Veterans for Common Sense

March 3, 2008 – Pahrump, Nevada – All Spec. Travis Virgadamo ever wanted was to be a soldier.

But two years after his father signed papers for him to enlist at age 17, things went terribly wrong. Last August, three months after arriving in Iraq, he walked outside his barracks and killed himself with his rifle.

When the news crackled over the Bonecrusher Troop’s radio, 1st Lt. Kyle Graham knew immediately that it was Virgadamo, the troubled soldier who had been on suicide watch since June, when he threatened to kill himself while on patrol.

“I feel like we all had some responsibility to make sure this didn’t happen,” Graham said shortly after the incident. “It’s our responsibility to make sure we take care of our fellow soldiers.”

Virgadamo, whose case has been cited on the Senate floor and in congressional hearings, is a symbol of a growing problem facing the military as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars face repeated and extended deployments.

Last year, 121 soldiers in the Army and active-duty National Guard and Reserves committed suicide, the largest number since the military began keeping records in 1980.

That is more than double the 52 suicides reported in 2001, the year the war in Afghanistan began, according to a recent Pentagon report. The report also cited 2,100 attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries last year — six times the 350 reported in 2002, prior to the start of the Iraq war.

Efforts fail to stunt rise

The numbers are rising despite efforts by the military to beef up its mental-health programs. Faced with growing scrutiny over those programs in Congress and the news media, the Army has sought to improve services for soldiers, spending more than $1 million last year on additional counselors, training and screening, Army officials said.

“We are concerned,” said Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army’s chief psychiatrist. “We are doing a lot already to assist in suicide prevention, but clearly we need to do more.”

It is not uncommon to see an increase in suicides during war, said Coleen Boyle, an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and co-author of a mortality study on Vietnam veterans.

The current suicides, one-quarter of which occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, are due primarily to strained personal relationships exacerbated by repeated deployments that last up to 15 months, Ritchie said. That, coupled with the ready availability of firearms, often can become a deadly combination.

Ritchie said there is no indication that the stress of combat plays a major role in the suicides. But 19-year-old Virgadamo, his relatives said, was distressed over what he had seen in Iraq.

There were signs that he was having trouble long before he deployed. According to his grandmother, Katie O’Brien, Virgadamo had been sent to an anger-management program while in boot camp. She said he also was placed on suicide watch at the Army’s Ft. Stewart in Georgia and prescribed the antidepressant Prozac shortly before he deployed. Last June, officials in Iraq placed him on suicide watch again.

Informed of Virgadamo’s death, “I asked, ‘How many others lost their life with him?'” said O’Brien, 65. “They stood there for a minute and took a deep breath and said, ‘No others. It was self-inflicted.’ I went ballistic, and I screamed, ‘No, no no!'”

Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) said Virgadamo’s death and the growing number of suicides could signal that the Army is overlooking mental-health problems because it is overstretched by repeated deployments.

“This young man should not have gone back to Iraq,” Berkley said.

‘Deployed on Prozac’

While Ritchie would not specifically address Virgadamo’s case, which is under investigation, she said it is not uncommon for soldiers to return to active duty while prescribed mild antidepressants such as Prozac or Paxil. She estimated 5 percent fit in that category.

“If soldiers are treated and their symptoms are in remission and they are not having side effects, they can be deployed on Prozac,” said Ritchie, who compiled the Army’s suicide data.

David Rudd, head of the psychology department at Texas Tech University, said soldiers diagnosed with a psychiatric illness are vulnerable going back into a combat zone.

“Today, most people need medication and therapy,” said Rudd, a former Army psychologist. “My concern is about the availability of therapy in those combat zones.”

Shortly after arriving in Iraq, Virgadamo asked Graham and Sgt. 1st Class Chhay Mao if he could join their platoon. Mao said Virgadamo was a hard worker, but he worried that they would have to expend too much energy keeping an eye on the troubled young man. So Virgadamo transferred to another platoon.

After he threatened to kill himself, he was excused from patrol duty and given a desk job. The trigger bolt was removed from his weapon, making it useless, and he was ordered to undergo counseling.

On Aug. 30 he was cleared for duty and given back the bolt. About 10:30 that night, he shot himself.

The previous month, Virgadamo had been so depressed, his grandmother said, that the Army sent him home on leave for two weeks.

“It was my understanding from him that it was a leave to kind of see if he could be with his family and regroup,” she said. “Maybe it would be beneficial to him, but I don’t think 15 days was long enough.”

