultaneous to its slow dismantling by the federal government, which expects to do away with it by later this year.

In its three-page ruling, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the ruling was based on new information provided by the federal government, including a declaration from Major General Steven A. Hummer, who is leading the effort to repeal the policy.

"In order to provide this court with an opportunity to consider fully the issues presented in the light of these previously undisclosed facts," the court wrote, that it would uphold an earlier order to keep the policy in place.

The court of appeals had halted "don't ask, don't tell" July 6 but the Department of Justice filed an emergency motion Thursday saying ending the policy now would pre-empt the orderly process for rolling it back, per a law signed by President Barack Obama in December.

The ruling was supported by Servicemembers United, an organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans, but the group's executive director Alexander Nicholson voiced frustration over the slow process of dismantling "don't ask, don't tell." "The situation with finally ending this outdated and discriminatory federal policy has become absolutely ridiculous," said Nicholson. "It is simply not right to put the men and women of our armed forces through this circus any longer."

The Department of Justice said in a statement that it asked the court to reconsider its order "to avoid short-circuiting the repeal process established by Congress during the final stages of the implementation of the repeal."

It said senior military leaders are expected to make their decision on certifying repeal within the next few weeks. In the meantime, the Justice Department said "it remains the policy of the Department of Defense not to ask service members or applicants about their sexual orientation, to treat all members with dignity and respect, and to ensure maintenance of good order and discipline."

The Justice Department noted that the Defense Department has discharged only one service member since Congress voted to repeal the policy, and that was done at the request of the service member.

Last year's ruling by the appeals court stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the Log Cabin Republicans against the Department of Justice.

The gay rights group persuaded U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips to impose a worldwide injunction halting the ban last October, but the appeals court granted the government a stay, saying it wanted to give the military time to implement such a historical change.

The Log Cabin Republicans asked the court Friday to deny the motion, saying "an on-again, off-again status of the District Court's injunction benefits no one and plays havoc with the constitutional rights of American service members."

The plaintiff said while only one service member has been discharged since the congressional vote, three others have been approved for discharge by the secretary of the Air Force but the processing of those actions have been "stopped in their tracks" by the court's order. Granting the stay the government wants would allow it to act on those discharges and also allow it to put recent applicants from gay enlistees in limbo, the group said.

Justice Department attorneys said in their motion Thursday the grounds for keeping the stay in place are even stronger today than they were when this court initially entered the stay, and that disrupting the process set out by Congress would impose "significant immediate harms on the government."

The chiefs of the military services submitted their recommendations on the repeal to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last week. As soon as the Pentagon certifies that repealing the ban will have no effect on military readiness, the military has 60 days to implement the repeal, which could happen by September.

Lt. Col. Paul Hackett, a lawyer in the Marine Corps Reserve, said military officials are ready for the change and there is no need for a delay.

"We're already taking steps to implement it," he said. "Politicians do what politicians do for whatever their political need is. It's an election year, so somebody is obviously taken that into consideration. I suspect that's what driving this."

Friday's order lays out a schedule for anticipated objections and motions from both sides: the Log Cabin Republicans have until 5 p.m. Thursday to file opposition to today's motion, and the federal government has until 5 p.m. the next day to file a reply supporting it.

The court also asks the federal government to explain by close of business Monday why the information on implementation of the Repeal Act wasn't provided sooner.

On Saturday, a contingent of active-duty troops and veterans are expected to march in San Diego's gay pride parade.

Former Navy operations specialist Sean Sala is organizing what is believed to be the first military contingent of troops and veterans to lead a gay pride parade.

Sala said the parade group wear T-shirts showing their branch of service. They will walk with two horses — one draped in an American flag and the other with the rainbow-colored Pride flag — to honor service members and those who have died for equality.

Associated Press writers Pete Yost in Washington and Julie Watson in San Diego contributed to this report.

Original Page: http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/125685508.html

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Veterans wait too long for mental health services, reports say

2011-07-17T18:53:00.001-07:00

Veterans wait too long for mental health services, reports say

by Steve Vogel, washingtonpost.com

Veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues often face “unconscionable” waits for treatment that leave them at risk of suicide, according to testimony at a Senate hearing Thursday and new reports from the Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general.

The reports come as VA faces unprecedented demand for mental health services from veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 202,000 veterans from those conflicts have been seen for potential PTSD at VA facilities through March 31, according to data released Wednesday. This is an increase of 10,000 veterans from the last quarterly report.

Retired Army Spec. Daniel Williams, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq from a makeshift bomb that also left him with PTSD, told the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs Thursday that when he tried to reschedule an appointment to enable him to testify, he was told he would have to wait four months for a new date.

“I’m sorry not only do I have to go through this, but many of my fellow soldiers have to as well,” said Williams, who served with the 4th Infantry Division. He testified that he attempted suicide in 2004 after being unable to get psychiatric help but was saved when his gun misfired.

Williams, a resident of Homewood, Ala., described continued struggles battling red tape, waiting for appointments and trying to get attention at VA facilities. “It literally takes my wife nearly getting arrested by VA police,” he said.

“The VA system makes you want to give up and try something else,” added Williams, who testified on behalf of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Andrea Sawyer’s husband, retired Army Sgt. Loyd Sawyer, served on a mortuary affairs team in Iraq, where he processed many dead service members and civilians.

Upon his return in 2007, she testified, “I listened to his plans to slit his throat.” Nonetheless, it took months navigating his care through the VA bureaucracy, she said, and added that it remains a round-the-clock effort.

“I gave up my job in order to keep him alive,” said Sawyer, representing the veterans advocacy group Wounded Warrior Project. “That’s what I had to do.”

George Arana, VA’s acting assistant deputy undersecretary for clinical operations and management, apologized to Williams and Sawyer at the hearing. “These stories are just unacceptable,” Arana said.

“Any veteran who needs mental health services must be able to get that care rapidly and as close to home as possible,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairman of the committee.

VA’s Office of Inspector General reported this week that several VA mental health clinics in Atlanta were found to have unacceptably high patient wait times. Some patients on an electronic waiting list attempted suicide, were hospitalized or went to the emergency department, according to the report.

The report said that facility managers were aware of long wait lists for mental health care but were slow to respond to the problem.

“We were not as quick as we should have been,” William Schoenhard, VA’s deputy undersecretary for health for operations and management, told the committee.

The report noted that VA tracks only the time it takes for new patients to get their first appointment. “This is simply unacceptable and must change,” Murray said.

Original Page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hearing-veterans-wait-too-long-for-mental-health-services/2011/07/14/gIQAcAd7EI_print.html

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Gov=?UTF-8?B?4oCZdCBXYXRjaGRv?=g Criticizes Pentagon Center for PTSD, Brain Injuries

2011-07-13T15:24:00.001-07:00

Gov’t Watchdog Criticizes Pentagon Center for PTSD, Brain Injuries

by T. Christian Miller, propublica.org
September 8th 2010

If you want more explanation about the military’s troubles in treating troops with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress, read no further than two recent but largely unnoticed reports from the Government Accountability Office.

It turns out the Pentagon’s solution to the problems is an organization plagued by weak leadership, uncertain priorities and a money trail so tangled that even the GAO’s investigators couldn’t sort it out. The GAO findings on the Pentagon’s Defense Centers of Excellence (DCOE) echo our own series on the military’s difficulty in handling the so-called invisible wounds of war.

“We have an organization that exists, but we have considerable concern about what it is that it’s actually accomplishing,” said Denise Fantone, a GAO director who supervised research on one of the reports. She added: “I can’t say with any certainty that I know what DCOE does, and I think that’s a concern.”

First, some background. After the 2007 scandal over poor care delivered to soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Congress ordered the Pentagon to do a better job treating soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. The Pentagon’s answer was to create DCOE. The new organization was supposed to be a clearinghouse to foster cutting-edge research in treatments.

DCOE was rushed into existence in late 2007. Since then, it has churned through three leaders, including one let go after alleged sexual harassment of subordinates. It takes more than five months to hire each employee because of the federal government’s glacial process. As a result, private contractors make up much of the center’s staff.

“DCOE’s development has been challenged by a mission that lacks clarity and by time-consuming hiring processes,” according to the first report in the GAO series, focusing on “management weakness” at DCOE.

Just as concerning, the GAO says that it can’t quite figure out how much money DCOE has received or where it has all gone. DCOE has never submitted a budget document that fully conformed to typical federal standards, according to a GAO report released last month. In one year, the center simply turned in a spreadsheet without detailed explanations.

The Defense Department says that DCOE got $168 million beginning in fiscal year 2010—but the GAO isn’t buying that number: “Because of unresolved concerns with the reliability of funding and obligations data provided by DOD (Department of Defense), we cannot confirm the accuracy of figures related to DCOE.” The GAO report reproduces this disclaimer no fewer than five times.

DCOE concurred with the bulk of the GAO’s findings and promised to fix its accounting errors and prevent them from happening again.

In its defense, DCOE has never had an easy job. It was created on the fly and tasked to deal with some of the most complicated mental-health issues in the military’s history. In addition, it has faced stiff bureaucratic resistance, with some Pentagon officials questioning its usefulness..

The Pentagon said that DCOE was conducting a “comprehensive review” to improve its operations.

“There is still substantial work to be done,” said Cynthia O. Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman. “We must ensure we are properly allocating resources and establishing priorities to take care of our service members.”

One telling GAO footnote suggests the extent of the obstacles the organization has faced. In Pentagon war games, the enemy is generally represented by the color red. When Congress ordered up its improvements in 2007, the Pentagon created a special committee to push through reforms that led to DCOE’s creation.

The special committee decided to call itself the “Red Cell.” Why? “The daunting task facing this team would likely make them the enemy of everyone else in the bureaucracy they sought to change,” the GAO says.

Original Page: http://www.propublica.org/article/gao-raps-pentagon-centers-for-post-traumatic-stress-brain-injuries?utm_source=socmed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=tweet5&utm_campaign=TBI

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Pentagon suspends DADT in wake of court ruling

2011-07-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

Pentagon suspends DADT in wake of court ruling

by ANDREW TILGHMAN, armytimes.com
July 8th 2011 11:57 AM BY - STAFF WRITER | POSTED : FRIDAY JUL 8, 2011 11:57:55 EDT

The Pentagon has ordered a halt to all separations of gay troops under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and will begin accepting applications from prospective recruits who identify themselves as homosexuals.

Related stories

Appeals court halts enforcement of DADT (July 6)

Air Force: 2 asked to leave service under DADT (June 27)

Officials: Half of force trained on DADT repeal (June 6)

The moratorium issued Friday came after a ruling Wednesday by a federal appeals court in California ordering the Defense Department to immediately stop enforcing the law. The court said the law is unconstitutional because it treats gay Americans differently under the law.

Disucss

Court-ordered halt on DADT

Meanwhile, defense officials will continue to prepare for the law’s formal repeal, which Congress approved in December. The law will be formally repealed 60 days after the defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs “certify” that it will not adversely impact military readiness.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he expected certification to occur in late July or early August.

It remains unclear whether the Pentagon will seek to appeal Wednesday’s court ruling, which would have to go to the Supreme Court, Pentagon spokesman Marine Col. David Lapan said Friday.

Troops are currently undergoing training programs to clarify the law and ensure a smooth transition to its repeal. Most of that training is expected to be completed by this summer, yet there is no requirement that 100 percent of the force must be trained prior to repeal, Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said.

In October, the Pentagon raised the bar for separation of gay troops by requiring the civilian service secretaries and the Pentagon’s top lawyer to approve any separation. Since then, four troops have been separated under the law.

Original Page: http://www.armytimes.com/mobile/index.php?storyUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.armytimes.com%2Fnews%2F2011%2F07%2Fmilitary-DADT-Pentagon-court-ruling-070811w%2F

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Iraq War Veteran Spared From Deportation, Prosecution

2011-07-13T14:06:00.001-07:00

Iraq War Veteran Spared From Deportation, Prosecution

huffingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON -- A military veteran who was facing deportation will likely be allowed to stay in the United States after he was released from immigration detention earlier this month, in part thanks to help from Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.).

Navy Reserve Petty Officer Elisha Dawkins, 26, entered a pre-trial diversion program on Tuesday that will spare him from federal charges for allegedly lying when he applied for a U.S. passport in 2006, a crime that could have landed him in prison for 10 years.

Dawkins, who served in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in the Army and Navy Reserve, was born to a Bahamian woman in either the U.S. or the Bahamas, but has American birth certificates and knows no other country, his attorney Clark Mervis said. But he has unknowingly faced deportation since the age of 8 after his mother was deported back to the Bahamas.

Dawkins joined the Army after high school and served in Iraq, and then attended nursing school, joined the Navy Reserve and served as a photographer in Guantanamo Bay.

When he returned to the United States, he was arrested for allegedly lying when he applied for a U.S. passport in 2006 -- a crime that could have sent him to prison for 10 years -- and placed in removal proceedings.

Wilson, who represents the district where Dawkins grew up, heard about his story and intervened on his behalf, writing a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

"It was a tear-jerker for me when I realized all of his service," Wilson told HuffPost on Tuesday. "The real tear-jerker was that he spent two months in detention."

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Wilson pointed out an administration policy that allows military combat veterans pathways to citizenship, and Dawkins' detainer was lifted on July 1. Under the pre-trial diversion program, charges will be dropped in 90 days for his alleged lying on passport documents.

Now, his lawyer is working toward citizenship for Dawkins.

"If he was starting from scratch, he would clearly be eligible under the provisions that allow combat veterans to naturalize, so we feel like at the end of the day he will be a United State citizen," Mervis said.

But until Congress acts on some type of immigration reform, more veterans could face detention and deportation, Wilson said. The solution would be to pass the DREAM Act, she said, which allows some undocumented young people who entered the U.S. as children to stay if they attend school or join the military.

"What we need to do as a nation is adopt the DREAM Act," she said. "Until we do that, we will always have people who are patriots who will suffer unjustly."

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Original Page: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/12/iraq-war-veteran-deportation_n_896323.html?1310502107&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008

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Epidemic: Over 400,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries for Vets Coming from Iraq and Afghanistan

2011-07-05T00:09:00.001-07:00

Epidemic: Over 400,000 Traumatic Brain Injuries for Vets Coming from Iraq and Afghanistan

by Conn Hallinan, alternet.org
June 21st 2011

"We are facing a massive mental health problem as a result of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a country we have not responded adequately to the problem. Unless we act urgently and wisely, we will be dealing with an epidemic of service related psychological wounds for years to come." -- Bobby Muller, President Veterans for America

"The multiple nature of it [multiple tours and longer deployments] is unprecedented. People just get blasted and blasted and blasted." -- Maj. Connie Johnmeyer, 332nd Medical Group

According to official Defense Department (DOD) figures, 332,000 soldiers have suffered brain injuries since 2000, although most independent experts estimate that the number is over 400,000. Many of these are mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI), a term that is profoundly misleading.

As David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, points out, "I don't know what makes it 'mild,' because it can evolve into anxiety disorders, personality changes, and depression." It can also set off a constellation of physical disabilities from chronic pain to sexual dysfunction and insomnia.

MTBI is defined as any incident that produces unconsciousness lasting for up to a half hour or creates an altered state consciousness. It is the signature wound for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where roadside bombs are the principal weapon for insurgents.

Most soldiers recover from mTBI, but between five and 15 percent do not. According to Dr. Elaine Peskind of the University of Washington Medical School, "The estimate of the number who returned with symptomatic mild traumatic brain injury due to blast exposure has varied from the official VA [Veterans Administration] number of 9 percent officially diagnosed with mTBI to over 20 percent, and, I think, ultimately it will be higher than that."

Serious consequences from mTBI are increased when troops are subjected to multiple explosions and "just get blasted and blasted and blasted," in the words of Maj. Connie Johnmeyer. Out of two million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 800,000 have had multiple deployments, many up to five times or more.

But mTBI is difficult to diagnose because it does not show up on standard CAT scans and MRIs. "Our scans show nothing," says Dr. Michael Weiner, professor of radiology, psychiatry and neurology at the University of California at San Francisco and director of the Center for Imaging Neurodegenerative Disease at the Veteran's Administration Medical Center.

They do now.

An MRI set to track the flow of water through the brain's neurons, has turned up anomalies that indicate the presence of mTBI. However, the military has blocked informing patients of results of the research, and if history is any guide, the Pentagon will do its best to shelve or ignore the results.

The DOD has long resisted the diagnosis of mTBI, as it has avoided paying for a successful - but expensive - way to treat it. The price of that resistance is escalating suicide rates and domestic violence incidents among returning soldiers. In 2010, almost as many soldiers committed suicide as fell in battle.

MTBI is hardly new. Some 5.3 million people in the U.S. are currently hospitalized or in residential facilities because of it, and its social consequences are severe.

A Mt. Sinai Hospital study of 100 homeless men in New York found that 80 percent of them had suffered brain trauma, much of it from child abuse. A study of 5,000 homeless people in New Haven discovered that those who had suffered a blow that knocked them unconscious or into an altered state were twice as likely to have alcohol and drug problems and to be depressed. It also found mTBI injuries were correlated with suicide attempts, panic attacks, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. And a recent study by Dr. Elaine Peskind of the University of Washington School of Medicine found that mTBI is a risk factor for developing Alzheimer's disease.

In spite of the documented consequences of mTBI, the military has been extremely tardy in dealing with it. Part of the problem is military culture itself. The Pentagon found that 60 percent of the soldiers who suffered from the symptoms of mTBI refused help because they feared their unit leaders would treat them differently. Many were also afraid that if they reported their condition it would prevent them from getting jobs as police and fire fighters after they got out of the service.

Even if soldiers wanted treatment, there are few resources available to them. "There are two things going on regarding vets," says Col. (ret) Will Wilson, chair of the American Psychological Association's Division 19 (Military Psychology). "One, there are not enough care providers available, and, two, there are not enough people focusing on the problem outside the military."

Indeed, there are not enough military psychologists to treat the problem, and since the military pays below-market rates for civilian psychologists, up to 30 percent of private psychologists are unwilling to take on soldiers as patients. The cheapest and easiest solution is to shoot up the vets with drugs. A study by Veterans for America found that some soldiers were taking up to 20 different medications, many of which canceled out the effect of others.

The situation appears to be even worse for National Guard and Reserve units, who make up almost 50 percent of the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Veterans for America found that such troops "are experiencing rates of mental health problems 44 percent higher than their active duty counterparts" and that their health care is generally inferior.

A Harvard study found that 1.8 million vets under 65 have no health care or access to the Veterans Administration. "Most uninsured veterans are low-to-middle income workers who are too poor to afford private coverage but are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or free VA care," the study found.

Treating mTBI injuries is difficult, but by no means impossible. Dr. Alisa Gean, chief of Neuroradiology at San Francisco General Hospital, who has worked with wounded soldiers at U.S. Army's Regional Medical Center at Landstuhl, Germany says the old conventional wisdom that brain damage was untreatable is wrong. "We now know that the brain can heal. It has an intrinsic plasticity that allows it to recover, and this is particularly true for the young brain."

A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections," thus "overturning a century of prevailing thought."

One method that has worked effectively is cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CRT) that retrains patients for tasks like counting, cooking, and memory. But CRT takes time and it can be expensive, ranging from $15,000 to $50,000 per patient. However, the DOD's health program - Tricare - refuses to endorse CRT, because it says there is no scientific evidence that justifies the expense involved.

However, an investigation by T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Daniel Zwerdling of National Public Radio found that the vast majority of researchers, even those associated with the DOD, sharply disagreed with Tricare's evaluation of CRT. According to the two reporters, "A panel of 50 civilian and military brain specialists convened by the Pentagon unanimously concluded that cognitive therapy was an effective treatment and would help many brain damaged troops."

The therapy is also endorsed by the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Neurophysiology and the British Society of Rehabilitative Medicine.

Instead of accepting the advice of its own researchers, however, Tricare hired ECRI- a company which had already done a study concluding that CRT was ineffective-to examine the therapy. But critics charge that the study was so narrow, and the assumptions behind it so loaded, that it was almost a given that the study would conclude the benefits of cognitive therapy were "inconclusive." Outside researchers blasted the ECRI study, one of them describing it as "hooey" and "baloney."

In spite of the criticism, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England concluded, "The rigor of the researchhas not met the required standard."

However, Miller and Zwerdling concluded that Tricare's resistance to CRT was not about science, but the bottom dollar. According to the reporters, a Tricare-sponsored study found "that comprehensive rehabilitative therapy could cost as much as $51,480 per patient. By contrast, sending patients home from the hospital to get a weekly phone call from a therapist amounted to only $504 a patient."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already made it clear that he intends to cut the military's $50 billion annual health budget. No matter how effective CRT is, it's not likely to get past the brass, who would rather spend the money on weapon systems than on healing the men and women who they so casually put in harm's way.

So far, the military has put the clamps on the new MRI technique. Dr. David L. Brody, an author of the study, told the New York Times that researchers were blocked from giving the MRI results to patients."We were specifically directed by the Department of Defense not to so," adding, "It was anguishing for us, because as a doctor I would like to be able to help them in any way. But that was not the protocol we agreed to."

Given that mTBI is so difficult to diagnose, and sufferers are many times told there is nothing wrong with them, that seems an especially cruel protocol. "Many of them [the doctors] were hoping we could give results to their care providers to document or validate their concerns."

In the end it will come down to treatment, and whether the wounded vets will get the care they need, or sit by a phone and wait for their once a week call from a therapist.

Original Page: http://www.alternet.org/story/151376/epidemic%3A_over_400%2C000_traumatic_brain_injuries_for_vets_coming_from_iraq_and_afghanistan?page=entire

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Veterans' Group Says Stop Deploying Traumatized Troops

2011-07-04T23:36:00.001-07:00

Veterans' Group Says Stop Deploying Traumatized Troops

by Joshua Philipp, m.theepochtimes.com

The Iraq Veterans Against the War claims thousands of troops are being sent to war while suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), or military sexual trauma (MST).

In a move to stop the redeployment of troops suffering from trauma, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) launched its first strategic campaign, Operation Recovery: Stop the Deployment of Traumatized Troops.

The veterans hope to help troops who are already suffering from traumatic experiences to avoid getting pushed over the edge by being forced back into a war zone, according to Joe Callan, IVAW Western Regional Field Organizer, who served in the Marines for 11 years.

“We don’t want them to have to go back,” Mr. Callan said. “There are many soldiers who do want to go back in, and there are many soldiers who don’t want to deploy, that have to deploy even with these traumas.”

Currently, troops with PTSD and psychiatric conditions may or may not be deployed, depending on their situation, according to Maria Tolleson, media-relations officer of the U.S. Army Office of the Surgeon General.

Before deployment, soldiers undergo a face-to-face screening process that identifies those at risk. “Providers make a recommendation to commanders about deployability of soldiers; commanders use their best judgment based on mission requirements, etc. and make the final decision, taking into consideration medical recommendations,” Tolleson said.

Soldiers who are identified as having PTSD or behavioral or mental health issues that may become worse by deployment are then given another assessment by a behavioral health expert, according to Tolleson.

Regulations about deployment for troops suffering from PTSD or similar issues are outlined in the Health Affairs Policy issued in November 2006 on Deployment Limiting Psychiatric Conditions. Soldiers who are determined to be non-deployable are given a profile on their limitations, but “if their psychiatric situation is stable, they may be deployed and followed up by a behavioral health provider in theater,” Tolleson said.

“There is a waiver process that must be utilized for soldiers considered non-deployable with psychiatric conditions,” Tolleson said, adding that “commanders may NOT deploy a soldier whose waiver was denied.”

“Our goal is that the troops who are fit to deploy do deploy, and those that are not fit to deploy get the type of treatment they need so they can deploy,” Tolleson said.

Caring for Veterans

A complete withdrawal of the 50,000 remaining U.S. troops in Iraq is scheduled for 2011, and a troop drawdown in Afghanistan is planned for July 2011.

More than 2 million U.S. service members have been deployed to war zones in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and more than 40 percent (831,169) of them served two or more deployments, according to data collected by Veterans for Common Sense.

The VA has had 143,530 PTSD patients who were veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to March 13, 2010, data collected by Veterans for Common Sense.

Although the main objective of the IVAW Operation Recovery campaign is to stop the redeployment of troops suffering trauma, it has other concerns that may be on the way to resolution.

The IVAW campaign description states, “The VA doesn't have the resources to serve all those in need; too often service members are conveniently denied care or access to quality mental health screenings.”

The Obama administration recently changed the standards that troops need to meet in order to receive PTSD treatment and other mental health care.

Previously, troops needed to provide documented proof of an incident (stressor) that would cause them to have PTSD. During his July 10, 2010, weekly address, President Barack Obama announced that the VA will no longer require troops to prove a stressor in order to get treatment.

An additional $16 billion in funding was also announced for the VA, raising its budget to $114 billion, which is the highest it’s been since the years following the end of the Vietnam War.

In an Aug. 23 speech, Vice President Joe Biden said the administration had launched “one of the largest, most comprehensive programs in American history to support our returning veterans and their families long after their military service is over.”

Changing Culture

Mr. Callan was with a light-armor and reconnaissance battalion during his three tours in Iraq. Nearly a third of his platoon were wounded during his second deployment in 2004 and 2005. They were in “a ton of firefights,” and they were hit with at least 18 IEDs.

After the fray, two soldiers went to go see the psychiatrist, referred to as “the wizard” among the troops. One of them was released on a behavioral disorder, while the second got off as a conscientious objector. “They both got out, but they had to fight really hard to get to go see the psych,” Mr. Callan said.

According to Mr. Callan, things may have changed quite a bit since then because in 2005, the mentality surrounding PTSD was that “if you have PTSD, you’re weak, or you couldn’t hack it,” whereas “now it’s more like anybody can get it.” “It’s not so much that you can’t hack it. These things are awful, and you’re having a normal reaction to some really awful things.”

“It’s much more recognized now,” he said.

Original Page: http://m.theepochtimes.com/index.php?page=content&id=43524

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Veterans Die Facing Mountains of Red Tape

2011-07-04T23:34:00.001-07:00

Veterans Die Facing Mountains of Red Tape

by Lena Groeger, m.wired.com
June 29th 2011

When Clay Hunt returned home to Texas after two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the struggle didn’t end. Tormented by flashbacks and post-traumatic stress, he sought medical help from the Department of Veteran Affairs – but faced a pile of paperwork. While waiting for help, he turned his energy towards helping his fellow veterans, raising money for the wounded and appearing in public service announcements for veterans struggling, like him, with the psychological trauma of war.

Hunt took his own life on March 31, 2011. His disability checks arrived five weeks later.

Tragically, Clay’s story is not unique. Every day, 18 veterans of the nation’s armed forces become casualties by their own hands. One thousand more attempt to take their own lives every month. The numbers are as grim for active duty and reserve soldiers: The Army just reported 27 suspected suicides for the month of May, higher than any other month this year.

“Those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg,” Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, tells Danger Room. “This is a problem that’s clearly out of control.”

As Obama promises a drawdown of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq is coming to a close, the number of soldiers returning home is only rising. But after fighting for their country, these veterans are forced to fight a health care system that is not sufficiently able to help them. Last month the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals berated the Department of Veteran Affairs for delays in treating veterans who have the combat-related mental injuries that put them at an increased risk of suicide.

“The VA’s unchecked incompetence has gone on long enough; no more veterans should be compelled to agonize or perish while the government fails to perform its obligations,” the judges wrote in the majority ruling.

But it may be years before the situation improves. As of 2010, the VA had a backlog of over 1 million benefits claims. Veterans can wait a year or more for disability checks, and weeks for mental health referrals. The problem is only getting worse, with the influx of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, the rate of suicide for veterans is three times higher than the general public, according to a 2006 study.

“We’re almost 10 years into the war, the backlog has gone up, and it doesn’t look like things are getting better,” Rieckhoff says.

While the number of stories like Clay Hunt’s are on the rise, the concern over veteran suicides is not new. Over seven years ago, the Bush administration commissioned the VA to overhaul its mental health system. The “Mental Health Strategic Plan” that followed promised all sorts of improvements: better screening for at-risk veterans, more urgent health care, less waiting time for treatments and benefits claims. But a 2007 report (.pdf) by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that much of that plan had not been implemented. It found that almost two-thirds of the Veterans Health Administration facilities lacked a suicide prevention strategy to target returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and 70 percent didn’t have a system to track veterans who showed risk factors for suicide.

Since then, the VA has made continued efforts to strengthen its suicide prevention program. The Veterans Crisis Line (1-800-273-8255) was opened in 2007 to provide telephone access to trained counselors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“The hotline has grown tremendously over the last four years, to about 500 calls a day,” says Janet Kemp, the national director of the VA’s suicide prevention program. In April, the hotline fielded more than 14,000 calls, the most ever for a single month. Kemp credits the hotline with saving over thousands of lives, but admits that the VA could do better.

“People do wait too long to get the services they need,” says Kemp. “Hopefully we’re putting those into place.”

The hotline guarantees medical attention to anyone in a crisis situation, but not every case appears to be an immediate crisis. For thousands of veterans at risk of suicide, theirs is a much slower, but no less urgent, predicament. Risk factors for suicide are complex, but psychological illnesses like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are clear culprits. One study found that the risk of suicide doubles for men with psychological conditions. For women, the risk is five times as high.

