Veterans for Common Sense

March 10, 2008 – Deep Creek, FL – DEEP CREEK – A badly decomposed body found Sunday in a culvert in Charlotte County is suspected of being that of missing Iraq war veteran Eric Hall.

“Everybody’s kind of concluded that,” said Bob Carpenter, spokesman for the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office.

However, he said, a final determination will not be made until the body is analyzed by the county medical examiner.

Hall’s mother, Becky Hall, said she wanted to wait for the medical examiner’s report before reaching any conclusions or making comments.

Carpenter said he did not know when the medical examiner would make a determination. He also could not say whether shoes, a cell phone, or clothing belonging to Hall were found in the culvert or nearby.

Becky Hall also would not say whether any items were found.

Suspicion is high that the body is Hall’s because the culvert was very close to an underground shelter Hall is thought to have built weeks ago.

A volunteer who was searching for signs of Hall contacted the sheriff’s office Sunday morning to report a strong odor coming from the culvert, according to a sheriff’s office news release.

The county’s public works department provided a backhoe for investigators to dig to the pipe and cut a hole in it. The body was found 40 to 50 yards inside the pipe.

Family members said Hall went missing on Feb. 3, after he experienced a traumatic flashback and fled the home of his aunt, where he was alone with his grandmother.

The family has not heard from Hall since his disappearance. They were given false hope that he was still alive two weeks ago, when an ex-girlfriend of his received phone calls from a man who sounded like him.

It was later discovered that the woman’s ex-husband made both phone calls as a hoax, Becky Hall said.

Hall, 24, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after an improvised explosive devise killed his best friend and permanently wounded his own leg in Fallujah, Iraq, three years ago.

He had moved from his hometown of Jeffersonville, Ind., to live with his cousin and get a fresh start in a warm climate, family members said.

March 12, 2008 – On a sticky evening last July, Sgt. Allan Dempster cruised through South Philadelphia, his fiancee’s 14-year-old nephew at his side. They were headed to his future mother-in-law’s house to hook up her new DVD player, enjoying each other’s company.

As Dempster wheeled his nine-year-old BMW hatchback right onto Broad Street, the driver of a Ford F-150 pickup came up on his tail, lighting up Dempster’s entire car with his headlights.

Dempster, 34, a powerfully built man, had been back for 17 months from Iraq, where six men in his Pennsylvania National Guard unit had been killed in bomb attacks. Twice jolted by bomb blasts himself, he now suffered recurring headaches, “like pins being pushed in my head.” Close situations still felt threatening.

At the first stoplight, with the truck beams piercing his window, Dempster felt his heart race. He began to hyperventilate.

Control yourself, he thought.

He climbed out of the BMW and walked back to the pickup. He showed the driver his military ID card, said he was an Iraq veteran, and asked the man to back off.

Then he got back in his car.

But two blocks later, the truck was still there, still close. Dempster lost it. He slammed on the brakes in the middle of a block, popped the hatch and jumped out. He raced to the rear of the car and leaned in.

When he swiveled around, he had a mad look in his eye and a sword scabbard in his hand. From each end, he pulled out a long Chinese fighting knife.

This time, he charged the truck window, weapons flashing, and yelled at Jonathan Frick, 33, of Morton, “I’m going to slit your throat.”

Frick, startled, grabbed his cell phone and called 911.

Navarr, the 14-year-old with Dempster, was frightened. Using his cell phone, he called his aunt. “Uncle Allan, he’s going off on this guy,” he told her.

Within seconds, screaming police cars with flashing lights had arrived, blocking in both vehicles. Two helicopters thumped overhead.

The show of force got to Dempster. He dropped the swords and submissively held his ID card over his head “so they wouldn’t shoot me,” he said.

The officers made him sit on the curb as they sorted out what had happened. The official report would call it a case of road rage.

The officers asked Frick, a lanky guy in a baseball cap, if he wanted to press charges. He thought about it and decided no.

“I just didn’t want to go to court,” he said.

For much of last summer, Sgt. Harold Myers sat fretting at his picnic table in Birdsboro, Pa., while his daughter, 6, and son, 2, splashed in the above-ground pool.

Myers had pinched nerves and post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Iraq. He broke into tears readily, drank heavily, and railed and banged around the house. His behavior so frightened his wife, Megan, that she took away his key to the gun safe.

Something he had seen or done in Iraq – he wouldn’t say what – was weighing on him. And his best friend, Spec. Kurt Krout, had been among the six Alpha Company members who had been killed. Krout could have gotten out of going, but Myers had urged him to join the rest of the unit.

“I owe my life to Kurt and the others who died,” Myers said, “and I feel guilty for being home.”

To compound his troubles, a notice from the Department of Veterans Affairs seemed to say that Myers owed a lot of money.

Encouraged by the Army and the VA, Myers and almost half of the Alpha veterans had applied for disability payments; 38 applications had been approved. Myers’ benefits were $1,100 a month, and he also got paid for weekends on Guard duty.

The notice now said he couldn’t legally receive VA benefits for periods when he was in training – 63 days a year, on average, for Guard members.

Nationwide, according to federal data, about 5 percent of all Guard and Reserve members currently collect VA pensions, even though they continue to serve in the military. Their commanders decide if they are fit for duty.

Myers, the notice said, would have to pay back all of the extra money he had collected the previous year, hundreds of dollars. He’d have to forgo some VA pay until he had squared his account.

“My wife is freaking out,” he said. “How are we going to afford the mortgage?”

He and other Alpha soldiers went to the Guard for help, but though sympathetic, the Guard said they had all signed papers saying they understood they could not double-dip.

“I wouldn’t call it double-dipping,” Myers protested. “Double-dipping is you know you’re doing wrong. We thought we were doing it right. Why wouldn’t you get paid for going to drill?”

Even at first light, the day was unbearably humid.

It was Aug. 6, 2007, the second anniversary of a bomb attack on the Samarra Bypass north of Baghdad that killed two Alpha soldiers: Krout, 43, of Spinnerstown, Bucks County, and Sgt. Brahim Jeffcoat, 25, of Philadelphia.

Three days later, four other Alpha soldiers were lost, near Beiji.

Krout, a father of four who had been a Wal-Mart manager, was the only one of the six to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His grave had become a hallowed spot for Alpha survivors to remember all their fallen brethren.

This morning, two combat veterans from Alpha had linked up with friends and girlfriends on a rowhouse street in Phoenixville to make the three-hour drive to Arlington.

At an Interstate 95 rest stop in Maryland, they were met by a third veteran. Two more would join them at the cemetery. Another would catch up at a bar near the White House, where Sgt. Neill Coulbourn would offer a toast: “To the six.”

At Arlington, amid 200 acres of white tablets, the talking grew muted.

Just 18 months before, at another solemn gathering, Tyler Kline, an Alpha soldier who died in a car crash the day after his 21st birthday, had been laid to rest back in Pennsylvania. The sense of loss did not abate.

The veterans now walked down Eisenhower Drive and then turned left on York Drive under tall, old oaks. Brandon Miller, a former sergeant, unrolled two small American flags on sticks that he had bought in the gift shop.

“Anybody have a pen?”

Leaning on Coulbourn’s broad back, Miller signed his name on a white stripe. Each man, in turn, autographed the flag.

Miller, 34, joined the Guard the day after 9/11, fired up by the same patriotism that had led men to enlist after Pearl Harbor. His hands, face and right ear had been burned June 14, 2005, when he rescued a soldier from a burning humvee. Now he managed community services at an apartment complex in Chadds Ford.

Coulbourn, 39, also a Purple Heart recipient, remained in the Guard and held a training job at Fort Indiantown Gap. He was among the nearly half of Alpha veterans who had been diagnosed with PTSD. He was excited to hear that Alpha might be called back in 2008 because he wanted to “get payback” for the deaths of so many friends.

Also in the group was Cpl. Joel Quirple, 23, who had been an auto technician at a Chevy dealer. He, too, held a full-time Guard job. His older brother, Josh, had been with him in Iraq, where they had looked out for each other and made it home without a scratch. Quirple couldn’t watch news of continued violence in Iraq. No matter what the commentators said, “I start yelling at the TV.” Yet he wanted to go back to Iraq. He felt he had left a job undone.

Meeting them on York Drive was Staff Sgt. David Jock, an Alpha medic in Iraq. He had been struggling with PTSD and, like Coulbourn, had spent weeks at the Coatesville VA hospital. He had split from his wife but had a new girlfriend.

The group stood smoking and teasing one another quietly. The section in which Krout’s grave lay was only a few yards away. But no one ventured there until all the men had arrived.

