Veterans for Common Sense

The war in Iraq was too much for Brandon Price to cope with. Now the former Army reservist is fighting new battles here at home.

The 21-year-old Lawrence man is trying to escape the clutches of alcohol and deal with what may be post-traumatic stress disorder. But despite an honorable discharge last year, he can’t immediately get disability benefits and medical help from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

While in Iraq, Price was caught “huffing” from a compressed air container, which can cause someone to be affected by mind-altering chemicals. He didn’t finish his deployment.

And because of that, it could be at least a year before he can get any V.A. medical benefits by applying through organizations such as the American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Price is in a catch-22 situation that shouldn’t be allowed to happen, said Kevin Lucey, a Massachusetts man who has become an advocate for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress. His son, Jeffrey Lucey, committed suicide after serving as a Marine reservist in Iraq.

“If this country truly supports the troops, then there should not be any barrier to when they should be eligible to receive services,” Lucey said in an e-mail to the Journal-World.

In November, Lucey was contacted by Price’s stepmother, Leisa Price, after she read a story in the Journal-World about his visit to Lawrence. Lucey had discussed his son’s plight after watching a play at Kansas University about a soldier suffering from PTSD.

Leisa Price has spent the last several months writing letters, e-mails and making phone calls to anyone she can think of who might help her son. That includes V.A. officials, congressmen, President Bush and an aide to former presidential candidate John Kerry, Democratic senator from Massachusetts.

So far no one has been much help.

“Here we serve up our son on a platter and take great pride in the fact he’s serving our country and fighting in the war overseas,” Leisa Price said. “He had a problem. Because he didn’t fit into the criteria they set up, now he’s lost — totally abandoned. That just gets under my skin.”

Brandon Price said that he knew he made some mistakes and that he was trying to recover from them. But he can’t help feeling bitter.

“I used to think a great deal of the Army,” said Price, who served more than two years in the Army Reserve. “Now it makes me feel like they use you as long as they can, and then they throw you away.”

Casualty of war

Brandon Price was a member of the Army Reserve 917th Corps Support Group based in Belton, Mo. He was an E-4 when he was deployed to Iraq in October 2004. Among the duties he had were plotting convoy routes, going out on convoys, construction and various odd jobs.

He refused to talk publicly about what might have traumatized him in Iraq. He has told his parents that it involved a firefight or some type of battle. But the military hasn’t been able to confirm that such an incident occurred, Leisa Price said. Jeffrey Lucey, however, also described incidents in Iraq that the military couldn’t verify, his father has said.

In April 2005, Brandon Price returned to Lawrence on leave. That was when his parents realized their son had changed drastically. Brandon Price spent most of his time in a hotel room drinking and doing drugs, Leisa Price said. He missed his flight back to Iraq, and the military came looking for him. Army recruiters found him and this time made sure he got on a plane headed back to Iraq, the Prices recalled.

“That was the point when everything just started getting really crazy,” Leisa Price said.

By June 2005, Brandon Price had been sent back to the United States and was undergoing alcohol and drug rehabilitation at Fort Riley. He encountered more problems while he was there. He was still drinking and didn’t feel comfortable participating in group therapy. No individual therapy sessions were offered, and Brandon Price stopped going to the group sessions.

Brandon Price received an honorable medical discharge from the Army in September.

The bottom fell out for Brandon Price in November when he was in Lawrence living in his car and drinking heavily. He ended up at Lawrence Memorial Hospital for self-inflicted mutilation to his arm.

“He was a mess,” Leisa Price said. “I’d never seen him that way before. He was sobbing, hysterical and angry all at once.”

A hospital social worker sent information about Brandon Price to the V.A. medical centers in Leavenworth and Topeka. The word came back that because he didn’t finish his deployment in Iraq he was ineligible for V.A. benefits.

Outside help

Brandon Price hasn’t officially been diagnosed with PTSD. But his personal physician thinks the symptoms are there, according to the Prices.The doctor didn’t return phone messages Friday.Brandon Price is getting treatment at Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center, but it is for anger management.

In the meantime, he is jobless, and the Tricare medical insurance program he has from the military expires at the end of March. Leisa Price worries her son needs much more help than he’s getting — the kind of help only PTSD treatment at a V.A. hospital offers.