Unfortunately, these are exactly the mental disorders that President Obama has called the “signature wounds of today’s wars.” An unprecedented number of veterans are being diagnosed with PTSD, and the increased use of explosives by hostile forces in Afghanistan and Iraq raises the risk for traumatic brain injury. Currently an estimated 20 percent of soldiers with combat-related injuries also have traumatic brain injury (compared to 12-14 percent of Vietnam War veterans), which can lead to further mental health problems, and even suicide.

The psychological toll of war, a flood of returning troops and an overburdened VA healthcare system has proven to be a deadly combination. There are some options for veterans – the IAVA has put into place an online community for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, to ease the transition back to civilian life. It’s not enough.

“I don’t think we’ve seen a sustained national effort around suicide, period,” said Rieckhoff. “This needs national attention, and there needs to be a demand for services. We need help.”

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Original Page: http://m.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/veterans-die-red-tape/

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DADT Was Repealed, Right=?UTF-8?B?PyBTbyBXaHkgQQ==?=re Servicemembers Still Being Discharged

2011-06-28T20:56:00.001-07:00

DADT Was Repealed, Right? So Why Are Servicemembers Still Being Discharged Under it?

alternet.org | Jun 28th 2011 6:16 AM

Despite the fact that President Obama signed legislation to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" 187 days ago (and counting), the Advocate reports today that the Pentagon has confirmed servicemembers are still being dismissed under the policy, because the "certification" loophole has allowed the military to drag its feet on implementing the change.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates is leaving office this week, to be replaced by outgoing CIA chief Leon Panetta, who testified during his confirmation hearing earlier this month that he "will work closely with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assess whether the elements for certification in the law are met before signing it myself." Which is so vague that it's essentially meaningless.

The can just keeps getting kicked down the road, and, per the Advocate, the discharges continue:

The Pentagon confirmed Monday that more service members have been discharged under "don't ask, don't tell" pending certification of the policy's repeal, with one individual's discharge approved as recently as Thursday.

A total of four airmen have been discharged under the policy in the last several weeks, Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez confirmed Monday.

...Defense officials had said that the separation approved April 29 was the only such discharge under DADT since late October, when the Defense Department limited authority for discharges to just five senior officials.

But in a statement, Harper confirmed the additional discharges since. "On May 31st, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force approved discharges of two Airmen under the provisions of 10 USC 654 [the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy]," Harper said. "On June 23, 2011, the Secretary of the Air Force accepted the resignation of an Airman who asked to be separated under the provisions of [DADT]."

Harper said that all four individuals discharged had made voluntary statements regarding their sexual orientation and had asked to be "separated expeditiously."

So, basically, the military may not actively ask anymore, but if you tell, you're still getting kicked the fuck out.

Original Page: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/625519/dadt_was_repealed%2C_right_so_why_are_servicemembers_still_being_discharged_under_it/#paragraph4

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Blast-related brain injuries could cause unique damage

2011-06-17T11:17:00.003-07:00

Blast-related brain injuries could cause unique damage

by Gregg Zoroy, usatoday.com

Mild brain injuries from an explosion — one of the most common wounds suffered by troops in Afghanistan — appear to be different and more extensive than mild brain injuries that result from playing sports, according to a study in TheNew England Journal of Medicine.

The findings support a growing theory that brain injury from a blast is so unique that it may even be a newly uncovered disease, scientists say.

Army Col. Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist who has led research into how blasts affect the brain, said the study reveals "a high likelihood that there are some unique features to blast injury."

Scientists in the study uncovered indications that blast-related damage to the brain can last for months. Troops diagnosed with a concussion or mild brain injury from blasts are expected to recover in a few weeks and return to combat.

In the new research, scientists used advanced imaging techniques to examine dozens of wounded soldiers and Marines and found damage persisting for six months to a year after the injury.

The study was conducted during 2008-2009 at an Army hospital in Germany where all casualties from Afghanistan and Iraq arrive before going home.

The study looked specifically at how blasts damage the brain's wiring. Researchers found neural pathways disrupted in areas of the brain that are not affected in civilian cases of mild brain injury — such as from sports injuries or car accidents.

These were areas of the brain regulating emotions and impulsive behavior and governing coordination, movement, organization and planning, says David Brody, a neurologist who co-authored the study.

Researchers were particularly concerned about those areas regulating impulse, especially for combat troops. "Being impulsive is not something you want in people (in combat)," says Christine Mac Donald, a biomedical engineer and study co-author.

Original Page: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-06-01-brain-injury-troops_n.htm

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Returning To The Battlefield, With A Brain Injury

2011-06-17T11:17:00.001-07:00

Returning To The Battlefield, With A Brain Injury

by Blake Farmer, m.npr.org
May 10th 2011

Nashville Public Radio

The signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI — is hard to diagnose and just as difficult to treat. Now, many of these injured soldiers are returning to duty, and doctors are struggling to determine whether and when they're well enough to fight.

One way to find out is to observe patients under the stress of combat in simulated battlefield situations. That's what physicians at Fort Campbell in Kentucky are doing with recovering TBI patients.

On The (Mock) Battlefield

"Jesus!" says Sgt. Joshua Thurman, as an explosion catches him by surprise. He and a team of recovering TBI patients at Fort Campbell sweep a gravel road for possible roadside bombs. They're armed with paintball guns, taking periodic fire from pretend insurgents.

The last time most of these veterans heard bomb blasts and gunshots was the day they nearly died in Afghanistan.

"Manning the .50 cal, there was an explosion, concussion got me," Thurman says. "Came to find out I did have a TBI, but I also lost the hearing in my left ear."

Many of these soldiers now wear hearing aids. That limitation alone may keep some from going back to the front line. The lingering effects of the concussion also get in the way. Memory loss, mood swings and balance problems make returning to duty after a traumatic brain injury difficult, but not impossible.

Physical therapist Tamara Moreland tests the balance of TBI patients after each battlefield simulation.

She asks one soldier, Sgt. Patrick Cummings, to shake his head. Then she instructs others to take 50 steps in place with their arms straight out and their eyes closed.

Moreland watches to see if they end up in the same place they started. Physical symptoms of TBI tend to get worse under stress, and Moreland wants to see how much worse.

Returning To Duty

Until now, returning to duty took a doctor like David Twillie looking at a few charts and signing off. That's changing.

"Soldiers are making life and death decisions, so doesn't it make sense to use demonstrated competence as the standard for returning someone to duty?" he asks.

Twillie directs Fort Campbell's TBI clinic, which has been singled out as a national model by the Pentagon. Here patients must demonstrate their competence through pencil-and-paper tests as well as new real-life exercises.

Most soldiers who get to these simulations will return to duty, Twillie says. But some soldiers appear ready to go back on paper, when they're really not.

"In fact very recently we had a soldier that had a desire to stay in, had done well in all our simulations," Twillie says. "But when all the different sights, sounds, smells came back, he just wasn't able to change his focus, and that's very important in combat."

A Flashback, And Tears

Jeremy Cole, a trainer who works with the TBI patients, tries to see whether soldiers can complete a series of tasks in the correct order even when rattled. He plays audio from a battlefield scene in Saving Private Ryan and then tells the soldiers to put in chest tubes and tighten down tourniquets.

"Catch your breath," he tells one soldier who is trying to assess a casualty.

As the sound goes down and the lights come up, pools of red surround each body.

"I've had soldiers' blood on my hand before, so it takes you back there," says Staff Sgt. Nicholas Smith, looking at his own hands.

He says the amount of blood in this simulation is pretty true to life.

"The only difference is no one's screaming 'Mom!' or 'Get me out of here!' That's the only difference."

Sgt. Patrick Cummings, a big guy with a serious face, says he's surprised by his reaction to the battlefield simulations.

"It kind of brought tears because I was there. I was one of these patients before," he says. "It just hit home."

Despite the flashback, Cummings wants to deploy again. As a TBI survivor, he won't be alone. The Department of Defense estimates roughly 115,000 soldiers have experienced one of these mind-altering injuries. [Copyright 2011 Nashville Public Radio]

TRANSCRIPT:

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, or TBI, has become a signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of troops have suffered concussions that left them with TBI. And doctors have struggled to determine when or if a person with the condition can return to battle.

Blake Farmer of member station WPLN takes us to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where physicians are simulating stressful combat situations. The goal is to better understand TBI.

(Soundbite of explosion)

Sergeant JOSHUA THURMAN: Jesus. Okay.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BLAKE FARMER: An explosion catches Sergeant Joshua Thurman by surprise, as he and a team of recovering soldiers sweep a gravel road for explosives at a training site on Fort Campbell. Armed with paintball guns, they take periodic fire from pretend insurgents.

(Soundbite of paintball shots)

FARMER: The last time most of these veterans heard bomb blasts and gunshots was the day they almost died in Afghanistan.

Sgt. THURMAN: Manning the 50-cal and there was an explosion, and the concussion got me. And came to find out I did have a TBI, but I also lost the hearing in my left ear.

FARMER: Hearing loss alone may keep Thurman from going back to the front line. But the lingering effects of a concussion also get in the way for soldiers. Memory loss, mood swings and balance problems make returning to duty after a TBI difficult, but not impossible.

Between each battlefield simulation, physical therapist Tamara Moreland tests each soldier's balance.

Ms. TAMARA MORELAND (Physical Therapist): You put your arms straight out in front of you, close your eyes, 50 steps in place, stay where you stop.

(Soundbite of footsteps)

FARMER: Physical symptoms of TBI tend to get worse under stress. Moreland wants to see how much worse.

Until now, returning to duty took a doctor like David Twillie looking at a few charts and signing off. That's changing.

Dr. DAVID TWILLIE (Director, Traumatic Brain Injury Center, Fort Campbell): We said soldiers are making life and death decisions, so doesn't it make sense to use demonstrated competence as the standard for returning someone to duty?

FARMER: Twillie directs Fort Campbell's TBI clinic, singled out as a national model by the Pentagon. Patients here must demonstrate their competence through pencil-and-paper tests, as well as new real-life exercises.

Most soldiers who get to these simulations will return to duty, Twillie says. But some soldiers appear ready to go back on paper when they're really not.

Dr. TWILLIE: In fact, very recently had a soldier that really had a desire to stay in, had done well on all of our pencil and pad, our computerized tests and all of our simulations. But when all of the different sights, sounds, and smells, everything that's related to combat, he just wasn't able to change his focus. He could focus on one thing but he couldn't really switch when the conditions changed to something else. And that's very important in combat.

(Soundbite of simulated battle scene)

FARMER: The audio of a battle scene, lifted from "Saving Private Ryan," is pumped into this black box of a room. A strobe light imitates the flashes of gun muzzles. Three mannequins lie in pools of fake blood with amputated limbs scattered around them.

Sergeant JEREMY COLE (Trainer, Fort Campbell Warrior Resiliency Recovery Center): All right, staff sergeant, we've got more than one casualty. Let's go.

FARMER: Trainer Jeremy Cole watches to see if soldiers can complete a series of tasks in the correct order, even when rattled. They put in chest tubes, tighten tourniquets.

Unidentified Man #2: On your knees. We're going to need...

Sgt. COLE: Catch your breath. We're going to need probably blood. He's lost a lot of blood. We're going to need another stretcher.

FARMER: As the sound goes down and the lights come up, Staff Sergeant Nicholas Smith stands in a pool of red looking at his hands.

Staff Sergeant NICHOLAS SMITH: I mean I've had soldiers' blood on my hand before, so it's just like, you know, it takes you back there.

FARMER: There is blood everywhere in this room. And you're saying this is no exaggeration.

SSgt. SMITH: When you have a massacre like this, it's everywhere. So...

Sergeant PATRICK CUMMINGS: The only difference is no one is crying. No one is screaming, Mom, or get me out of here.

SSgt. SMITH: That's the only difference.

FARMER: That's Sergeant Patrick Cummings, a big guy with a serious face, who says he's surprised by his own reaction.

Sgt. CUMMINGS: It kind of brought tears because of just - I was there. I was one of these patients before and it just hit home.

FARMER: Despite the flashback, Cummings wants to deploy again. As a TBI survivor, he'll be in good company. The Department of Defense estimates roughly 115,000 servicemembers have experienced one of these mind-altering injuries.

For NPR News, I'm Blake Farmer in Nashville. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

Original Page: http://m.npr.org/story/136170907?url=/2011/05/10/136170907/back-to-battle-with-a-brain-injury≻=tw

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Air Force to discharge 30 Tinker airmen for possession of synthetic marijuana

2011-06-17T11:06:00.001-07:00

Air Force to discharge 30 Tinker airmen for possession of synthetic marijuana

by BRYAN DEAN, newsok.com
June 14th 2011

30 airmen from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma will be discharged over possession of the drug Spice, a synthetic version of marijuana that was recently banned by the federal government.

Air Force officials are discharging 30 airmen at Tinker Air Force Base for possession or use of “Spice,” a synthetic version of marijuana, military officials said Monday.

Multimedia

Air Force to discharge 30 Tinker airmen for possession of synthetic marijuana

Spice is a mixture of herbs sprayed with chemicals that mimic THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. It produces a high when smoked. Spice first appeared in Europe, and its use has spiked in the U.S. over the past few years.

The Drug Enforcement Administration temporarily banned the drug last year, and it was permanently added to the federal government's list of banned substances in March.

The U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations recently finished an investigation that began after the drug was banned. Investigators found 30 airmen who possessed or used the drug ranging in rank from airman to senior airman.

Those service members are being discharged from the military.

Air Force officials said about half of those caught with the drug were habitual users who were passing it on to others.

Col. Bob LaBrutta, base commander, sent a warning to those on base that use of the drug won't be tolerated.

“Everyone needs to understand that Spice is a Schedule One controlled substance. In other words, it's considered the same as using marijuana,” LaBrutta said.

“If you use Spice and are caught — which you will be — the Air Force has a zero-tolerance policy, so you will be jeopardizing your military career.”

Special Agent Jeffrey Carlson, of the Office of Special Investigations, said authorities were tipped off to a mounting Spice problem on the base and identified those involved through interviews and other investigative measures.

“Even though Spice doesn't seem as serious of a drug as cocaine or marijuana, we don't just turn a blind eye to it,” Carlson said.

Before it was banned, the drug often was sold at smoke shops and other retailers in packages labeling it as incense.

Military officials said side effects can be much more serious than marijuana and include headaches, seizures and a feeling of numbness or paralysis.

Another common problem is that recipes for the drug vary, so it is difficult to predict its effects.

Military officials said service members who test positive for Spice can be court-martialed, demoted, dishonorably discharged, confined for at least five years and docked pay.

Original Page: http://newsok.com/air-force-to-discharge-30-tinker-airmen-for-possession-of-drug/article/3576901?custom_click=lead_story_title

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Airmen discharged for Spice

2011-06-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

NewsOK

by BRYAN DEAN, m.newsok.com
June 13th 2011

Air Force officials are discharging 30 airmen at Tinker Air Force Base for possession or use of “Spice,” a synthetic version of marijuana, military officials said Monday.

Spice is a mixture of herbs sprayed with chemicals that mimic THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. It produces a high when smoked. Spice first appeared in Europe, and its use has spiked in the U.S. over the past few years.

The Drug Enforcement Administration temporarily banned the drug last year, and it was permanently added to the federal government's list of banned substances in March.

The U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations recently finished an investigation that began after the drug was banned. Investigators found 30 airmen who possessed or used the drug ranging in rank from airman to senior airman.

Those service members are being discharged from the military.

Air Force officials said about half of those caught with the drug were habitual users who were passing it on to others.

Col. Bob LaBrutta, base commander, sent a warning to those on base that use of the drug won't be tolerated.

“Everyone needs to understand that Spice is a Schedule One controlled substance. In other words, it's considered the same as using marijuana,” LaBrutta said.

“If you use Spice and are caught — which you will be — the Air Force has a zero-tolerance policy, so you will be jeopardizing your military career.”

Special Agent Jeffrey Carlson, of the Office of Special Investigations, said authorities were tipped off to a mounting Spice problem on the base and identified those involved through interviews and other investigative measures.

“Even though Spice doesn't seem as serious of a drug as cocaine or marijuana, we don't just turn a blind eye to it,” Carlson said.

Before it was banned, the drug often was sold at smoke shops and other retailers in packages labeling it as incense.

Original Page: http://m.newsok.com/air-force-to-discharge-30-tinker-airmen-for-possession-of-synthetic-marijuana/article/3576901

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A Virtual Test for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

2011-06-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

A Virtual Test for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

by Emily Singer, technologyreview.com
June 16th 2011

Researchers hope the use of multiple sensors will result in a more objective way of diagnosing this anxiety disorder.

Audio »

By combining virtual reality with data from physiological sensors, researchers at Draper Laboratory are trying to develop a new way to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which people who have undergone a traumatic event experience it again and again.

The research is of particular interest to the military, because many fighters returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD. Many have also been subjected to explosions or other trauma, often resulting in mild traumatic brain injury. The two disorders have similar symptoms but require different treatments, so accurate diagnosis is crucial.

A diagnosis of PTSD is currently based on interviews with a physician and the presence of certain symptoms, such as flashbacks of the trauma and difficulty in sleeping and concentrating. But if the disorder could be diagnosed more precisely and objectively, it could help physicians distinguish PTSD from other disorders, and also help in assessing the effectiveness of specific treatments.

In a pilot study of seven people with PTSD, seven healthy people, and 11 people with trauma but not PTSD, Andrea Webb, who is a psychophysiologist at Draper, and collaborators measured heart rate, finger pulse, respiration, and skin conductance (a measure of stress and excitement), first when the person was calm and then when he or she was shown potentially frightening scenes via virtual-reality goggles. The virtual-reality scenes became progressively more intense. For example, the first might be a helicopter flying overhead; the last might be an insurgent running toward the subject while shooting his weapon.

Previous research by others in the field has shown that people with PTSD tend to have an exaggerated response to these kinds of scenes, with more dramatic increases in heart rate and blood pressure than those recorded in healthy people. Webb's goal is to take data from the sensors and create algorithms to reliably detect who has PTSD. Although data collection and analysis are still underway, Webb says that preliminary findings show several instances in which people with PTSD did react more strongly than those in the other groups.

Original Page: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37816/?a=f

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Overlooked and cut loose by the Army, veteran=?UTF-8?B?4oCZcyBsaWZlIHNw?=irals to an end

2011-06-12T12:03:00.001-07:00

Overlooked and cut loose by the Army, veteran’s life spirals to an end

by Bill Murphy Jr., stripes.com
June 7th 2011

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — By last September, the Army had had just about enough of infantryman Jacob Andrews, so it gave him a general discharge and a one-way bus ticket home to Kansas City.

He had plenty to think about on the 30-hour trip from Fort Drum, N.Y.

There were the alcohol-fueled mistakes that had led to the end of his military career, and the memories of good friends who had been killed the year before in Afghanistan. There was, in particular, his horrific discovery of the body of one friend who had been crushed to death in a Humvee accident.

There was the night back at Fort Drum when he’d tried to commit suicide.

Friends and family members say the Army was more than happy to take Andrews when it needed new soldiers for an unpopular war, but that it punished and abandoned him when he returned from Afghanistan, despite clear signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and possible traumatic brain injury.

Those actions, they charge, put Andrews on the path to his tragic demise. In April, as the government hounded him for repayment of his re-enlistment bonus, and after he was incorrectly denied the educational benefits he’d counted on to help make a new start, Andrews, 22, hanged himself in a wooded area near his parents’ home in Kansas City.

“He tried. The kid asked for help,” said Andrews’ mother, Lauri Turner. “But to them, he was just a number.”

Joining up

Numbers were exactly what the Army needed when Andrews joined in May 2007 as it struggled to meet recruiting goals. He’d dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, but he enlisted as one of a vanguard of new recruits who came in with GEDs instead of high school diplomas. He went to court to get charges of assault and vandalism dismissed before he could head to Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training, at a time when the Army accepted thousands of recruits who’d had minor criminal trouble.

Later, when the Army chaptered him out, Andrews joined a rising number of troubled soldiers quickly separated with general discharges or worse. Andrews was one of 8,175 soldiers separated from the military for misconduct in fiscal year 2010, up 42 percent from 2006.

Finally, when he killed himself last month, he became part of the grimmest military statistic of modern times: one of the 18 U.S. veterans, on average, who commits suicide each day.

The Army declined to comment for this story, citing “privacy concerns,” except for a prepared statement offered a month after Stars and Stripes’ first request that expressed concern for Andrews’ family and emphasized that decisions on how to handle a troubled soldier like Andrews would be made at the brigade level.

Stars and Stripes also made multiple attempts to reach Andrews’ former brigade, battalion and company commanders via email and through the military organizations to which they are currently assigned. All of those efforts went without reply.

This article was reported based on Andrews’ records from the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs and on interviews with his friends, family and fellow soldiers, including his former platoon leader.

Heading to war

The Army seemed like a godsend when Andrews signed up. His family had never had much money, college was out of the question, and the chances of a high school dropout making a decent living were remote. His mother and stepfather encouraged him to enlist, although his mother begged him to pick a safer specialty than infantry.

Not a chance, Andrews told her; he wasn’t going to be a “POG,” military slang he’d already learned for “person other than grunt.” He earned his “11B” infantry classification and was assigned to Company D, 2nd Batallion, 87th Infantry Regiment, part of the 10th Mountain Division.

At Fort Drum, Andrews fit in quickly among most of his fellow soldiers. They remember him as “wild,” “fun” and “a firecracker,” and they described a true “infantry” lifestyle — training and partying with equal intensity.

“Andrews was always a straight ladies’ man,” recalled Nick Ooten, a close friend who had reached the unit a few months earlier and who shared a similar background — a Midwesterner with a GED. “You know the girls that you dream about, that you wish [you] could talk to them? Andrews had no fear, drunk or sober. He would go and talk to any girl and he would get their attention. He could pull models. He was so smooth.”

Andrews’ unit expected to go to Iraq, but in late 2008 his battalion received orders instead for Wardak province in Afghanistan, about 20 miles from Kabul. Its mission would be to secure an area around a main highway and deny the Taliban a long-held safe haven.

For the first several months, Andrews did fine. On one of their first days in Wardak province, Andrews was the gunner on an M1117 Armored Security Vehicle, manning a .50-caliber machine gun and a Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher. They rushed to the aid of some soldiers on foot who were under fire.

“I was driving. He was gunning,” recalled Zachary Precopio, a friend of Andrews’ who is no longer in the Army. “My [truck commander] made me drive up this crazy hill and [Andrews] started rocking with the .50, and he switched over to the Mk 19, kept switching back and forth. He knew his [stuff] with that thing.”

Andrews was promoted to specialist in May 2009. He’d re-enlisted just before the deployment — pocketing and quickly spending a $12,000 re-enlistment bonus — and he talked with friends about making a career out of the Army.

When a new soldier, Pvt. Peter Kyle Cross, 19, joined the unit, Andrews and Precopio took him under their wing. They rode in the same armored security vehicle for several weeks.

“You know how it is; the guys in your truck, you talk to them 24 hours a day. … That’s when we started getting close,” Precopio said. “So we were pretty well connected with Cross. It was like he was our little brother.”

Andrews went home on mid-tour leave in May 2009. His mother and stepfather gave him an early surprise party for his 21st birthday in a local park. His played with his 2-year-old niece, Kayli, who had learned to say that her Uncle Jake was “fighting monsters in Afghanistan.” He was happy and proud, his mother recalled.

When he returned to Afghanistan, things quickly fell apart.

He learned that two good friends, Sgt. Carlie M. Lee III and Staff Sergeant Esau I. De la Pena-Hernandez, had been killed while he was gone. Lee, especially, had been a mentor to Andrews.

Not long after he returned, a vehicle in which Andrews was riding was hit by a powerful improvised explosive device that knocked him unconscious.

Then came the event that truly devastated him.

On June 26, Andrews and another soldier were manning an observation post at the top of a hill. Cross was driving to bring them some food, but his Humvee slipped off the road and tumbled down the side of the hill.

Andrews ran and reached Cross long before anyone else. The young private had been thrown out and crushed by the Humvee. Andrews fell to the ground and cried.

“I’ll be straight up and honest with you, sir,” said another of Andrews’ friends in the unit, Justin Chavez. “Jake was a different person [after Cross’ death]. That totally [messed] up his head right there.”

Precopio agreed.

“That’s when I really think a lot of depression and sadness [started]. That ate at him more than anything bad in his past, just because of the way he saw him,” he recalled.

“The kid was crushed by a Humvee. … Nobody should have to see that.”

Andrews was one of the soldiers chosen to escort Cross’ body to Bagram Air Base.

“All of us were upset, but he was the only person that was really in tears,” recalled DeWitt Moss, who also escorted Cross’ body. “I just seen it in his eyes. He went into detail, saying how he could tell [Cross’s] neck was broke and he wasn’t breathing. I’ll just never forget the look on his face.”

Soon afterward, a new platoon leader took over. The soldiers gave themselves a platoon nickname, Bohicas, and when the new lieutenant, Kyle Hooten, made Andrews his driver, Andrews took on the radio call sign “Bohica 6 Delta.”

Andrews was a good soldier, Hooten recalled, “in the upper quarter” of the platoon, but he could be “restless” and seemed to be carrying a heavy burden at times. Hooten thought Andrews was likely worried about his mother, who had gotten sick while the unit had been in Afghanistan. He hadn’t been in the platoon at the time of Cross’ death, but later he wondered whether that might have been what was affecting Andrews.

“There’s a specific incident I’m thinking of when he was almost in tears in the truck,” Hooten recalled. “He was a good kid. He was a normal kid. But you knew that he was dealing with some demons.”

Real trouble begins

By December, the rest of the unit packed up and headed to Bagram Air Base, where they were to wait a few days for a flight home.

It was there that Andrews’ real trouble began, on Christmas 2009.

He, Precopio and another soldier named Andrew Nordlund were bored and wandering around the base when they met a group of soldiers from other NATO countries. Americans are prohibited from drinking alcohol in Afghanistan, but the other soldiers, from Australia, France and the United Kingdom, had a copious supply of tequila, beer and wine.

“It was pretty much the United Nations of a drinking Christmas party, so we had to throw the U.S. in the ring,” Precopio recalled. “We’d had a rough deployment, so we did it.”

The alcohol hit the three soldiers hard. Before the night was out, Nordlund was passed out on the sidewalk. Precopio was covered in blood, courtesy of a punch to the nose from Andrews. Someone called the military police.

“Three infantrymen drinking and getting into a fight? It’s really not that uncommon,” Precopio said.

By the next morning, he had “brushed it off” and completely forgiven Andrews. He teased him for landing a lucky punch.

“It’s funny stuff looking back on it,” said Precopio, recalling how later that night he vomited in an MRI machine at the base hospital.

“It sucks that I got knocked down” in rank as a result of the episode, he said. “But now I’ve got a pretty funny story to tell about how I got drunk in Afghanistan.”

The Army wasn’t laughing, however, and it wasn’t in a forgiving mood. When they got back to Fort Drum in January 2010, all three soldiers were busted to private. Precopio and Nordlund tried to get Andrews to take his punishment and keep his mouth shut, but his temper was short. He was withdrawn, and he was quick to argue with sergeants and officers.

The result was that he was denied post-deployment leave. He was assigned extra duty at Fort Drum while everyone else went home.

Many of the soldiers found shifting back to the civilian world difficult, but it was obvious to those closest to Andrews that he was struggling more than his peers.

“He wasn’t the same person that I knew,” Moss said.

“You could tell he was in some kind of emotional distress,” said Andrews’ girlfriend, Ashley Mercante, a nursing student who met him at a bar about 10 miles from Fort Drum just weeks after Andrews returned from Afghanistan. “He had a lot of nightmares. Graphic, horrible nightmares. He just always wondered why his buddies hadn’t lived and he had.”

His fellow enlisted soldiers also recalled that Andrews was the only soldier in his platoon not to be awarded the combat infantryman badge — a key decoration for an infantry soldier — despite clearly meeting the criteria for the award.

“Once he got in trouble, they said, ‘Screw him,’ ” said Precopio, who eventually went AWOL and was chaptered out of the Army, but still got his combat badge.

Andrews’ troubles compounded. According to what his family said he told them, the sergeant assigned to oversee his extra duty released him most days, but when they got caught, the sergeant denied having given permission. More military legal action was inevitable.

Andrews was drinking heavily by then. In March 2010, he admitted himself to the mental health unit of a civilian hospital, ostensibly because he realized he had a drinking problem. It’s unclear from records whether Andrews told anyone in his unit, but he later told a Department of Veterans Affairs doctor that another impetus for admitting himself was that he’d tried to commit suicide.

‘Breaks my heart’

Look up PTSD on the VA’s website and you’ll find the official psychological criteria for the disorder.

Did the soldier experience intense fear, helplessness or horror after witnessing a traumatic event involving serious injury or death?

Does he or she have recurring and intrusive dreams, memories or flashbacks?

Does he or she avoid talking or thinking about the event, or experience a “numbing of general responsiveness”?