Delayed was a big redhead, Spec. Brian Mandes, 34. He had gotten married just before going to Iraq but saw the marriage fall apart after he got home. He fixed cash registers for Wawa stores.

Krout’s grave was No. 8209. With Mandes’ arrival, the group walked over.

The men stood in silence over the stone, which bore a Celtic cross. To the left and right were graves of other soldiers and Marines killed in the early days of August 2005.

Beyond lay newer rows of graves, reflecting the war’s continuing cost. The grass everywhere else was brown; there it was green. The sod was new.

Coulbourn rested his chin on the head of his tiny girlfriend, Kelly Bartch, who hugged him. The others stood with hidden thoughts.

Back under the shade along the road, cigarettes were passed around. Asked what he had been thinking, Jock looked annoyed. After a while, he spoke.

“We lived, and they didn’t.”

In mid-August, because of the Broad Street episode, Allan Dempster found himself under orders to report to the Laurel Highlands Neuro-Rehabilitation Center in Johnstown, Pa.

He would spend three months at the center, a federally financed facility for treatment of traumatic brain injury.

That’s what Army doctors said Dempster had – TBI, the result of literally having his brain rattled by the bomb blasts in Iraq.

The Defense Department now calls TBI the “signature injury” of a war in which most of the casualties are caused not by bullets but by explosions.

At least a half-dozen veterans of Alpha Company have been diagnosed with TBI. As they struggle to get better, it has slowly dawned on them that they might never get back their full abilities.

Many of the signs – anger, anxiety, depression – mimic the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. That makes it harder for doctors to diagnose.

But traumatic brain injury is also characterized by bouts of confusion and short-term memory loss. At one point, Dempster was on seven medications that he would sometimes forget to take. He would lose track of where he was supposed to be. He could no longer work.

Army doctors at first told him that, with time, the symptoms might lessen or go away. Clearly, that wasn’t happening.

Just before Labor Day, Mike and Kelly Sarro were nesting in the small, Colonial-style house they had recently bought on a cul-de-sac near Downingtown.

In the driveway sat a Ford Explorer with a license plate identifying the owner as a Purple Heart recipient. An American flag hung limp in a light drizzle.

Kelly was within days of delivering their first child, a boy, Michael John Sarro 4th.

“It’s all good,” Sarro said of his life.

You could hardly notice the limp from the bullet that pierced his right leg, but when he lifted his pants, the leg was gnarled, and a yellowish sheen made it look waxed.

Alpha soldiers typically said that when they first got home from Iraq, their taste for living was dulled. That happened to Sarro, too.

His passion had been the Philadelphia Eagles. Even in Iraq, he had written “Go, Eagles” on the turret of his humvee. And he swears his last words before being carried away on the medevac helicopter were “Go, Birds.”

But when he got home, his Eaglemania waned. Only now was it coming back, along with other interests. And now he could put it in perspective.

What he wanted was to get out of the limbo he was in. If he were physically fit, he said, he might reenlist, even go back to Iraq. “I believe in the Guard,” he said. But at this point, in his condition, he was eager to get his medical discharge.

Upstairs, on a computer in his bedroom, he studied for a degree in criminal justice from an online university.

Success, he said, was a matter of attitude.

“And mine’s good.”

He was on the road to recovery.

On a weekday evening in September, Hasan Fersner poked at a sandwich at a Panera Bread restaurant along West Chester Pike.

Fersner, a first lieutenant, had been the patrol leader the night the four Alpha soldiers died in the ambush.

He said he could understand why so many Alpha veterans – 46 percent – have been treated for PTSD. It was not only because of all they saw and did; it also was because most have been dealing with the emotional fallout alone.

Those who remain are scattered among several companies in the Philadelphia area, and even they might see others only once a month.

“It would be difficult for anyone to just shut that off when you’ve got nobody to talk to,” Fersner said.

Fersner himself was walloped by the deaths of the men under his command. He still holds himself responsible for what happened Aug. 9, 2005.

“Trust me,” he said, “I have gone over 100 different ways I could have gone.”

He was afraid, at first, that the other men would blame him.

“I think the guys knew that,” he said, “because they tried to embrace me.”

The experience did not deter him from military life. Last year, he attended a 20-week course at Fort Knox, Ky., to prepare officers for company command and staff assignments. He is now the battalion intelligence officer.

 

In October, two months after landing in Johnstown, Dempster sat on the porch of a brick house the Laurel Highlands center makes available to soldiers in its traumatic brain injury program.

He looked great.

A few days earlier, he had made his first solo bus trip, to the BI-LO supermarket. He found his way there, but on the way home, he waited for the bus on the wrong side of the street.

After an anxious hour, during which he several times caught himself lighting a new cigarette while another still burned, he grabbed the first bus he saw. He rode around for a long time but eventually made it back to the house.

The staff of the neuro-rehabilitation center had expected him to be agitated, he said. But he played it cool.

“I said the bus was late.”

Since August he had gained weight, and he was smoking more. But he was taking his medications, he said, and that had made a positive difference in his outlook.

His fiancee, Nannett Moore, had come to see him for a weekend, and they had stayed at the Comfort Inn.

“Now, I’m real schedule-oriented; she noticed that and made a comment about it,” he said. She approved of the change.

With the center’s help, he was building habits to compensate for gaps in his short-term memory, such as forgetting to turn the coffee pot off.

His goal, he said, was to “work in a civilian job as a normal person.” He said he wanted to have memories of Iraq but not be overcome by emotion, as he sometimes was. He wanted, he said, “to be the same guy I was before.”

“Right now,” he said, “I am confident everything is going to work out.”

His time in Johnstown was coming to an end. He was looking forward to going home, he said, but was nervous about how he would do on his own.

 

In South Philadelphia, Nannett was also looking forward to Dempster’s coming home. Yet she, too, was a little nervous.

A supervisor for Cigna International, she had been out of town the night he had threatened the other driver. When Navarr had called, she heard Dempster yelling over the phone.

No one was happier than she was when Dempster got help in Johnstown. She is encouraged by his progress.

She knew he had a ways to go, but said, “I do think that everything is OK.”

The two share a tastefully decorated rowhouse on South 22d Street with her two children and Navarr. She’s a petite woman; he’s a big man.

“I’m worried that he thinks he’s a bad person for fighting in the war,” she said. “I know he has said that. I am worried he thinks he is a failure, [at] getting a job and all that.”

 

In the fall, Robert Jackson enrolled at Community College of Philadelphia to begin work on a degree in financial management. He was trying to keep his life on course; it wasn’t easy.

His best friend had been killed six months before while he was sitting in his car talking on his cell phone. Jackson had been right there, at 57th and Rodman Streets, when two men rode up on dirt bikes, and he had seen the whole incident. One rider had taken out a pistol and shot the friend four times in the chest and once in the head.

Jackson said he had tried to help, “but he was gone.”

In Iraq, Jackson, an Army specialist, had roomed with Spec. John Kulick, one of the six Alpha soldiers killed in bomb attacks there.

Jackson spent his first few months home stuck at Fort Dix for medical treatment while other members of Alpha Company were reintegrating themselves in civilian life.

He’d been getting treatment of chronic back, shoulder, knee and foot injuries from the regular wear and tear of scores of missions. But it soon became apparent that his biggest problem was – and is – PTSD. He was in group therapy and individual counseling at the Philadelphia VA hospital while battling what he said was a drinking problem.

Jackson had moved in with his mother, 73, in West Philadelphia. His ex-wife had taken their two children to Lancaster. He was spending time each week going to doctors’ appointments at the Philadelphia VA hospital. He was collecting a disability pension from the VA.

Two days after starting a part-time job as a bartender, Jackson had been robbed at gunpoint. He played it smart, gave up his money and didn’t get hurt.

Sometimes, he thought he might have more “peace of mind” if he were back in Iraq, even though he doubted the United States could gain a clear victory. In Iraq, he said, there were “no electric bills, no gas bills, no phone bills.”

He said he missed the kinship of men in combat.

“We were family.”

 

On Dec. 7, which just happened to be the 66th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Lorenzo Martinez’s store-front church in North Philadelphia was holding a campaña evangelistica, an evangelistic crusade.

Martinez had come a long way since that night in June 2006 when he had flipped out at his home – thinking he was back in Iraq – and had tried to throw himself out of the window.

After 23 years, Martinez retired from the Guard. He still worked at the chemical plant, but his heart was in his new role as assistant pastor of his church, La Iglesia Evangelica el Refujio.

Behind the altar, slow-dancing to the beat of maracas and tambourines, he was the same man who once wasted too many nights “drinking and partying,” often at the expense of his family.