O’Brien’s daughter, Jacque Juliano, 46, and her husband, Travis Virgadamo Sr. adopted their son at birth. They divorced when he was 4.

Two days before his death, Virgadamo called his grandmother.

“I said, ‘Are you doing OK?’ He said, ‘Yeah Grandma, just keep praying for me.'”

“I just said, ‘Sweetheart, I’m praying for you and all of you over there.’ I said, ‘It’s going to be OK, Travis. It’s going to be OK, baby.'”

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.

March 10 Update – VCS Fights for Veterans in Federal Court, Our Civil Liberties Remain in Danger, and President Bush Endorses Torture

Dear #Salutation#:

Hearings Progress in California – All week long, VCS Executive Director Paul Sullivan was in San Francisco for hearings on our class action lawsuit. Testimony by VA officials revealed many loopholes and inconsistencies in patients’ rights, especially veterans seeking care for suicide. In a local TV interview, Paul said VA failed to deal with the growing problem of veteran suicides.  Our case goes to trial Apr. 21, 2008 in Federal District Court in San Francisco.

On Monday, during the court hearing, the nation’s foremost authority on post-traumatic stress disorder testified in Federal Court that up to 30 percent of combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to be diagnosed with PTSD and that the Veteran’s Health Administration is not doing enough to help them.

The class action lawsuit forced VA to confirm two important facts: the number of Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran patients continues rising quickly, and the new law mandating five years of free healthcare is an entitlement. VCS encourages veterans to use VA – and we also want VA to be fully ready when veterans arrive for care.

Saving Our Civil Liberties- During a House Judiciary Committee meeting last week, Congressman Alan Clemmons, (R-SC), erroneously claimed that voting is a privilege, not a right. VCS suggests that he read our Constitution again because voting is a right, and efforts to undermine voting rights for anyone are an attack on everyone.

VCS is concerned that some Democrats in the House of Representatives – teetering on the verge of compliance with the spy power demands of the Bush administration – have devised a plan that would give the president everything he has demanded.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told senators yesterday that agents improperly used a type of administrative subpoena to obtain personal data about Americans until internal reforms were enacted last year. Mueller’s comments confirm that our civil liberties were trampled upon during the past six years.

Finally, the President Vetoed Anti-Torture Legislation – President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks. Unfortunately, the President’s disastrous position doesn’t produce results, it undermines our moral authority, and it jeopardizes our combat soldiers.

Remember, VCS stays is largely member-funded, so your generous contributions help us keep up the fight for our veterans, our freedom, and our security!

Thank you,

Libby Creagh
Development Director
Veterans for Common Sense

VCS provides advocacy and publicity for issues related to veterans, national security, and civil liberties. VCS is registered with the IRS as a non-profit 501(c)(3) charity, and donations are tax deductible.

 

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March 7, 2008 – The anti-war base of the Democratic Party is back for the election year with a message to voters worried about the economy: Blame the war in Iraq.

Gearing up for the fifth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq war, on March 19, a new organization comprising the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn.org, and the Center for American Progress is sponsoring vigils across the country to reflect on the fiscal costs of the war. During the coming months, the new coalition, called the Iraq Campaign 2008, will spend $20 million on grassroots organizing, television ads, and YouTube videos aimed at linking the word “recession” to “Iraq” for swing voters.

“We want people to think, in one fell swoop, when they think of Bush and Republicans, to think of Iraq and recession as a hyphenated word,” Brad Woodhouse, the president of a group in the coalition, Americans United for Change, and a former staffer on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an interview yesterday.

The latest push is both old and new for the Democrats. The far left of the party has long complained that defense spending deprives the federal government of money for domestic spending such as national health care insurance and pre-kindergarten education. But for anti-war groups, which have called for a retreat from Iraq on moral and strategic grounds, the emphasis is new.

Last summer, the peace groups’ strategy was to persuade Republicans who were wavering on the war to support time lines for an exit from Iraq. The campaign was focused largely on the Democratic-majority Congress to spur leaders to tie funding for the war to hard-and-fast deadlines for pulling troops out of the war zone.

The new campaign is less a cajole and more a bludgeon in an election year. Last week, for example, an anti-Iraq war group of veterans that is part of the coalition, VoteVets, released an ad featuring veteran Rose Forrest, who asked the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Senator McCain, whether he would commit to 1,000 years of universal health care instead of 1,000 years in Iraq.

Polling in September for Americans United for Change on President Bush’s budget battle with Congress showed that cost was becoming one of the top concerns for Americans about the war, Mr. Woodhouse said. Last month, a poll conducted by the Associated Press and Ipsos found that 68{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Americans ranked pulling out of Iraq as the no. 1 way to fix the economy.