Is the soldier having trouble sleeping, or is he or she prone to outbursts of anger, startling, hypervigilance or inability to concentrate?

Have the reactions been going on for more than a month?

In May 2010, as his commanders pursued formal disciplinary action against him, Andrews was sent to an Army psychiatrist who wrote after a “succinct” evaluation that he “[did] not have a psychiatric disorder which warrants disposition through medical channels.”

His military records and the recollections of his fellow soldiers, however, suggest strong evidence for each of the PTSD criteria.

While stressing that he could not “diagnose Jacob from a distance,” especially after his death, psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, one of the foremost authorities on PTSD, reviewed a summary of Andrews’ records at Stars and Stripes’ request.

“Jacob’s story breaks my heart,” said Ochberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University who is also the former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

“The most disabling wounds of war are, in my personal opinion, untreated PTSD, TBI and survivor guilt. These conditions cause haunting recollection of terrible events, isolation from sources of love and respect and often a reduced capacity to control aggressive impulses. Self-medication with alcohol is common.”

Andrews, Ochberg added, “was injured in ways that should [have been] obvious to his command. Jacob deserved better.”

In spring 2007, just as Andrews was starting basic training, the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health recommended that soldiers who engage in patterns of misconduct who have possible PTSD or TBI should be referred to medical evaluation boards instead of being involuntarily or administratively discharged.

The task force, however, had no power to enforce its recommendations.

Falling down

There is a point in Andrews’ story in which his well-documented parade of troubles — some his fault, others not — grows almost unbelievable.

His mother and stepfather were strapped for cash, but they paid $850 to ship his truck from Missouri, since he wasn’t allowed to leave Fort Drum to get it. Within 24 hours, he was arrested for drunken driving. He faced a summary court-martial over the dispute about his extra duty and was sentenced to 30 days at the Lewis County Jail in Lowville, N.Y., which had an arrangement to confine Fort Drum soldiers. He also had to forfeit half of his $1,400 monthly pay.

By the time he rejoined his unit, his slide was almost inexorable. He was drinking very heavily almost every day, downing a bottle of vodka or 30 cans of beer in a sitting.

According to Andrews’ family, a clinical social worker in the behavioral health department at the Fort Drum hospital wanted to send him to a military in-patient treatment center for substance abuse in Texas.

“Most of us know that if somebody’s drinking heavily, it’s to self-medicate,” said Turner, Andrews’ mother. “So he asked for help, asked to go to the wounded warrior program.”

A spokeswoman for Fort Drum declined to discuss Andrews specifically but said that any determination on whether to send a soldier to such a program would have been made “with input from the entire brigade chain of command” and from “subject-matter experts.”

There is no indication in the records Stars and Stripes obtained that such a move was ever considered.

Andrews made matters worse in mid-August by driving his truck while intoxicated for the second time in five months, this time with a suspended license.

It’s difficult to know the exact details, but Andrews told a VA doctor later that one of his commanders called him a “piece of shit” and told him he wanted him out of the Army immediately.

On Aug. 26, Andrews’ company commander, Capt. Jonathan Cintron, recommended that he be separated with a general discharge under honorable conditions.

Though a “general under honorable” discharge sounds similar to an “honorable” discharge, the two characterizations of service are very different. Andrews’ form DD-214 showing his release from active duty noted that the reason for his separation was “misconduct (serious offense).”

By mid-September, his brigade commander, Col. Patrick Frank, signed the papers, and Andrews was on the bus to Missouri with a $12,000 bill for repayment of the re-enlistment bonus he’d received nearly two years earlier. None of his time in the Army, including the year in Afghanistan, counted toward it.

“When they told Jake ‘We just want you out now,’ ” Mercante said, “it’s like, ‘We’re just sweeping this dirt out. Let’s get rid of him.’ They didn’t really care. They didn’t care about his well-being, because they were expendable.”

A hero’s welcome

Even though the Army had no use for him anymore, Andrews’ family still planned a hero’s welcome. Aboard the bus to Kansas City, he wore civilian clothes, but his short hair and steel physique gave him away as military. He wore two black memory bracelets inscribed with the names of friends killed in Afghanistan: Lee and De la Pena-Hernandez on one bracelet; Cross on the other. When his bus pulled into the station around 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 12, 2010, other passengers clapped and gave the thumbs-up sign.

His mother and stepfather, along with most of his family, were there to meet him.

“I was doing the mom thing, snapping pictures,” his mother recalled. “When I got my arms around him I didn’t want to let go. I was embarrassing him.”

She staged a little ceremony where her son cut the yellow ribbon she had tied around a tree in the front yard of his childhood home.

In the days that followed, Turner was all business. She insisted that Andrews go to the VA hospital in Kansas City, where for the first time, according to his files, he was diagnosed with PTSD, depression and anxiety and sent for tests to determine whether he’d suffered traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan, possibly from being knocked unconscious by an IED.

Andrews was forthright about his drinking and his suicide attempt. He told a VA doctor he was glad to be home and that he hoped to keep busy, stay out of trouble and go to college. A Fort Drum counselor had told him that with his re-enlistment and his general discharge, he’d be entitled to 70 percent of the post-9/11 GI Bill.

“Sleep — no good,” the doctor wrote in his file. “Trouble falling asleep. Nightmares every night. Tries to stay busy … crying spells … The veteran reported grieving every day over [his] fallen friends in combat.”

Next to a line on the form reading, “sense of foreshortened future (e.g. does not expect to have a career, marriage, children or a normal life span),” the doctor marked an X, and added a quote from Andrews: “This stuff has ruined my life.”

Andrews started on his paperwork — an application for the GI Bill, one for community college, another to try to get his discharge upgraded. He had another problem hanging over his head, though. His August arrest for drunken driving in New York was certain to mean going back to serve time in the county jail. Meanwhile, the bank repossessed his truck and sent him a bill for $7,000.

He filed for unemployment, but the Army reported that it had paid his accrued leave while neglecting to mention that it had applied the entire amount toward repaying his re-enlistment bonus, so his net benefit was zero. He got into college, but the VA rejected his GI Bill application.

In response to an inquiry from Stars and Stripes, the VA acknowledged weeks after Andrews’ death that the denial was almost certainly a bureaucratic mistake.

A servicemember needs an honorable discharge to take advantage of the post-9/11 GI Bill, a VA spokesman explained, but re-enlisting, as Andrews did in November 2008, is treated as the equivalent of an honorable discharge. The problem was that the Department of Defense reported Andrews’ general discharge to the VA, but did not report his re-enlistment.

'A cry for help'

In the days that followed that rejection, Andrews started spending a lot of time alone in the woods. He went back to the VA, with his mother driving him to medical appointments and waiting hours for him to finish. He became so agitated that he couldn’t sit still. He stormed out at the end of one consultation with a VA psychologist.

He cut off all contact with Mercante, his girlfriend from Fort Drum. One of the few friends he still saw, Michael Lingenfelser, had known him since they were kids. He said Andrews was radically different from the smooth guy everyone liked who could talk to just about anyone.

“You could just see it in his face, that awkward feeling,” Lingenfelser recalled. “He was socially awkward, like he didn’t know what to say or do.”

They shot pool in a bar one night last December, and suddenly Andrews disappeared. Lingenfelser found him outside, “just bawling, crying his eyes out.”

Andrews stayed with his family for Christmas. His mother gave him an iPod, and he enjoyed his first holiday with them in three years. In January, his sister gave birth to a baby boy she named “Gunnar,” in Andrews’ honor, since he had been a gunner on an armored vehicle in the Army.

Then he flew back to New York to do his time for the second drunken driving conviction.

“All I really wanna do is get my discharge up and get a job,” he wrote his mom from the Jefferson County Jail on Feb. 1. “It’s not a whole lot to look forward to but better than where I am now.”

He’d bought his round-trip flight without knowing when he’d be going home, and with no money to pay to change it, he had to find somewhere to go in New York for a few days when he was released. Around 7 a.m. on the day he got out, he called Mercante.

“I was so ecstatic, and told him to come right over,” she said.

He hadn’t talked with her since December, and hadn’t let her know he’d returned to serve his jail time.

They got back together, but Andrews was volatile. He couldn’t stop drinking, and he’d say mean, crazy things when he did, she said. He’d threaten to hurt himself, or worse, but the next morning he was always fine — embarrassed at the most, or ashamed.

Mercante came to visit him in Kansas City in early March, and Andrews went completely berserk after drinking a bottle of vodka.

He was “yelling obscenities,” according to a police report on the incident, and “threatening to ‘hurt someone’ if he gets loose.”

“That was the worst that it’s ever been,” Mercante said. “It was a cry for help.”

Andrews’ mother begged the police to take her son involuntarily to the VA or to a private hospital. Instead, they arrested him and charged him with disorderly conduct. He made his $100 bail in an hour, took a cab home and had no memory of the event the next day.

“It doesn’t really make sense, because if you’d known Jake, the Jake that everybody loved, he has a heart of gold,” Mercante recalled. “He was awesome to be around. He was the best person ever. … But it was the most bizarre thing, to see someone go just completely polar opposite. ”

A nursing student, Mercante started researching traumatic brain injury and PTSD.

“The only way I can make a little bit of sense out of that is that when he drank, it switched his subconscious, the dial, just full on.”

Turn for the better

Though he claimed not to remember that March night, something clearly changed afterward. Friends and family say Andrews went cold turkey and stopped drinking. His resolve strengthened after Mercante shared some surprising news soon afterward: She was pregnant with his child.

He was stunned when she told him, Mercante recalled, but added: “His first reaction was to take care of me. He was worried about me. ‘Are you OK? We’re going to keep it, right?’ So quickly, he went into thinking about everything else that was going to have to happen.”

He was adamant that he needed to get a job and an apartment. Finally, he landed a good offer, making $38 an hour with a contractor that maintains municipal water and sewer systems. He would start in April.

Andrews bought a mountain bike and climbing ropes and he spent his time until then going to the gym and riding trails near his home. He joined Facebook and started posting videos of his rides online. He played with his niece, Kayli, and when she mentioned that she wanted a Hello Kitty bicycle for her birthday, he promised to get her one.

Perhaps most important, he slowly ended his self-imposed isolation. He reached out to his old friends from the Army — calling Chavez, who was selling cars in Arizona; Ooten, who was working for the postal service in Indiana; and several others.

“He told me he got a brand new job, making about $30-something dollars an hour,” Chavez recalled. “He had a baby on the way. He was doing pretty good for himself, finally. I felt like he’d made a turn for the best.”

A sudden end

All of that apparent progress makes Andrews’ final chapter so much harder to understand.

The last night of his life is both well-documented and a complete mystery.

What’s clear is that in the early morning hours of April 5, after drinking heavily, he walked into a wooded area near his family’s home, strung his climbing rope over a tree branch and hanged himself. The Kansas City medical examiner’s report gives the cause of death as “asphyxia due to hanging” with “post-traumatic stress disorder” and “depression” listed under “other significant conditions.”

But as clear as the cause of death was, nothing else makes sense.

How does it square with the long text message exchange he had with Lingenfelser the night before talking about mountain bikes, or the list he wrote earlier that day of trails that he hoped to ride? There was the normal conversation he’d had with his mom just before she’d gone to bed around 10 p.m. There was the new job, and his pending fatherhood.

He and Mercante fought that night over the phone, after everyone else was asleep. Andrews started drinking — the first time anyone is aware of that he drank since the March 6 incident — and he grew angry and morose. He said the kinds of crazy things he was prone to say when he drank, including talking about suicide, she said. He would hang up, or she would, over and over. One or the other would call back.

He’d done the same thing many times before. Mercante was 1,000 miles away. It was the middle of the night. She was exhausted and half-asleep.

“I just know that I told him I loved him, and people love him, and you have to be a father now. Don’t do this,” Mercante recalled. “But like so many times before, he would get drunk … and turn into this other guy.

“So I didn’t ...”

She paused.

“I should have …”

She paused again.

“Anybody should take that seriously. But I don’t know why I didn’t. The only thing that can halfway make sense is that that had kind of happened before and Jake was always OK.”

A neighbor walking his dog found Andrews’ body the next morning. The rope around his neck had stretched to the point where Andrews’ tan boots touched the ground. The earbuds to the iPod his mother had given him were in his ears, and his right hand clutched his cell phone. He wore the black memorial bracelets for Lee, De la Pena-Hernandez and Cross. Empty beer cans were strewn around the area.

Later, when his family checked his Facebook page, they saw his last postings had been around 3 a.m. — one highlighting a fatalistic Eminem music video and another commemorating the ninth anniversary of the death of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley.

Wounds not visible

Lauri Turner woke up and immediately sensed that something was wrong. Her son’s bedroom door was open; she saw empty beer cans inside. His climbing rope was missing. She ran outside, toward the woods.

She saw a firefighter first, and then her son’s body, still hanging from the tree.

She fell to the ground and screamed.

Mercante said the reality of Andrews’ death hasn’t sunk in. She replays their conversations that night in her head and tells herself that she has to keep things together because she is carrying his baby.

His friend Lingenfelser was shocked to hear the news.

“Of any of the people I’d ever known, even with all the problems, I would have never thought he would have done that,” Lingenfelser said. “That’s what made me so mad. We talked about everything, and just one time he decided not to call me and talk to me.”

Friends turned his Facebook page into a memorial wall.

“To Bohica 6 Delta,” his old platoon leader, Hooten, wrote on the page. “You will always be remembered as a man of honor who both lived and fought hard. I am forever indebted to you as my driver … leading the rest of us Bohicas to safety.”

His mother is haunted by the memory of her son’s body, and by the fact that the night before he died was one of the few nights she hadn’t kissed him goodnight and told him she loved him. She feels guilty that she slept soundly when he was walking around the house with his rope; that she encouraged him when he wanted to join the Army; that she cremated his remains because she couldn’t afford a casket; that she was unable to get him more help.

The funeral was at the national veterans cemetery in Leavenworth, Kan. His friends grieved in their own ways. Most of them wore T-shirts bearing his photograph. On the way to the ceremony, his mother realized that they had no minister, no one to say a few words at the gravesite. She would have to do it herself.

She thanked the Patriot Guard members who had made up the procession — hundreds of motorcyclists who stood at attention for hours. Then she talked about her son. He’d served his country in a war, and been wounded in the process.

“Jacob’s wounds weren’t visible,” she said, “but they were very deep.”

A legacy

Andrews is gone, but the bureaucracies still don’t get it. His mother has made it her mission to tangle with them in her son’s place. She has his documents well-organized in folders on the kitchen table.

Her first fight was to get the highest rank Andrews earned, specialist, on his headstone.

A polite woman at the VA offered condolences on his death but said she couldn’t release his medical records without an official death certificate. A dour clerk at the Kansas City police department refused to provide a copy of the March 6 police report because Turner wasn’t named in it.

More reminders came in the mail.

The state of New York assessed $1,250 more for Andrews’ drunken driving convictions. The bank that repossessed his truck sent notices that it wanted its money. A letter Jake wrote in jail in February arrived; the postmark showed the facility didn’t bother to mail it until April. The state of Missouri wrote to say his license would be suspended until deep into a year he won’t see.

The Army hasn’t offered any condolences besides the brief statement for this story, but the Department of Defense sent more threatening letters, demanding repayment of the remaining $11,000 on Andrews’ re-enlistment bonus.

Turner has been meeting with veterans’ advocates who want to help her get her son’s discharge upgraded. She wants the Army to award her son the combat infantryman badge his buddies say he earned. She plans to file a complaint against the Kansas City police department for not taking her son to a hospital when he was arrested on March 6.

“I’m gonna do everything in my power to take the [expletive] who betrayed you down,” she wrote on his Facebook page May 5. “It’s too late to help you, but maybe my actions will help another family from going through what we have gone through.”

Turner was in court May 18 when her son was supposed to appear after the March 6 incident. The prosecutor offered sympathy. She gave Turner a copy of the report that the police clerk had refused, saying there was no reason why it should have been withheld from her.

The judge asked Turner whether her son had suffered from mental illness.

“He was a veteran and had PTSD,” she answered.

The judge offered condolences.

“Be a voice,” he told her.

She said she planned to, but for the moment, she had other concerns.

She went to a nearby office to apply for a refund of the $100 her son had posted for bail back in March.

Money is tight. It will go toward paying off his funeral.

Original Page: http://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/suicide-in-the-military/overlooked-and-cut-loose-by-the-army-veteran-s-life-spirals-to-an-end-1.145953

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America's Medicated Army

2011-06-12T11:56:00.002-07:00

America's Medicated Army

by Mark Thompson, time.com
June 5th 2008

Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don't always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would."

So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons," LeJeune says. "If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills."

While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop Hellfire missiles on the enemy below, troops like LeJeune are going into battle with a different kind of weapon, one so stealthy that few Americans even know of its deployment. For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army's fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.

At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn't consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track. Given the traditional stigma associated with soldiers seeking mental help, the survey, released in March, probably underestimates antidepressant use. But if the Army numbers reflect those of other services — the Army has by far the most troops deployed to the war zones — about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were on such medications last fall. The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.

In some ways, the prescriptions may seem unremarkable. Generals, history shows, have plied their troops with medicinal palliatives at least since George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge. During World War II, the Nazis fueled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War.

The military's rising use of antidepressants also reflects their prevalence in the civilian population. In 2004, the last year for which complete data for the U.S. are available, doctors wrote 147 million prescriptions for antidepressants, according to IMS Health, a pharmaceutical-market-research firm. This number reflects in part the common practice of cycling through different medications to find the most effective drug. A 2006 federally funded study found that 70% of those taking antidepressants along with therapy experience some improvement in mood.

When it comes to fighting wars, though, troops have historically been barred from using such drugs in combat. And soldiers — who are younger and healthier on average than the general population — have been prescreened for mental illnesses before enlisting.

The increase in the use of medication among U.S. troops suggests the heavy mental and psychological price being paid by soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon surveys show that while all soldiers deployed to a war zone will feel stressed, 70% will manage to bounce back to normalcy. But about 20% will suffer from what the military calls "temporary stress injuries," and 10% will be afflicted with "stress illnesses." Such ailments, according to briefings commanders get before deploying, begin with mild anxiety and irritability, difficulty sleeping, and growing feelings of apathy and pessimism. As the condition worsens, the feelings last longer and can come to include panic, rage, uncontrolled shaking and temporary paralysis. The symptoms often continue back home, playing a key role in broken marriages, suicides and psychiatric breakdowns. The mental trauma has become so common that the Pentagon may expand the list of "qualifying wounds" for a Purple Heart — historically limited to those physically injured on the battlefield — to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on May 2 that it's "clearly something" that needs to be considered, and the Pentagon is weighing the change.

Using drugs to cope with battlefield traumas is not discussed much outside the Army, but inside the service it has been the subject of debate for years. "No magic pill can erase the image of a best friend's shattered body or assuage the guilt from having traded duty with him that day," says Combat Stress Injury, a 2006 medical book edited by Charles Figley and William Nash that details how troops can be helped by such drugs. "Medication can, however, alleviate some debilitating and nearly intolerable symptoms of combat and operational stress injuries" and "help restore personnel to full functioning capacity."

Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the "dwell time" at home before they go back to war — it's possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. "This is what happens when you try to fight a long war with an army that wasn't designed for a long war," says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration.

Military families wonder about the change, according to Joyce Raezer of the private National Military Family Association. "Boy, it's really nice to have these drugs," she recalls a military doctor saying, "so we can keep people deployed." And professionals have their doubts. "Are we trying to bandage up what is essentially an insufficient fighting force?" asks Dr. Frank Ochberg, a veteran psychiatrist and founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Such questions have assumed greater urgency as more is revealed about the side effects of some mental-health medications. Last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urged the makers of antidepressants to expand a 2004 "black box" warning that the drugs may increase the risk of suicide in children and adolescents. The agency asked for — and got — an expanded warning that included young adults ages 18 to 24, the age group at the heart of the Army. The question now is whether there is a link between the increased use of the drugs in the Iraqi and Afghan theaters and the rising suicide rate in those places. There have been 164 Army suicides in Afghanistan and Iraq from the wars' start through 2007, and the annual rate there is now double the service's 2001 rate.

At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, including 36 in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army said on May 29. That's the highest toll since it started keeping such records in 1980. Nearly 40% of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 took psychotropic drugs — overwhelmingly, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac and Zoloft. While the Army cites failed relationships as the primary cause, some outside experts sense a link between suicides and prescription-drug use — though there is also no way of knowing how many suicide attempts the antidepressants may have prevented by improving a soldier's spirits. "The high percentage of U.S. soldiers attempting suicide after taking SSRIs should raise serious concerns," says Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "And there's no question they're using them to prop people up in difficult circumstances."

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The Trauma of War
Before the advent of SSRIs — Lilly's Prozac was the first to be approved by the FDA, in 1987, followed by Zoloft from Pfizer, Paxil from GlaxoSmithKline, Celexa from Forest Pharmaceuticals and others — existing antidepressants had many disabling side effects. Impaired memory and judgment, dizziness, drowsiness and other complications made them ill suited for troops in combat. The newer drugs have fewer side effects and, unlike earlier drugs, are generally not addictive or toxic, even when taken in large quantities. They work by keeping neural connections bathed in a brain chemical known as serotonin. That amplifies serotonin's mood-brightening effect, at least for some people.

In 1994 then Major E. Cameron Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist, was among the first to suggest that SSRIs should deploy with Army combat units. In a paper written and published after she returned from a combat deployment to Somalia, Ritchie noted that the sick-call chests used by military doctors "contain either outdated or no psychiatric medications." She concluded, "If depressive symptoms are moderate and manageable, medication may be preferable to medical evacuation."

By 1999, military docs were debating the matter among themselves. Nash, a Navy psychiatrist, wrote that Navy doctors — who also provide Marines with medical care — had "sharp differences of opinion" over letting troops in war zones use SSRIs. Skeptics argued that their "real safety" in combat had not been proved. Supporters countered that their use could "avoid depleting manpower resources and damaging individual careers through unnecessary removals from operational duty." Nash reviewed the medical literature and reported that SSRIs "can be safely administered to deploying and deployed personnel."

The trickle of new drugs became a flood after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Details of America's medicated wars come from the mental-health surveys the Army has conducted each year since the war began. If the surveys are right, many U.S. soldiers experience a common but haunting mismatch in combat life: while nearly two-thirds of the soldiers surveyed in Iraq in 2006 knew someone who had been killed or wounded, fewer than 15% knew for certain that they had actually killed a member of the enemy in return. That imbalance between seeing the price of war up close and yet not feeling able to do much about it, the survey suggests, contributes to feelings of "intense fear, helplessness or horror" that plant the seeds of mental distress. "A friend was liquefied in the driver's position on a tank, and I saw everything," was a typical comment. Another: "A huge f______ bomb blew my friend's head off like 50 meters from me." Such indelible scenes — and wondering when and where the next one will happen — are driving thousands of soldiers to take antidepressants, military psychiatrists say. It's not hard to imagine why.

Repeated deployments to the war zones also contribute to the onset of mental-health problems. Nearly 30% of troops on their third deployment suffer from serious mental-health problems, a top Army psychiatrist told Congress in March. The doctor, Colonel Charles Hoge, added that recent research has shown the current 12 months between combat tours "is insufficient time" for soldiers "to reset" and recover from the stress of a combat tour before heading back to war.

Colonel Joseph Horam says antidepressants have made "a striking difference" in the way troops are treated in war. A doctor in the Wyoming Army National Guard, Horam served in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War and has been deployed to Iraq twice during this war. "In the Persian Gulf War, we didn't have these medications, so our basic philosophy was 'three hots and a cot'" — giving stressed troops a little rest and relaxation to see if they improved. "If they didn't get better right away, they'd need to head to the rear and probably out of theater." But in his most recent stint in Baghdad in 2006, he treated a soldier who guarded Iraqi detainees. "He was distraught while he was having high-level interactions with detainees, having emotional confrontations with them — and carrying weapons," Horam says. "But he was part of a highly trained team, and we didn't want to lose him. So we put him on an SSRI, and within a week, he was a new person, and we got him back to full duty."

It wasn't until November 2006 that the Pentagon set a uniform policy for all the services. But the curious thing about it was that it didn't mention the new antidepressants. Instead, it simply barred troops from taking older drugs, including "lithium, anticonvulsants and antipsychotics." The goal, a participant in crafting the policy said, was to give SSRIs a "green light" without saying so. Last July, a paper published by three military psychiatrists in Military Medicine, the independent journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, urged military doctors headed for Afghanistan and Iraq to "request a considerable quantity of the SSRI they are most comfortable prescribing" for the "treatment of new-onset depressive disorders" once in the war zones. The medications, the doctors concluded, help "to 'conserve the fighting strength,'" the motto of the Army Medical Corps.

These days Ritchie — now a colonel and a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general — thinks the military's use of SSRIs has helped destigmatize mental problems. "What we're trying to do is make treating depression and PTSD — especially PTSD, which is quite common for soldiers now — fairly routine," she says. "We don't want to make it harder for folks to do their job and their mission by saying they can't use these medications." Ritchie, who communicates "six times a day" with her colleagues in the war zones, says she is unaware of "any bad outcomes" resulting from soldiers taking SSRIs.

William Winkenwerder Jr., who issued the 2006 policy as the Pentagon's top doctor before stepping down last year, says the new medicines are working well. "Combat presents some unique and important caveats — obviously, those who are being treated have access to firearms, and they may be under significant stress, so they need to be very carefully evaluated, and good clinical decisions need to be made," Winkenwerder tells TIME. "It's my belief that is happening."

"In a Total Daze"
And yet the battlefield seems an imperfect environment for widespread prescription of these medicines. LeJeune, who spent 15 months in Iraq before returning home in May 2004, says many more troops need help — pharmaceutical or otherwise — but don't get it because of fears that it will hurt their chance for promotion. "They don't want to destroy their career or make everybody go in a convoy to pick up your prescription," says LeJeune, now 34 and living in Utah. "In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication. In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly." LeJeune says the medications — combined with the war's other stressors — created unfit soldiers. "There were more than a few convoys going out in a total daze."

About a third of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq say they can't see a mental-health professional when they need to. When the number of troops in Iraq surged by 30,000 last year, the number of Army mental-health workers remained the same — about 200 — making counseling and care even tougher to get.

"Burnout and compassion fatigue" are rising among such personnel, and there have been "recent psychiatric evacuations" of Army mental-health workers from Iraq, the 2007 survey says. Soldiers are often stationed at outposts so isolated that follow-up visits with counselors are difficult. "In a perfect world," admits Nash, who has just retired from the Navy, "you would not want to rely on medications as your first-line treatment, but in deployed settings, that is often all you have."

And just as more troops are taking these drugs, there are new doubts about the drugs' effectiveness. A pair of recent reports from Rand and the federal Institute of Medicine (iom) raise doubts about just how much the new medicines can do to alleviate PTSD. The Rand study, released in April, says the "overall effects for SSRIs, even in the largest clinical trials, are modest." Last October the iom concluded, "The evidence is inadequate to determine the efficacy of SSRIs in the treatment of PTSD."

Chris LeJeune could have told them that. When he returned home in May 2004, he remained on clonazepam and other drugs. He became one of 300,000 Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffer from PTSD or depression. "But PTSD isn't fixed by taking pills — it's just numbed," he claims now. "And I felt like I was drugged all the time." So a year ago, he simply stopped taking them. "I just started trying to fight my demons myself," he says, with help from VA counseling. He laughs when asked how he's doing. "I'd like to think," he says, "that I'm really damn close back to normal."

Original Page: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858,00.html

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Defense unable to track deployed troops' use of psychiatric drugs

2011-06-12T11:56:00.000-07:00

Defense unable to track deployed troops' use of psychiatric drugs

by Bob Brewin, nextgov.com
June 8th 2010

Defense Department The Army estimates 17 percent of troops in Afghanistan take either antidepressants or sleeping pills.

This article was updated at 3:19 pm on Tuesday, June 8.

The Defense Department's Military Health System cannot track the use of prescription medications, especially psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs used by troops engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Monday.

At a hearing in March, members of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee described widespread use of prescription drugs throughout the services and by deployed troops.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., estimated that one out of six service members is taking some form of psychiatric drug. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., said internal Army studies showed that 12 percent of its troops in Iraq and 17 percent in Afghanistan have been prescribed either antidepressants or sleeping pills.

Army statistics indicate "we have an alarming use in the increase of antidepressants," Cardin said. "In 2005, there were a little over 4,000 combat troops using antidepressants. That's about 1 percent. By 2007, it grew to over 19,000, or 5 percent, of our troops on antidepressants. That's a huge increase in the use of antidepressants. And that number remained pretty constant for 2008."

Lt. Gen Eric Schoomaker, Army Surgeon General, discounted these figures, and told the panel that Army surveys showed between 3 percent and 6 percent of deployed troops had been prescribed drugs to treat mental health or stress problems, while 8.6 percent of 550,000 active-duty soldiers were prescribed drugs to treat depression and anxiety or to help them sleep.