In a gray suit and dark shirt, he walked to the dais. He held up his Bible for all to see.

God, he said, had protected him in war. Now, he said, God had a new mission for him – “to praise him.”

The church responded, Gracias a Dios.

“I feel 95 percent,” Martinez said later. “I can’t say 100 percent. I feel better.

“God did it for me. He is the one that takes care of me.”

 

To date, the troop surge seems to be working. But soldiers and Iraqis continue to be killed, and the war, a core issue in the presidential campaign, goes on. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has said U.S. troops could stay in Iraq for 100 years.

And Alpha Company, once again, is getting itself ready to go into combat.

Four and a half months ago, on Oct. 19, the American Forces Press Service reported on the Pentagon Web site: “The Defense Department today announced the alert of seven National Guard brigades as replacement forces for Operation Iraqi Freedom. . . .”

One of those was the 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a 4,000-man unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard that includes Alpha Company and its First Battalion of the 111th Infantry.

An alert is not a mobilization order, but Alpha is almost certain to be called up this fall for a year of duty. Preparations have begun.

The trials and ordeals will begin all over.

Of the men who came home from Iraq in late 2005, at least a third have left the Guard as their enlistments have expired. Others who still bear physical wounds or incapacitating emotional problems will be excused from Iraq duty.

That still leaves a lot of men who will be asked, again, to lay aside their schooling or civilian careers, to say goodbye once more to wives who will have to bear all the family’s burdens and to children who will grow too rapidly while they are away.

For some, the alert order the brigade received was a blow.

“I’m still battling depression and post-traumatic stress from the first tour,” said Spec. Bryan Walczer, of Northampton, Pa., who was caught in a bomb attack in May 2005. “To go back again – it’s kind of heartbreaking.”

But many in the company have greeted the alert order matter-of-factly. In fact, 40 percent of the 126 company veterans The Inquirer interviewed said they would willingly go back if the military asked.

“I knew it was coming; it doesn’t bother me one bit,” said Cpl. Quirple, who visited Kulick’s grave in Arlington in August.

Capt. Anthony Callum, the former company commander, said Alpha might not have enough soldiers to fill its ranks, so the Guard will probably ask men who have left to come back.

Callum believes some will say yes.

They will do it, he said, because they won’t want to let down their old comrades. They are patriotic, to be sure, he said. But their strongest sense of duty is not to the flag, but to one another.

“They’ll go,” he said, “because of the bond they have.”

March 12, 2008 – The Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office has notified Eric Hall’s family this morning that the remains found in a culvert Sunday was the former Marine.

A detective from the agency notified the family at 10 a.m. and relayed the cause of death has not been determined.

Becky Hall, Eric’s mother, plans a press conference at noon.

The family scheduled a military memorial service at noon Thursday at the Faith Lutheran Church, 4005 Palm Drive, Punta Gorda.

March 11, 2008 – Top officials from the departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense said on Tuesday that they plan to improve the health care for troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan by providing them with “a life map for recovery” that integrates all their heath records into one package and lays out a listing of follow-up services.
In a joint statement submitted to a hearing of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Dr. Lynda Davis, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for Military Personnel Policy, and Kristin Day, chief consultant for care management and social work at VA, said Defense and VA partnered in October to establish the Joint VA/Defense Federal Recovery Coordinator Program.

Program coordination officials will develop several Web-based applications, including a Federal Individual Recovery Plan and a National Resource Directory, they said. They will team with military health care personnel to use the recovery plan to create in one set of documents a so-called life map for recovery for wounded, ill or injured service members, as well as veterans and their families.

The recovery plan will provide a complete menu of care (integrated documents that include all health services and health organizations, including longitudinal records, and clinical and nonclinical services) to service members headed back to duty or retirement, Davis and Day said. The plan will include information on support services and resources for health care providers and the wounded service members and veterans, they added.
VA and Defense developed the application based on recommendations from the President’s Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors, which President Bush formed in response to critical reports of military health institutions such as Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, providing poor health care services to wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Last August, the commission, headed by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Donna Shalala, secretary of the Health and Human Services Department in the Clinton administration, recommended that Defense and VA develop within a year a Web-based portal to provide patients with health care and benefits information from the two departments.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England and Veterans Affairs Deputy Secretary Gordon Mansfield told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in February that they planned to set up an eBenefits Web portal that will meet the commission’s mandate, but they did not provide a timeline.
The commission also said the Web portal should provide patient records to recovery coordinators, who work directly with wounded soldiers in military clinics and hospitals, to clinicians and other health care professionals in both departments.

Davis and Day also described the National Resource Directory, developed in collaboration with the Labor Department, that wounded service members, veterans and families will use will use to find health services offered by federal, state and local agencies and veterans services organizations. Health care providers and the general public will be able to use the directory as well, Davis and Day said.
But for the time being, care for wounded soldiers still remains in disarray, says retired Air Force Col. Peter Bunce, whose son Justin, a Marine corporal, was severely wounded by an improvised explosive device in Iraq in March 2004. Peter Bunce, who testified before the committee, says families still must battle a disorganized, paper-based system on their own to obtain needed care.

Peter Bunce said his son lost an eye as a result of an IED blast and also sustained traumatic injury from a piece of shrapnel that penetrated the frontal lobe of his brain. Peter Bunce said he considers the brain injuries the “signature wound” of combat operations in Iraq and said the effects of those injuries are felt not only by the wounded soldiers but also by their families, who as caregivers are often left to manage much of the wounded soldiers’ daily lives.

The burden that they bear in dealing with traumatic brain injuries is compounded by what Peter Bunce described as “the multitude of bureaucratic hoops that families are expected to jump through for services [which] can be the breaking point for that veteran’s support system.”

Case management at the VA Medical Center in Washington, where Justin Bunce receives treatment, only schedules appointments, Bunce told the panel. “Case management has been the sole responsibility of my family,” he said. “We have had to navigate ourselves through the stovepiped departmental nature of care at the VA.
“We have been the ones, not VA personnel, to make trips to other VA hospitals in Tampa, [Fla.], and Milwaukee to bring back best practices for … therapeutic care to our local VA hospital that is ironically located in the heart of our nation’s capital just a few miles from the Veterans Administration [sic] headquarters,” he added.
Poor case management at the VA Medical Center is the cause of Peter Bunce’s inability to obtain a review of the medications prescribed to Justin Bunce by various medical departments and evaluate the dosages and how the medications may be interacting, Peter Bunce told the committee. He said the only way he can keep track of clinicians providing care to Justin was with “a fistful of business cards, [which] does not suffice when families are overwhelmed with day-to-day recovery, therapeutic, medical and emotional issues.”

Peter Bunce gave the committee his own recommendations for care at VA, which reflect those made by the wounded warriors commission and which appear to be the goal of the new eBenefits Web portal:
A wiring diagram detailing the responsibilities of the different VA team members in the various medical departments that delineates their respective roles in rehabilitation, therapy and medical care.One document for each family listing the names and phone numbers of the entire member on a patient’s health care team and department extensions.A flow chart allowing a family to track the process for making appointments, referrals, contacts for financial services, and insurance and legal assistance, and explaining how to access free outside medical and therapeutic services.

VA did not return calls or e-mails asking when it planned to have the eBenefits portal in operation.

March 7, 2008 – Thousands of U.S. citizens who participated in human experimentation for the military may have been exposed to harmful chemical and biological substances.

In some cases, healthy adults, psychiatric patients and prison inmates were used in experiments that often included intentional exposure to blister and nerve agents. A GAO report adds that many of the test subjects have not been notified by the government about their potential exposure.

The report cites tests conducted by the Defense Department going back to World War II, most of which were a part of its Project 112 test program, while others were conducted as separate efforts.

“I really don’t understand it,” said Davi D’Agostino, director of defense and management at GAO. “It would be easy to say DOD has a lot of priorities right now, but they’ve also got a lot of problems, and we think this is very important.”

Since World War II, the Defense Department has been involved in classified human experimentation tests that were conducted to support weapons development programs, identify methods to protect the health of military personnel against a variety of diseases and combat conditions and analyze U.S. defense vulnerabilities, according to the GAO. From 1962 through 1974, the department conducted a series of classified ship and land-based chemical and biological warfare tests involving military and civilian personnel. This group of classified tests were named Project 112 because it was the 112th project of 150 outlined by the secretary of defense in 1962.

GAO has done four previous reports regarding the dangers of letting those who were exposed to hazardous material continue to go unidentified. In 2004, GAO performed a random sample in Utah and discovered 12 boxes with names of people who received no notification after exposure to chemical and biological agents. GAO says a cost-benefit analysis is necessary to give transparency on the efforts that have been made, and what other things can be done.