On a conference call with reporters last month, a former North Carolina senator and Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, ticked off a list of economic woes for American voters, from the price of gasoline to the state of the health care system, and concluded: “All these things are [made] much worse by concerns about the war in Iraq.”

One boost to the anti-war push is a new book from a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz. In “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Mr. Stiglitz argues that the Iraq war is not only the proximate cause of the recession, but that its cost is $3 trillion, despite an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office last month that the total additional cost for the war on terrorism in general and in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular is $752 million.

Mr. Stiglitz, who argued in the 1990s that the speedy transition to a free market system from totalitarian communism left many Russians in worse shape than they were under the Soviet empire, testified on February 27 before the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate, and later speculated that the war could end up costing $5 trillion because of additional costs for health care for wounded veterans and the rising price of gasoline.

Dean Baker, a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank, said in an interview this week that the new political campaign to tie the recession to the Iraq war was mistaken. “The facts are so strong: The war was wrongheaded from a national security standpoint, a moral standpoint; Saddam did not attack us; we killed a lot of people in the process. There is also an argument that the war is bad for the economy,” Mr. Baker said. “But I hate to see us try to stretch it by linking it to the recession.”

Mr. Baker said he believes that America is in a recession because of the collapse of the housing bubble.

When pressed, Mr. Woodhouse said he and his coalition are not arguing on policy grounds that the Iraq war caused the recession. “We are saying to a larger measure, if we had not been spending the billions in Iraq, you can bet the stimulus package would have been more robust,” he said.

The director of foreign policy and national security for Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign, Randy Scheunemann, said the new anti-war campaign fails to recognize the costs of leaving Iraq prematurely. “This is an argument that the right-wing or left-wing isolationists would have said, ‘We shouldn’t spend money overseas because we have domestic needs at home.’ Obviously we have domestic needs. Just as obviously, if anyone needed a lesson, we got a lesson on September 11, 2001, that what happens in faraway places directly affects our security,” he said.

Senate Republicans, who just last week welcomed and won an open debate over legislation by Senator Feingold, a Democrat of Wisconsin, to mandate Iraq war funds be limited to fighting Al Qaeda, see the new campaign as a sign of desperation.

“They spent all last summer, tens of millions of dollars, trying to explain why the surge won’t work and why it was a bad idea,” Don Stewart, the spokesman for Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said. “Now you have even some of the harsher critics say it has some success. What they said would happen did not happen. The problem is you can only make inaccurate predictions so many times.”

March 7, 2008 – More than five years of recycling soldiers through Iraq and Afghanistan’s battlefields is creating record levels of mental health problems, as about three in 10 GIs on their third tour admit emotional illnesses, according to an Army study released Thursday.

Soldiers in combat suffering emotional issues and who saw friends killed were twice as likely to abuse civilians by kicking or hitting them, or destroying their property, the study shows. Half of those soldiers admitted unethical conduct compared with a quarter of all other soldiers in combat.

From 15{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 20{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of all soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan show signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), says the study of almost 2,300 soldiers finished last fall. That rate jumps to about 30{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} for soldiers who have been on three or four combat deployments.

The study, conducted by mental health teams from the Army Surgeon General’s Office, is the fifth since the Iraq war began in March 2003.

“Mental health problems are just one of the cascading costs we’re seeing after a five-year war,” said Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., who leads a Senate subcommittee on military personnel. “Psychological wounds affect families, both emotionally and financially, just as much as physical wounds.”

The report underscores concerns raised by military leaders that the current year-long break soldiers receive between successive 12- to 15-month combat deployments is far too short for them to recover. In fact, certain mental illnesses such as PTSD grow more intense as the soldiers prepare to go back into combat, the report shows.

“People aren’t designed to be exposed to the horrors of combat repeatedly. And it wears on them,” Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff, told reporters last month, adding that breaks between must be lengthened. The report also showed the mental health issues for troops in Afghanistan have equaled those for soldiers in Iraq. U.S. forces ousted the Taliban in 2001, and fighting against Afghanistan’s Taliban rebels has increased over the past three years.

For the first time, the study reviewed how much sleep soldiers receive. An average soldier receives 5.6 hours of sleep per night, “too few to maintain optimal performance,” the study says.

The study says overall soldier morale improved in 2007, as the United States added 30,000 more troops to stabilize the Iraqi government. Although more U.S. troops died in 2007 — 899 — than any other year, overall violence dropped in the second half because of the added U.S. troops.