But according to the committee's report, which accompanied the fiscal 2011 Defense Department authorization bill, the Military Health System is unable to track drugs prescribed to deployed troops. In response to follow up questions from the March hearing, Defense informed the committee that the Military Health System's Pharmacy Data Transaction Service "has no visibility of pharmacy data for prescriptions dispensed in forward operating areas."

Officials with the Military Health System did not respond to queries on whether or not it can track prescriptions for troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. But a description of the Pharmacy Data Transaction Service posted online says it serves only Defense hospitals, retail pharmacies that supply prescription drugs to military personnel and their families enrolled in the TRICARE health insurance program, and mail order pharmacies that support troops and their families.

The MHS Pharmoeconomic Center website prominently displays a link to Deployment Medication Resources, but the link returns an error message when clicked.

Frank Ochberg, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Michigan State University and a former associate director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, said he was concerned that Defense was sending troops who needed psychotropic drugs to treat a diagnosed mental condition into combat.

Ochberg, who has years of experience in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, said he was dismayed to learn that Defense was not tracking drugs prescribed to deployed troops since accepted standards of care requires it.

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said he does not understand how Defense can send drugs to remote locations in Afghanistan and Iraq and not know how to track them electronically or include the prescription data in the AHLTA electronic health record, a Defense system that stores soldiers' health records.

Lack of prescription drug records could cause problems for troops medically evacuated from combat, because doctors would not know the psychiatric drugs a soldier could be taking, possibly leading to harmful interactions with other prescribed drugs at stateside hospitals, Sullivan said.

The Military Health System must quickly develop a database of all drugs prescribed to deployed troops, he said. "This needs to be fixed now," he said.

In its report, the Senate Armed Services Committee said it expects Defense to expeditiously develop "a reliable method to track and manage the prescription and use of pharmaceuticals, to include psychotropic medications, by deployed service members."

Original Page: http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20100608_2900.php

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Invisible Wounds: Mental Health and the Military

2011-06-12T11:55:00.001-07:00

Invisible Wounds: Mental Health and the Military

by MARK THOMPSON, time.com
August 22nd 2010

U.S. Army specialist Ethan McCord was one of the first on the scene when a group of suspected insurgents was blown up on a Baghdad street in 2007, hit by 30-mm bursts from an Apache helicopter. "The top of one guy's head was completely off," he recalls. "Another guy was ripped open from groin to neck. A third had lost a leg ... Their insides were out and exposed. I'd never seen anything like this before." Then McCord heard a child crying from a black minivan caught in the barrage. Inside, he found a frightened and wounded girl, perhaps 4. Next to her was a boy of 7 or so, soaked in blood. Their father, McCord says, "was slumped over on his side, like he was trying to protect the children, but he was just destroyed." McCord couldn't look away from the kids. "I started seeing images of my own two children back home in Kansas." (See pictures of a soldier coping with the aftermath of war.)

Ethan McCord's mind and thousands like his are the U.S. Army's third front. While its combat troops fight two wars, its mental-health professionals are waging a battle to save soldiers' sanity when they come back, one that will cost billions long after combat ends in Baghdad and Kabul. It is a high-intensity conflict: Army troops, TIME has learned, are seeking mental help more than 100,000 times a month. That figure reflects a growth of more than 75% from the final months of 2006 to the final months of '09, according to Army data.

Army Lieut. General Eric Schoomaker, the surgeon general who oversees the mental and physical well-being of the nation's soldiers, concedes he doesn't have the doctors and therapists he needs. "We're in uncharted territory in respect to the strain on the force," Schoomaker said recently. Translation: he needs help. According to the Army's estimates of its needs, 414 psychiatrists are 20% fewer than Schoomaker should have. A study released by the Army on July 29 concluded that "numerous critical shortages of care providers including behavioral health" personnel are hurting its efforts to curb suicides. "The Army has been criminally negligent," says Captain Peter Linnerooth, an Army psychologist for nearly five years until 2008, who notes that the service has had a difficult time finding psychiatrists to care for combat vets, which puts even more pressure--"and way too much burnout"--on those who stay.

Interviews with dozens of mental-health experts at Army bases tell a similar story. Even though the Army mental-health corps has increased about 60% since 9/11, demand is growing even faster. One anonymous mental-health professional told researchers last year that he spends a quarter of his time on "really sick people who never should have been let in [the military] to begin with." During the past year, indeed, it has become clear that a shortage of mental-health care can be nearly as dangerous to troops as any enemy. Last November, when Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan allegedly gunned down 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, it forced the Army to ask some hard questions. Did supervisors overlook Hasan's poor performance and alarming ideology because they are desperate for psychiatrists?

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Without doubt, those in the specialty feel under pressure. Sergeant Brock McNabb, who left the Army in 2008, was a mental-health technician operating out of a base near Baghdad; he endured nearly a year of 12-hour-plus shifts without a day off. "My marriage is going to hell. The commands aren't listening to a lot of the things we're saying when we're trying to take care of these guys," he recalls thinking. "It wasn't any huge, dramatic thing. I just decided, 'Yeah, today's the day I'm going to die,' and I was O.K. with that." He collapsed, fully clothed, on his cot. "I looked over at my 9 mm on this little hutch I'd made, and I started laughing hysterically," he says. "I was so exhausted after 10 months of all the s___ I'd been through, I was too tired to ... reach for the 9 mm and put it in my mouth." He passed out and awoke fine the next day.

The Enduring Taboo

McCord Pulled the two kids out of the minivan--the boy was still alive--and helped get them to a hospital. The Apache gunship killed a dozen men, including a pair working for the Reuters news agency; the episode became a video sensation after WikiLeaks released footage of it in April. Back at his base, McCord washed the children's blood off his uniform and body armor. That night, he told his staff sergeant he needed help. "Get the sand out of your vagina," McCord says his sergeant responded. "He told me I was being a homo and needed to suck it up." McCord says he never spoke to anyone about it after that because he didn't want to get in trouble and instead did what soldiers have done forever. "I decided to try to push it down and bottle it up," he says. But his anger, fueled by flashbacks to that day in Baghdad, kept growing. Any misstep by one of the soldiers on his team would set him off. "It was like a light switch," McCord says. "They'd do something wrong and I'd be screaming at them."

Going to a psychiatrist is still seen as a sign of weakness in the Army; the chief fear is that it will work against promotion. That may be why only about half of those needing help seek care, according to a 2008 Rand Corp. study. And only half of those--25% of the total who need help--get "minimally adequate treatment," the Rand study found. Repeat deployments deepen the crisis. One in every 10 soldiers who has completed a single combat deployment has a mental ailment; that rate jumps to 1 in 5 with a second deployment and nearly 1 in 3 with a third. That means that more than 500,000 troops have returned home to the U.S. in the last decade with a mental illness.

Complicating the Army's mental-health challenge is an increase in brain trauma. The two wars are revealing a connection between physical wounds and mental ailments. Advances in body armor protect soldiers' bodies but have left skulls and the gray matter inside them relatively defenseless. Schoomaker says the wars' biggest surprise is how traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused by roadside bombs has unleashed mental trauma. Bruised brains trigger "persistent stress-hormone releases" that can cause posttraumatic stress disorder. That, in turn, can lead to suicide. The Army has been battling a rising suicide rate for the past six years; June saw 32 suspected suicides, one of the highest monthly totals in Army history. Of those, 22 had served in combat, including 10 who had deployed two or more times.

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The root cause is no mystery: repeat deployments drive up cases of posttraumatic stress, which makes soldiers six times more likely to kill themselves. So, quietly, all over the world, the Army has opened 48 medical sites dedicated to treating soldiers' injured brains. Ground zero for this is Fort Campbell, Ky., home to the 101st Airborne Division. After 11 suicides at the base during the first five months of 2009, a top general ordered a three-day halt to all activities to discuss the problem and issued an astonishing order to the entire division: "Suicides at Fort Campbell have to stop now."

The Army has spent $7 million building at Fort Campbell what it calls its first behavioral-health campus (soldiers call it "the mental-health mall") with a half-dozen new clinics filled with the latest technology for diagnosing and treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury. The fort's mental-health staff has grown from 31 in January 2008 to 95 today. Yet suicides continued to rise. "The way Fort Campbell deals with the soldiers are why there's so many suicides there," Sergeant James Kendall, now studying to be an Army nurse at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, says. "Pretty much everyone who went to mental health said the same thing I did--they're just shoving them out the door." Kendall, a medic in the 101st, returned from Afghanistan in March 2009 and says he was brushed off when he initially sought help. It was only after he downed a full bottle of Army-prescribed Vicodin, he says, that the Army took his worries seriously. (His wife resuscitated him by injecting him with an antioverdose medication he had stashed in his medic's bag.)

Dr. Bret Logan, a psychiatrist in charge of medical hiring at Fort Campbell, says few medical professionals want to settle near the rural base--an hour north of Nashville--for far less money than they could make in a big city. The post has hired several foreign-born doctors, which has created cultural as well as language barriers. With only four suicides so far this year, the epidemic at Fort Campbell seems to have abated. But the trend at the base remains clear; the workload per mental-health worker has nearly doubled from 2008 to 2010, jumping from 19 to 32 visits per week.

A Patchwork Solution

McCord returned to Kansas five months after rescuing the children, but the nightmares continued. He sought help, and after a two-week wait for his first appointment, he was told by his civilian Army psychologist to calm his nighttime shakes with a blanket and a scented candle. Several weeks later, he saw a civilian Army psychiatrist, who prescribed three antidepressants that McCord says turned him into a zombie. Soon he began downing pills with whiskey and walking around his house brandishing his military knife with its 7-in. (18-cm) blade. His wife tricked him into driving to the hospital, where an Army counselor committed him to a private mental center.

(4 of 4)

Can the Army's mental-health corps heal itself? Not soon. Schoomaker has shifted some 100 physical-health jobs to mental-health billets, and combat tours for some medical specialists, including psychiatrists, have been cut from 12 months to six. But the Army has been forced to hire regular civilians to help, many of whom know little about the military and its culture. One soldier walked out on a civilian therapist who thought an RPG--a rocket-propelled grenade, one of which killed his buddy--was a small car.

Army mental-health providers have been receiving "provider resiliency training" since late 2008 to ward off compassion fatigue. "The Army recognized they need to take care of their staff," says Major Chris Warner, chief of behavioral medicine at Georgia's Fort Stewart. Psychologist Charles Figley, a former Marine sergeant in Vietnam and pioneer in the study of burnout among military counselors, credits the Army for taking some long overdue steps to help its healers. But there is no magic formula to fix the damage to soldiers' minds--itself the product of wars that have lasted far longer than expected and are being fought by volunteer troops. A bigger Army would mean fewer combat tours for each soldier, but that's not going to happen.

One bright spot: as the demand for troops eases, soldiers will spend more time at home between deployments, and such "dwell time" reduces mental ailments. There is also a growing network of private counselors across the country listening to soldiers, often for free. Barbara Van Dahlen, a Washington psychologist, launched the nonprofit Give an Hour organization in 2005 to offer free counseling to U.S. troops and their families. "We decided to step up and help," she says, "because these are our folks too."

McCord got out of the mental hospital after four days and left the Army last June. His psychological turmoil, he says, played a role in his 2008 divorce. He is no longer taking antidepressants. "The Army's attitude was, 'Let's give this guy drugs and hope they work because we're overbooked and don't have time to deal with it,'" he says. "If they had understood what I was going through, I think all of this could have been avoided."

Treating Soldier Stress

To see more photos of the behavioral-health facilities at Fort Campbell, go to time.com/ft_campbell

This article originally appeared in the August 16, 2010 issue of TIME.

Original Page: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2008886-1,00.html

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Invisible Wounds: Mental Health and the Military

2011-06-12T11:53:00.001-07:00

Several Warnings, Then a Soldier=?UTF-8?B?4oCZcyBMb25lbHkg?=Death

2011-06-12T11:45:00.001-07:00

Several Warnings, Then a Soldier’s Lonely Death

by JAMES RISEN, nytimes.com
January 1st 2011

WASHINGTON — A gentle snow fell on the funeral of Staff Sgt. David Senft at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 16, when his bitterly divided California family came together to say goodbye. His 5-year-old son received a flag from a grateful nation.

But that brief moment of peace could not hide the fact that for his family and friends and the soldiers who had served with him in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too many unanswered questions remained about Sergeant Senft’s lonely death in a parked sport utility vehicle on an American air base in Afghanistan, and about whether the Army could have done more to prevent it.

Officially, the Army says only that Sergeant Senft, 27, a crew chief on a Black Hawk helicopter in the 101st Airborne Division’s aviation brigade, was killed as a result of “injuries sustained in a noncombat related incident” at Kandahar Air Base on Nov. 15. No specific cause of death has been announced. Army officials say three separate inquiries into the death are under way.

But his father, also named David Senft, an electrician from Grass Valley, Calif., who had worked in Afghanistan for a military contractor, is convinced that his son committed suicide, as are many of his friends and family members and the soldiers who served with him.

The evidence appears overwhelming. An investigator for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, which has been looking into the death, has told Sergeant Senft’s father by e-mail that his son was found dead with a single bullet hole in his head, a stolen M-4 automatic weapon in his hands and his body slumped over in the S.U.V., which was parked outside the air base’s ammunition supply point. By his side was his cellphone, displaying a text message with no time or date stamp, saying only, “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.” (Mr. Senft shared the e-mails from the C.I.D. investigator with The New York Times.)

With Sergeant Senft, the warning signs were blaring.

The Army declared him fit for duty and ordered him to Afghanistan after he had twice attempted suicide at Fort Campbell, Ky., and after he had been sent to a mental institution near the base, the home of the 101st. After his arrival at Kandahar early in 2010 he was so troubled that the Army took away his weapon and forced him into counseling on the air base, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator. But he was assigned a roommate who was fully armed. C.I.D. investigators have identified the M-4 with which Sergeant Senft was killed as belonging to his roommate.

“I question why, if he was suicidal and they had to take away his gun, why was he allowed to stay in Afghanistan?” asked Sergeant Senft’s father. “Why did they allow him to deploy in the first place, and why did they leave him there?”

Defense Department officials have frequently spoken about how suicide prevention has become a top priority, and in interviews, officials noted that the National Institute of Mental Health was now leading a major study of Army suicides.

Ever since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, suicides among American troops have been soaring, as military personnel become mentally exhausted and traumatized from repeated deployments to combat zones. In 2004, the Army reported that 67 soldiers on active duty committed suicide; by 2009 that number had jumped to 162. The Army has reported 144 suicides in 2010 through November, and officials say it is now beginning to see a sharp rise in suicides among nonactive duty National Guard and Reserve personnel who are not currently deployed.

It is unclear how much the Army knew of Sergeant Senft’s deterioration. But Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of the Army’s health promotion and risk reduction task force, which handles suicide prevention programs, said that a medical determination of cause of death, a law enforcement review of the matter by Army investigators, and an internal review of both Sergeant Senft’s personnel history and the handling of his case by his chain of command were all continuing.

(Page 2 of 2)

“We are trying to get answers to these questions, answers to many of the same questions that the family is raising,” said Colonel Philbrick, who has personally reviewed Sergeant Senft’s case.

Sargeant Senft was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 16. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he died in a “noncombat-related incident.”

Interviews with friends and family members suggest that for Sergeant Senft, prolonged exposure to two wars may have been too much to bear for a friendly and sweet, but emotionally fragile young man filled with insecurities resulting from a badly splintered family life.

His parents divorced when he was about 3 years old, and the rift between his father and mother never healed. Home life for David and his brother and sister became intertwined with a series of stepparents and divided families around Northern California. David’s younger brother, Andrew, is now in prison in California for armed robbery.

The first signs of trouble for David Senft came when he was 18 or 19 and living with a stepmother who had divorced his father and remarried. He ran away and threatened to kill himself, recalled his stepmother, Tina Norvell. Her husband, Steve Norvell, found him and took him home.

David Senft joined the Army in early 2002, just months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After basic training, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and in 2003 he was sent to Iraq as a member of a helicopter crew.

His experiences during that first combat deployment had a major impact on him, according to close friends. In one episode that he often recounted to both his family and friends, he told of witnessing the crash of an evacuation helicopter filled with medical personnel and wounded soldiers that had been shot down by insurgents. He and his Black Hawk crew were ordered to the crash site, and the gruesome scene haunted him.

“He changed after he went to Iraq the first time,” recalled Ana Ochoa, one of his closest friends.

After returning to Fort Bragg in 2004, David Senft confided in another soldier, Lynette Hager, that he wanted to kill himself.

“I reported it to the chain of command,” recalled Ms. Hager, who has since left the Army. “When you come back from a deployment, they have briefings and make you watch PowerPoints, but if you need help, you have to go get it yourself.”

Ms. Hager and David Senft later began dating, and in 2005 she gave birth to their son, Landon. She said that during a fight over child support payments, he threatened to kill himself rather than make further payments and that because of the suicide threat, the court ordered that he be allowed only supervised visitation rights with their son. “He was a really good guy, fun, nice, and he loved being in the military,” Ms. Hager said. “But he didn’t have the coping skills to get out of his depressive states.”

In 2007, he was deployed again with the 82nd Airborne Division, this time to Afghanistan. After his return, he transferred to the 101st Airborne Division and re-enlisted in the Army.

“I told him not to re-enlist; I told him to get out, his personality was changing. I told him, ‘You are making me uncomfortable,’ ” Ms. Ochoa said. “After each deployment he seemed to get needier, sadder, and he would be talking deeper.”

While at Fort Campbell in 2008, he attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. The pills only knocked him out for two or three days, and when he awoke in his apartment, he called friends, who urged him to get help. He agreed to be admitted to a mental hospital in Hopkinsville, Ky. He told Ms. Ochoa that he had tried to kill himself twice while at Fort Campbell. “He was depressed,” she said. “He said he had seen a lot of crazy stuff and seen a lot of friends die, and he was unhappy; he had a lot of failed relationships.”

His suicide attempts and hospitalization finally got the attention of the Army, which kept him back from a scheduled deployment to Iraq. Instead, he was given a desk job at Fort Campbell. “I remember he told me he had tried to kill himself and had been taken off the deployment roster for Iraq,” recalled Matt Davis, who served with Sergeant Senft in the 82nd Airborne Division.

But he could not get out of his unit’s next scheduled deployment, to Afghanistan in early 2010. Colonel Philbrick said that he could not answer why Sergeant Senft was allowed to deploy to Afghanistan after he had been held back from Iraq after his suicide attempt.

He apparently did well for the first few months of the Afghan deployment, because he went home on leave in July and, without telling many friends and relatives, quietly married another soldier he had recently met.

But his mental state seemed to worsen again after his return to Afghanistan, and his commanders took action. He was placed in regular counseling in Kandahar, apparently for the first time in his military career, and met regularly with an Army chaplain on the base. His weapon was taken from him several months before his death, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator.

On the morning of Nov. 15, Sergeant Senft’s roommate woke to find his weapon missing. After Sergeant Senft failed to show up for duty that morning, another member of his unit discovered his body.

Ms. Ochoa said: “As soon as I heard he was dead, I just said to myself, he did it. He did it.”

Original Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/world/asia/02suicide.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

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Maltreated and hazed, one soldier is driven to take his own life

2011-06-09T16:28:00.001-07:00

Maltreated and hazed, one soldier is driven to take his own life

by Megan McCloskey, stripes.com
June 7th 2011

See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jsxw4Y21fY

For Army Spc. Brushaun Anderson, there was no escaping his torment.

The senior noncommissioned officers who ruled his life at a remote patrol base in Iraq ordered him to wear a plastic trash bag because they said he was “dirty.”

They forced him to perform excessive physical exercises in his body armor over and over again.

They made him build a sandbag wall that served no military purpose.

Anderson seemed to take it all in stride. Until New Year’s Day 2010, when the once-eager 20-year-old soldier locked himself inside a portable toilet, picked up his M4 rifle, aimed the barrel at his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Anderson left behind a note lamenting his failures in the military, and some soldiers in his unit immediately said that Anderson had been driven to kill himself by leaders bent on humiliating him.

“No matter what Spc. Anderson did, no matter how big or small the incident was, his punishment was always extremely harsh, [and] a lot of the time demeaning,” one corporal later told Army investigators.

“Spc. Anderson’s punishments were not like anyone else’s in the platoon,” another corporal said. “Spc. Anderson was singled out.”

The U.S. Army is confronting an unprecedented suicide crisis. Since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 1,100 soldiers have taken their own lives, with the numbers escalating each year for the last six years. Last year alone, 301 soldiers committed suicide — a new record.

Army officials often profess bafflement over the causes of the suicide epidemic, and they have spent more than $75 million on studies to try to understand the problem and reverse the devastating trend.

In Anderson’s case, at least, there was little mystery.

An Army investigation into Anderson’s unit following his suicide concluded that he had been hazed on multiple occasions and subjected to “cruel, abusive and oppressive treatment.”

Anderson’s battery commander, first sergeant, platoon sergeant and squad leader were found responsible for his maltreatment, according to documents obtained by Stars and Stripes.

But the Army didn’t hold them criminally culpable, and they weren’t made to leave the service.

Instead, all four superiors are moving ahead with their careers in leadership positions, entrusted with molding the Army’s next generation.

This is the story of one soldier’s humiliation — and the Army’s decision to avert its gaze. It is based on interviews with Anderson’s family and soldiers who witnessed his mistreatment and more than 500 pages of Army documents, including sworn statements from members of his unit and the conclusions of two Army investigators.

Rocky deployment

Brushaun Anderson had been raised by his great aunt in a modest community in Columbus, Ga., and had joined the military for the same reason many low-income recruits do: He saw it as his chance to get ahead.

He was an inexperienced soldier, with only two years in the Army, and on his first deployment. He dreamed of joining Special Forces, perhaps becoming a sniper. He could rattle off details of the Army’s weapons systems and obsessively cleaned his rifle. He also wanted to recruit, because he liked to teach and talk and “he loved what he was doing in the Army,” said his great aunt, Phillis Eason.

In the beginning, Anderson saw success.

Capt. William Fisher, Battery A’s commander, praised him in Army documents, calling him “an impressive soldier with the highly sought after ‘self-starter’ quality,” and the battalion made him Soldier of the Quarter the month before they deployed.

Anderson was then given the honor of carrying the battalion’s colors at the pre-deployment ceremony at Fort Drum, N.Y., and promoted to specialist not long after.

Yet, in Iraq, Anderson found himself something of an outsider. He was an infantryman, not a field artillery soldier. He and a few other young infantrymen had been added to 2nd Battalion, 15th Field Artillery Regiment for the deployment. He was also one of the few black soldiers in the battery.

Anderson received only mediocre performance reviews. He wasn’t meeting expectations in many regards, including his attitude.

He had lapses in judgment and a hygiene problem that hurt his reputation among some of Battery A’s leadership, even though one lieutenant said much of his behavior was typical of young soldiers. He thought Anderson simply needed more guidance from his direct leadership to help him develop as a soldier.

That wouldn’t happen at Patrol Base Babil.

The base in eastern Baghdad was remote and austere. There was no running water, no amenities like Internet access and, for a while, no portable toilets. Battery A’s 2nd Platoon and an attached squad lived sparsely in a tight square of tents next to Iraqi Security Forces.

Their battalion was based at the larger Joint Security Station Zafaraniyah about 20 minutes away, so the 40 or so soldiers at Babil were largely isolated from the rest of the unit.

The platoon’s top enlisted man, Sgt. 1st Class Phillip Devos, was granted wide leeway to run the show, and he reveled in the power, declaring himself “Supreme Allied Commander¬–Babil,” noncomissioned officers told Stars and Stripes.

He had the backing of Fisher, the battery’s commander, and then-Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Amaral, the battery’s first sergeant, both of whom encouraged a domineering spirit among the NCOs and emphasized punishment as a primary means of leadership, the NCOs said.

With this shared philosophy, the three leaders were close knit, the soldiers said. The leaders were eager for the deployment to turn into something big, itching for combat at a time when the mission in Iraq had shrunk to conducting courtesy patrols with the Iraqi Security Forces.

In December 2009, Devos got a new soldier to command when Anderson was moved from 1st Platoon to Babil.

Devos and the squad leader, Staff Sgt. Charles Bruckner, immediately pounced on Anderson’s minor mistakes.

Soldiers said once Bruckner and Devos identified Anderson as a soldier they could pick on, they never let up. They called him names and told him he wasn’t good enough for their platoon, that he was a “shit-bag soldier.”

They encouraged the other NCOs to find it funny and “release the dogs” on Anderson, a sergeant later wrote in his sworn statement.

Bruckner and Devos lacked even a “hint of moral capacity or professionalism,” another soldier wrote.

According to one sergeant, Devos was known for his “belittlement, cruelty and his verbal abuse.” Another soldier stated that Devos called Anderson stupid and sneered that the specialist must have cheated on his recruitment test because the Army doesn’t accept “retards.”

Anderson was also punished for “unreasonably long periods,” a soldier wrote, often for violations of rules that no one else had to abide by.

“Spc. Anderson was not a perfect soldier and he knew he made mistakes,” the soldier continued, “but no one deserved to get smoked like he did.”

Harsh punishment

For Christmas, the entire battery squeezed in at Babil to celebrate together.

Anderson was pulling guard duty in the predawn hours while most of the battery slept. As the sun began to rise, he lit a cigarette while sitting in the truck.

That was technically against the rules, but it was common practice at Babil.

Fisher asked him if he was smoking.

“Yeah, roger,” Anderson replied.

Fisher and Amaral weren’t pleased with the response. Both men demanded not just respect but total deference, soldiers said.

They had Bruckner and Anderson’s team leader counsel the specialist for disrespecting a senior officer and violating a lawful order for smoking in the truck. Both NCOs then recommended that Anderson get a company-grade Article 15, a nonjudicial punishment through the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.

Fisher and Amaral decided against that. Instead, Anderson was ordered to perform hours of corrective training.

Fisher, in fact, never approved an Article 15 during the entire deployment, setting him apart from the other battery commanders in the battalion. He and the rest of the battery and platoon leadership portrayed this as if they were doing the soldiers a favor.

It was better to keep these things in-house with corrective training than to go through the UCMJ, the rationale went. Some of the soldiers in the battery agreed.

Fisher told Stars and Stripes there was a simple explanation for it: Nothing rose to the level of an Article 15 while his battery was deployed.

The Army specifically states that corrective training isn’t supposed to be punitive. It’s intended to teach a soldier how to improve and to instill discipline, and it should directly relate to a soldier’s weakness.

But in Battery A, corrective training was a euphemism for whatever punishment the leadership chose that day.

For Anderson on Christmas, that meant he would get little rest.

After his night shift on guard, he had to pull two more hours of the duty. Then he was ordered to don full body armor for an hour of strenuous physical exercise with his rifle: sprints, push-ups, lunges while holding his rifle over his head and mountain climbers.

A lieutenant with the battery was on his way to start his shift serving the enlisted men their holiday meal when he saw Anderson sweating through the exercise.

He went to find Fisher to see whether the captain was aware of what was going on.

“I’m a firm believer in disciplining soldiers,” Fisher replied, according to the lieutenant’s sworn statement.

The lieutenant “questioned the weight of the punishment” and “made it known” that he “did not agree [Anderson] should have to suffer that long for such an easy correction, especially on Christmas morning.”

Fisher, who was old for a captain as a prior enlisted soldier, replied that Anderson’s punishment was his decision and it needed to be done.

The lieutenant was unimpressed.

“Personally, I believe there are more important things to focus on rather than demanding respect from subordinates,” the lieutenant wrote in his statement.

He walked away from his talk with Fisher concerned that Anderson was the only one being held accountable for smoking on guard duty while more concerning infractions by other soldiers, such as urinating near the sleeping tents, went ignored.

As part of the corrective training, Anderson’s squad was also roused out of bed and told that because Anderson had messed up, they all had to start filling sandbags for what was called the “Wall of Shame” or the “Wall of Discipline.”

The construction of the random wall, which had no legitimate military purpose, had become routine punishment for Anderson and the junior soldiers in his squad. There was even a wooden sign reading “Wall of Discipline.” One private first class, though, said it was just a joke and no one took it too seriously.

Anderson was instructed to join his squad once he was done with his hour of physical training.

While the young soldiers labored on the wall with “a clearly broken spirit,” one sergeant said, Fisher and Amaral stood by laughing.

Devos joked that the soldiers looked like refugees.

Deriding mental help

Anderson started spending more time by himself. At Babil, he often paced around the small patrol base or stood alone by the campfire.

A private first class asked him whether he was OK one night, and Anderson said he just wanted to be alone to think.

Friends said Anderson, the happy guy who made jokes and was always willing to help out, seemed to shrug off his treatment at the hands of Bruckner and Devos.

“If he was humiliated he never really showed it,” a specialist in the platoon said in a sworn statement, “and if it bothered him he never said it did.”

Some of the soldiers in the battery said Anderson brought things on himself by being lazy and repeatedly making stupid mistakes. The trouble wasn’t the platoon or battery leadership, a few said in their sworn statements, it was his lack of discipline.

One soldier wrote: “He wasn’t singled out. He did dumb [stuff] and got in trouble for it.”

Two days after Christmas, when most of the battery had been up for at least 36 hours, Anderson failed a room inspection at Zafaraniyah. The platoon rotated through that base to get showers and a break from Babil.