“We thought that if we could randomly pick 12 boxes at a former testing site and find names, there could potentially be more information at this location,” said D’Agostino. “This is why we still have questions and feel that DOD should do a documented cost-benefit analysis since they haven’t taken any actions with our recommendations from 2004.”

In response to GAO’s recommendations, the defense determined continuing an active search for individuals had reached the point of diminishing returns and reaffirmed its decision to cease active searches.

“We believe DOD made a full accounting of its efforts available to Congress in 2003,” said Chris Isleib, Defense Department spokesman. “At that time, DOD informed Congress it had ceased the active stage of the investigation but would pursue any leads that became available.”

“If they’re transparent about it with Congress and the veterans, they would have more credibility with their decision,” said D’Agostino. “That’s why we recommended it, and they disagreed with that recommendation.”

In 2003, the Defense Department reported it had identified 5, 842 service members and estimated another 350 civilians could have been potentially exposed to chemical or biological substances during Project 112, and indicated that they would cease actively searching for additional individuals. GAO says that since that time, the DOD has stopped actively searching for individuals who were potentially exposed, without giving a sound and documented basis for that decision.

And since 2003, non-DOD sources — including the Institute of Medicine — have identified approximately 600 additional names of people who were potentially exposed during Project 112. GAO maintains that until these issues are addressed, some identified veterans and civilians will remain unaware of their potential exposure.

“This is a striking issue,” said D’Agostino. “Some of these tests are going all the way back to World War II, and it would seem that you would want to get some of these people help as soon as you could.”

March 8, 2008 – New York – The number of wounded soldiers has become a hallmark of the nearly 5-year-old Iraq war, pointing to both the use of roadside bombs as the extremists’ weapon of choice and advances in battlefield medicine to save lives.

About 15 soldiers are wounded for every fatality, compared with 2.6 per death in Vietnam and 2.8 in Korea.

But with those saved soldiers comes a financial price — one veterans groups and others claim the government is unwilling to pay.

Those critics also say that the tens of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq are part of a political numbers game, one they say undermines the system meant to care for them.

The most frequently cited figure is the 29,320 soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of Thursday. But there have been 31,325 others treated for non-combat injuries and illness as of March 1.

“The Pentagon keeps two sets of books,” said Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard and an expert on budgeting and public finance whose newly published book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, was co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

“It is important to understand the full number of casualties because the U.S. government is responsible for paying disability compensation and medical care for all our troops, regardless of how they were injured,” Bilmes said.

$2.3 billion increase

Veterans Affairs predicts it will treat 330,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 — a 14 percent increase over the 2008 estimate of 263,000 — at a cost of nearly $1.3 billion.

For the 2009 budget, the White House requested $93.7 billion for the VA, including $41.2 billion for medical care for all veterans — not just those from Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s an increase of $2.3 billion over the current budget.

But critics say that is not enough for a system that has a backlog of about 400,000 pending medical claims and complaints, especially in mental health care.

The VA “will not request enough resources to care for the troops — and in fact this is precisely what has happened in the past three years,” said Bilmes.

Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman, rejected accusations that the government is trying to hide or obscure the number of wounded soldiers by placing the total in two categories on its Web pages.

“Both of the Web sites have equal importance. They are just counting different things,” Smith said. “Neither is more prominent than the other.”

James Peake, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said that funding for VA medical care requested for next year is “more than twice what it was seven years ago” before operations in Afghanistan started.

But Bilmes says the VA is hoping to offset some of the costs through increased fees and co-payments — putting more of the burden for health care costs back on soldiers.

“That is the thing that sticks in the gullet, the fact they’re hoping to raise $2 or $3 billion through their fees, which is what we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan in about three days,” she said. “For three days of fighting, we could not charge these vets a higher co-payment.”

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, an advocacy group based in Washington, said the VA’s budget request for 2009 also does not pay adequate attention to chronic problems facing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, such as drug and alcohol addictions.

This week, a federal judge in San Francisco held the first hearing in a class-action suit filed by two vet groups, including Sullivan’s, against the VA alleging neglect in treating suicidal soldiers. The suit seeks prompt screening and treatment of potentially suicidal veterans.

144 suicides through ’05

According to VA research obtained last month by The Associated Press, 144 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide from the start of the war in Afghanistan in 2001 through the end of 2005. Statistics from 2006 and 2007 were not yet available.

Dr. Gerald Cross, a VA official, said during this week’s hearings that 120,000 vets from Iraq and Afghanistan using VA care have potential mental health problems, and that nearly 68,000 have potential post-traumatic stress disorder.

March 10, 2008 – Get ready for the horrible, honest reality of the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan like you haven’t heard it before. For four days, from March 13 through March 16, hundreds of U.S. veterans of the two wars will descend on Washington and testify in the “Winter Soldier” hearings about what they really did while they were serving their country in Iraq. And their experiences aren’t pretty.

The event is inspired by the Winter Solider tribunal held in 1971 by Vietnam War vets, including John Kerry. The name comes from a quote from Thomas Paine, the revolutionary who rallied George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, saying: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

Paine was trying to keep Washington’s army from deserting in the face of a bitter winter and mounting defeats at the hands of the British. Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War say the same type of courage is needed to confront the evils unleashed by the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lawless Atmosphere

“The problem that we face in Iraq is that policymakers in leadership have set a precedent of lawlessness where we don’t abide by the rule of law, we don’t respect international treaties, argued former U.S. Army Sergeant Logan Laituri, who served a tour in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 before being discharged as a conscientious objector. “So when that atmosphere exists it lends itself to criminal activity.”

Laituri explained that precedent of lawlessness makes itself felt in the rules of engagement handed down by commanders to soldiers on the front lines. When he was stationed in Samarra, for example, he said one of his fellow soldiers shot an unarmed man while he walked down the street.

“The problem is that that soldier was not committing a crime as you might call it because the rules of engagement were very clear that no one was supposed to be walking down the street,” Laituri said. “But I have a problem with that. You can’t tell a family to leave everything they know so you can bomb the shit out of their house or their city. So while he definitely has protection under the law, I don’t think that legitimates that type of violence.”

Not Just Numbers

Aaron Hughes, a former member of the Illinois National Guard who spent a year running convoys in Iraq, is getting involved too. “We’re trying to create a space for veterans to speak out and change the rhetoric around the war,” he said. “There are human beings on both sides. There are not just numbers. That’s what missing in our culture.”

Hughes grew up in a basement apartment in Chicago and joined the National Guard when he saw how successfully it provided relief during heavy flooding on the Mississippi River.

But after being sent to Iraq, he came to see the military in a different way. An art student at the University of Illinois at the time he was called up, Hughes went back over the photos he took while deployed in Iraq and altered them in an “attempt to interpret the posture assumed as a soldier/tourist in the surreal space of Iraq.” Hughes’ work was been shown at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

“I think it’s wrong, looking back at it,” he said. “How can you not perceive it as a step away from your humanity? They automatically start isolating you. They tell you your girlfriend or your husband is not going to be there. They tell you not to trust anyone but the military and they really start fostering that as your sole relationship in life.”

Equally Criminal Wars

The veterans also want to stress the similarities between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The exact same units that are getting the exact same training and the exact same orders are getting sent to both Iraq and Afghanistan,” explained Perry O’Brien, a former U.S. Army Medic who became a conscientious objector after his tour in Afghanistan. “What we’re seeing is a lot of similarities between practices in both countries and both are equally criminal.”

O’Brien even witnessed the abuse of dead bodies during his tour. “When a patient would die, we would hear over the PA system an announcement through the clinic saying ‘Who wants to learn how to do a chest tube?’ or ‘Who wants to know what a human heart looks like?,’” he said. “Rather than giving the proper treatment of the dead, the body would become a cadaver for medical practice with no consent from the victim.”

First Winter Soldier

When the first Winter Soldier hearings were held 37 years ago in 1971, the United States had reached a point in the war that was very similar to what’s going on today. Public opinion had moved decidedly against the war. Coalition partners like Australia and New Zealand were withdrawing their troops. The Pentagon Papers had just been released showing a long list of official deception from Washington. And yet, the war continued with President Richard Nixon pushing ahead with an expansion of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, which included the invasion of Cambodia.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War were determined to play a role in changing that. They gathered in Detroit to explain what they had really done when they were deployed overseas serving their countries. They showed, through their first-person testimony that atrocities like the My Lai massacre were not isolated exceptions.