Jim Gleisberg, spokesman for Eastern Kansas Health Care, which manages the V.A. hospitals in Leavenworth and Topeka, said he couldn’t talk specifically about individuals receiving or seeking care at the hospitals. But he did confirm that a soldier who fails to complete a deployment because he was sent back to the United States because of problems such as alcoholism, bad morale or similar problems, isn’t immediately eligible for V.A. health programs. He said it would take action by Congress to change that.

Someone who spent time on active duty and received an honorable discharge can apply for V.A. compensation and pension from the American Legion or VFW, “but it could take up to a year, year and a half to get that done,” Gleisberg said.

Brandon Price now lives with his parents. He has done better about avoiding alcohol, he and his parents said. He plays with his younger brothers and sisters, and he helps his father coach a youth wrestling club called the Lawrence Coyotes. He had wrestled in high school.

“Brandon is kind of like the Pied Piper,” his father, Chris Price said. “Especially with the younger kids. They just kind of follow him around.”

Brandon also credits the support he’s received from a church group at Lawrence Free Methodist Church.

“Every day is a stressful one for me,” he said. “I just got to do what I can for myself.”

He is doing much better at staying sober, Leisa Price said.

“His commitment to his own sobriety seems to increase with every passing day,” she said. “It’s just too bad that the military couldn’t provide him with the help he needed, and that our government can’t provide him with continued help and support that he deserves.”

The Army said Wednesday it is reevaluating the way it handled the 2004 friendly fire shooting of a 21-year-old Ohio soldier whose death was initially blamed on a vehicle crash in Iraq.

Among other things, the Army inspector general will try to determine why it took nine months for the family of Army Spc. Jesse Buryj (pronounced BOO-dee) to learn that his death was a result of friendly fire, and why there was confusion over whether Buryj was shot by U.S. or allied Polish forces.

Buryj’s wife and parents were first told that Jesse Buryj died May 5, 2004, in Karbala after a dump truck hurtled through a checkpoint and crashed into the armored vehicle in which he was riding.

The Army still says Buryj, of Canton, Ohio, was killed in a crash, but the official cause of death is listed with the Combat Readiness Center as “friendly fire” by fellow U.S. soldiers.

“That’s how it’s recorded, but that’s not what I was told,” Peggy Buryj, the soldier’s mother, said Wednesday. “We were told it was suspected that it came from the Polish sector.”

The Army started an internal review after The Washington Post reported last month on the family’s struggle to learn details about the incident. The Pentagon told the Post on Tuesday that the Army inspector general “would review the matter to determine if proper policies and procedures were followed,” but wouldn’t elaborate.

Maj. Beth Robbins, an Army spokeswoman, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the internal review would look at “how the incident was investigated and the family notification procedures.”

The procedures followed by crash investigators are under review because it remains unclear who shot Buryj, Robbins said. The response by U.S. and Polish forces to the crash itself is not under review, she said.

“It could not be definitively assigned (to one country’s soldiers or the other’s) and so it’s being categorized as U.S.-on-U.S.,” Robbins said. Polish officials have denied a Polish soldier ever shot toward Buryj’s position in the turret of an armored vehicle.

When asked about the different explanations given to Buryj’s family, Robbins said the Army “has to balance accuracy and timeliness and take very seriously its obligation to notify families with as much as is known as quickly as possible.”

Peggy Buryj has said she sought more details about her son’s death from President Bush during a July 2004 campaign stop. She said she still supports Bush and the war, but now wonders whether Bush knew at that time that there were disparate explanations of her son’s death.

“It’s a shame I had to have The Washington Post write a story before they would cooperate,” she said Wednesday. “Anything they tell me now is nothing they shouldn’t have told me a year ago. Now they want to review certain aspects of this? Yeah; too little, too late.”

DAMASCUS, Syria — A senior Hamas official called on the United States Thursday to remove the militant Islamic group from Washington’s list of terrorist organizations and to open a dialogue without preconditions.

Moussa Abu Marzook, deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, told The Associated Press the U.S. should deal with Hamas “as it is, and later there could be a dialogue…but there should be no preconditions.”

“Hamas is not the only side that wants peace. …All the Palestinians want peace because they are the only people whose rights have been encroached upon and who have been expelled from their lands,” Abu Marzouk said.

Abu Marzouk described as “absolutely unacceptable” Israel’s call for Hamas to start an unconditional dialogue with the Jewish state, saying “Hamas…was chosen by the Palestinian people…this is democracy.”

Hamas won a landslide victory in last month’s Palestinian legislative elections and has dispatched delegations to Arab and other foreign capitals to win support the group’s efforts to form a new government.