Bruckner told him his room was a “disgrace” with “trash on the floor, leftover meals in trays, flies, empty soda cans, dirty laundry and military equipment strewn all over the floor,” according to a formal counseling statement that Bruckner prepared. “Once again this shows the unit you have no discipline.”

Amaral was livid. He started throwing Anderson’s stuff around in his room, saying, “I’ll show you NCOs how to toss a room,” according to one sergeant.

The NCOs had Anderson put on his body armor and remove everything from his room, wipe down the walls and floor and then move everything back in.

Then Bruckner, who soldiers said tried hard to impress Devos, told Anderson to pack up his stuff because he was being exiled back to the spartan Babil permanently. That was a threat Devos often held over the heads of soldiers, one sergeant said.

One of Anderson’s friends, another specialist, saw him afterward and asked whether he planned on doing anything stupid.

“No, I’m fine,” Anderson told him. “I just need to settle down and slow down.”

Back at Babil, the platoon’s leaders didn’t relent.

They yelled at Anderson for not keeping up with proper hygiene. They told him he smelled bad and called him dirty, and then they forced him to wear a garbage bag at all times, according to sworn statements.

That type of demeaning treatment of soldiers wasn’t new for Devos, and it wasn’t unknown to the Army.

The spring before the unit deployed, Devos was admonished by a military judge. During a court-martial of one of Devos’ soldiers, it came to light that Devos had called out the accused in formation, made threatening remarks and generally acted in a “manner designed to humiliate, punish and degrade” the soldier, the judge said.

He was so “gravely concerned” about Devos’ “inappropriate and unprofessional” behavior that his actions ended up being a “significant mitigating factor” in sentencing the soldier.

Less than a year later, Devos — or “Big Time” as soldiers said he liked to call himself — was back at it in Iraq.

He had the encouragement of Amaral, a close friend.

To Amaral, everything was a game, a sergeant who served with Anderson told Stars and Stripes.

He molded the battery’s NCOs into the kind of leaders who hound junior enlisted soldiers, lecturing them that “soldiers have no rights” and if “you aren’t yelling at soldiers, you aren’t doing your job,” several soldiers said.

The first sergeant often boasted of how he took his personal frustrations out on soldiers by yelling at them or making fun of them. Amaral called the practice “Joe Time,” referencing the common nickname for soldiers.

Neither he nor Devos had much tolerance for the Army’s new spotlight on soldier care and they mocked the emphasis of mental health. In fact, Devos subjected his soldiers to exactly the kind of stigma the Army claims it’s trying to eliminate from the ranks.

If a soldier went to the “wizard,” as Devos derisively termed mental health counselors, that soldier was considered weak, the sergeant told Stars and Stripes.

“He said it so frequently that everyone knew,” the sergeant continued, asserting that promotions were also withheld for anyone who sought mental health care.

Devos often turned suicide into a punch line. Before working his soldiers hard, for example, he’d tell them they’d better get their ACE cards ready, referring to the laminated pocket guide for suicide intervention that soldiers carry.

When Babil got three portable toilets, the sergeant told Stars and Stripes, Devos joked that no soldier should use one as place to kill himself because he didn’t want to have to clean up the mess.

Tired and defeated

On Jan. 1, 2010, soldiers at Babil didn’t get out of bed until around 1 p.m. They had spent the night before out on patrol and arrived back early in the morning.

Anderson had fallen asleep in the turret during the mission — a serious violation — and so would spend the first day of the new year working on the “Wall of Discipline.”

Before he could get started, Anderson was caught for another infraction, this time for uniform standards. He was wearing an unauthorized pair of eyewear with headphones.

Those type of standards were mostly nonexistent at Babil, and it was the kind of infraction that was commonly ignored, several soldiers said.

But Anderson was nabbed for the violation and promptly made to do mountain climbers in full body armor with his rifle. Amaral put an end to the exercise around 10 minutes later.

Soon after, wearing a trash bag, Anderson started filling sandbags for the “Wall of Discipline.” Soldiers described him as looking tired and defeated.

Anderson headed to the bathroom and, on his way, he ran into a friend, a private first class who asked him what he was doing.

“Taking a break,” he said, before going into the middle of three portable toilets.

About 15 minutes later, a gunshot brought the soldiers running to the latrines.

The first soldier there knocked and called out “Hello?” before yanking the door open. He saw an M4 rifle in a pool of blood and Anderson slumped over on the seat.

In his journal by his bunk, Anderson had written what appeared to be a suicide note.

“I really don’t know what to say in a note like this. I just don’t feel good about what I’ve accomplished in my life. I feel like a faliuer (sic). I feel like I’ve failed. And theirs (sic) no hope of improving. I’ve been a couple of places in the Army and it’s all been pretty much the same.”

'It was preventable'

Immediately after Anderson’s suicide, Bruckner told his soldiers to quickly empty the sandbags and take down the “Wall of Discipline,” three different sergeants said. Amaral also wanted the wall removed.

Devos later convened a meeting with all the NCOs. He told them there was a “circle of trust” and that they had to know who was on the inside and who was on the outside, a sergeant wrote. Devos tried to convince the soldiers that the questions being asked about Anderson’s death were an affront to the entire platoon.

Then a few days later, Bruckner held another meeting with the same NCOs, imploring them to stick together and protect Devos, to have his back.

“I believe he told us NCOs that … because they knew they were wrong in what happened,” a corporal wrote in a sworn statement.

The soldiers calling attention to how Anderson had been treated before his suicide were told to pipe down by battery and battalion leadership. At one point, some of the NCOs tried to convince a few soldiers that Anderson killed himself because he was gay, a sergeant told Stars and Stripes.

But the Army’s subsequent investigation into Anderson’s suicide revealed the battery’s troublesome corrective training practices, and some soldiers told the investigator that they thought the battery’s leadership played a role in Anderson’s death.

“I knew him very well, and I believe his suicide was in direct relation with how he was being treated and made an example out of in front of all his peers and fellow soldiers,” Anderson’s former team leader from 1st Platoon said.

A sergeant wrote: “It was preventable. The battery leadership allowed unorthodox and mean spirited punishment to take place. This was a direct result of how [Amaral and Fisher] ran the battery.”

Another soldier wrote: “I believe the constant pressure from his chain of command pushed him over the edge.”

Those concerns set off a larger investigation a few months later into the battalion’s use of corrective training and improper punishment.

Token reprimands

In the end, Anderson’s leaders escaped any serious consequences.

The captain who conducted the first investigation found that the battery’s corrective training was “imposed in an oppressive manner to evade procedural safeguards applying to imposing non-judicial punishment.” He blamed the command climate set by Fisher and Amaral, which “resonated throughout the battery.”

In the six-week follow-up investigation, a colonel concluded that soldiers in Battery A, and Anderson in particular, “were treated in a cruel, abusive, oppressive and harmful manner.”

Devos “was directly responsible for soldiers’ well-being and duty bound to foster a healthy environment to maximize their potential,” the colonel wrote. Instead, Devos created an “environment of maltreatment and abuse when he allowed unauthorized punitive actions to be imposed.”

As battery commander, Fisher’s actions “jeopardized the well-being of all his soldiers.” He fostered “unacceptable conditions affecting good order and discipline of his unit” and “instead of intervening and taking preventative measures, he stood idle.”

As did Amaral, according to the investigating colonel.

The colonel recommended that they all get General Officer Memorandums of Reprimand, a form of administrative action that would likely keep them from being promoted to the next rank.

He also recommended Bruckner and Devos be relieved of duty for cause, and they were reassigned to different positions within the battalion while the unit was still deployed to Iraq.

But the memos of reprimand didn’t stick for Fisher and Amaral.

Although the reprimand was ordered by Maj. Gen. Terry Wolff, the battalion commander worked to get the men off the hook.

Lt. Col. Heyward Hutson said he went to bat for Fisher and Amaral because he “didn’t think they were culpable enough to end their careers over it.”

The memos of reprimand were downgraded to more minor letters of concern and weren’t filed in their permanent records. Since they have each moved on to new assignments, their records are unblemished, and both can move up the chain of command without anyone knowing about their misconduct.

Wolff declined to comment on why the reductions were made to Fisher’s and Amaral’s punishments. Fisher had written Wolff a letter rebutting the conclusions of the colonel’s investigation.

In an interview with Stars and Stripes, Fisher said that Anderson’s suicide greatly affected the entire battery, and as a leader he considered it a failure.

“I take full responsibility,” he said. “I’ll live with this the rest of my life.”

However, Fisher said that incidents “were blown out of proportion,” and from what he understood from his soldiers, the “climate of the battery was exceptional and things were going really well.”

In sworn statements, some soldiers backed this up, either praising Fisher’s command or expressing neutral feelings.

Fisher said he thought a few soldiers who didn’t reflect the majority and had a grudge about other issues used the investigation to voice their displeasure, driving the investigation to go further than it needed to go.

“The picture that was painted in the findings wasn’t accurate,” he said.

Amaral wrote a letter to the brigade’s commander, saying the unit did not have “an alarming issue with corrective training.” The problem was junior leaders and their lack of training in how to develop soldiers, he wrote.

Devos is appealing his memorandum of reprimand with the full support of Hutson, who wrote a letter on his behalf recommending the appeal.

Even if the appeal is denied, Devos is high enough up the chain of command to stay in the service without being promoted. So is Bruckner. As a result, the reprimands won’t affect their ability to serve 20 years and retire with full benefits.

Amaral, Devos and Bruckner did not respond to requests from Stars and Stripes for comment.

U.S. Army officials declined to comment, including Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff and the man tasked with overseeing the Army’s response to the suicide problem.

But attending to the emotional needs of soldiers has long been a declared priority for Chiarelli.

“This generation needs caring and involved leaders,” Chiarelli told students at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., last October. “[Soldiers] are stressed and tired after nine years of war.”

Army spokesman Col. Thomas Collins referred questions about the case back to the chain of command of Anderson’s unit.

“What I can say definitively is that we have a system of justice in which commanders weigh the facts and make determinations on what is appropriate punishment,” Collins said.

Anderson’s case stands in stark contrast to how the Army dealt with a similar incident in Iraq the year before. In 2009, a private killed himself in a portable toilet and the Army charged two noncommissioned officers with cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting the soldier to ridicule and excessive physical training. They both served a few months in the brig and were reduced in rank.

Yet, a year and half after Anderson’s death, all four of the leaders called out in the investigation maintain their leadership positions within the Army:

Bruckner is back in the position of platoon sergeant with the same battery.

Devos, with 2nd Battalion, 307th Field Artillery Regiment, is training National Guard and Reserve soldiers at Camp Atterbury in Indiana before they deploy.

Amaral was promoted and is a battery first sergeant at Fort Carson, Colo., with 2nd Battalion, 77th Field Artillery.

Fisher is mentoring U.S. troops and American allies, ensuring they follow Army doctrine as they train for combat at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Hohenfels, Germany.

“The Army has spoken on this and said it’s acceptable,” the sergeant who had served with Anderson told Stars and Stripes. “That’s the big crime.”

mccloskeym@stripes.com
Twitter: @megmccloskey

Original Page: http://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/suicide-in-the-military/maltreated-and-hazed-one-soldier-is-driven-to-take-his-own-life-1.145941

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How America Screws Its Soldiers

2011-06-02T21:27:00.001-07:00

How America Screws Its Soldiers

by Andrew J. Bacevich, thedailybeast.com
May 28th 2011 7:24 PM

Everyone claims to “Support Our Troops.” But as Andrew J. Bacevich explains, telling the military it can do whatever it wants works for everyone—except for the soldiers themselves.

Riders on Boston subways and trolleys are accustomed to seeing placards that advertise research being conducted at the city’s many teaching hospitals. One that recently caught my eye, announcing an experimental “behavioral treatment,” posed this question to potential subjects: “Are you in the U.S. military or a veteran disturbed by terrible things you have experienced?”

Just below the question, someone had scrawled this riposte in blue ink: “Thank God for these Men and Women. USA all the way.”

Here on a 30 x 36 inch piece of cardboard was the distilled essence of the present-day relationship between the American people and their military. In the eyes of citizens, the American soldier has a dual identity: as hero but also as victim. As victims—Wounded Warriors —soldiers deserve the best care money can buy; hence, the emphasis being paid to issues like PTSD. As heroes, those who serve and sacrifice embody the virtues that underwrite American greatness. They therefore merit unstinting admiration.

Whatever practical meaning the slogan “support the troops” may possess, it lays here: in praise expressed for those choosing to wear the uniform, and in assistance made available to those who suffer as a consequence of that choice.

From the perspective of the American people, the principal attribute of this relationship is that it entails no real obligations or responsibilities. Face it: It costs us nothing yet enables us to feel good about ourselves. In an unmerited act of self-forgiveness, we thereby expunge the sin of the Vietnam era when opposition to an unpopular war found at least some Americans venting their unhappiness on the soldiers sent to fight it. The homeward-bound G.I. spat upon by spoiled and impudent student activists may be an urban legend, but the fiction persists and has long since trumped reality.

Today such egregious misbehavior has become unimaginable. Even if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not especially popular or successful, no one blames the troops. Instead we cheer them, pray for them, and let them go to the front of the line when passing through airport security. And we take considerable satisfaction in doing so.

From the perspective of those who engineer America’s wars, the principal attribute of this relationship is that it obviates any need for accountability. For nearly a decade now, popular willingness to “support the troops” has provided unlimited drawing rights on the United States Treasury.

Since 9/11, in waging its various campaigns, overt and covert, the United States military has expended hundreds of billions of (mostly borrowed) dollars. By the time the last invoice gets paid, the total will be in the trillions. Is the money being well spent? Are we getting good value? Is it possible that some of the largesse showered on U.S. forces trying to pacify Kandahar could be better put to use in helping to rebuild Cleveland? Given the existing terms of the civil-military relationship, even to pose such questions is unseemly. For politicians sending soldiers into battle, generals presiding over long, drawn-out, inconclusive campaigns, and contractors reaping large profits as a consequence, this war-comes-first mentality is exceedingly agreeable.

One wonders how many of those serving in the ranks are taken in by this fraud. The relationship between American people and their military—we love you; do whatever you want—seems to work for everyone. Everyone, that is, except soldiers themselves. They face the prospect of war without foreseeable end.

Americans once believed war to be a great evil. Whenever possible, war was to be avoided. When circumstances made war unavoidable, Americans wanted peace swiftly restored.

Present-day Americans, few of them directly affected by events in Iraq or Afghanistan, find war tolerable. They accept it. Since 9/11, war has become normalcy. Peace has become an entirely theoretical construct. A report of G.I.s getting shot at, maimed, or killed is no longer something the average American gets exercised about. Rest assured that no such reports will interfere with plans for the long weekend that Memorial Day makes possible.

Members of the civil-military-corporate elite find war more than tolerable. Within its ranks, as Chris Hedges has noted, war imparts meaning and excitement to life. It serves as a medium through which ambitions are fulfilled and power is accrued and exercised. In Washington, the benefits offered by war’s continuation easily outweigh any benefits to be gained by ending war. So why bother to try?

As the 10th anniversary of what Americans once called their Global War on Terror approaches, a plausible, realistic blueprint for bringing that enterprise to a conclusion does not exist. Those who might once have felt some responsibility for articulating such a plan—the president, his chief lieutenants, senior military leaders—no longer feel any obligation to do so. As a practical matter, they devote themselves to war’s perpetuation, closing one front while opening another. More strikingly still, we the people allow our leaders to evade this basic responsibility to articulate a plan for peace. By implication, we endorse the unspoken assumption that peace has become implausible.

Here at last we come to the dirty little secret that underlines all the chatter about “supporting the troops.” The people in charge don’t really believe that the burdens borne by our soldiers will ever end and they are not really looking for ways to do so. As for the rest of us, well, we’re OK with that.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

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For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Original Page: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-28/memorial-day-how-america-screws-its-soldiers#

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Ill reservists blame post-war 'spray bird' missions

2011-06-02T21:23:00.000-07:00

Ill reservists blame post-war 'spray bird' missions

montgomeryadvertiser.com | May 30th 2011

In a complaint to the Air Force inspector general, a retired officer alleges health officials have known since at least 1994 of Agent Orange contamination aboard C-123 aircraft flown by reserve squadrons for a decade after the Vietnam War, and failed to warn personnel of the health risks.

After the Air Force stopped using UC-123K Provider aircraft to spray herbicide on the jungles of Vietnam, some of those aircraft, their spray tanks removed, were reassigned in 1972 to new missions at three stateside bases.

For the next decade Air Force reservists flew and maintained them. Last month one of the post-war crewmen, disabled retiree Maj. Wesley T. Carter, 64, of McMinnville, Ore., had a heart attack requiring surgery, and also learned that he has prostate cancer.

A medical service officer, Carter said he thought about the many hours he had served aboard foul-smelling C-123 "spray birds" after the war, flying out of Westover Air Force Base, Mass. So in recent weeks he conducted online searches, looking for any report of lingering Agent Orange contamination on these planes assigned Reserve missions until 1982.

What Carter found alarmed him, enough he told me, that he began to contact crewmen from his squadron. The first five he reached had prostate cancer, Carter said. He heard of others who had died, most of them from more diseases that Department of Veterans Affairs presumes, at least for veterans of Vietnam, were caused by Agent Orange exposure.

Carter started a blog, www.c123kcancer.blogspot.com, with links to reports and memos referencing dioxin contamination aboard C-123s flown by reservists after the war from Westover, Pittsburgh (Pa.) Air Reserve Base and Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio.

One of the first disturbing documents found, Carter said, deals with a famous C-123, nicknamed "Patches" during the war because it was hit so often by enemy fire during spraying runs. Patches was one of three C-123s, among 16 aircraft of the 731st Tactical Airlift Squadron, known to crewmen as having sprayed herbicide during the war.

Carter found a report from 1994 showing that before Patches was put on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, an analysis for toxins found that it was "heavily contaminated with PCDD," or polychlorinated dibenzodioxin, a human carcinogen.

So work crews that prepared Patches for display had to wear hazardous material suits and respirators, and the public would not be allowed to touch it. Yet Carter and crewmates had flown it often. He remembered its strong smell, like the inside of one Halloween mask he had worn as a kid.

By filing an IG complaint, Carter wants the Air Force to explain why, after learning C-123s flown by reservists were toxic, the service did not warn former crewmen of their exposure and possible health risks.

Retired Air Force Reserve Lt. Col. John O. Harris of Mashpee, Mass., flew 2,700 hours as a C-123 command pilot for the 731st, from 1973 to 1981. Almost 400 of those hours were in Patches or in one of the other squadron aircraft that had sprayed in Vietnam. Harris, 67, has diabetes and peripheral neuropathy, both conditions on VA's list of 14 AO presumptive diseases.

"We knew it was there," Harris said of residual herbicide on some C-123 aircraft. "You could smell it on a hot day, or a cold day when the heaters were running. You could smell it so bad you couldn't stand it."

Harris said he often flew with cockpit windows open. He compares the smell to wasp or roach spray. Vietnam vets in the squadron identified it as Agent Orange, Harris said. But no one back then understood the dangers of compounds used in the war to defoliate jungles and kill crops.

Neither Harris nor Carter served on the ground in Vietnam. Both men now believe reservists who flew or maintained these aircraft should be treated like Vietnam veterans with regard to Agent Orange-related presumptive diseases when filing VA compensation claims or seeking survivor benefits.

Several years ago Harris did file a claim for his diabetes, citing post-war exposure to Agent Orange on his missions with the 731st. He provided flight logs listing hours aboard "spray bird" aircraft. Both his claim and his appeal were denied, Harris said, because he had not served in Vietnam.

Harris later remembered that, while flying F-4 Phantoms out of Thailand during the war, he had a two-hour refueling stop at Da Nang. He even recalled the guy he chatted with at the airfield that day. After finding him and supplying VA with his statement, Harris qualified for disability pay.

"Two hours on the ground with no Agent Orange in sight trumped 11 years and 400 hours of definitive exposure flying spray UC-123s," he said. Harris figures he caught a break and others haven't. So he has joined Carter's quest to find more colleagues and notifying of them of toxin exposure. They want to help those with AO-related ailments get VA care and compensation, and for spouses of colleagues who have died from these conditions get VA Dependency and Indemnity Compensation.

Besides the memo showing Patches was toxic, Carter learned the government in 1996 stopped a contract to sell some of these C-123s because of contamination. Another report indicates Air Force struggled over how to dispose of these aircraft, worried that even burying them could contaminate the ground. Some officials told Carter that last year the service tore apart and melted down remaining C-123 aircraft.

Asked to comment on this, on Carter's complaint and his blog, an Air Force spokesman, Jonathan Stock, said the service "is going to look into these claims" but can't make any immediate comment. Also, VA Press Secretary Josh Taylor said VA will "carefully review this matter."

Marshall Hanson with Reserve Officers Association added, "This cadre of Agent Orange casualties needs to be recognized for the contamination risks they have been exposed to, similar to crews that initially flew the same C-123 aircraft. Agent Orange presumption needs to be re-examined to include all those who were exposed outside the Vietnam territories, both in the Air Force and the Navy."

To comment, or write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, Va., 20120-1111

Original Page: http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20110529/NEWS02/105290327/Ill-reservists-blame-post-war-spray-bird-missions%3E

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Brain Injuries Are Seen in New Scans of Veterans

2011-06-02T21:08:00.001-07:00

Brain Injuries Are Seen in New Scans of Veterans

by DENISE GRADY, nytimes.com
June 1st 2011

A new study may help explain why some military personnel exposed to blasts have symptoms of brain injury even though their CT and M.R.I. scans look normal.

Using a highly sensitive type of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied 63 servicemen wounded by explosions in Iraq or Afghanistan and found evidence of brain injuries in some that were too subtle to be detected by standard scans. All the men already had a diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury (synonymous with concussion), based on symptoms like having lost consciousness in the blast, having no memory of it or feeling dazed immediately afterward.

About 320,000 American troops have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them mild, according to a 2008 report by the RAND Corporation. The injuries are poorly understood, and sometimes produce lasting mental, physical and emotional problems.

“This sort of mild traumatic brain injury has been quite controversial,” said Dr. David L. Brody, an author of the new study and an assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. “Is it due to structural abnormalities in the brain, chemical dysregulation, psychological factors or all three? We show that at least in some there are structural abnormalities.”

The pattern of the damage differed from that found in head injuries not caused by blasts, and matched computer simulations predicting how explosions would affect the brain, Dr. Brody said. If the new findings hold up, he added, they may eventually influence the design of helmets to provide more protection against blasts.

But Dr. Brody and other researchers cautioned that the study was only “a small first step.” The study and an accompanying editorial were published online on Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine.

The special M.R.I. technique, known as diffusion tensor imaging, is also being studied to help improve the diagnosis of concussions. It can be performed by most M.R.I. machines and does not take longer or cost more than a standard M.R.I. The test measures the movement of water in nerve fibers in the brain; abnormal flow may indicate injury. Changes can be detected in bundles of thousands of axons, the fibers that carry signals.

Dr. Brody and others from Washington University collaborated with military researchers at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, to which troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are evacuated for treatment.

In 2008 and 2009, the researchers performed diffusion tensor imaging on 63 men who had recently sustained mild traumatic brain injuries from blasts; all but one had normal results on a standard M.R.I. For comparison, 21 control subjects were also scanned — men exposed to blasts recently but with no symptoms of concussion.

Eighteen of the 63 men with traumatic brain injury had abnormalities consistent with nerve injury in two or more brain regions, areas not usually damaged by other types of mild head injury. The researchers said that only 2 of 63 healthy subjects would be expected to have such abnormalities. Twenty other men with traumatic brain injury had abnormalities in one area, and 25 had none.

“A negative scan, even with these advanced methods, does not rule out traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Brody said.

Although the findings suggested that blasts may cause a specific pattern of brain injury, the researchers could not be sure, because their study subjects had experienced blows to the head in addition to blast exposure.

Dr. Allan H. Ropper, the executive vice chairman of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who wrote the editorial, said in an interview, “It’s never been clear that a blast alone could cause brain damage without some kind of impact on the head, so it’s a very important finding that there may be a structural brain representation of a blast injury.”

Katherine Helmick, deputy director for traumatic brain injury at the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, said the Defense Department was eager for information that would “help us understand what blast is doing to the brain, and help us get what we really want in diagnosing traumatic brain injury, which is objective markers.”

The new study helps, but is by no means definitive, she said.

The researchers did not tell the study participants the results of their tests. “We were specifically directed by the Department of Defense not to do so,” Dr. Brody said. “Many of them were hoping we could give results to their care providers to document or validate their concerns. It was anguishing for us, because as a doctor I would like to be able to help them in any way I can. But it was not the protocol we agreed to.”

Nick Colgin, 26, an Army veteran with a brain injury from the war in Afghanistan, who was not involved in the study, said he would like very much to have one of the sensitive M.R.I. scans, to better understand his injury. After a blast in 2007, he developed problems with speech, balance, thinking and focusing his eyes. For a while, he could not write his own name. But nothing showed up on his M.R.I. He has improved gradually and is now attending the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, but he still has severe headaches.

Christine L. MacDonald, a research instructor in neurology at Washington University and another author of the study, said the scans were still a research tool and not ready for widespread use. Researchers are trying to perfect the technique as quickly as possible for use in the care of wounded service members, she said in an e-mail, adding, “I wish we could help them now, but we aren’t there yet.”

Original Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/health/02brain.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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Returned Combat Veteran : 'Anxiety Trumps Logic'

2011-06-02T14:38:00.001-07:00

Returned Combat Veteran : 'Anxiety Trumps Logic'

by Benjamin Tupper, m.npr.org
June 2nd 2011

Like many U.S. veterans, commentator Benjamin Tupper has read Tim O'Brien's famous book about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried. Tupper's war was in Afghanistan, but he says O'Brien's observations hold true, decades later.

Most of the physical items we soldiers carry are owned by the government, like body armor and weapons and helmets. These are unceremoniously returned to Uncle Sam as we out-process from military service.

But the emotional baggage is ours to keep. The memories are packed deep inside our own private war museums. Sometimes the outside world gets a peek at these painful artifacts when they rise to the surface, manifested by bouts of depression, rage, or guilt.

Like most combat veterans, I keep many of my post-war idiosyncrasies private, for fear they might alienate my friends and family. If I aired them, I fear I'd receive an impromptu intervention, and be dragged off to a mental hospital for further evaluation.

A good case in point is the anxiety I still feel at being outside arm's reach of a weapon. I know it's absurd to fear that a squad of Taliban may be laying an ambush in my suburban neighborhood. But when an event or sound or smell recalls a moment at war, my anxiety trumps logic.

So when I came home three years ago, I bought the exact same model of combat shotgun we carried in Afghanistan.

Then I bought the same M4 carbine rifle, complete with a combat reflex site. And an M9 pistol, identical to the one that never left my side over there. Now I keep it in my truck. I stuffed the shotgun under my mattress in case the Taliban attack at night. And the rifle is positioned at the ready in my office.

No one — not even my wife — knew I had woven this security blanket of weapons to cover me from home to work and all points in between. No one knew, that is, until a couple months ago, when I spoke to a group of student veterans and their faculty advisers.

One Iraq war veteran in the classroom confessed he felt alienated and vulnerable back home, unarmed and defenseless. In an attempt to show he wasn't alone, I revealed the secret of my personal arsenal.

Right after I said it, I knew I'd gone too far. I expected the students and professors to lean back in their chairs and nervously eyeball the shortest path to the exit.

Instead, one student stood up and pulled out a large hunting knife he'd concealed on his waist. He said when he turned in his M16, he began carrying this knife. Not a day had gone by since he returned from Iraq that he didn't carry it.

Then a professor reached into his pocket and pulled out a tube of ChapStick.

He said the day he left his job as a police officer, he had to turn in his pistol. He also moved to carrying a concealed knife. After a couple years, he mustered up the courage to transition from the knife to his lethal tube of ChapStick.

He trained himself to accept the ChapStick as a protective talisman. It provided the peace of mind he'd previously achieved with the knife and gun.

For five cathartic minutes, this conversation among veterans of the military and law enforcement sounded like a chapter from O'Brien's book: the stories warriors never tell, for fear civilians will never understand.

In the end, for better or for worse, we know the things that we carried are now carrying us.

Ben Tupper is a major in the Army National Guard. His latest book is Dudes of War. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Original Page: http://m.npr.org/story/136503834?url=/2011/06/02/136503834/returned-combat-veteran-anxiety-trumps-logic&ft=1&f=1001≻=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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New Data on High Unemployment Among Recent Veterans

2011-06-02T14:29:00.001-07:00

New Data on High Unemployment Among Recent Veterans

by JAMES DAO, atwar.blogs.nytimes.com
May 30th 2011

Much has been said about the high unemployment rate among veterans from the post-9/11 wars, but a new Congressional study offers some fresh insights into the nature of the problem, which does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

The report, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans was 10.9 percent in April. Although that is more than 2 percentage points lower than a year before, it is significantly higher than the rate for all veterans, 7.7 percent, or for the nonveteran population, 8.5 percent.