Soldiers are more willing to seek mental health care, the study shows. However, some soldiers in remote parts of Iraq and Afghanistan told the survey they had difficulty accessing such care. Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, a deputy surgeon general, said the Army is trying to get more counselors to remote areas.

One possibility, she said, is deploying civilian mental health workers into combat areas for the first time.

 

March 7, 2008 – Three trillion dollars — a controversial number expected by one prominent economist to be the low side of the real cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — is a statistic.

One troubled veteran of those wars — such as the one who looked out at us from the front page of Monday’s Buffalo News — is a tragedy.

As explained by, among others, News reporter Lou Michel, the facilities and services set up by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs to deal with the financial, physical and emotional needs of returning veterans is already showing signs of breaking down.

That is a far greater problem than the apparent lack of tactical planning for the aftermath of the wars themselves, as historic as those goof-ups were. But it is also a problem that can be faced head-on by the federal government, if the people and their elected officials only will demand it.

Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is out with a controversial new book titled “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” In it, he and his co-author, Harvard University professor Linda Bilmes, calculate that, rather than the $2 billion sticker price American taxpayers were promised before the invasion of Iraq five years ago this month, the actual foreseeable cost stands to be at least $3 trillion, and will likely reach as high as $7 trillion. (Little is said about the administration’s side promise that the war would pay for itself, with still dreamed-of oil revenues from a free and peaceful Iraq covering all bets.)

One key reason for the difference, beyond the fact that the wars are lasting years longer than their planners and perhaps even their opponents imagined, is that nobody figured in the ongoing costs of caring for and, in many cases, permanently supporting disabled veterans of those and other conflicts associated with the Wide World of War.

Veterans Affairs managers in Western New York, and across the nation, are said to be staffing up for the expected onslaught of broken warriors — otherwise known as our friends, neighbors and relatives. But even with significantly larger budgets and increasing staff, veterans in need of both physical care and mental therapy are told to wait, and wait, and wait some more for everything from brain scans to psychological counseling.

Those who don’t get what they need don’t just suffer in silence. They cause pain to their families, burn through their savings, down large amounts of drugs — prescribed or otherwise — and, all too often, die, of neglect or by their own hand.

Winning the war in Iraq depends on many things beyond the control of the American people and their government, including such factors as the moods of rival militia leaders and the presidents of neighboring theocracies.

Winning the peace on the home front is our responsibility alone. If we fail, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

March 8, 2008 – President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks.

“The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror,” Bush said in his weekly radio address taped for broadcast Saturday. “So today I vetoed it,” Bush said. The bill provides guidelines for intelligence activities for the year and includes the interrogation requirement. It passed the House in December and the Senate last month.

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

Supporters of the legislation say it would preserve the United States’ ability to collect critical intelligence and raise country’s moral standing abroad.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress would work to override Bush’s veto next week. “In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our moral authority,” said Pelosi, D-Calif.

But based on the margin of passage in each chamber, it would be difficult for the Democratic-controlled Congress to turn back the veto. It takes a two-thirds majority, and the House vote was 222-199 and the Senate’s was 51-45.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Bush often warns against ignoring the advice of U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq. Yet the president has rejected the Army Field Manual, which recognizes that harsh interrogation tactics elicit unreliable information, said Reid, D-Nev.

“Democrats will continue working to reverse the damage President Bush has caused to our standing in the world,” Reid said.

Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, said Bush “will go down in history as the torture president” for defying Congress and allowing the CIA to use interrogation techniques “that any reasonable observer would call torture.”

“The Bush administration continues to insist that CIA and other nonmilitary interrogators are not bound by the military rules and has reportedly given CIA interrogators the green light to use a range of so-called ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and exposure to extreme cold,” Daskal said. “Although waterboarding is not currently approved for use by the CIA, Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to take it off the table for the future.”

The intelligence bill would limit CIA interrogators to the 19 techniques allowed for use by military questioners. The Army field manual in 2006 banned using methods such as waterboarding or sensory deprivation on uncooperative prisoners.

Bush said the CIA must retain use of “specialized interrogation procedures” that the military does not need. The military methods are designed for questioning “lawful combatants captured on the battlefield,” while intelligence professionals are dealing with “hardened terrorists” who have been trained to resist the techniques in the Army manual, the president said.

“We created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al-Qaida operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland,” Bush said. “If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior al-Qaida terrorists, and that could cost American lives.”