Among those in attendance was 27-year-old Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, who had served on a Swift Boat in Vietnam. Three months after the hearings, Kerry took his case to Congress and spoke before a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats.

Then and Now: Kerry and Mejia

“Many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia,” Kerry told the committee, describing the events of the Winter Soldier gathering. “It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit – the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.”

In one of the most famous antiwar speeches of the era, Kerry concluded: “Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be – and these are his words – ‘the first president to lose a war’. We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War intend to play a similarly historic role.

“We have given a blanket invitation to Congress,” said Camilo Mejia, the Chair of the Board of Iraq Veterans Against the War. ”We hope the Congress will give these hearings the same attention they did during the Vietnam era.”

But action from politicians is only one possible outcome. Mejia says IVAW also hopes Winter Soldier will increase the size and strength of GI Resistance against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This event is going to empower soldiers to follow their conscience whatever that means for them,” said Mejia, who deserted the military after five months in Iraq. “The kinds of things we’re talking about are non-partisan. They’re non-political. They have to do with human being trapped in this atrocity producing situation.”

Breaking Point

Many observers believe the Army is already close to its breaking point. Last week, top Army officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it’s is under serious strain and must reduce the length of combat tours as soon as possible.

Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of Staff said, “The cumulative effects of the last six-plus years at war have left our Army out of balance.” Casey told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that cutting the time soldiers spend in combat is an integral part of reducing the stress on the force. Last year, Senate Republicans and President George W. Bush sabotaged Democratic attempts to ensure troops as much rest time at home as they spent on their most recent tour overseas. Cycling troops through three or four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan has been the only way Bush has been able to maintain a force of over 140,000 US soldiers in Iraq.

For most Americans, “this war has been statistics, it’s been rhetoric,” said Hughes, the former member of the Illinois National Guard. “But for the American soldiers who’ve served there it is personal, and for the Iraqi people who live there, it’s personal. That’s why our testimony is important.”

Streaming Video and Audio

Video and photographic evidence will also be presented, and the Winter Soldier testimony and panels will be broadcast live on nationally Pacifica Radio and satellite television station Free Speech TV Channel 9415. Streaming video on ivaw.org, as well as audio at KPFA.org and warcomeshome.org will enable people to tune in across the world.

The War Comes Home site, which I edit and is associated with the San Francisco Pacifica radio station KPFA, will also feature bios, photos, and videos of the speakers. Online audio clips of the testimonials will be posted as the hearing progresses.

Space at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Washington, DC suburb where the hearings will occur, is limited. Antiwar activists are not being encouraged to show up, but are instead being asked to have listening or viewing parties in their own communities.

March 9, 2008 –

When President Bush vetoed legislation Saturday that would have prohibited the CIA from using physical force in interrogations, he had the support of Sen. John McCain – the most outspoken of any presidential candidate in his opposition to torture.

The Arizona Republican has described his own torture by the North Vietnamese, who captured him in 1967 after his plane was shot down on a bombing run. He spoke out against the near-drowning technique called waterboarding when it was being defended by other Republican candidates and by Vice President Dick Cheney.

And McCain won the signature of a reluctant Bush on 2005 legislation that prohibited military interrogators from using waterboarding and other “cruel, inhumane or degrading” methods.

On Saturday, however, McCain backed Bush’s veto of a bill that would have barred the CIA from employing those same techniques – or any others not authorized by the Army Field Manual – when questioning prisoners.

In a Saturday morning radio address announcing the veto, Bush said the measure would have barred “safe and lawful” interrogation methods that have prevented terrorist attacks.

“This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe,” the president said.

He did not specify those practices, but repeated previous statements that the CIA no longer uses waterboarding.

In congressional testimony last month, however, Justice Department official Stephen Bradbury indicated the administration does not consider waterboarding illegal in all circumstances and reserved the right to resume its use by the CIA.

Campaign aides said Saturday that McCain believes waterboarding violates both U.S. and international law and is forbidden to all federal agencies. Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy director for McCain’s campaign, denied any inconsistency between the senator’s record and his position on the bill.

“It’s not about waterboarding and it’s not about torture,” Scheunemann said.

He said McCain opposed the bill for the same reason he exempted the CIA from his 2005 legislation: his belief that the agency should not be limited to methods spelled out in a public Army manual.

McCain feels “it’s a good thing that (the CIA can use) enhanced interrogation techniques that are not revealed in your newspaper,” Scheunemann said. He declined to identify methods that McCain believes should remain available to the CIA while being off-limits to military interrogators.

The Army Field Manual prohibits the use of force during interrogation. Among the techniques it forbids, in addition to waterboarding, are beatings, burns and electric shock; use of extreme heat; use of dogs; mock executions; forced nudity or sexual acts; hooding or taping a prisoner’s eyes; prolonged sleep deprivation; and denial of needed food, water or medical care.

Democratic backers of the vetoed bill are far short of the two-thirds majority needed to override Bush’s veto.

“This president had the chance to end the torture debate for good,” said Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a sponsor of the legislation. “Yet he chose instead to leave the door open to use torture in the future.”

When the Senate passed the measure by a 51-45 vote on Feb. 13, McCain insisted that his opposition did not signal a retreat from his position on torture.

His 2005 legislation restricting military interrogation methods exempted the CIA but was not intended to “permit the CIA to use unduly coercive techniques,” McCain said in a Senate floor statement.

He said the Bush administration should acknowledge “what is clear in current law,” that waterboarding is illegal and that any U.S. interrogator who uses it risks criminal prosecution. But McCain did not specify any other techniques that should be allowed or prohibited, or explain why Congress should not set uniform standards.

Human-rights lawyers who praised McCain for his stand against torture said they were disappointed by his position on the bill and bewildered by his explanation.

“I remain convinced that he is personally opposed to these techniques,” said New York attorney Scott Horton, a former president of the International League for Human Rights. But as long as the Bush administration is free to apply its view of the law, he said, the veto McCain supported will allow the CIA to use interrogation methods the senator opposes.

“I think Sen. McCain’s faith that the administration will implement the law in the manner he describes is seriously misplaced,” said James Cullen, a New York lawyer, retired brigadier general and former chief judge of the Army Court of Criminal Appeals.

Both of McCain’s potential Democratic rivals, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, were absent from the vote but have said they support the vetoed bill. Neither has made it a campaign issue, however, and neither commented on Bush’s veto.

Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean used the occasion to take a swipe at McCain.

“It is shameful that George Bush and John McCain lack the courage to ban torture,” Dean said in a statement. “And it is reprehensible that McCain changed his position on torture just to win an election.”

March 9, 2008 – The flat roofs across the street were checkered with black shadows. In the dim yellow light of a city sky at night, Sgt. Lorenzo Martinez thought he saw a man move.

He jumped away from the window and pressed his back to the wall.

Maybe, he thought, he was becoming too cautious, too wary. Ever since six of his friends in Alpha Company had been killed in hidden-bomb attacks in Iraq, he had been easily spooked.

His mind raced. Was the door locked? Was there a route of escape? What would he do without a weapon?

With just thumb and forefinger, he slowly separated the blinds and peered out again.

He froze.

Sure enough, it was a sniper.

 

But this was Philadelphia, not Baghdad, and Martinez was in his own bedroom on the second floor of his own house on North Fifth Street.

Somehow, the bald, 44-year-old father of two had transported himself back to Iraq, back to the dusty roads and drab villages where the bomb attacks that his outfit suffered in 2004 and 2005 made it the hardest-hit Pennsylvania National Guard unit since World War II.

This evening in June 2006, he’d had a couple of beers. He and his wife, Maria, had exchanged sharp words. His eyes, flashing in the round mirror on the dresser, had grown wild.

Now he yanked open the drawers and dumped them on the floor. He turned over the mattress and shoved it, with other furniture, against the door.

With the lights out, he stood staring at imagined danger across the way.

He began to dwell on the faces of the men who’d been lost – members of the First Battalion of the 111th Infantry, based at an armory in Northeast Philadelphia.

There was Spec. Gennaro Pellegrini, a police officer who boxed professionally and was known as “Punchy.” Martinez could picture him all worked up, ready for a fight.

There was Sgt. Brahim Jeffcoat, long-faced and lean, who was a Temple University student and father of a 19-month-old girl. His round glasses gave him a studious look.

There was Nathaniel DeTample, a former 130-pound wrestler at Pennsbury High School in Bucks County. At 19, he was a rarity in Alpha: a private first class in the veteran unit. Martinez always thought he looked like a baby.

Martinez could bring to mind all the faces – of those three and of the others, Spec. Kurt Krout, Sgt. Francis Straub, Spec. John Kulick. They had been killed in a pair of bomb blasts three days apart in August 2005. The calamity had been major news across the state.