Theories abound on why the rate remains stubbornly high, including that employers do not fully appreciate the ways that military skills might translate into nonmilitary jobs.

But the report, by the chairman’s staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, suggests a fairly straightforward reason: the typical work experiences of recent veterans are best suited to the very industries which were particularly hard hit by the recession.

“Prior to the start of the recession, post-9/11 veterans were more likely than nonveterans to be employed in mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation and utilities, information, and professional and business services — all industries that experienced significant drops in employment during 2008-2009,” the report says. “These veterans also were less likely to be employed in education and health services, the only major sector that added jobs during the Great Recession.”

The report notes that the problem is particularly severe among young male veterans, ages 18 to 24, for whom the unemployment rate is nearly 27 percent. While younger people in general are more likely to be unemployed, that number is still significantly higher than the rate for male nonveterans of the same age group: 17.4 percent.

The report also raises concerns about whether disabled veterans will begin dropping out of the labor force over time, as seems to have happened with Vietnam-era veterans. While labor force participation among post-9/11 veterans is relatively high, at 81 percent, the report says that a quarter of those veterans have service-connected disabilities that could “lead to a decline in employment among them.”

Labor force participation refers to people who are either working or actively looking for work, and includes those receiving unemployment benefits.

The report was prepared by the staff of the committee’s Democratic chairman, Senator Robert P. Casey Jr., of Pennsylvania. The committee includes 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, chosen from both houses of Congress.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the report comes with a plug for legislation supported by Mr. Casey, including the Hiring Heroes Act of 2011, which would make it easier for new veterans to apply for federal jobs, provide money for job training programs and require service members to participate in job-hunting programs before the leaving the military.

“In the upcoming budget deliberations, not only must Congress support essential programs for veterans, but we also must modernize and improve them,” Mr. Casey said in a statement. “Education and training which targets expanding sectors of the economy is vital – both before and after service members leave the military. We need to do a better job helping veterans translate their military experiences and skills to employers.”

The report also includes some ideas that might not go over well with Republicans in Congress or with Republican-controlled state legislatures that are working hard to slash public sector spending.

The report notes, for instance, that 16.3 percent, or almost one-sixth, of recent veterans are employed by the federal government, compared with 8.7 percent of all veterans and just 2.2 percent of nonveterans. And it points out that nearly a third of recent veterans work in the public sector generally, compared with 14.8 percent of nonveterans.

Given those high rates, the report argues that federal, state and local governments need to be aware that deep budget cuts could hurt veterans.

“As Congress deliberates how best to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path, efforts to reduce the federal deficit must not come at the cost of helping recent veterans succeed in today’s labor market,” the report says.

Original Page: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/new-data-on-high-unemployment-among-recent-veterans/?pagemode=print

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U.S. military working to combat post-traumatic stress

2011-05-28T10:09:00.001-07:00

U.S. military working to combat post-traumatic stress

by CHARLES HOSKINSON, politico.com
May 26th 2011 3:40 AM

Moved by the high cost of post-traumatic stress from earlier wars, the U.S. military is working to ensure the nation’s longest war doesn’t leave another trail of broken lives behind.

For the past eight years, the Army has conducted intensive studies of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq to discover the causes of post-traumatic stress and find ways of treating it before it becomes a lingering problem.

“There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as exposure to combat,” Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker told reporters last week, adding that the studies have helped officials understand what causes post-traumatic stress and how to treat it.

It’s an issue that requires immediate attention. The latest study, from July to September 2010, found that tough fighting in Afghanistan caused significant declines in morale among soldiers and Marines compared with five years ago, as well as significantly higher rates of mental health problems.

But the study also found fewer barriers and better access to mental health care — a sign that efforts to deal with combat stress on the front lines are working.

Given the intensity of the combat exposure, “we would have expected to see a much larger increase in mental health symptoms and a much larger decrease in morale,” said Col. Paul Bliese, director of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who led the study. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re over the hump.”

The military’s history of treating combat stress in past wars has been spotty at best and marked by the stigma that those suffering from its effects lacked courage or were trying to avoid combat. Post-traumatic stress was not even diagnosed as a disorder until 1980, and research since then indicates it grows worse with time if not treated.

A 1986-88 study of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Affairs Department found that 15.2 percent of men and 8.5 percent of women had post-traumatic stress disorder. Among those exposed to combat, the figures were 35.8 percent and 17.5 percent, respectively.

“When a soldier comes back from war, he might look exactly the same and act the same, but after two weeks or so, the signs start to show up,” said Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli. “He goes to the doctor and says ‘fix it,’ and the doctor can’t fix it. It’s got to be the most frustrating thing in the world. That’s what we’re faced with.”

Research indicates that a key factor in reducing the rates of post-traumatic stress is frontline treatment of combat stresses. A 2005 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that Israeli soldiers in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon who had received frontline treatment had much lower rates of post-traumatic stress 20 years later.

This is what moved military leaders to create a system of frontline care for soldiers, including pre- and post-deployment training in stress management, access to counseling, enforcement of sleep discipline to reduce deprivation and policies that give units 24 months of dwell time at home before redeploying — a longer period than in past years.

The studies have also shown the need to focus on nonmedical factors, such as unit cohesion, training and the troops’ sense of mission.

“We’re only now learning some of the lingering effects of earlier wars,” Schoomaker said. “I came out of this with an increased respect for what warriors in past conflicts endured.”

One of the biggest areas of progress is in understanding the link between traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress, Schoomaker and others point out. Research has shown that even a slight concussive event can increase a soldier’s risk, so the military has instituted mandatory screenings for troops involved. “We think that is going to have a very positive effect on post-traumatic stress problems,” Schoomaker said.

“We are looking at a number of different tests and scans to see if there’s a highly specific or highly sensitive test or scan out there” to provide a more accurate measure of traumatic brain injury, he said.

Still, there are challenges. The latest study showed that mental health problems increase with combat intensity and multiple deployments — two factors beyond the medical community’s control.

“It’s very hard to move behavioral health indexes when you have extremely high combat exposure,” Bliese said.

But the biggest problem may be the same as in past wars: the stigma attached to admitting that combat causes stress.

“The hardest part of this is breaking down the stigma,” Chiarelli said. “They really don’t believe these injuries are as serious as the ones they can see.”

Original Page: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55706.html#ixzz1NRrK6u2T

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Protesters erect watchtower just outside post

2011-05-28T09:56:00.001-07:00

Protesters erect watchtower just outside post

kdhnews.com | May 27th 2011 By Anthony Scott
Killeen Daily Herald

Out of protest against the deployment of soldiers with mental injuries to war, Iraq Veterans Against the War teamed up with Under the Hood Outreach Center and Cafe to set up a watchtower outside Fort Hood's East Gate.

The protesters stood their ground all day Thursday, from start to finish of the post's entire duty day. As cars went by, some passengers honked and shouted.

"We built a tower and the tower's based on putting (III Corps and Fort Hood Commander Lt. Gen. Donald Campbell Jr.) accountable to all the suicides that are happening at Fort Hood and to all the soldiers not getting the proper (mental health) treatment that they need," said Kyle Wesolowski, an Iraq war veteran who recently left the Army with a conscientious objector discharge.

Wesolowski toured Iraq from 2008-09 with the 1st Cavalry Division and is now the manager at Under The Hood Cafe, an outreach center for soldiers.

"We're going to leave him accountable for all of these things now and until the future," he said. "Now we're trying to talk to (Campbell) to sit down with him. We've given him over 600 emails to be sent to him from our supporters from IVAW members alike."

Wesolowski said one of the things that needs to be done is let soldiers heal from mental health problems before deployment.

"A lot of soldiers are falling through the cracks," he said. "They're being redeployed to Iraq with many of these mental conditions."

The protest was part of Operation Recovery, an IVAW campaign to stop the deployment of traumatized troops.

Prior to the protest, the group went on post Wednesday morning to III Corps Headquarters and asked for a meeting with Campbell, said veteran and organizer Aaron Hughes.

"We were refused again," he said. "We're tired of being ignored."

Led by Wesolowski, a group of six of the veterans went to III Corps Headquarters and asked to meet with Campbell at the reception desk. The Army did not grant the request, said organizer Scott Kimball, a veteran who recounted the experience on the IVAW website.

Kimball said because they did not make contact with Campbell the group was putting him on watch.

The next day at the watch tower, Wesolowski led the crew of protesters by listing a number of complaints, including the fact that in 2009 more than 7,000 soldiers were on antidepressant or antipsychotic medication and military suicide rates increased 150 percent from 2001 to 2009.

Fort Hood also has the highest suicide rate of any Army post at 22 cases of suicide last year, nearly twice as many cases as any other post. Increased cases of military sexual trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury were also problems, he added.

"We believe they need to get the help they need," Wesolowski said. "To heal, and not be redeployed: That to me is an Army value. To respect every service member when they're in trouble."

Contact Anthony Scott at ascott@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7568. Follow him on Twitter at KDHcity.

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Advocates: Retain evidence in military rape cases

2011-05-25T00:34:00.003-07:00

Advocates: Retain evidence in military rape cases

foxnews.com | May 24th 2011

WASHINGTON – The military too quickly destroys records from the hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults reported confidentially each year, say victims' advocates and some members of Congress.

They say the practice can hamper successful disability claims by victims or the prosecution of offenders. They want the military to preserve and centralize all reports of rape, assault or harassment.

One blanket, consistent rule that ensures all such records are kept, they say, would put an end to a common complaint from victims that paperwork is lost or hard to find. The branches have inconsistent policies as to how long and where sex crimes records are kept, which can lead to a bureaucratic mess for victims later seeking them.

The advocates are particularly concerned about what happens when a victim files a confidential report — a special category in the military that allows a victim to report an incident but not trigger an investigation. Any evidence of a sexual attack, including a medical rape kit, is destroyed after one year, unless the victim withdraws the confidentiality within that time. That means a suspect probably cannot be prosecuted after a year.

The defense budget expected to come up for a vote in the House this week includes a provision written by Reps. Niki Tsongas, D-Mass., and Michael Turner, R-Ohio, that would force the military to save all such records and make them accessible to victims. Bills with similar provisions are pending in the Senate.

"To me, there's no good reason to throw things away if you want to have an open policy and make sure that people are able to access their own records or provide these records to a future prosecution," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a former prosecutor.

Cynthia O. Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said in an email to The Associated Press that when the confidential option was created it was decided "after much deliberation" that the military would destroy such evidence in the confidential cases after one year due to "long-term storage limitations by its law enforcement agencies, as well as for evidence viability reasons."

"It is important to remember that reports are only handled in this fashion if the victim chooses the restricted reporting option" because the victim "does not want it to be investigated and reported to command and law enforcement," Smith said.

Because of changes in DNA technology and "evolving victim needs," Smith said the military is formulating new rules on storing records. She declined to elaborate or comment on the pending legislation.

After a sexual harassment case is closed, the Navy maintains the paperwork for three years. Other branches keep such records only two years, Kaye Whitley, director of the military's sexual assault and prevention office, told Congress last year in written testimony.

The branches also have varying policies about where they keep a form that indicates whether the victim wanted to file a confidential report or not. The Army and Air Force keep it at the base where the attack was reported, the Navy enters it into an electronic database, and the Marines move it after three years from the base where it was reported to headquarters.

Victims have long complained about the difficulty in obtaining disability compensation from the VA for health problems stemming from such an attack, and the inability to find related paperwork is a reason.

The case of a 54-year-old female veteran who was raped and experienced other sexual assaults during her time in the Army in the late 1970s is typical in that she didn't realize she needed help until her life spiraled downward and she was living in the streets in a car, advocates say. Each time she'd flip through her hundreds of pages of paperwork, she said, she'd have panic attacks because it brought back painful memories. It took more than a decade of attempts, but she was recently awarded more than $80,000 in retroactive payment from the VA with the help of lawyers from the Inner City Law Center in Los Angeles

"It's been a nightmare between trying to receive treatment and get help and then being able to properly file my claim," the woman said. The AP generally as a policy does not name rape victims.

Exactly how many rape victims have had their claims denied isn't known, though a VA spokesman said that last year that two-thirds of claims for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from sexual trauma in the military were denied. It's not clear how many of those were due to records being destroyed.

To assist those who were raped in the military with a claim, the VA allows victims to submit circumstantial evidence, such as treatment for a sexually transmitted disease or testimony from someone the victim confided in about the attack. The California woman, for example, was able to show she'd received psychiatric help after the time of the rape.

Even then, it's challenging to obtain compensation, said Elly Kugler, who works at the Inner City Law Center. Of the more than 40 military sexual trauma cases she and her colleagues have worked for veterans who served from the 1970s to the present, not one has been able to find copies of paperwork directly related to the attack — even for those who say they reported it to military authorities, she said.

"It's especially frustrating for someone who knows that she took that brave step of making a report to someone and yet she cannot find it anywhere," Kugler said. "If there could be someplace where those restricted reports would be available to the person who was a survivor of that assault, it would be incredibly helpful to that person. Because it's likely not something that would pop up anywhere else in their military records."

Because many victims never report a rape or assault, the military in 2005 established the confidential or "restricted" reporting options with the hope that some victims would come forward who otherwise wouldn't. No investigation is conducted in such a report, but the victim can receive medical care and counseling. In the 2010 fiscal year, 882 "restricted" reports of sexual assault were filed. In 15 percent of those cases, the victim later decided to press charges against the attacker.

Joy Ilem, deputy national legislative director at Disabled American Veterans, said while there have been improvements in the system, there still doesn't appear there is a clear mandate about how such paperwork is supposed to be handled by the military.

"If they want to protect people and do right by people assaulted, they need to get it squared away and do it uniformly with each military service," Ilem said.

_____

Online:

DOD Sexual Assault and Prevention Office: http://www.sapr.mil/

Disabled American Veterans: http://www.dav.org/

_____

Kimberly Hefling can be reached at http://twitter.com/khefling.

Original Page: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/24/advocates-retain-evidence-military-rape-cases/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+foxnews/national+%28Internal+-+US+Latest+-+Text%29

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Some California National Guardsmen accused of collecting improper pay

2011-05-25T00:34:00.001-07:00

Some California National Guardsmen accused of collecting improper pay

by Charles Piller, mercurynews.com
May 24th 2011 11:38 AM

By Charles Piller

Sacramento Bee

SACRAMENTO -- About 100 California National Guard members have been accused by the Guard's internal auditor of collecting fraudulent or improper pay totaling more than $500,000 from 2006 through early last year by violating dual compensation and travel expense rules.

In preliminary reports issued in March and April, auditor Debbie Richardson reported that 95 guard members received more than $286,000 in improper compensation for wildfire-response duties in 2008. The problems largely involved a fire-duty premium that full-time Guard members received above their normal state pay.

Other audits found that three service members got more than $65,000 in inappropriate commute expenses, and one filed fraudulent timesheets for 12 months to receive more than $163,000 while living and working in Texas for that state's Guard.

"If individuals owe money, it will be collected," the Guard said in a written statement. A spokesman declined to comment on specific audit findings because the reports are preliminary, and officials wanted to avoid compromising future investigations.

The highest ranking officer cited as collecting pay in acts the auditor called "suspected fraud or irregular acts" was Col. Robert A. Spano, currently the Guard's chief of staff and third ranking officer. Spano's payments, ostensibly for fire-related work in 2008, included periods during which he was on federal military duty out of state.

The

Guard's top officer, Adjutant General David S. Baldwin, recently ordered an audit of Spano's pay, as well as his own and that of Col. Matthew P. Beevers, assistant adjutant general -- as a matter of due diligence, rather than from evidence of a problem. Baldwin also ordered a compensation review for all generals who served the Guard full time in recent years.

Spano, the Guard's comptroller in 2008, received $1,000 in fire pay that year, according to payroll data from Cal Fire. He said that he might have received a small amount of that total improperly, and, if so, would repay it. Spano disputed the characterization of possible fraud by himself or others accused of taking improper fire-duty pay.

In his case, Spano said, some problems occurred because another officer signed his timesheet for him. Spano said he also signed another timesheet in advance and workdays later were entered incorrectly by a colleague. The actions were improper, he said, but were done to meet payroll deadlines with no fraudulent intent.

"It was a total failure of internal controls," Spano acknowledged, calling the payroll reporting system the Guard used at that time "archaic."

The most egregious case involved an officer who fraudulently obtained $163,074 from the California Guard while in Texas, according to a Guard audit. The payments included tax-free housing subsidies for a Texas residence. Spano identified him as Maj. Thomas Venable, a homeland security specialist.

Venable, who also was cited as having received improper fire pay in 2008, could not be reached for comment.

Another high-ranking officer cited as collecting such improper dual pay was retired Lieutenant Col. Irma L. Goodwater, a comptroller, who received at least $3,092 in fire pay, according to payroll records. The improper amount was not specified by the auditor, who indicated that Goodwater collected fire pay while on sick leave.

Goodwater could not be reached for comment. A person at her residence referred calls for comment to Guard headquarters.

Lt. Johan Lai, who lists himself on his Linkedin.com page as the manager of the emergency fire duty pay system, was noted as receiving at least $6,272 in improper fire pay. He got more than $9,500 overall, according to payroll records.

Lai was among three employees whom the auditor said were paid large sums in improper commuting costs -- in Lai's case, nearly $42,000 for food, lodging and travel between his San Diego County home and Guard headquarters in Sacramento. Some of the reimbursements were made for days Lai was not present at his job.

Via email, Lai said he had not been notified by the Guard about any pay problems, and referred questions to Guard headquarters.

"We refuted (the auditor's) findings for those three individuals," said Spano, referring to Lai and the two others cited for commute expenses. They were temporary employees who were permitted to work at home part of the time and commute costs were allowed, he said. The cases have yet to be resolved.

Richardson's audit suggested that the amount of improper pay for fire duty to hundreds of guard members might rise after a more complete review. The Guard's contract with Cal Fire permits premium pay for fire duties. But the auditor contended that the entire practice of differential pay for fulltime Guard members contradicts state law.

That legal question was hotly debated among Guard leaders in 2008, according to Richardson and Spano, who said he was involved in the discussions. Some leaders would not personally accept fire pay, but did not otherwise intervene.

On Tuesday at a joint hearing of the state Senate and Assembly Veterans Affairs Committees, legislators asked Baldwin whether special fire pay was justified for fulltime Guard members. He said that practice, though considered valid by Guard policies, had been suspended pending a review.

"What we're questioning," Baldwin said, "is whether it is the right thing to do."

In a separate report, the Guard auditor addressed long-standing concerns that the department relies too heavily on "state active duty" employees who are the subject of the recent fire pay concerns. Those employees are also Guard members and get higher salaries and better benefits than civil servants doing the same work.

For example, the auditor said six fulltime Guard members working in purchasing and contracting earned nearly $500,000 collectively, while comparable civilians who worked alongside them made just $275,000.

"Throughout the organization, (state active duty) members receive two to three times more in compensation than their State Civil Service co-workers performing similar or more duties," the auditor wrote.

In 2005, Guard officials vowed to reduce costs by converting fulltime jobs for Guard members to civil service when possible -- but as of last December, the auditor found, no job had been converted.

The findings follow recent revelations of up to $100 million in improper or illegal recruitment and retention payments to service members, and dual-pay violations by Guard pilots. Those cases are the subject of ongoing criminal investigations by federal law enforcement agencies.

The former top commander of the Guard, Major Gen. William H. Wade II, received about $155,000 in apparently improper dual compensation from the state and federal governments during his term, which ended early last year. On Baldwin's request, the state Department of Personnel Administration is reviewing Wade's records for possible recoupment of funds.

"Integrity is the cornerstone of their profession, yet you have massive breakdowns all over the Guard," said Democratic state Sen. Ted Lieu, a reserve Air Force officer and member of the Veterans Affairs Committee. "It's very concerning."

Tuesday's legislative hearing examined Guard pay and employment issues.

"If confidence has been lost (in the Guard) how can we restore it?" asked Senate committee chair Lou Correa, a Democrat.

Baldwin replied that he has ordered more than two dozen reviews and investigations on possible fraud or other improper activities since he was appointed in April, and has suspended from command duties 20 leaders who were implicated in apparently improper or illegal acts.

Baldwin blamed "loopholes" in the Guard's internal regulations for contributing to a history of opportunism and said he ordered a comprehensive review to correct the rules. He said he would enforce stronger leadership throughout the Guard to reform the organization's "ethical culture."

"The root cause of the problem," he said, "is that the organization lost its way, ethically and morally."

Original Page: http://www.mercurynews.com/twitter/ci_18132848?source=rss&cid=dlvr.it&nclick_check=1

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Injured troops still waiting for claim processing

2011-05-21T11:27:00.001-07:00

Injured troops still waiting for claim processing

foxnews.com | May 18th 2011

WASHINGTON – A system designed to get wounded troops out of the military and on disability compensation more quickly has failed recently to meet its efficiency goals, delaying service members' release sometimes more than a year, documents show.

The lag has caused some of the troops to turn down job offers or postpone college because they don't know when they will be discharged from the military.

The system is called the Integrated Disability Evaluation System. It started as a pilot in 2007, but has since been rolled out to nearly 80 military installations. By this fall, about 140 installations are expected to participate. It works by consolidating the required medical exams and ratings, so that a service member doesn't have to go through the disability claims process first in the military and then in the VA.

Congress pushed the system following the 2007 scandal over poor living conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which highlighted the complexities of the disabilities claims system. Some wounded veterans were left in dire financial conditions as they waited for compensation from the VA.

The new program's goal is to get troops through the system in a little more than nine months on average. But March figures show it only met that goal about 15 percent of the time for active-duty troops, 28 percent for those in the Reserves and 40 percent for the Guard, according to documents obtained by the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee and shared with The Associated Press.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement that under the new system, it takes on average nearly 400 days to process a claim.

"All too often this time spent idle results in our men and women in uniform falling through the cracks of the system," said Murray, who is expected to question defense and VA officials about the delays at a hearing before the committee on Wednesday. "This IDES system was designed after the Walter Reed scandal to improve a broken system, but at this point DoD and VA need to take a hard look at improving it before expanding it further."

Thirteen troops going through the new system have committed suicide or died from drug overdoses, according to the records.

Despite the delays as the new system is rolled out, it appears that claims are being processed faster than under the older "legacy" system. In a report late last year, the Government Accountability Office said comparisons are difficult, but that under one estimate under the older system, it took on average 540 days.

The GAO noted problems with the new system such as insufficient staff, but concluded that it shows promise and "service members who proceed through the process are able to leave the military with greater financial security, since they receive disability benefits from both agencies shortly after discharge."

Original Page: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/18/injured-troops-waiting-claim-processing/

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Troop morale in Afghanistan plummets

2011-05-21T11:22:00.001-07:00

Hawaii News Now - KGMB and KHNL HomeTroop morale in Afghanistan plummets, report says

hawaiinewsnow.com | May 19th 2011 10:33 AM By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - As fighting and casualties in Afghanistan's war reached an all-time high, U.S. soldiers and Marines there reported plunging morale and the highest rates of mental health problems in five years.

The grim statistics in a new Army report released Thursday dramatize the psychological cost of a military campaign that U.S. commanders and officials say has reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency.

Military doctors said the findings from a battlefield survey taken last summer were no surprise given the dramatic increase in combat, which troops reported was at its most intense level since officials began doing mental health analyses in 2003.

"There are few stresses on the human psyche as extreme as the exposure to combat and seeing what war can do," Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said at a Pentagon news conference.

Some 70 percent to 80 percent of troops surveyed for the report said they had seen a buddy killed, roughly half of soldiers and 56 percent of Marines said they'd killed an enemy fighter, and about two-thirds of troops said that a roadside bomb - the No. 1 weapon of insurgents - had gone off within 55 yards of them.

Most of those statistics were significantly higher than what troops said they experienced in the previous year in Afghanistan as well as during the 2007 surge of extra troops into the Iraq war, the report said.

Some 20 percent of troops said they had suffered a psychological problem such as anxiety, severe stress or depression. Considering the intense levels of combat they are seeing, that number may actually be small, said Col. Paul Bliese, who led the last three survey teams to the battlefield, in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

"We would have expected to see a much larger increase in the mental health symptoms and a much larger decrease in morale ... based on these incredibly high rates of exposure" to traumatic combat events, Bliese said. The report's authors took the statistics as evidence that the force is resilient, a trait the military has been working to develop in troops.

The report is a snapshot of the health of the forces in Afghanistan last year, drawn by a mental health team that polled more than 900 soldiers, 335 Marines and 85 mental health workers on the battlefield in July and August, as troops surged into the country under the Obama administration's new strategy for fighting the insurgency.

President Barack Obama sent an additional 30,000 troops there last year to build the force to the current 100,000. Commanders and administration officials say the push has weakened the Taliban, and a limited troop withdrawal is planned by this July.

Troops said they were receiving better training in suicide prevention and other coping strategies and that mental health treatment was easier to get at the warfront.

"I do believe we're making progress," Schoomaker said.

But a particularly stubborn problem for the Army persisted: About 50 percent of soldiers said they believe getting professional help for their problems would make them appear weak. Defense officials have gone to great lengths over a number of years to encourage troops to get treatment, and Marines made some headway in reducing the perceived stigma, according to the report.

Americans "have not solved this problem in the civilian world," said Dr. Robert Heinssen, a research director at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The military says it boosted the mental health staff in the Afghanistan to 1 for every 646 soldiers last year, compared with 1 for every 1,123 in 2009.

"War affects everyone ... and most are able to deal with their experiences and move on to stable, productive lives," said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Key to coping with those experiences is available care, access to care and knowing that you are not alone."

Some of the report's highlights:

- Only 46.5 percent of soldiers said their morale was medium, high or very high last year, compared with 65.7 percent in 2005. For Marines, it was only 58.6 percent last year compared with 70.4 percent when they were surveyed in 2006 in Iraq. (The report compares numbers of the Marine to their time in Iraq because they were not in Afghanistan in significant numbers before the surge.)

- Nearly 80 percent of Marines and soldiers said they'd seen a member of their unit killed or wounded, compared with roughly half who said that in the earlier years.

- Nearly 1 in 5 soldiers and Marines reported psychological problems such as acute stress, depression or anxiety last year, compared with 1 in 10 among soldiers in 2005 and about 1 in 8 among Marines in 2006.

- The use of drugs for mental health or combat stress was lower among soldiers and Marines than among civilians in the same age group.

___

Online:

The report: http://www.armymedicine.army.mil/reports/mhat/mhat_vii/J_MHAT_7.pdf

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Original Page: http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/14676683/troop-morale-in-afghanistan-plummets-report-says?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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New Survey: Few Troops Exposed to Bomb Blasts Are Screened For Concussion

2011-05-21T11:19:00.001-07:00

New Survey: Few Troops Exposed to Bomb Blasts Are Screened For Concussion

by T. Christian Miller, propublica.org
September 8th 2010

More than half of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan have been exposed to bomb blasts in the last year, but only about 1 in 5 of them said they were examined for concussions, according to a draft of a recent military survey.

Medical officials failed to screen about 80 percent of soldiers and Marines who reported being within 50 meters of a roadside blast during their tour of duty, according to combat troops surveyed in July and August of last year.

The survey noted, however, that the troops were quizzed before full implementation of a new military policy in June mandating screening for troops exposed to such bombs.

The survey, which has not been finalized, but was obtained by ProPublica, NPR and USA Today, is conducted to assess the mental health and morale of America's troops. Part of the survey examines the military's efforts to treat traumatic brain injuries, also known as concussions.

Screenings for such wounds are important because concussions caused by blast waves are difficult to detect, yet may cause lasting cognitive issues, especially when soldiers absorb multiple injuries. Most soldiers recover within two weeks. But civilian and military studies have suggested that a minority of concussion victims, between 5 percent to 15 percent, go on to suffer cognitive problems, such as having difficulty reading or following instructions. Multiple concussions over a long period have been linked in athletes to a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which has dementia-like symptoms.

Official military figures show that more than 155,000 troops have suffered concussions since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them caused by blasts from roadside bombs, a common insurgent weapon. Nearly 50,000 others have suffered more severe brain injuries. Previous ProPublica and NPR stories cited studies showing that as many as 40 percent of mild traumatic brain injuries go undiagnosed.

Overall, the survey presented a bleak picture of an increasingly dangerous war in Afghanistan. One extraordinary statistic: Near the peak of violence in Iraq in 2006, from 12 percent to 15 percent of troops responding to a similar survey reported killing an enemy. In Afghanistan last year, 48 percent to 56 percent of combat troops surveyed reported being "directly responsible" for killing a combatant—a more than threefold increase.

In addition, about 50 percent to 60 percent of soldiers and Marines in Iraq in 2006 reported that a comrade had suffered a casualty. In Afghanistan, 73 percent of soldiers and almost 80 percent of Marines reported having a buddy who was wounded or died.

The Army has struggled to keep up with flood of soldiers suffering from so-called invisible wounds of war, such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. Last month, ProPublica and NPR reported the Army is facing a "critical" shortage of neurologists to implement its new initiative to improve diagnosis and treatment of mild traumatic brain injuries.