The 19 interrogation techniques include the “good cop/bad cop” routine; making prisoners think they are in another country’s custody; and separating a prisoner from others for up to 30 days.

Among the techniques the field manual prohibits are:

—hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes.

—stripping prisoners naked.

—forcing prisoners to perform or mimic sexual acts.

—beating, burning or physically hurting them in other ways.

—subjecting prisoners to hypothermia or mock executions.

It does not allow food, water and medical treatment to be withheld. Dogs may not be used in any aspect of interrogation.

But waterboarding is the most high-profile and contentious method in question.

It involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition and is condemned by nations around the world and human rights organizations as torture.

The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 includes a provision barring cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment for all detainees, including CIA prisoners, in U.S. custody. Many people believe that covers waterboarding.

There are concerns that the use of waterboarding would undermine the U.S. human rights efforts overseas and could place Americans at greater risk of being tortured when captured.

The military specifically prohibited waterboarding in 2006. The CIA also prohibited the practice in 2006 and says it has not been used since three prisoners encountered it in 2003.

But the administration has refused to rule definitively on whether it is torture. Bush has said many times that his administration does not torture.

The White House says waterboarding remains among the interrogation methods potentially available to the CIA.

“Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists,” Bush said.

March 7, 2008 – The Pentagon is slated to release a suspected toxicant in Crystal City, Virginia this week, ostensibly to test air sensors.

The operation is just the latest example of the Defense Department´s long history of using service members and civilians as human test subjects, often without their consent or awareness.

Gas chambers in Maryland

Wray C. Forrest learned about the US military´s human-testing program the hard way. In 1973, the Army sent then 23-year-old Forrest to its Edgewood Arsenal chemical-research center in Maryland, promising patriotic service and a four-day work week.

Instead, he became one of roughly 6,720 soldiers used as Edgewood Arsenal test subjects between 1950-1975.

Forrest was given a new identity at Edgewood: Research Subject #6692. He says, “That was the number assigned to me … similar to the numbers assigned to the Jews in the concentration/death camps in Germany during WWII.”

The US military tested heart drugs on Forrest, which he says were administered by IV and various types of injections. Forrest was also exposed to “contaminated drinking water, food, and various ground contaminates that permeate Edgewood Arsenal. BZ [a chemical incapacitating agent], napalm, mustard agents, and any number of other contaminates in the ground and drinking water there, from previous testing done there by the military.”

A total of 254 different chemicals were researched on soldiers at Edgewood, and Forrest notes, “We were never informed as to exactly what we were being given. We also did not sign any informed consent prior to the testing. This was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention rules for the use of humans in chemical and drug experiments/research.”

The Edgewood Arsenal facility played a role in WWII human subject testing as well. Roughly 4,000 US soldiers were used as human guinea pigs in chemical research which often took place in gas chambers.

US Navy member Nat Schnurman, for example, was sent to an Edgewood gas chamber six times one week in 1942. As The Detroit Free Press reported: “On his last visit, a blend of mustard gas and lewisite was piped in. Schnurman was overcome with toxins, vomited into his mask and begged for release. The request was denied. His next memory is of coming to on a snowbank outside the chamber.”

A pattern of abuse and neglect

If the sagas of Forrest and Schnurman were isolated, they would represent a disgraceful yet closed chapter of US military history. Unfortunately, the Pentagon´s human-testing program has extended far beyond Edgewood Arsenal.

Human Experimentation , a 1994 report from the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), lays out the Defense Department´s sordid history in detail.

Between 1949 and 1969, for example, the Army sprayed bacterial tracers or simulants on unsuspecting populations in hundreds of biological warfare tests. According to the GAO: “Some of the tests involved spraying large areas, such as the cities of St. Louis and San Francisco, and others involved spraying more focused areas, such as the New York City subway system and Washington National Airport.”

No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.

Between 1952-1975, the CIA tested LSD and other psychochemical agents on “an undetermined number of people without their knowledge or consent.”

No coherent attempt was made to offer follow-up information or care.

Over 235 atmospheric nuclear tests and experiments were conducted on roughly 210,000 personnel affiliated to the US Defense Department from 1945-1962. A further 199,000 “were exposed to radiation through work.”

No coherent attempt was made to warn those affected or to offer follow-up medical care.

One of the best known examples of US military human-testing is Project 112, whereby the Pentagon used biological/chemical agents on 5,842 service members in secret trials conducted over a ten-year period (1962-73).

Project 112, and the affiliated Project SHAD, tested everything from Sarin nerve agent to an E. coli simulant aboard Navy ships and in land trials. Tests were conducted in six states (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah) Canada and Britain and often without the consent or awareness of those exposed.