During his night of distress, Martinez had these men on his mind. “Where,” he wanted to know, “are my friends?”

 

More than two years after coming home, and on the eve of the Iraq war’s fifth anniversary, the 131 survivors of Alpha Company are still trying to sort out the meaning of their sacrifice.

These were citizen-soldiers, many of them family men, drawn from across the Philadelphia region. They are, today, police officers and prison guards, construction workers and drugstore clerks. One is an airport screener, one carries mail, and one digs graves.

The Inquirer set out almost a year ago to track down every Alpha member. About a third have left the Guard, and others have transferred to units as far away as Texas and Arizona. One died in a car accident, one went to prison, one melted into the shadows of Army Special Forces. It took court records to find some. Others, although still in the Guard and in the area, were wary of talking.

The newspaper ultimately reached all but one veteran, and all but five cooperated in reporting on how they were doing.

Alpha never expected to go to war. Its members knew it was possible, but the Pennsylvania Army Guard hadn’t sent units into combat since World War II.

Many of the men had been in the Guard for years without ever venturing much farther than Fort Indiantown Gap on the eastern slopes of the Allegheny Mountains.

Then came 9/11. Then came the Iraq invasion. Alpha was called up in 2004 for almost six months of pre-Iraq training in Texas and Mississippi. The unit then spent nearly 11 months in the dust and danger of northern Iraq, where Alpha endured half a dozen bomb attacks and ambushes in which men were hurt. Besides the six men who were killed, 17 received the Purple Heart for getting wounded in combat.

Amid the relief and joy of coming home in late 2005, the survivors weren’t fully prepared for what, to them, were unexpected difficulties of readjusting to civilian life.

Some emerged from the trial of Iraq stronger and more self-confident, with high hopes for the future.

But others feel derailed and don’t know, yet, how to get back on track. Almost half – 46 percent – have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

For many, the stresses of reentry – reacquainting themselves with wives and girlfriends, returning to work or school – caused levels of anger and anxiety that required psychotherapy and medication, often at a VA hospital or clinic.

About a third were collecting VA disability pensions for PTSD, hearing loss, bad backs and other injuries – some while still serving in the Guard.

Almost every man said he had felt welcomed home. Sometimes strangers, seeing them in uniform, would say thank you. But many in the company saw an America bored with veterans’ stories – too detached or too distressed by events in Iraq to care much about them. And that felt like an insult.

For some men, the path to recovery remains as elusive as the shadowy insurgents Alpha stalked on the plain of ancient Mesopotamia.

Sgt. Allan Dempster of South Philadelphia, rocked by two bomb blasts in September 2005, came back and was medicating himself with alcohol, only to learn that he had traumatic brain injury – which the Pentagon now calls the signature injury of the Iraq war.

Dempster never got a Purple Heart. The Army apparently did not consider his injury to be a combat wound. Yet it haunts him still. His evaluation of his own condition is both plaintive and concise.

“I am changed,” he said.

Some of the men in the all-male unit said they’d almost rather be back in Iraq. Life was simpler there; a man just followed orders. Fifty of them said they’d volunteer to go back, and 10 others said they’d consider it.

All of the veterans, in one way or another, have been marked indelibly by their Iraq experience – some quite literally, as in the case of Sgt. Neill Coulbourn of Phoenixville.

Coulbourn has a tattoo etched on his big right arm that bears the names of six men – six dead men. Underneath, it says: “August 2005.”

For Alpha Company, everything begins with August 2005.

 

The summer temperature at Forward Operating Base Summerall was routinely 110 degrees. The desert compound 110 miles north of Baghdad had been an Iraqi military airfield before the Americans took over. To Sgt. Dan South, it seemed “like a little fort in Indian country.”

This was August 2005. South had been in Iraq for eight months. Several times, the unit was hit with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. As yet, it had suffered no fatalities.

South, 23, joined the Army out of high school in York County. He had been in the Fourth Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, but had gotten out a few months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

He then joined the Guard to get the college benefits it offered and enrolled at Millersville University. As the war rolled into 2004, he began to suspect that he would never make it to graduation. Indeed, he was called up for 18 months. He joined Alpha for training and then flew out with the unit around Thanksgiving 2004.

He never wanted to go to Iraq. It wasn’t that he opposed the war; he didn’t. In fact, he wanted to earn the respect of his father, who had been a Marine at the Vietnam War battle of Khe Sanh. But South had other plans. He wanted to be back in school.

In the summer of 2005, nearly half of all U.S. troops in Iraq were from the Guard and Reserves. Never before had part-time soldiers carried so heavy a share of the load in fighting a war.

As guardsmen, the men of Alpha were typically older than regular Army troops. Fourteen were over 40, and the eldest was 55.

FOB Summerall, as they called their base, was near Beiji, an important crossroads with the largest oil refinery in Iraq. The fortress, an ocean of white trailers, was surrounded by a wall of enormous sandbags, each filled with a ton of soil.

For the 1,000 or so men of Task Force Dragoon, of which Alpha was a part, living at the FOB was only occasionally dangerous. Insurgents might lob in a mortar shell, but they knew U.S. forces would respond with shells twice as big.

By Army standards, the accommodations were comfortable. Troops ate in a cool, spacious dining facility where the menu included Baskin-Robbins ice cream. They bunked, in pairs, in steel, air-conditioned boxes that looked like shipping containers. Each day, soldiers could be seen running in shorts and T-shirts along the dirt-and-stone roads of the compound. The air often was thick with dust.

Many Alpha soldiers had volunteered for Iraq. They had been members of other companies in the battalion and agreed to fill vacant slots on Alpha’s roster.

Still, they complained. They complained about the heat. They complained about the spiders and scorpions. They complained about their leaders. All the carping – which they saw as every soldier’s right – let off steam.

Every day, usually twice a day, they rode dangerous patrols in their armored humvees. Every day, they were in danger from mines planted beneath the roads, from bombs hidden alongside the roads, from suicide bombers driving cars or trucks packed with explosives.

And every day, they counted the time until they could go home.

 

Almost every Alpha soldier was on at least one patrol that came under attack.

Staff Sgt. Anthony Kelly, a platoon sergeant from Drexel Hill, a law-school graduate with a shaved head, kept an e-mail diary in which he wrote: “Imagine rolling down the street at 60 m.p.h in a 12-ton freight car, equipped with a [machine gun] that spits hundreds of pointy metal bricks at a couple of thousand feet per second.

“Now imagine some yokel taking potshots at you . . . or planting a bomb for you to run over, or planting one in a car that he tries to drive into the side of your humvee (killing himself in the process). . . . It feels like driving through a really bad neighborhood.”

Soldiers rarely had a chance to fight back.

“Me, personally, I never saw an insurgent,” said Sgt. Mark Ransom of Royersford, a former Marine who would have preferred a head-to-head fight. “It was a year of just sitting around and waiting to get blown up.”

Over the months, the frequency of attacks waxed and waned. Soldiers would kick open some doors in Beiji and break up an insurgent cell. Bomb attacks would ebb. Then another cell would arise, and attacks would increase. The battle to stay ahead was constant.

In May and June 2005, bomb blasts seemed to come in waves, and several men were seriously hurt. As August arrived, Alpha’s sector seemed quiet.

Capt. Anthony Callum, the company commander, felt confident enough to accept the two weeks of home leave that the Army offered each soldier during his deployment.

Callum, too, had never expected to find himself at war. He had been in the Guard for 18 years. In 1983, he was a Navy sailor off the coast of Beirut when 241 Marines on shore were killed in a terrorist bombing of their barracks. That was the closest Callum had ever come to combat.

“I thought my adventure stories were over,” he said just before leaving for Iraq around Thanksgiving 2004. “Why would they want a 43-year-old man with a family of four?”

Still, he was excited: It was the leadership chance of a lifetime.

Callum was 6,000 miles from Iraq, at home with his wife and two children in the Philadelphia suburb of Chalfont, when bad news arrived from Iraq.

Two Alpha soldiers, Sgt. Jeffcoat, 25, of Philadelphia, and Spec. Krout, 43, of Spinnerstown, Bucks County, had gone with a convoy to the Camp Anaconda supply base to pick up a machine gun that needed repair. This was not an Alpha mission; they merely bummed a ride with other troops.

On their way back, a roadside bomb along the Samarra bypass killed them both.

A shaken Callum started back for Iraq as fast as he could.

He had traveled as far as Germany when the news got worse.