At a hearing last June, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, told Congress that the Army had a total of 52 neurologists, though only 40 were practicing—a figure, he said, that included child neurologists. "We're an Army that's in uncharted territory here," Chiarelli recently told USA Today. "We have never fought for this long with an all-volunteer force that's 1 percent of the population."

Original Page: http://www.propublica.org/article/new-survey-few-troops-exposed-to-bomb-blasts-are-screened-for-concussion?utm_source=socmed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=%2B1&utm_campaign=tbi

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Army Chief Faults Unfit Recruits for Injuries

2011-05-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

Army Chief Faults Unfit Recruits for Injuries

foxnews.com | May 19th 2011

U.S. Army recruits have had poorer diets and are less fit than past generations, making them more prone to injury from heavier loads lugged in combat, its top general told a Senate panel on Wednesday.

"It's really the generation of Americans that have this problem," said Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey. "But it's exacerbated by the load we ask them to bear."

He singled out poor eating habits plus carbonated drinks as a contributing factor to "musculoskeletal" injuries that have been a leading cause of U.S. medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan. Such injuries typically include fractures, tendinitis and connective tissue disorders but not combat injuries.

Dempsey was responding to concerns from U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, a World War Two veteran who won the Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. decoration for military valor.

Inouye, 86, fretted that individual U.S. troops' combat gear was pushing toward 125 pounds compared with, as he put it, the no-frills load he carried as an infantryman.

"I feel for them because I believe my combat kit never exceeded 20 pounds, including my rifle, boots and helmet, grenades and all the ammo I carried," the Hawaii Democrat said at a hearing on the Army's fiscal 2012 budget request at the Appropriations Defense subcommittee he chairs.
"I hope we can lighten the load and lighten the injuries," added Inouye, who lost his right arm in a battle against German forces.

Dempsey said troops' heavy combat load was a "constant issue on our minds" as the Army tried to lighten everything from boots to helmets to rifle opticals. It is also studying squad-level changes that could shift more of the batteries being lugged to automotive "mules" and robotic devices, he said.

But part of the problem "is that young men and women coming in the army today are not as fit or as skeletally sound as you were," he told Inouye.

"Even in basic training, before we load the soldier with the gear that eventually they will have to learn to bear, we have these same kind of musculoskeletal injuries," Dempsey said.

The Army did not immediately respond to a request for details of a typical combat load.

Inouye said musculoskeletal injuries had risen ten-fold in the last four years and the cost of related disability benefits was topping $500 million a year.

Original Page: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/05/19/army-chief-faults-unfit-recruits-injuries/

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Military Rape: Rampant, Ignored

2011-05-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

Military Rape: Rampant, Ignored

by Nan Levinson, inthesetimes.com
May 18th 2011

A lawsuit against Robert Gates and Donald Rumsfeld and new legislation try to stop an epidemic.

When Panayiota Bertzikis tried to tell her commanding officers that she had been raped in May 2006 by a shipmate four months into her tour at the Burlington, Vt., Coast Guard Station, they discouraged her from talking to an Equal Opportunity officer, barred her from seeing a civilian therapist, ignored a written confession from her attacker and browbeat her into silence.

But thanks to victims-turned-activists like Bertzikis who are pulling military sexual trauma (MST) out from the shadows, it’s become harder for the U.S. military to ignore the problem. In February, Bertzikis, along with 14 other women and two men, filed a lawsuit (Cioca et al. v. Rumsfeld and Gates) charging Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, with mishandling their sexual assault cases.

MST is an epidemic. Nearly a quarter of women serving in combat areas say they have been sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers. But everyone agrees that reliable statistics don’t exist. The Pentagon, which recorded 3,158 cases of sexual assault in 2010, estimates that only about 14 percent of all incidents are reported.

Back in 2006, when Bertzikis went online after her rape to look for help, she found almost no information. But when she blogged about her experience, stories similar to hers poured in. In response, Bertzikis—who left the Coast Guard in 2007 and is now 29—set up the Military Rape Crisis Center in Cambridge, Mass. She estimates the organization has provided 6,200 people with counseling, legal advocacy and case management—along with the assurance that they are not alone.

Susan Burke, the attorney in Washington, D.C., who initiated the lawsuit, says, “The military is woefully mishandling these cases all the time.” Intending to file what she calls “a reform lawsuit,” she sought plaintiffs through advocacy groups, including the Crisis Center.

Their allegations are not easy reading. The plaintiffs report being spat on, grabbed at, masturbated over, stripped, drugged, stalked, beaten and raped. One rapist took photos; another videotaped the event. (That tape was later used as evidence against the victim because, she was told, it showed that she “did not struggle enough.”) When victims’ reported the abuse, their commanders ignored them, insisted the sex was consensual or a result of drinking, and ordered them not to pursue action because it would ruin their attacker’s career. In a world where rank is everything, those raped were generally low-level, while their rapists were often their superiors. The plaintiffs report being forced to continue working under their attackers’ supervision or to live nearby.

By the Pentagon’s reckoning, fewer than 21 percent of reported cases make it to court martial and only a little over half of those result in convictions. In the ultimate insult, as a result of their trauma, many MST victims are deemed unfit to serve and were kicked out of the military. “Every case I get,” says Bertzikis, “they blame the victim, the perpetrator never gets punished and the survivor is the one who ends up losing her career.”

Because the military investigates itself, there is little incentive to deal with a problem that makes everyone look bad. In civilian life, of course, most rapes also go unreported and most assailants don’t spend time in prison. But because enlistees cannot just walk away, the aftermath of an unpunished assault in the military can often be more traumatic for victims. Commanders have control over an enlistee’s career, living situation, safety, medical care and community standing. When a rape survivor is forced to confront her attacker daily, Bertzikis says, “The only options out are going AWOL or suicide.”

It may not be possible for civilians to change military culture, but they can create oversight and accountability. In April, a pair of legislators re-introduced a bill to do just that. The Defense STRONG Act, co-sponsored by Reps. Niki Tsongas (D-Mass.) and Mike Turner (R-Ohio), would guarantee access to a military lawyer, allow victims to transfer from where the assault happened, ensure confidentiality of communication with advocates and counselors, give teeth to the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office and institute effective rape prevention training, which now seems to focus on telling service women how to avoid getting raped. The Holley Lynn James Act, written by Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) with the help of SWAN, would go further by creating a system of independent oversight; MST cases would go to military court automatically.

The bills’ prospects remain uncertain, but the lawsuit, along with some horrific high-profile cases, has focused attention on pervasive sexual trauma in the U.S. military. “There’s a groundswell,” says Anu Bhagwati, executive director of the advocacy group Service Women’s Action Network and a former Marine captain. “The epidemic is widely known, so Congress can’t afford to ignore it any longer.”

Original Page: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7317/military_rape_rampant_ignored

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U.S. Troops' Mental Health Continues to Erode

2011-05-21T01:49:00.001-07:00

U.S. Troops' Mental Health Continues to Erode

by Mark Thompson Thursday, battleland.blogs.time.com
May 19th 2011 9:41 AM

U.S. troops' minds are going to hell in a hand basket, according to the latest comprehensive survey of the mental health of U.S. soldiers and Marines waging war in Afghanistan.

"Psychologically, it is hard to imagine that these elevated levels of combat are not taking a toll on Soldiers," the study concludes. "Reports of acute stress symptoms among Soldiers surveyed in 2010 have significantly increased and reports of individual morale have significantly decreased relative to 2009."

The key findings in the study released Thursday morning are depressingly blunt. Here's a sampling of the conclusions from the 112-page report:

Among Army soldiers:

   -- Morale: Significant decline in reports of individual morale relative to 2009 and 2005.

    -- Psychological Problems: Acute stress rates significantly higher than rates from 2009 and 2005. Rates of combined psychological problem measure (acute stress, depression, or anxiety) significantly higher than 2005.

    -- Combat Exposures: Dramatic increase in combat exposure relative to 2009. Higher combat levels reported than in any previous MHAT to either OEF or OIF. [OEF is Operation Enduring Freedom -- the war in Afghanistan; OIF is Operation Iraqi Freedom -- the war in Iraq.]

    -- Multiple Deployments: More multiple deployers than in 2009. Soldiers on their third/fourth deployment report significantly more psychological problems and use of mental health medications than Soldiers on their first or second deployment.

Among Marines:

   -- Individual Morale: ...the percent of Marines reporting high or very high unit morale is significantly lower in 2010 than in 2006 or 2007.

    -- Psychological Problems: The rate of Marines reporting psychological problems (acute stress symptoms, depression or anxiety) is significantly higher in 2010 than in 2006 or 2007.

    -- Combat Exposures: Marines report dramatic increase in combat exposure relative to 2006 and 2007 in OIF.

    -- Sleep Problems: Significant increase in the percentage of Marines who report high or very high concern about not getting enough sleep. Sleep disruption primarily due to poor sleep environment (e.g., too hot, noisy, etc.).

    -- Multiple Deployments: Marines on three or more deployments report lower morale than those on first deployment. Multiple deploying Marines also show increased psychological problems.

All this bad news comes despite reported improvements in unit cohesion, leadership, and reduced barriers to getting mental-health care in theater.

Bottom line: the Pentagon's mental-health workers are fighting a valiant war for the minds of the nation's soldiers and Marines, but they continue to lose ground.

The Army-led seventh Mental Health Advisory Team surveyed combat soldiers and Marines (as opposed to those in support units) in both Afghanistan last summer to get an accurate picture of how they're faring, mentally, after nearly a decade of war. They surveyed 911 (a coincidence, I'm sure) and 335 Marines. It's a pretty impressive feat; in past conflicts such studies generally were conducted among soldiers after they returned home. It's known as "MHAT-7" around the Pentagon.

Other interesting findings:

-- 11.4% of soldiers were taking medication for sleep problems, up slightly from 2009's 9.6%. But 60% of those taking sleep meds also were drinking at least one highly-caffeinated energy drink a day. "It is difficult to determine if caffeine consumption is the cause or the effect," the study reported.

-- 3.7% of soldiers were taking medication for mental-health problems. That's up from 2.6% in 2009, an increase of 42%, although the report said the hike was "non-significant" and "well-within the National estimates for this demographic group."

-- IED blasts can cause PTSD. "Over 50% of the Soldiers reported being dismounted and within 50 meters of a blast at least once," the survey found. "This number is almost certainly an underestimate of the percent of Soldiers that will experience exposure to blast in a full 12 month tour."

-- In Iraq in 2006 -- the most violent period of that war -- 12.7% of Marines surveyed said they had killed an enemy combatant. Last year in Afghanistan, the number was 56.1%

The Army quoted many of the soldiers it surveyed. Grunts have griped since the days of the Roman Empire, of course. But after a decade of fighting, some of the recurring comments about poor command -- which can aggravate, if not trigger, mental-health ills -- are distressing. It certainly offers an unvarnished look inside a war that you can't get at a Pentagon briefing or Capitol Hill hearing. It's also more candid than reporters get when talking to troops; here, they are speaking, more or less, among themselves:

Leaving home station, we didn't have a clue what we were going to do here. Mission set has changed 6 times since in country ... be flexible, but not THAT flexible! We are mission jumping constantly.

Goals/standards are ridiculous ... you can't meet them if they keep changing. Doing the right thing here is wrong."

"There was no guidance from leadership on the goal of specific missions.

Role? I don't know if I am a platoon sergeant, squad leader, or team leader ... I still don't know my role and we are58 days out from coming home.

Info comes down, but we don't have a good understanding of it, but then we have to take it, try to make sense of it, and try to give It to our Joes. I know it doesn't make sense to them.

We had a large white board in the TOC [tactical operations center] for the purpose of writing down changes to the mission but the NCO wouldn't use it...instead he would keep the changes to himself.

You never get positive feedback, but you will get an -ss-chewing if you screw up ... They tell you what is not going to work.

There is no feedback at all from leadership.

Our platoon sergeant usually tells us that 'You guys are s--t bags for making me look bad.'

You want to throw 20 people into a 10 man tent and have us live like that for the past 9 months....REALLY.

Leadership was never NOT breathing down my neck...poor planning on many issues.

They use any sign of error to belittle you...focus is on failure to make themselves look better. Cruise control once we got here... it is nota problem until it is a catastrophe.

Nobody advocates for us. They never listen to the experts...they don't listen to the people that know. But I go toe-to-toe with them. I have to serve as the advocate. I get the blame though for everything that could go wrong.

Leadership is giving us Uunior enlisted] no support. They let themselves be walked all over.

They challenge us in unrealistic ways ... good idea fairy.

Leadership isn't teaching you how to fish, but instead they are just giving you a fish.

They are not engaged and have no concept about what is going on out there. They just don't get involved.

He [NCO] will send us to work while he stays back and watches TV.

They dictate methodology, don't innovate, and don't let others innovate either. Appearance means more than anything.

There is one solution and it's his solution.

It's their way or the highway.

They tell us to do it ourselves all the time...It's frustrating that when we do it ourselves they then come back and get mad at us because we didn't do it their way even though they didn't tell us how they wanted it done.

All my guys are hurt. No one cares. A guy with fractured foot is still going out on missions.

We survived a crash and all the NCO wanted to know was when we were going to be back to work.

Original Page: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/05/19/u-s-troops-mental-health-continues-to-erode/

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More Than Half of Recent War Vets Treated by VA Are Struggling With Mental

2011-05-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

More Than Half of Recent War Vets Treated by VA Are Struggling With Mental Health Problems

by Joaquin Sapie, propublica.org
September 8th 2010

More than half of all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans treated in Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals since 2002 have been diagnosed, at least preliminarily, with mental health problems, according to statistics obtained by the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.

The data, which is released quarterly, also show that the raw number of returning soldiers with psychological problems is rising. Nearly 18,000 new patients were treated for mental health issues at VA facilities in the last three months of last year—the most recent time period for which data is available—upping the total to more than 330,000.

The latest numbers confirm a trend that has intensified over the last several years. Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that when the organization first began to collect the data in late 2004, only 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in VA hospitals had been diagnosed with mental problems.

The increase should come as no surprise, given that a recent military survey obtained by ProPublica and other media outlets shows that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are currently reporting lower morale and greater emotional strain than at any other time in the last five years.

That report notes that mental health staffing has doubled in warzones in order to ensure treatment is available immediately for soldiers who suffer psychological trauma.

Sullivan applauded the increase in staff abroad but questioned what’s being done to make sure that troubled troops are properly cared for once they come home.

“We truly support having more doctors in warzones, that’s great,” Sullivan said. “But we also need to make sure we have enough doctors here.”

Laurie Tranter, a spokeswoman for the VA, told ProPublica that the agency has increased the number of mental health staff in the United States by more than 40 percent since 2002 to more than 20,000. Tranter suggested that the increase in veterans diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems may, in part, reflect more proactive screening and better access to services.

Pressure is mounting on the military and the VA to fix long-standing shortfalls in mental health care.

A federal appeals court issued a scathing opinion of the VA’s system yesterday, noting that it takes an average of four years for veterans to receive mental health benefits, a beleaguered process that demands immediate reform.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Stephen Reinhart said, “Although the VA is obligated to provide veterans mental health services, many veterans with severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) are forced to wait weeks for mental health referrals. ... For those who commit suicide in the interim, care does not come soon enough.”

As reported by the Associated Press, the ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a 2008 verdict and sends the case, which was filed against the VA by veterans’ advocates, back to U.S. District Court for resolution.

Original Page: http://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-recent-war-vets-struggling-with-mental-health-problems?utm_source=socmed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=tweet5&utm_campaign=tbi

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Troops seek help for military sexual trauma

2011-05-18T16:06:00.001-07:00

Troops seek help for military sexual trauma

by Cathryn Creno, usatoday.com

Gilbert resident JoAnn White says she was wounded while serving with the Air Force during the Vietnam War and has not been able to work since.

Her injuries were not inflicted by a foreign enemy. She said she was raped and sexually assaulted during her military career by men who were supposed to be on her side.

White says her pain is as emotional as it was physical, and was exacerbated by a system that shrugged off her reports without investigating them.

So White has looked on with satisfaction recently as a group of 16 men and women who were raped and assaulted during active service filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon and as legislation was introduced in Congress to expand legal rights and protections for such victims.

"What I had to deal with in the Air Force just about destroyed me," White told The Arizona Republic. "I hope telling what happened to me will help other women. I am fed up and tired. I want the word out there."

Last year, 3,158 sexual assaults were reported by men and women serving in all branches of the Armed Forces, according to the Department of Defense's Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military. But the department estimates that last year's number reflects only about 13.5 percent of the total number of assaults on men and women in active duty last year.

Advocates like Panayiota Bertzikis, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Military Rape Crisis Center, said those victims often fail to report attacks for various reasons, including pressure from supervisors and peers.

Bertzikis is a plaintiff in the February lawsuit, which accuses the military of allowing a culture that fails to prosecute sex offenders and instead punishes victims who come forward.

Bertzikis said she was accused of lying by a commanding officer when she reported being raped by a Coast Guard shipmate in 2006. She said a Coast Guard-appointed advocate also cautioned her not to pursue having her attacker disciplined because she might be viewed as a troublemaker.

Some victims feel trapped in a system designed not to protect victims but the military's reputation, she said, noting, "When you enlist … your entire support system is the military."

Others victims fear forced transfers from jobs they like and have worked hard to get, Bertzikis said.

That's what White says happened to her after an officer groped her breast and another co-worker raped her while she was serving as a fuel systems mechanic at McChord Air Force Base in Washington during the 1970s.

Her complaints were recorded, but the men who attacked her were not punished, she said. The Department of Veterans Affairs declined to discuss the specifics of her case.

Soon after she first filed her complaint, White said, she was transferred to a low-level job.

Ultimately, White say, she came to see the problem as one that is less about sex and more about power.

"Your superiors have so much power over you when you are in the military," she said. "It blew me away that these complaints could be in my records, but there was no policy in place to address it."

White said that after leaving the service, she tried working in civilian jobs, but mental health problems and a debilitating eating disorder prevented her from succeeding. She receives disability benefits from the VA, but it was not until four years ago that she realized the military has an official name for the anger, anxiety and depression she had suffered from being attacked while in the service: military sexual trauma.

The problem is so large that the Phoenix VA Medical Center has hired a full-time social worker who does nothing but provide individual counseling and support groups for sexual trauma victims.

Social worker Judith Orosz said anger, anxiety, depression and an inability to hold a job are typical among those who seek help.

"What is really troubling is that the sexual assaults are done by people who are supposed to have their back. People they are supposed to be able to trust," she said. "It's usually done by someone who knows them, someone in their unit and maybe even in a position of authority. They leave the military with a lot of trauma, a lot of anger and they feel like they can't trust anyone. It makes it very hard for them to hold a job."

One 47-year-old Avondale woman, who asked that she not be identified, told The Republic she is still in counseling at the Phoenix VA Health Care System more than a decade after her sexual assault by an Army supervisor.

The former Army staff sergeant said she abandoned her dream of further officer training because her assailant, a major, convinced her no one would believe her version of the story over his.

"What happens in the military is that you are separated from your family and loved ones -- you are all alone," the former sergeant said.

"The military is very political. It's a good old boy system," she said. "They stick up for each other and protect each other."

Bertzikis said women fighting in current wars are finding a way around that system through social networking. Her Military Rape Crisis Center has a Facebook page and website with emergency phone numbers.

She said both sites help victims feel less alone, share stories and work together to support legislation, such as the Defense Sexual Trauma Response, Oversight and Good Governance -- or Defense STRONG -- Act, which was introduced in Congress last month.

If passed, it would give military sexual assault victims the right to legal counsel and to transfer to another base after making a complaint. The bill also would mandate increased training on bases to prevent sex assaults.

Many believe that the best way to get at the root problem of sexual violence is through training early in a military career.

"Correcting the culture within the military is being done in a very pointed way," said Joice Jones, a civilian social worker who coordinates Luke Air Force Base's sexual assault prevention and response program and helps run prevention workshops.

Jones compares many of the airmen and airwomen stationed at Luke to first-year college students: They are away from home for the first time and need information about date rape prevention as well as how to intervene if they see someone on base being sexually harassed or assaulted.

"It's the same age group and the same dynamic as first-year college students," Jones said. "If they are a bystander and they see a fellow wingman who might be taking advantage of someone, they need to know how to respond."

Michelle Wilmot, a Tucson Army veteran featured in a 2008 documentary film about women in combat called "Lioness," agrees that peer support is a key to eliminating sex assault in the military.

She said a man serving in the Marines intervened when a solider attempted to sexually assault her in 2002, when they were serving in Ramadi, Iraq.

"Luckily the Marine stepped forward -- he was a lot bigger and was someone who was respected," Wilmot said. "I was able to run in another room and lock the door."

Like White, Wilmot believes military sexual assault "is all about power."

"Some men think women shouldn't be in the military," she said. "They can't stand the idea that I'm 5-foot-3, a girl and a combat veteran. That issue doesn't get addressed much at all."

Original Page: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-05-15-troops-sexual-abuse_n.htm

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GETTING OUT OF THE MILITARY

2011-05-16T11:36:00.001-07:00

GETTING OUT OF THE MILITARY

http://nlgchicago.org/programs/cle-training-on-military-law/

Continuing Legal Education Seminar: an orientation to military law
and discharges, and how to advise service members seeking discharge
from the military.

Friday May 20, 2011

New Survey: Few Troops Exposed to Bomb Blasts Are Screened For Concussion

2011-05-15T17:28:00.001-07:00

Court Demands Mental Health Care Reform for Veterans, Cites VA's "Unchecked Incompetence"

2011-05-14T11:05:00.001-07:00

Court Demands Mental Health Care Reform for Veterans, Cites VA's "Unchecked Incompetence"

by Jason Leopol, truth-out.org
May 13th 2011

Before he left office more than two years ago, George W. Bush released two reports touting his accomplishments during his tenure as president, boasting that he "provided unprecedented resources for veterans" and "increased the benefits available to those who have served our Nation and transformed the veterans health care system to better serve those who have sacrificed for our freedom."

Those reports, "Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush," and "100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record," further claimed that Bush "instituted reforms for the care of wounded warriors ... and dramatically expanded resources for mental health services."

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals essentially shredded Bush's assertions, ruling in a sweeping 104-page opinion that years of "unchecked incompetence" at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was directly responsible for an epidemic of suicides and lengthy delays in processing disability benefits for war veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that began while Bush was in office and has continued under President Barack Obama's leadership.

"VA's unchecked incompetence has gone on long enough," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the majority. "No more veterans should be compelled to agonize or perish while the government fails to perform its obligations."

The Ninth Circuit's surprise 2-1 decision came in response to a federal lawsuit filed four years ago against various government officials by nonprofit advocacy groups Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and Veterans United for Truth. The organizations sought a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat war veterans, particularly those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and showed signs of or were already suffering from PTSD. In addition, the veterans' groups wanted a federal judge to force the VA to overhaul its internal systems that handles disability benefits claims and medical services.

Following a trial in the summer of 2008, US District Court Judge Samuel Conti ruled that he lacked the legal authority to implement those measures and said the veterans groups should get "Congress, the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the adjudication system within the VA and the Federal Circuit" to address the matter.

Instead, the veterans groups appealed to the Ninth Circuit, stating that Conti's ruling was legally flawed and that he "erred in denying relief to remedy both VA's mental health care delays and the lack of procedural safeguards to challenge those delays."

Paul Sullivan, executive director of VCS, said in an interview two years ago that VCS and Veterans United for Truth appealed to the Ninth Circuit because VA continuously failed to fully implement its Mental Health Strategic Plan (MHSP) and conduct oversight of it.

The MHSP, unveiled in 2004, would have provided veterans who show signs of being at risk of suicide or are suffering from PTSD with immediate mental health care and eliminate the waiting period for receiving treatment.

But according to a November 2006 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), spending for the program was substantially less than what the VA had proposed - leaving untreated tens of thousands of veterans who were at risk of suicide.

In June 2007, in response to a VA inspector general's report that also criticized the VA's failure to implement the MHSP, William Feeley, then the VA's undersecretary for health, operations and management, issued a memo requiring VA hospitals and outpatient treatment centers to provide urgent mental health care within 24 hours and nonurgent care to veterans within 14 days.

But Feeley, who was one of a handful of VA officials who received lucrative bonuses in 2006, admitted in a deposition in the lawsuit VCS and Veterans United for Truth filed against the VA, that he never conducted any oversight to ensure his directives were being adhered to. In that deposition, Feeley said an uptick in veterans' suicides and suicide attempts did not mean the VA failed to provide proper care to veterans.

"A suicide does not mean negligence on the part of a medical center director or a network director," Feeley said. "Suicide occurs just like cancer occurs."

In his prior position as director of the Veterans Integrated Services Network in upstate New York, Feeley was required to implement several elements of the MHSP at the network's community-based outpatient clinics with a population of at least 1,500 veterans. But Feeley said in his deposition that he only read an executive summary of the MHSP after it was released in June 2004 and had no idea whether the clinics adopted the proposals.

Internal VA memos that surfaced during the trial showed VA officials were aware of and attempted to cover-up the fact that 18 veterans per day took their own lives and more than 1,000 veterans had attempted suicide per month, which attorneys representing the veterans' advocacy groups argued could have been avoided if the MHSP, which called for the development of a "national, systemic program for suicide prevention," was implemented.

The Ninth Circuit agreed. In its opinion issued Tuesday, the appeals court directed the VA to immediately put a "systemwide" plan into place to address, among other things, a shortage of suicide counselors at 800 outpatient clinics used by veterans, and take steps to correct the poor health care treatment and the benefits backlog at the VA, which the Ninth Circuit said amounts to a violation of veterans' "due process rights to receive the care and benefits they are guaranteed by statute for harms and injuries sustained while serving our country."

"We do not reach this answer lightly," Judge Reinhardt wrote. "We would have preferred Congress or the President to have remedied the VA's egregious problems without our intervention when evidence of the Department's harmful shortcomings and its failure to properly address the needs of our veterans first came to light years ago. Had Congress taken the requisite action and rendered this case unnecessary even while it was pending before us, we would have been happy to terminate the proceedings and enter an order of dismissal.

"When the government harms its veterans by the deprivation at issue here, [veterans] are entitled to turn to the courts for relief. Indeed, our Constitution established an independent Judiciary precisely for situations like this, in which a vulnerable group, that is being denied its rights by an unresponsive government, has nowhere else to turn. No more critical example exists than when the government fails to afford its injured or wounded veterans their constitutional rights. Wars, including wars of choice, have many costs. Affording our veterans their constitutional rights is a primary one."

At a press briefing Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney said, "the Veterans Administration and the Justice Department are taking a very hard look at the [Ninth Circuit's] ruling and will work closely to address any of the issues raised by the court."

When Bush was president, he stacked the VA with political cronies, such as former Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson, who, as VA Secretary, defended a budget measure that sought major cuts in staffing for health care and at the Board of Veterans Appeals, slashed funding for nursing home care and blocked four legislative measures aimed at streamlining the backlog of veterans' benefits claims.

Obama vowed to reverse that trend. Prior to being sworn in as president, Obama said on his transition web site, Change.gov, that he intended to "Fix the [VA] Benefits Bureaucracy" by hiring "additional claims workers and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently." Moreover, Obama vowed to "transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness."

But those efforts have not yet been fully implemented. Although Obama proposed a dramatic increase in VA's budget, of which Congress approved, implemented a series of new suicide prevention programs and selected retired Vietnam War veteran Gen. Eric Shinseki, who has advocated on behalf of veterans and is one of the defendants in the lawsuit, to lead the VA, the administration has been slow in cutting through the bureaucratic red tape that began with his predecessor.

The backlog of unfinished disability claims at the VA has increased from less than half a million at the turn of the millennium to more than one million today. Veterans who file claims must wait an average of five to six months before receiving a response from VA as to whether their claim has been accepted. Currently, there are about 200,000 veterans who have appealed VA's disability claims decisions and they wait an average of four years for a response, the Ninth Circuit found, noting that the VA was unable to provide the "court with a sufficient justification for the delays."

In a statement Wednesday, Sullivan said, "The ball now sits in VA's court."

"Will VA fight against veterans by appealing the case? Or, will VA face reality, especially the broken claims system and work with veterans, Congress, academic experts and others to finally fix VA so our veterans don't face mountains of paperwork, endless delays and other obstacles to care?"

On Monday, a day before the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion, Sullivan's group obtained new statistics from the VA and Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents reveal that as of December 31, 2010, nonfatal battlefield casualties among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans exceed 90,000. Additionally, of the 654,000 service members of those conflicts treated at VA hospitals and clinics, 332,000 were diagnosed by the VA with one or more mental health conditions.

Despite these dramatic figures, Sullivan said VA "still has no strategic plan to meet sharply rising demand for treatment and benefits."

"Tragically," Sullivan added, "the [appeals] court confirms veterans died (more than a thousand during a few month period during the 2008 trial) while waiting for VA to provide healthcare and benefits."

Original Page: http://www.truth-out.org/appeals-court-cites-unchecked-incompetence-va/1305302437

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Strain on forces in the field at a five-year high

2011-05-13T20:58:00.001-07:00

Strain on forces in the field at a five-year high

by Gregg Zoroy, usatoday.com

U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan are experiencing some of the greatest psychological stress and lowest morale in five years of fighting, reports a military study.