Only in 2003, after crucial documents slowly became declassified, did the veterans´ health complaints start to be acknowledged. By then, over 750 Project 112 veterans were already dead.

The Veterans´ Administration still had not notified more than 40{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of those used in Project 112/SHAD human testing by 2004. The Defense Department was blamed for foot-dragging in identifying the potentially affected service members and civilians.

The battle to receive care

Wray Forrest knows firsthand about fighting official neglect and denial over human-testing. When his health started to deteriorate, Forrest was forbidden to get medical support: “We could not tell what we were exposed to due to the classification of the project, nor could we seek medical help due to the alleged non-disclosure papers we signed.”

Forrest was discharged from the military in 1982 for health reasons (deemed “unsuitable for service”). He was still unable to talk to anyone about Edgewood Arsenal, so kept his “agreed silence, and took what the military dished out calling me, UNSUITABLE.”

In July 2006, the Veterans´ Administration (VA) released a document on health care eligibility listing Edgewood Arsenal survivors as a Category 6 disability rating, which meant that affected veterans would be eligible for clinical evaluation and “necessary treatment of conditions related to exposure without copays.” But when Forrest called the VA to seek help, he was told that the publication was an error and in fact Edgewood Arsenal veterans have no VA health care eligibility.

“How sweet, they have killed us, buried us, and now they want us to go away,” he concluded.

Forrest is not the only veteran subjected to human-testing who has fought to receive care. Even in well-documented and recent cases, compensation is elusive.

In December 2007, for example, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the widows of five veterans who died after being enrolled in fraudulent drug studies at the Stratton VA Medical Center in Albany, NY.

Stratton had been plagued by allegations of research violations from the early 1990s. Then in 1999, the facility hired Paul Kornak to be its Research Coordinator, despite the fact that Kornak had forged his credentials, falsified his college transcript and been arrested in Pennsylvania years earlier for related fraud. Apparently, background checks for health professionals were minimal at Stratton VA Medical Center.

From 1999-2003, Kornak falsified veterans´ medical records at Stratton, inappropriately enrolling them in studies for drug marketability. In 2001, for example, Stratton tested a powerful three-drug chemotherapy combination on Carl M. Steubing, a 78-year-old Battle of the Bulge veteran, despite his previous bout with cancer and poor kidney function.

Steubing died in early 2002. His widow still wonders if the fraudulent human-test studies at Stratton cost her husband his life.

In court, the five widows´ lawyer argued that Stratton “committed every kind of research ethics violation imaginable,” adding “when you use individuals, humans, as guinea pigs, you do them harm.”

The US government responded by saying there was no way to prove the veterans had experienced pain or died early as a result of the corrupt drug experiments.

Case closed.

Open-air testing

If veterans with solid proof of having been used as test subjects cannot receive compensation, the possibilities are miniscule for service members and civilians used in trials without their consent or awareness.

Open-air testing of chemical and biological (CB) agents is one such case.

After 6,000 sheep died following the apparent release of a nerve agent at an Army facility in Utah in 1969, open-air testing was officially said to have ended in the US.

But the Defense Department´s April 2007 report to Congress on “Chemical and Biological Defense” strongly suggests an imminent resumption.

According to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, at least three passages of the Pentagon´s 2007 report indicate a planned continuance of open-air testing.

While one section of the document, for example, mentions the use of “live-CB-agent full system test chambers,” another passage (page 67) reads:

“More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.”

As Dr. Boyle notes, both “test chambers” and “field testing” are mentioned in the report.

In addition, the passage says that improvements in the T&E (testing and evaluation) infrastructure and “better simulated representation of threats” are going to be carried out using “full systems” rather than simulants.

Dr. Boyle says, “It is clear they will be engaging in ´Field Trials´ (not in test chambers) of ´full systems,´ which means ´live CB agents,´ not simulants.”

Another troublesome passage from the Defense Department´s April 2007 report (page 65) is:

“Current T&E shortfalls lie in the full systems and platform test chambers and supporting instrumentation and fixtures. These test fixtures must be able to introduce and adequately control live CB agent challenges and provide a range of environmental and challenge conditions to simulate evolving threats, while performing end-to-end systems operations of CBD equipment.”