 

The Sunni insurgents appeared intent on picking a fight. They were out in the dark somewhere, shooting rocket-propelled grenades into the air or lobbing them at truck convoys on Highway 1, like some school-yard tease: Come and get me!

Alpha Company, burning from the loss of two of its men, leaped at the challenge.

It was after 11 p.m. on Aug. 9. Alpha’s Second Platoon had been on call since 9 as a quick-reaction force in case anything happened in Task Force Dragoon’s sector of Salahuddin province.

Sixteen men from the Second and Third Squads began to load up. By now, with scores of missions behind them, the Alpha soldiers were confident veterans. They put on their helmets, wrap-around armor vests, knee pads and elbow pads. They checked their ammunition and started the smoky diesel engines of their four armored humvees.

Spec. Kulick 35, a lanky Jenkintown firefighter, had all his personal belongings packed and ready to send home. His roommate, Spec. Robert Jackson, a North Philadelphia barber and divorced father of three, knew Alpha Company wouldn’t be relieved for several months. What was Kulick thinking?

“He was always the kind of guy who liked to be prepared ahead of time,” Jackson recalled. “But I said: ‘Whoa! It’s way too early for that. You’ve got plenty of time.’ “

As the squads waited by their humvees, Lt. Hasan Fersner emerged from the tactical operations center with their orders.

At 26, the rugged, square-chinned Fersner was the platoon leader. His father had been studying Islam when he was born, and had given him his Islamic-sounding name. But Fersner was Christian. He had majored in English lit at Stroudsburg University.

He told the men that Army scouts had spotted insurgent grenade fire in a back-country area near the town of Laqlaq known as Smugglers Road. It ran between Highway 1 and the west bank of the Tigris River.

Alpha was to go out and battle the insurgents, or at least chase them away. Battalion leaders wanted two civilian dog handlers and their dogs to go along.

“If anybody tried to run, we’d have the dogs to sniff them out,” Fersner recalled.

To make room for the dog teams, Kulick, the lanky firefighter, was asked to vacate his spot in the fourth humvee and take a seat in the third.

He did what he was told.

 

The humvees, each topped with a machine gun, departed the FOB by Gate 3. The soldiers rode without lights, using night-vision goggles. But the diesel-powered engines were noisy.

They rumbled past the village of As Saliyah and continued into open desert.

They crossed a railroad overpass and turned south on Highway 1, a four-lane road that prewar invasion planners had code-named Tampa.

They then swung left toward Laqlaq, rolled through the town and stopped on Smugglers Road. Beyond lay the sudden green swath by the Tigris.

Another U.S. force was heading south on Smugglers Road so they could clamp the insurgents in a vise.

Sgt. South, driver of the third vehicle, was spoiling for a fight. The men of Alpha were confident. They had superior weapons and superior training. They believed they could win any head-on fight with the insurgents.

“We were professionals and they were amateurs,” South said. “The whole job of infantry is to engage the enemy.”

The first Alpha humvee made the left turn, north. Then the second followed. Then South’s vehicle moved after the others.

That was the last moment South could remember.

Directly beneath his humvee, a bomb exploded.

Several 155mm artillery rounds, investigators would later say, had been wired together, packing enough power to destroy a heavy tank. The lighter humvee, with South and four other men in it, was obliterated.

An instant later, a second bomb exploded from under the road, but this one missed its target, creating a big crater between the first and second U.S. vehicles.

Then, from a field to the right, the insurgents opened up with gunfire and grenades.

The U.S. plan to squeeze the insurgents had backfired. Instead, Alpha men were the ones who were ambushed.

Spec. Kieran McGurk, a ruddy-faced 21-year-old who had joined the Guard straight out of Upper Darby’s Monsignor Bonner High School, was standing in the turret of the last humvee. The first blast momentarily blinded him.

“It was so bright,” he said. “I just remember feeling the heat off of it. It was incredible.”

When Jackson, at the wheel of the trailing vehicle, had to stomp on the brakes, McGurk was thrown into the side of the turret and broke his wrist.

He fell down into the humvee but got up and started firing the M240 Bravo machine gun into the blackness. It jammed. He then picked up a SAW rifle, a light machine gun, and fired with that.

After the second bomb, there may have been a third, possibly planted in a tree along the left side of the road.

A large section of tree trunk smashed through the bullet-resistant windshield of the second humvee and pinned a wounded Staff Sgt. Timothy Breen to his seat.

The soldiers were confused: Had the road bomb knocked over one of the trees that lined the road? Or had a bomb been planted in the tree itself?

“Something had to cause the tree to become a missile,” said Staff Sgt. David Jock.

Jock, a short, redheaded rooster of a man, was a medic. A former member of the Army’s 82d Airborne Division, he was a paramedic at home in rural Chester County. He already had seen a lot in Iraq. Any time there was blood, the medic had to come running.

In the smoke of battle, there was uncertainty over whether the insurgents had fired rocket-propelled grenades. Jock was sure they had.

He said an RPG flew right past his window. He saw the flame trail. The rocket hit a wall next to the road. “You could feel the heat from it when it went off,” he said.

Jock rode in the lead vehicle with Fersner, the platoon leader. In the dark, as the vehicle turned to go help the others who were hit, it fell into one of the blast holes. The sudden lurch tore ligaments in Jock’s left shoulder.

 

The firefight lasted only a short time.

Fersner was on his radio getting reports from the other humvees. But from Vehicle No. 3, led by Spec. Gennaro Pellegrini, there was silence.

“Pellegrini still hadn’t called in,” Fersner said. “I was trying to contact him.”

Only later, as the firing died down and the insurgents slipped away, did Alpha Company realize the full scale of what had happened.

Vehicle No. 3 was gone.

Pellegrini, 31, a Philadelphia police officer who had been ready to leave the Guard before he got the call to Iraq, was dead.

So was Sgt. Francis Straub Jr., 24, of Philadelphia, who had worked for United Parcel Service.

So was Pfc. Nathaniel DeTample, 19, of Morrisville, one of the youngest in Alpha.

And so was John Kulick. Kulick, who’d packed his bags early; Kulick, who’d given up his seat.

If Kulick had been in the last vehicle, where he usually sat, he would have survived. No one in that vehicle was hurt. Not the dog-handler. Not the dog.

But where was the fifth man in Vehicle No. 3? Where was the driver, Dan South, the sergeant who’d been spoiling for a fight?

“We couldn’t find South,” Jock the medic said.

South, somehow, had been thrown from the destroyed vehicle. The explosion that killed the four men had rocketed him over a stone wall.

“It’s all kind of foggy,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I remember driving down Smugglers Road. The next thing I remember is coming to. I didn’t know where I was.”

South awoke hearing Sgt. Sean Snell calling his name.

“Over here,” South said.

He didn’t yet know what had happened. But he could see an orange glow. It was from the burning humvee.

Snell, then of Philadelphia’s East Falls section, had been delivering pizzas when he was called up for Iraq. In Alpha Company, he was a squad leader.

He leaped over the wall and found South sitting up in shock, with no helmet, no armor vest, no rifle. Other than his uniform, all he had on were knee pads.

Snell checked South all over. Satisfied that he was medically stable, he told South he had to go check on the others. But first he drew a 9mm Glock pistol from his holster and gave it to South.

“If you see anything,” Snell told South, “shoot it.”

 

Back at FOB Summerall, other Alpha soldiers were leaning over the radio at their tactical operations center to catch snatches of the action miles away.

Martinez had been in his hut, winding down for the night, when another soldier ran in and said the patrol had been hit – no one yet knew how bad. Martinez leaped up and ran to the operations center.

He remembers that it was hard to make heads or tails of the radio chatter. They heard that one man had been killed in action. Then they heard two. Or was it three? More? For security reasons, no names were used over the air.

Sgt. Jeremiah Boring, then of Harleysville, recalled: “Everyone from our platoon was running around getting our combat gear ready. . . . We were all planning on going out.”

Boring, who had just turned 23, had joined the Guard three years earlier to earn money for college after his father lost his job at a Ford Motor Co. supplier. Boring had received a Bronze Star in June for pulling wounded men from a burning vehicle.

When Alpha men learned that battalion leaders were sending a different unit to help the men on Smugglers Road, they felt betrayed. They slammed their helmets and cursed at being held back.

“But after a while,” Boring said, “we started to take the measure of what we lost, and there were a whole lot of tears.”

 

Smugglers Road now hosted a convention of “fobbits.” That’s what Alpha infantrymen called soldiers who rarely left the relative safety of the FOB – Forward Operating Base Summerall.

All sorts of officialdom, along with backup combat forces and two helicopters, had descended on the ambush site. It was being treated the way police would handle a crime scene.