"We're an Army that's in uncharted territory here," says Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, who has focused on combat stress. "We have never fought for this long with an all-volunteer force that's 1% of the population."

Mental health strain was most severe among veterans of three or more deployments, with a third of those showing signs of psychological problems defined as either stress, depression or anxiety, the report obtained by USA TODAY says.

The research, based on a survey of soldiers and Marines in 2010, also found that the praise the troops have for their unit sergeants has never been higher as the United States approaches the 10th year of its longest war.

The report says decline in individual morale is significant: 46.5% of troops said they had medium, high or very high morale, compared with 65.7% who said that in 2005. About one in seven soldiers — and one in five Marines — reported high or very high morale.

President Obama ordered a surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan last year, bringing the total number to 100,000 troops. He said at the time that withdrawals would begin this July depending on security. The report says soldiers and Marines reported more intense fighting than during the surge in Iraq in 2006-07, with 75%-80% of those in Afghanistan involved in firefights.

Half or more of those surveyed said they had killed the enemy, and 75%-80% described the death or wounding of a buddy. Half also said that an improvised explosive device detonated within 55 yards while they were on foot patrol. The study's researchers also found evidence of physical wear-and-tear with a third of the force experiencing chronic pain.

"I'm not worried about our ability to continue the fight," Chiarelli says. "Folks who are coming home now are going to see that they're not going back for 24 months. And that hasn't been the way it's been for 10 years."

Mental health staffing has doubled in Afghanistan since 2009 and troops report better access to this care, though many are so busy fighting "outside the wire" to seek help, the study says.

"Having therapists forward, we're able to get them to talk to someone right away and intervene," says Kathleen Chard, a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs who trains Army medics. "In as little as two to four sessions we can begin having an impact on these guys and women."

The report noted that the emotional strain, while high, was lower than expected given the severity of combat — evidence of a growing resilience in the force. And confidence in the command skills of squad and platoon leaders has never been higher at close to 50%, up from 38.6% in 2005.

"They have learned to be leaders in a crucible," Chiarelli says. "And their soldiers have seen that."

Original Page: http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-05-08-troops-strain-morale-afghanistan_n.htm

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More than Half of Recent War Vets Treated by VA Are Struggling With Mental

2011-05-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

More than Half of Recent War Vets Treated by VA Are Struggling With Mental Health Problems

by JOAQUIN SAPIEN, propublica.org
September 8th 2010

More than half of all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans treated in Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals since 2002 have been diagnosed, at least preliminarily, with mental health problems, according to statistics obtained by the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.

The data, which is released quarterly, also shows that the raw number of returning soldiers with psychological problems is rising. Nearly 18,000 new patients were treated for mental health issues at VA facilities in the last three months of last year—the most recent time period for which data is available— upping the total to more than 330,000.

The latest numbers confirm a trend that has intensified over the last several years. Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that when the organization first began to collect the data in late 2004, only 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in VA hospitals had been diagnosed with mental problems.

The increase should come as no surprise given that a recent military survey, obtained by ProPublica and other media outlets, shows that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are currently reporting lower morale and greater emotional strain than at any other time in the last five years.

That report notes that mental health staffing has doubled in warzones in order to ensure treatment is available immediately for soldiers who suffer psychological trauma.

Sullivan applauded the increase in staff abroad, but questioned what’s being done to make sure that troubled troops are properly cared for once they come home.

“We truly support having more doctors in warzones, that’s great,” Sullivan said. “But we also need to make sure we have enough doctors here.”

Laurie Tranter, a spokeswoman for the VA, told ProPublica that the agency has increased the number of mental health staff in the U.S. by more than 40 percent since 2002 to more than 20,000. Tranter suggested that the increase in veterans diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems may, in part, reflect more proactive screening and better access to services.

Pressure is mounting on the military and the VA to fix long-standing shortfalls in mental health care.

A federal appeals court issued a scathing opinion of the VA’s system yesterday, noting that it takes an average of four years for veterans to receive mental health benefits, a beleaguered process that demands immediate reform.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Stephen Reinhart said, “Although the VA is obligated to provide veterans mental health services, many veterans with severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) are forced to wait weeks for mental health referrals… For those who commit suicide in the interim, care does not come soon enough.”

As reported by the Associated Press, the ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a 2008 verdict and sends the case, which was filed against the VA by veterans’ advocates, back to U.S. District Court for resolution.

Original Page: http://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-recent-war-vets-struggling-with-mental-health-problems?utm_source=socmed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=tweet6&utm_campaign=tbi

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New Survey: Few Troops Exposed to Bomb Blasts Are Screened For Concussion

2011-05-13T20:56:00.003-07:00

More than Half of Recent War Vets Treated by VA Are Struggling With Mental

2011-05-13T20:56:00.001-07:00

More than Half of Recent War Vets Treated by VA Are Struggling With Mental Health Problems

by Joaquin Sapie, propublica.org
September 8th 2010

More than half of all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans treated in Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals since 2002 have been diagnosed, at least preliminarily, with mental health problems, according to statistics obtained by the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.

The data, which is released quarterly, also shows that the raw number of returning soldiers with psychological problems is rising. Nearly 18,000 new patients were treated for mental health issues at VA facilities in the last three months of last year—the most recent time period for which data is available— upping the total to more than 330,000.

The latest numbers confirm a trend that has intensified over the last several years. Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, said that when the organization first began to collect the data in late 2004, only 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in VA hospitals had been diagnosed with mental problems.

The increase should come as no surprise given that a recent military survey, obtained by ProPublica and other media outlets, shows that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are currently reporting lower morale and greater emotional strain than at any other time in the last five years.

That report notes that mental health staffing has doubled in warzones in order to ensure treatment is available immediately for soldiers who suffer psychological trauma.

Sullivan applauded the increase in staff abroad, but questioned what’s being done to make sure that troubled troops are properly cared for once they come home.

“We truly support having more doctors in warzones, that’s great,” Sullivan said. “But we also need to make sure we have enough doctors here.”

Laurie Tranter, a spokeswoman for the VA, told ProPublica that the agency has increased the number of mental health staff in the U.S. by more than 40 percent since 2002 to more than 20,000. Tranter suggested that the increase in veterans diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems may, in part, reflect more proactive screening and better access to services.

Pressure is mounting on the military and the VA to fix long-standing shortfalls in mental health care.

A federal appeals court issued a scathing opinion of the VA’s system yesterday, noting that it takes an average of four years for veterans to receive mental health benefits, a beleaguered process that demands immediate reform.

Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Stephen Reinhart said, “Although the VA is obligated to provide veterans mental health services, many veterans with severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) are forced to wait weeks for mental health referrals… For those who commit suicide in the interim, care does not come soon enough.”

As reported by the Associated Press, the ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a 2008 verdict and sends the case, which was filed against the VA by veterans’ advocates, back to U.S. District Court for resolution.

Original Page: http://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-recent-war-vets-struggling-with-mental-health-problems?utm_source=socmed&utm_medium=Twitter&utm_content=tweet1&utm_campaign=TBI

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Pot for PTSD Gets FDA Go-Ahead=?UTF-8?B?wqA=?=

2011-05-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

Pot for PTSD Gets FDA Go-Ahead

by David Downs, eastbayexpress.com
May 11th 2011

Largely banned since 1940, the field of medical cannabis research in the United States is celebrating a symbolic sign of acceptance this month: the US Food and Drug Administration approval of a study that gives pot to veterans suffering chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Rick Doblin, executive director of the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in Santa Cruz, California, said the FDA approved on April 28 his group's protocol for a study on the effects of marijuana on symptoms of PTSD. According to the study plan, neurochemical research shows that pot may relieve chronic post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms by interacting with the brain's endocannabinoid system.

Post-traumatic stress is a severe anxiety disorder that may appear after psychologically traumatic events. Veterans suffering from PTSD will often report flashbacks, nightmares, anger, hyper vigilance, and avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma. Symptoms last longer than a month and lead to "clinically significant distress and impairment."

Battle-damaged war veterans are already self-medicating with pot to treat symptoms like insomnia, anxiety, and depression, clinicians have found. The new study seeks to quantify the efficacy of those practices. Fifty veterans in Arizona will be the subject of the study, and they all have chronic PTSD — the most stubborn kind, Doblin said.

Pot "helps people not have nightmares," Doblin explained. "They sleep better. That's one of the main reasons why people use it. Another reason is it focuses people's attention on the here and now. It moves them a little ways out of being burdened by the past."

The FDA approval represents a historic landmark in cannabis research, Doblin said. It's the first FDA-approved study in at least thirty years that would give cannabis to patients for home use. As a sign of how hesitant the FDA was, Doblin's group had to assure the FDA that the veterans in the study would not go out and sell their weed on the street corner.

The study also calls for veterans to smoke weed with differing levels of active cannabinoids THC and CBD to determine if one, the other, or a balance of both proves more effective. Veterans will also either smoke or vaporize the plant to better test effects from different administrations of the drug.

Doblin said he was surprised that the FDA approved the study. He did not think the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) had the appropriate CBD-rich pot for the study, and that would force the FDA to reject it. NIDA controls the one federally legal pot farm in the nation, which is based in Mississippi and provides government-grown pot to a handful of federal patients, as well as researchers approved by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

But if history is any guide, NIDA will ultimately block the FDA-approved study from ever happening, said Doblin. NIDA must approve all research on pot, and their political goal is to ensure it never becomes legal, he said. NIDA states on its web site that it believes smoked marijuana is not a medicine, despite more than three thousand years of recorded medicinal use.

Doblin said NIDA has repeatedly denied approval of his group's efforts to clinically study the use of cannabis to treat AIDS wasting and migraines — despite repeated FDA approvals. Doblin said the FDA is interested in pursuing cannabis science, but NIDA is not.

"I would like there to be praise for the FDA; they're not doing anything unusual," he said. "But NIDA, the Drug Czar's office, and the DEA have bought into prohibition and prohibition doesn't make sense if you put science first.

"The Obama administration has talked a big game about how science should not be impeded by politics," Doblin continued. "He has disappointed us in major ways when it comes to drug-related science."

Dutch phytochemist Arno Hazekamp, a director at European cannabis manufacturer Bedrocan, has said that modern science is simply not set up to accept whole-plant medicine. The last century of modern medicine has been built upon the so-called "one-molecule-one-target" principle, he has noted.

Conversely, cannabis has more than four hundred psychoactive molecules and interacts with a vital yet barely understood cellular signaling system called the endocannabinoid system — which accounts for its wide variety of reported effects.

Some stronger pot these days definitely can cause anxiety, not lessen it, Doblin notes. And not all PTSD sufferers may have the same reaction to the same pot, he said. But the drug is nontoxic, and has been found to provide energy and lift the mood of depressed PTSD sufferers, he said. It doesn't treat the underlying psychological damage of war, however. "It's more on the level of symptom relief. If they don't use marijuana the next day or next night their symptoms usually come back," Doblin said.

Doblin's group has also been developing Ecstasy-assisted talk therapy for war veterans for about a decade. Few people know that NIDA has the unique authority to stop cannabis research, but it may not prevent research on other psychoactives such as LSD and Ecstasy. The euphoric, empathetic "love" drug Ectasy allows a vet to revisit traumatic memories and process them without panic and fear overwhelming his mind.

In preparation for an MDMA-talk session, Doblin sees his group stepping shell-shocked vets down off of prescription medications and onto pot — which leaves the system in eight hours, instead of weeks or months for prescription pills. A recent study of patients presenting at Medicann clinics in California found huge numbers of patients using pot in lieu of prescription sleep aids and mood adulterants.

But if NIDA rejects the newly approved study, it will be yet- another example of the government getting in the way of helping our troops, Doblin said. "There are a large number of people for whom this would work."

Original Page: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/pot-for-ptsd-gets-fda-go-ahead/Content?oid=2630300

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Army Reserve officers wait months for resignation OK

2011-05-09T22:53:00.000-07:00

Army Reserve officers wait months for resignation OK

azstarnet.com | May 8th 2011

RENEE JONES SCHNEIDER/ MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE Capt. Sheree Gunderson sent in her resignation papers in August. Eight months later, nothing has happened and she feels betrayed.

MINNEAPOLIS - Since turning in her resignation last August, Capt. Sheree Gunderson hasn't had much to do during weekend drills at Fort Snelling. She reads the newspaper, goes on the Internet to check her Hotmail and Facebook accounts, and occasionally attends classes unrelated to her military assignment. If there's a medical drill, she'll offer to play the role of a casualty.

For showing up, the Army pays her $550 to $600 each month.

According to her supervisors, Gunderson has done everything the Army requires in order to resign. But the Army won't let her go.

For officers, the process of leaving the armed forces is supposed to take eight weeks, according to a Pentagon memo. But for Gunderson and some other officers in the Army Reserve, processing that paperwork can take a year or two because so many supervisors have full-time civilian jobs that get in the way of their administrative duties, Army officials said.

The delay has forced Gunderson, 32, to postpone her plans for getting married and enrolling in graduate school. She wants to move on with her life.

"I have always loved the military," said Gunderson, who has served 11 years in the Army and the Reserve. "It is sad I have to leave this way. I feel betrayed."

Gunderson's supervisors are also dismayed. They said her departure stalled when her resignation paperwork was accidentally left on a desk for three or four months. It wasn't located until the Star Tribune and the Army's inspector general inquired about Gunderson's status, a colonel said.

"The whole process has been frustrating for me and the staff as well," said Maj. Mark Timm, who oversees Gunderson as commander of the 444th Minimal Care Detachment. "I feel bad for her. She was a good soldier for me when she wanted to be in the military. And once she decided to get out, I supported her position."

Some officers believe the military is making it hard for good soldiers to leave.

"People who are satisfactorily performing have a harder time getting out than people who are not satisfactorily performing," said Capt. Peter Fallgren, who supervises an officer who has spent more than a year trying to get her resignation approved. "I don't know where the system is breaking down, but I know that things should happen much quicker."

Army officials said they don't know how many officers have filed complaints about delays with the Army's inspector general. The Pentagon was unable to say how many officers are waiting for their retirement paperwork to be approved.

Unlike enlistees, who can leave as soon as their required time is up, officers must wait until their retirement paperwork is approved by multiple military officials.

"An officer in the Army does not have an end of enlistment term as does an enlisted soldier," said Lt. Col. Brent Campbell, an Army public affairs officer. "It is indefinite. The process goes through channels and can be approved and disapproved along the way."

Capt. Linda Wenker of Elk River, Minn., who joined the military in 2001 and now serves in the Army Reserve, submitted her resignation more than a year ago.

Though Wenker's documents were signed by two commanding officers, an Army spokesman said Wenker will not be eligible to retire until August, when she completes eight years of service as an officer.

Original Page: http://azstarnet.com/news/national/article_7a58a9a7-989c-5e4b-9f6f-b94bd5aa5353.html

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Soldiers hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased 7000 percent over pas

2011-05-09T12:19:00.001-07:00

Soldiers hospitalized for suicidal thoughts increased 7000 percent over past five years: study

by Nina Mandell, nydailynews.com
May 6th 2011 12:22 PM

The rate of soldiers hospitalized for having suicidal thoughts has soared a staggering 7,000% in the last five years, a new Pentagon report says.

The report, which covers the period from the fourth year troops were in Afghanistan and the third year they were in Iraq, is the latest troubling survey on potential suicides in the military.

* The Army reported last month there in March had been eight reported potential suicides involving soldiers who were not on active duty, and seven potential suicides among active duty soldiers.

* A study released in March found the suicide rate for female soldiers tripled while at war between 2004 and 2009 compared to soldiers who were not overseas.

* Five months ago, another survey found suicides had doubled among National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve soldiers from 65 in 2009 to 145 in 2010.

"Suicide is a symptom of a bigger problem," Gen. Pete Chiarelli, the army's top anti-suicide advocate told Time Magazine.

"It is rarely based on a single factor, but from work, health, finance and relationship problems."

The Pentagon says a new diagnostic code and greater awareness of the problem could be helping to drive the numbers higher.

The Defense Department has focused on improving suicide prevention among its troops who suffer from high rates of mental illness following their returns from war zones.

"Efforts to improve suicide prevention awareness, education and support that is readily available to all members of the Army family continue to be of paramount importance," said Col. Chris Philbrick, deputy director of the Army Health Promotion, Risk Reduction Task Force.

"Informed and engaged leaders at every level help foster a sense of responsibility in soldiers, Army civilians and family members."

"Leaders will reduce the stigma associated with seeking help by promoting positive behavioral health opportunities that include physical, emotional, social, family and spiritual well-being."

Original Page: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/05/06/2011-05-06_soldiers_hospitalized_for_suicidal_thoughts_increased_7000_percent_over_past_fiv.html

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Marines briefed matter-of-factly on 'don't ask, don't tell' repeal

2011-05-01T16:24:00.001-07:00

Marines briefed matter-of-factly on 'don't ask, don't tell' repeal

by Tony Perry, latimes.com
May 1st 2011

Col. Rudolph Janiczek, a battalion commander, briefs his Marines in a chapel at Camp Pendleton. )

Reporting from Camp Pendleton—

The presentation was direct, even matter-of-fact, giving no hint of the large-scale cultural shift that the new policy represents — or of the passionate debate it provoked among politicians, religious leaders and other civilians.

There is a new policy, the young-looking colonel told 50-plus enlisted Marines sitting in the pews of an aging chapel on this sprawling base.

You will follow the policy, he said in a calm tone. If you have trouble with the policy, please see your sergeant or chaplain.

"The leadership will try to work with you and get you through it," he said.

And with that, this group of Marines from the headquarters battalion, 1st Marine Division, had been briefed last week on a new law that will allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military.

Using a 30-minute slide show approved by Marine brass, Col. Rudolph Janiczek, the battalion commander, walked his Marines through what would change and what would not.

"I'm not here to change your belief system; that's not what this is about," Janiczek said. "You're free to be who you are. But when you begin to infringe on the rights of other Marines, that's the limit."

Similar briefing sessions are occurring at military bases throughout the U.S. and at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only after such sessions are completed will the new law go into effect — probably in late fall.

Recruits will no longer be asked about their sexual orientation. Being seen drinking in a gay bar off base or participating in a same-sex embrace will no longer be grounds for being booted out of the service.

Gays and lesbians will no longer have to hide their sexual orientation or pretend they are straight. If they believe they are being denied promotions or assignments because of their sexual orientation, there will be an appeal procedure.

But there will be no separate barracks for gay Marines. And there will be no "co-location" policy — the military ensuring, as it does for those who are married, that couples get assigned to same base or at least bases near each other — for same-sex couples.

Also, same-sex couples will have to obey the same rules as straight couples: no hand-holding on base, no mushy physical displays of affection in public, even when off base and wearing civilian clothing.

Same-sex partners will not be eligible to live in family housing or to receive dependent health benefits, because of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. The zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment remains in effect.

During the debate in Congress, polls showed that rank-and-file Marines were less accepting of the proposed change than their counterparts in other services.

Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos warned that it could be a dangerous "diversion." He proposed that any change be delayed until the military was no longer fighting two wars. His predecessor, Gen. James Conway, made a similar plea to Congress.

But if Amos was the last of the service chiefs to accept the idea, he may have been the first to pledge support for the change once the commander-in-chief signed the legislation in late December.

In January, the Marines released a video of Amos talking to his Marines.

The slide show is preceded by that same video of Amos and Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent — the Marine Corps' top enlisted man — speaking directly to the camera in a no-nonsense manner.

"I want to be clear to all Marines," Amos says. "We will step out smartly to faithfully implement this new law. It is important that we value the diversity of background, culture and skills that all Marines bring to the service of our nation. As we implement repeal, I want leaders at all levels to emphasize the importance of maintaining dignity and respect for one another."

Original Page: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gay-military-20110501,0,5731497.story

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Marines Trained On Accepting Gay Recruits

2011-04-28T17:38:00.001-07:00

Marines Trained On Accepting Gay Recruits

by Editorials, ksbw.com
April 28th 2011 SAN DIEGO -- If a Marine spots two men in his battalion kissing off-duty at a shopping mall, he should react as if he were seeing a man and woman. If he turns on the television news to see a fellow Marine dressed as a civilian and marching in a parade with a banner that reads, "Support Gays and Lesbians in the Military!" he should accept it as a free right of expression. Prescriptions for those possible scenarios are being played out at Marine bases as the military prepares to allow gays to openly serve, ending a 17-year-old policy commonly known as "don't ask, don't tell."Training for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines began early this year and is expected to finish by summer's end. The repeal goes into effect 60 days after the president, defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff certify that lifting the ban won't hurt the military's ability to fight. "These changes are about policy," states briefing material for Marine instructors. "The policy is about adherence to orders and behavior, and not about beliefs." The latest round of training material asks Marines to consider their reactions to a wide range of scenarios, from seeing a member "hanging around" a gay bar to hearing locker-room jokes from others who refuse to shower in front of gays. Members of the 1st Marine Logistics Group report to class Thursday at Camp Pendleton. There is nothing wrong with "hanging around" a gay bar, the materials state. The officer who witnesses the loud locker-room banter aimed at gays and lesbians should remind the Marines any discrimination or harassment is inappropriate. For those who oppose the new policy, the Marine Corps says it doesn't expect anyone to change their personal beliefs. Still, everyone must follow orders. "You remain obligated to follow orders that involve interaction with others who are gay or lesbian, even if an unwillingness to do so is based on strong, sincerely held moral or religious beliefs," the training material states. A top-notch recruiter who opposes the new policy cannot refuse a promising applicant on grounds of sexual orientation but might be considered for another assignment and, at the discretion of the Navy secretary, may be granted early discharge. Chaplains who preach at base chapels that homosexuality is a sin are entitled to express their religious beliefs during worship. The Marines expect to finish training on the new policy by June 1, Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, testified in Congress earlier this month. Amos testified last year that permitting gays to openly serve could disrupt smaller combat units and distract leaders from preparing for battle. When he appeared this month before the House Armed Services Committee, he said he had been looking for problems that might arise under the new policy and hadn't found any "recalcitrant pushback." "There has not been the anxiety over it from the forces in the field," he said.

Original Page: http://www.ksbw.com/news/27705309/detail.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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One Step Forward, One Step Back for DADT Repeal

2011-04-28T16:55:00.001-07:00

One Step Forward, One Step Back for DADT Repeal

by Adam Weinstei, m.motherjones.com
April 28th 2011 3:06 PM

At bases around the world, the military has already begun training service members to tolerate gay and lesbian colleagues' displays of affection, and to lay off the "gay bar" jokes...and yet this week, it still barred a standout former Army cadet from rejoining the ranks, because her lesbianism breaks the existing rules. The developments show how current and aspiring LGBT service members can continue to expect uneven treatment until Pentagon leaders dot the i's and cross the t's on a policy change that's already sailed through Congress.

Advances are being made, sort of. The AP notes that, since March, thousands of troops have already undergone instruction on how to work congenially with gay colleagues:

If a Marine spots two men in his battalion kissing off-duty at a shopping mall, he should react as if he were seeing a man and woman. If he turns on the television news to see a fellow Marine dressed as a civilian and marching in a parade with a banner that reads, "Support Gays and Lesbians in the Military!" he should accept it as a free right of expression.

The Marines are also reminding their charges that they're still entitled to think homosexuality is wrong; they just can't impose that dictum on their brothers and sisters in uniform. "These changes are about policy," their guidebook states. "The policy is about adherence to orders and behavior, and not about beliefs."

And yet, the case of Cadet Katie Miller—which may be familiar to Mother Jones readers—shows that the policy is in limbo, and out service members are still out of luck in the foreseeable future.

Last summer, exasperated with the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, Miller came out as a lesbian, resigned her US Military Academy appointment, and transferred to Yale. "I intend for my resignation to offer a concrete example of the consequences of a failed law and social policy," she wrote. And she made it clear that once DADT was dead, she'd happily rejoin the service. Congress repealed the 1993 policy late last year, and Miller applied for readmission to West Point. Campus officials confirmed this week that she'd been rejected.

It's not that the Army didn't want Miller in uniform—given her record of achievements in two years at West Point, (ninth in her class of 1,100, top-notch athlete, peer leader), who wouldn't? It's just that gays still can't serve openly until the military's brass announce that their Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal process is done:

"While at the academy Ms. Miller remained in good standing and had done exceptionally well academically, militarily and physically," said Lt. Col. Sherri Reed, director of public affairs at West Point. "The choice to seek re-admission is available to her once the repeal process is completed."

So when will that be?

It's supposed to be a done deal 60 days after the president and senior defense advisers certify that the repeal won’t hurt troops' ability to fight. It could go into full effect by late summer or early fall, by some estimates...Servicemembers United recently installed on its website a countdown clock marking the time elapsed since President Obama signed the repeal.

West Point couldn't really have been expected to rule differently on Miller's application, given the constraints of the current policy. But until the military bureaucracy reacquaints itself with the 21st century—and it congressional mandate—soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen will be stuck in a bizarro loop where gay smooches are to be tolerated, but high-performing gay colleagues are nowhere to be found.

Original Page: http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/04/dadt-repeal-lgbt-west-point-marines?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+Motherjones%252Fmojoblog+%2528MotherJones.com+%257C+MoJoBlog%2529

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West Point Refuses To Readmit Lesbian Cadet

2011-04-28T10:15:00.001-07:00

West Point Refuses To Readmit Lesbian Cadet

by The Associated Press, m.npr.org
April 27th 2011

A lesbian cadet who resigned from West Point last year has been rejected for readmission to the academy even as the military moves toward repealing its "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Officials at the U.S. Military Academy said they had no choice but to reject Katherine Miller's application, because the repeal of the policy barring gays from serving openly in the military is not in effect yet. The policy's repeal did not occur immediately after President Obama signed the legislation in December; training and certification are required before the ban is lifted.

In a statement Wednesday, Miller said she is sad but respects West Point's decision and still wants to pursue a military career.

Miller left West Point in August, halfway through her stint at the academy, saying she couldn't lie about her sexuality anymore.

"While the don't ask, don't tell policy was recently changed and will be repealed, the effective date has not yet been determined," said Lt. Col. Sherri Reed, the academy's director of public affairs, in a statement. "Due to this situation, West Point is unable to offer her readmission at this time."

Miller thrived at the historic academy looming over the Hudson River, ranking ninth in her class when she left. But she said keeping her sexuality a secret violated the academy's honor code and nagged at her conscience. It was hard for her to remain silent when her fellow cadets made derogatory comments about gays.

She filed her resignation just as she was to begin her junior year. The 21-year-old from Findlay, Ohio, instantly became a prominent face in the debate over gays serving openly. Miller was accepted to Yale University, but said she missed the camaraderie at West Point and re-applied late last year.

She said she now intends to graduate from Yale and join the military through officer candidate school.

The repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" is to go into effect 60 days after the president and senior defense advisers certify that it won't hurt troops' ability to fight. Training for service members began around March 1 and could be finished by summer's end.

"While at the academy Ms. Miller remained in good standing and had done exceptionally well academically, militarily and physically," Reed said. "The choice to seek re-admission is available to her once the repeal process is completed."

Under President Bill Clinton, the military in 1993 adopted it's "don't ask, don't tell" policy as a compromise that let gay men and women serve so long as they stayed silent about their sexuality. Clinton had wanted to repeal the ban entirely, but the military and many in Congress argued that doing so would disrupt order. [Copyright 2011 The Associated Press]

Original Page: http://m.npr.org/story/135781963?url=/2011/04/27/135781963/west-point-refuses-to-readmit-lesbian-cadet&ft=1&f=1001≻=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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Straight.com

2011-04-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

Straight.com

m.straight.com | Apr 21st 2011

It is long past time for the Canadian government to make it possible for U.S. Iraq war resisters to settle in Canada [“Tom Hayden and Libby Davies will draw attention to U.S. war resisters in Canada”, web-only]. I am one of the thousands of Vietnam-era immigrants who came to Canada because of our opposition to the Vietnam War. Back then, Canada welcomed us, and many of us have settled here and contributed to building our new country.

The Iraq War, which Canada also refused to take part in, has produced a smaller number of equally conscientious people who have sought peace in Canada. And, as before, Canadians have welcomed them—Canadians, that is, apart from the minority Harper government. The Harperites have tried every possible means to force the latest generation of war resisters to return to the U.S., where they face harsh, unjust punishment, including lengthy imprisonment and permanent economic disadvantages.

I have a strong suspicion that the current minority government regards the welcome people like me received from Canada four decades ago as a mistake. It is now trying to correct that by treating the current group of war resisters with all the malice that they can dredge up from their ample store of resentment.

Polls have shown consistent support for the war resisters from Canadians. The courts have repeatedly admonished the government to be fairer and more careful in their consideration of their cases. And refugee organizations, Amnesty International Canada, and many churches and other organizations have called on the government to cease making inappropriate comments that prejudge refugee claims, and to make it possible for them to settle in our country. Yet the Harperites, few of whom have ever worn a military uniform—and who have been charged with failing to provide Canadian veterans with adequate programs and support— have ignored or belittled these appeals for fairness.

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Original Page: http://m.straight.com/article/388178

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