Dr. Boyle points out that the passage says “full systems” rather than “simulants,” and it makes a distinction between “test fixtures” and “test chambers.” He adds that talking about “´a range of environmental and challenge conditions´ in a test chamber” is nonsensical. “A test chamber does not have a ´range of environmental and challenge conditions.´”

“What they are talking about here,” Dr. Boyle concludes, “is testing live CB (chemical and biological) agents in Field Tests – open-air testing, where there will be a ´range of environmental and challenge conditions´ to confront, test and verify.”

Gassing Crystal City

In May 2007, just one month after the Defense Department´s controversial report to Congress, the Pentagon quietly announced it would release “a dust simulating a biological attack in the Pentagon South Parking Lot.” The stated purpose was to study “the subsequent clean-up of roadways, people and equipment after the release.”

The announcement cryptically described the “dust” as containing “a harmless inert bacterium found in soil, water and air.”

Kirt P. Love, Director of the Desert Storm Battle Registry (DSBR), a Gulf War veterans´ group dealing with the exposures of the 1991 conflict, repeatedly phoned the Pentagon to clarify exactly what “dust” would be used in the imminent open-air test.

He soon found, however, that “the departments involved were not communicating with each other … only the people who handled the agent knew anything.”

Love described the situation as “disquieting” and said, “I thought this was very unfair to the Pentagon Police and other innocent bystanders who didn’t need to be kept in the dark about this. How could they conduct an open air test of a microbe and not tell people what it was up front?”

Eventually, Love´s phone calls paid off. A Pentagon representative told him the substance to be tested was Bacillus Subtilis, which intriguingly, was also used during the US military´s Project SHAD human testing in the 1960s-70s.

The Pentagon´s announcement was correct in saying that Bacillus Subtilis is found in soil. It failed to mention, however, that the bacterium has been linked to pulmonary disease and irreversible lung damage.

The Defense Department quietly carried out its Bacillus Subtilis release in early June 2007. A Pentagon spokesperson would not confirm if the roughly 50 test subjects and numerous bystanders had been informed about the possible health risks.

And the open air tests continue.

In the next few days, the Pentagon is slated to release perfluorocarbon tracers and sulfur hexafluoride in Crystal City, Virginia.

Dubbed “Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study,” the operation will test the effectiveness of the city´s chemical sensors, and according to The Examiner newspaper, “the data will help the Pentagon and Arlington shape their lockdown policies for chemical and biological attacks or accidents.” Lockdown policies.

According to a Pentagon press release from late February 2008, the study “will involve releasing a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and inert tracer gas that poses no health or safety hazards to people or the environment.”

But it´s not quite that simple. Sulfur hexafluoride is a suspected respiratory toxicant ; as such, exposure in certain amounts may be harmful for those with asthma, emphysema and other respiratory issues. It also is a suspected neurotoxicant, with potential untold consequences for the nervous systems of those vulnerable.

That part is left out of the Pentagon´s press release.

Crystal City is one of the “urban villages” of Arlington County, Virginia. It features upscale offices and residential areas – in other words a lot of civilians. You would think that if the Pentagon is releasing suspected toxicants into such a compressed urban area there would be more warning about potential health risks.

Yet repeated phone calls to the Pentagon yesterday yielded no results. The Force Protection Agency seemed unaware of the upcoming test and the press office was of no help either. No one could – or would – answer basic questions such as how many people could be exposed in the open-air test, if any attempt had been made to brief citizens on potential health risks or if there would be any medical follow-up provided.

Perfectly legal

The Pentagon´s laissez faire approach to these open-air tests raises questions about the possibilities for further testing on the general US population.

There is a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws). Specifically, Section 1520a lists the following cases in which the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans if informed consent has been obtained:

(1) Any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.

(2) Any purpose that is directly related to protection against toxic chemicals or biological weapons and agents.

(3) Any law enforcement purpose, including any purpose related to riot control.

In other words, there are many circumstances under which the Secretary of Defense can test chemical or biological agents on human beings, but at least informed consent has to be obtained in advance.

Or does it. Section 1515, another part of Chapter 32, is entitled “Suspension; Presidential authorization” and says:

After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President.

Essentially, if the President or Congress decides that we are at war then the Secretary of Defense does not need anybody´s consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual “war on terror.”

Ominously, in June 2007, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell gained White House approval to update a 1981 presidential order on how US spy agencies operate. Potentially up for review in the highly secretive overhaul, referred to as Order 12333, is the topic of human experimentation.

A surge in US WMD spending

The Bush administration has quietly channeled tens of billions of dollars into chemical and biological weapons. Bush´s 2007 budget, for example, earmarked almost $2 billion for biodefense research and development via the National Institutes of Health alone.