One “fobbit,” overcome by the excitement and the still-intense night heat, had to be airlifted to a medical facility.

In all of the hubbub, South somehow had been left behind.

A medic found him sitting in the back of a humvee long after other wounded men had been evacuated. With his painful broken jaw and rib, South had to ride all the way back to the FOB, bouncing along on hard roads, with the other Alpha survivors.

Kelly, the Second Platoon sergeant, was waiting at the battalion aid station when the dirty, exhausted troops returned.

He watched as the men, spent and bedraggled, pulled themselves to their feet. One of them – the medic, Dave Jock – didn’t go inside the steel building. Instead, he disappeared behind the building.

Kelly went to check on him.

As he approached, Jock looked up at the bigger man and burst into sobs.

 

On a flight layover at the airport in Shannon, Ireland, Sgt. Greg Torricellas, a Havertown carpenter, was headed home for two weeks of leave.

He called his fiancee, Anna Marie McConaghy, in Delaware County, to tell her when he’d be coming into the Philadelphia airport.

He said he was feeling blue about Jeffcoat and Krout, whose deaths he had learned about from the Armed Forces Network while en route.

“She said something about Pellegrini,” he remembered. “I said, ‘No, no, Pellegrini’s not dead.’ “

But McConaghy named the Alpha soldiers who’d been killed Aug. 9. She’d heard it on the news in Philadelphia.

So many. Torricellas was dumbstruck. He couldn’t talk. He had to get off the phone.

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group, said he was discouraged, but not surprised, that so few service members are being seen by mental-health specialists. The need to maintain troop strength, he believes, is one reason.  “They’re just not doing it,” he said of military leaders. “They don’t have enough bodies to deploy to the war zone, and there’s not enough clinicians” to do evaluations.  “This was not supposed to happen again,” Sullivan added, making reference to legislation passed after the Gulf War that aimed to ensure that troops’ baseline health was recorded before they deployed. “We were not supposed to send unfit soldiers into the war zone.”

Few Medical Exams Are Ordered, Despite Pressure From Congress. 

March 9, 2008 – The U.S. military continues to order mental health evaluations for only a tiny fraction of deploying combat troops, despite a congressional order to improve screening and evidence that mental illness is a growing problem in the Armed Forces, newly obtained data show.

Fewer than 1 percent of troops sent to war in 2007 received referrals to a mental health specialist as part of the pre-deployment screening process, according to Pentagon data obtained by The Courant.

Those numbers contrast with several military studies that have found mental-health problems in close to 10 percent of service members awaiting deployment. Most recently, Army researchers reported last month that among troops deployed to Afghanistan in late 2006 and early 2007, 9.6 percent had a diagnosis or a drug prescription indicating a mental health problem in the year before they were sent to war.

Under pressure from Congress, the Pentagon in late 2006 pledged to improve the mental-health screening of troops preparing to go to war. Soon afterward referrals to mental health specialists jumped sharply. But even at the peak, in March 2007, only 2.4 percent of service members were sent to a mental-health professional by screeners. And the spike was short-lived. Two months later, referrals had fallen back below 1 percent, and have stayed there ever since.

Although Congress in 1997 ordered the military to conduct an “assessment of mental health” for all deploying troops, that assessment consists of a single question on a health form, asking troops whether they have sought mental health care in the past year. Even for those who answer “yes” to that question, barely 1 in 10 were referred to a mental health professional last year, and 85 percent were ultimately deemed combat-ready.

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group, said he was discouraged, but not surprised, that so few service members are being seen by mental-health specialists. The need to maintain troop strength, he believes, is one reason.

“They’re just not doing it,” he said of military leaders. “They don’t have enough bodies to deploy to the war zone, and there’s not enough clinicians” to do evaluations.

“This was not supposed to happen again,” Sullivan added, making reference to legislation passed after the Gulf War that aimed to ensure that troops’ baseline health was recorded before they deployed. “We were not supposed to send unfit soldiers into the war zone.”

Military health officials, however, said the low referral rate was not an indication that the screening process was flawed.

“Since this is a relatively recent process, and there is no similar procedure in civilian health care, we do not know what the optimal referral rates should be,” said Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army Surgeon General. “In any case, good clinical judgment is always utilized.”

In defending its screening process, the military noted in a report to Congress last year that among deployed troops who indicated past mental health care or received a mental health referral, only 1 percent were later evacuated for psychiatric reasons. Ritchie said last week that psychiatric evacuations from the war zone have remained steady, and low, throughout the war, ranging from about 20 to 40 a month — even as reported mental health problems among deployed troops have grown.

Todd Bowers, director of government affairs for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said evacuations are not a good measure of the quality of pre-deployment screening. “For every one that is evacuated, I guarantee there’s approximately 10 who are dealing with these same type of issues,” said Bowers, who served two tours in Iraq with the Marine Corps. “But because of the stigma … they’re trying to push forward.”

A military report released last week found that repeat deployments are straining soldiers’ mental well-being, with 27.2 percent of noncommissioned officers on third and fourth deployments screening positive for depression, anxiety or acute stress. Bowers said the impact of repeat deployments highlights the need for widespread mental health screening before troops are sent into war.

“I think everyone should sit in front of a mental health professional and be properly screened to make sure they’re all right, to make sure they’re squared away, especially those who have deployed in the past,” he said.

The pre-deployment figures were obtained from a database of questionnaires filled out by the 342,911 troops preparing for deployment in 2007, including troops who were being deployed for the first time and those in the process of being sent back for subsequent tours. The data include the service members’ answers to medical questions and notations on whether they were referred to specialists and whether they were ultimately cleared for deployment. The database was released to The Courant with names and other identifying information redacted.

The data suggest that troops remain reluctant to disclose mental health concerns on the pre-deployment forms, despite efforts by the military to combat the stigma associated with psychiatric care. In 2006, just under 4 percent of troops disclosed that they had sought mental health care in the previous year. That figure rose in 2007 to about 4.7 percent, but is still less than the military’s own estimates of the percentage of troops who have mental health issues.

A recently published Army study, for example, found that about 7 percent of troops deployed to Afghanistan had one or more prescriptions for psychoactive drugs filled in the six months prior to deployment. The drugs included anticonvulsants, antidepressants, sedatives and antipsychotics.

Military officials say that in addition to the questionnaire, they rely on observations from commanders and fellow service members to identify troops who may not be mentally fit for combat. But unless troops disclose past mental health care on the form, professional referrals for further evaluation are extremely rare. In 2007, fewer than one in 400 service members who answered “no” to the mental health question were referred for a professional evaluation.

Though the referral rate remains small, it is an increase over the earliest years of the war, when as few as 0.3 percent of troops were referred for a mental health evaluation. And among troops who disclosed past mental health care, the percent referred to a specialist rose from 6.4 percent during the first three years of the Iraq war, to 9.6 percent over the past six months.

Following a May 2006 Courant series detailing gaps in military mental health care, Congress approved legislation directing the military to establish mental health “minimum standards” for combat deployment. Congress also ordered the military to establish clinical guidelines for determining when service members should be referred for a mental health evaluation before being cleared for deployment.

In response, the Pentagon issued new rules in late 2006 directing that service members with mental health disorders should be sent to war only if they demonstrate a “pattern of stability, without significant symptoms” for at least three months prior to deployment. In addition, troops who are prescribed psychiatric medications less than three months before deploying were not to be deployed to war unless there was evidence the drugs were working and had no significant side effects.

Ritchie last week described the new policy as “much more stringent” than prior rules, though she acknowledged that the number of soldiers excluded from deployment had remained small.

Troops who disclose possible mental health problems on the pre-deployment form are seen by low-level medical providers, who decide if a referral to a mental health professional is warranted. In a report to Congress last year, Dr. S. Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said screeners are well-trained and follow clinical guidelines when making referral decisions. Ritchie said those screeners can generally resolve health-care issues.

The military increased its focus on mental health following a spate of suicides in Iraq in 2003, and praised its suicide-prevention programs when the number of self-inflicted deaths dropped dramatically in 2004. But in 2005, and each year since, the suicide rate has reached the level that alarmed Pentagon officials early in the war. At least 145 service members have killed themselves in the Iraq war.

In response, the military has established programs to improve troop “resiliency” and help service members recognize and address combat stress in their comrades. Military leaders have also attempted to increase the number of behavioral health professionals in the war zone, although the ratio of professionals to troops has dropped steadily as the military struggles to find psychologists and counselors willing to enlist. Last week, top military health officials said they would begin recruiting civilian mental health providers to augment those in uniform.