Research aims are often dubious. In October 2005, for example, US scientists resurrected the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which had killed almost 50 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox) just to try stopping the virus once it has been created.

Since the R&D is top secret and oversight limited, the public is rarely aware of escalating dangers. As of August 2007, for example, biological weapons laboratories across the country had reported 36 lost shipments and accidents for that year, almost double the number for all of 2004.

In addition to challenging international non-proliferation agreements and risking a global arms race, the Bush administration´s surge in chemical and biological weapons spending raises questions over what deadly weapons may have been tested on populations abroad. And what may be tested domestically, with or without the public´s consent.

For Wray Forrest, the battle for government accountability continues: “On September 29, 2006, Congress passed a bill that will inform veterans exactly what they were exposed to, within the next two or three years. I can just see it now: They visit my grave site and post it on my tomb stone, in order to inform me of what I was exposed to and just what exposure caused me to die.”

March 7, 2008 – As the war in Iraq slides into its sixth year a few days from now, a cottage industry has grown up to determine how much the conflict has actually cost.

Last week, Senate Democrats carried out a feckless debate over still another bill to bring the troops home. This time, they said the nation’s troubled economy left Bush no choice but to stop spending billions in Iraq. The proposal died quickly under the threat of another veto.

This week, two economists, from Harvard and Columbia, are publishing a book titled “The Three-Trillion Dollar War.” That is near the upper end of the estimates of the war’s cost. The Congressional Budget Office says that number is bloated.

At the low end of the scale, the Department of Defense says it has spent $396 billion as of November 2007. Last month, the Congressional Research Service noted that the Pentagon hadn’t counted more than $200 billion in approved but unspent funds, or money spent by other agencies.

How much has the Bush administration spent on the war? What will it cost in total if the next president begins bringing the troops home shortly after taking office next year? It all depends on what you count. The two authors blame the war, in part, for the rise in oil prices and add that to the cost. Some analysts add the lost dollars that might have flowed into the economy, had all of that money been spent in the United States. (In truth, much of the money spent for equipment is spent in the United States.)

Without larding on rank speculation, here are numbers that seem undebatable. Nonpartisan congressional analysts estimate that Iraq war’s direct cost will reach $1.2 trillion if the next president begins rapidly withdrawing troops, leaving only 30,000 in Iraq two years from now. Here’s what needs to be added:

Almost every dollar spent on the war is borrowed. The Congressional Budget office says, under the quick withdrawal scenario, interest payments through 2017 will total $590 billion.

“Resetting” the military — replacing worn and damaged equipment and rebuilding the force — is an unavoidable expense. Last year, the Pentagon asked for $46 billion in “reset” funds. Most analysts believe the costs will reach at least $100 billion more.

Finally comes the cost of veterans’ health care in the months and years ahead. So far at least 60,000 Iraq war veterans have been wounded or received mental health care. Each totally disabled veteran is eligible to receive $1.4 million in lifetime disability payments if he lives an additional 50 years. Estimates of the total cost range from $200 billion to $650 billion, a number put out by a group of physicians a few weeks ago. Let’s go with the low number.

With all of that, the Iraq war will cost at least $2.1 trillion — and probably much more.

Billion, trillion … zillion. At these levels, a fictitious number seems to hold almost as much meaning as a real one. So writers and analysts try to make sense of the sums by showing what all that money could buy. One blogger noted that “you could buy 480 million Ferrari 612s,” at $268,000 a copy. That was a year ago, when the war-cost estimates costs totaled only about $1.2 trillion.

The two authors, Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia and Linda Bilmes of Harvard, note that, for less than the cost of the war, the nation could balance the Social Security system for at least 75 years.

Here’s another way to spend $2.1 trillion over 10 years: Eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax. Provide preschool for every child in the United States. Give every schoolteacher in the nation a $20,000 raise. Double the research budgets for cancer, heart disease and stroke.

In the end, however, all of this number gaming is meaningless. To fight the war, Bush has not taken money intended for other purposes. He is spending money the nation doesn’t have. Almost every dollar spent on the war is another dollar added to the national debt.

Some in the Bush administration argue that war spending stimulates the economy, giving some balance to the equation. But if that were so, why did administration find it necessary to enact a $168 billion stimulus plan a few weeks ago — even as it spends $15 billion a month on the war?

As Lawrence Lindsey, Bush’s former chief economic adviser, puts it: “Taking resources that could be used to build homes, manufacture appliances, or invent and develop new technologies and using them instead to make things that get blown up is not good for an economy.”