Hamas, which has previously carried out a wave of suicide bombings that killed or wounded hundreds of Israeli’s, has not claimed involvement in any suicide attacks since February 2005.

The radical organization has hinted at a readiness for a long-term truce or some other accommodation with the Jewish state, short of recognition.

But the U.S. and the European Union have threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas forms a government without first recognizing Israel and renouncing violence.

Abu Marzouk, who has been in Egypt, Sudan and Qatar, said Hamas found “all-out support” in the three countries, which back “the choice of the Palestinian people and the budget of the Palestinian Authority as it was in the past.” He did not elaborate.

In early 2004, Carl Mortenson left his job building trusses for a Howard Lake, Minn., lumber company and traded in his framing tools for a rifle and body armor.
Called to active duty in the Minnesota Army National Guard, specialist Mortenson spent the next year patrolling roads in northeastern Iraq, making sure the main supply routes were clear of roadside bombs.   
It was the 25-year-old’s first time in a combat zone and, he says, “It was a culture shock, that’s for sure.” Each long day began with the gnawing uncertainty that came with not knowing what waited on the road ahead for Mortenson and his comrades.
And for soldiers like Mortenson who go from the battle line to the unemployment line once they return from active duty, that feeling of uncertainty about the road ahead persists. 
Many come home from places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo worried about how they’ll pay the bills once they return to civilian life.
“I know a lot of them didn’t have a job to come back to,” says Mortenson, who now works in Hutchinson, Minn.  “It sounds like it should be something easy to do. Go get a job. But sometimes it’s not…. And some (soldiers) are a little too proud to admit it, but they need help.”
Whether hunting for a job, looking to change occupations, or researching career and education options, soldiers returning from active duty will find all the help they need at the Veterans Employment Service.
This dedicated staff of veterans serving veterans can help in a number of ways. Located in WorkForce Centers through Minnesota, they use their knowledge of the local community and a variety of resources – including the Minnesota Job Bank and other online services – to help veterans find employment. They also use labor market information and employment projections to help veterans identify occupations that are in demand – both now and in the future. 
The Veterans Transition Assistance Program (TAP) also offers free workshops that teach vets how to market their job skills to employers. Participants learn how to find hidden job opportunities, write effective resumes and cover letter, accentuate job skills in interviews and negotiate a fair wage. Veterans with barriers to employment may also be referred to other community-based organizations.
That kind of help is a welcome relief to soldiers struggling to readjust to civilian life, says Sgt. Ronald Huff, who did a tour in Iraq and now educates employers about returning soldiers.
“It’s a tough transition to make. It’s just overwhelming to be (back home),” said Huff. “It’s even tougher when you don’t have any job prospects beyond Taco John’s.”

Dean Eichelberger is the state’s coordinator of Veteran’s Transition Services through the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. A Vietnam-Era veteran, he has been helping veterans find employment for 28 years. For more information on veterans services, or to register for a TAP workshop, contact him at 320-231-5174, ext. 7520 or by e-mail at Dean.Eichelberger@state.mn.us.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Most employers are “unprepared” for the return of wounded veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and will have difficulty meeting their needs, according to a study released on Wednesday by the Insurance Information Institute (III).

At least 16,600 U.S. soldiers have been wounded, and many more of the 2 million who may serve in those arenas before the conflicts end could be traumatized, according to Robert Hartwig, chief economist for the III and author of the study.

Nearly a third of those troops are reservists and National Guard, who will be going back to their previous jobs. Hartwig said his survey shows that most employers don’t understand their needs or the special benefits they’re entitled to.

“These soldiers put their lives on the line and deserve the utmost respect,” said Hartwig. “But even big companies haven’t thought about their obligations to these people.”

Veterans are entitled to lifelong benefits, including mental health benefits. In addition, there are worker compensation issues for those wounded in battle or accidents, or have been traumatized by being in a war zone.

“There’s evidence that many soldiers will exhibit mental stress from their experience, and it’s important for employers to monitor them, particularly if they’re operating heavy machinery or driving,” said Hartwig.

After World War II and other conflicts, veterans faced discrimination when they returned home. In some cases, “Second Injury Funds” were set up to meet the needs of wounded soldiers whose injuries were aggravated by their stateside jobs.

Those programs have largely disappeared, and been replaced by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). That law prohibits discrimination against anyone with a disability.

Employers should be aware that failure to comply with the ADA can result in stiff fines, Hartwig said. Since 1992 the federal government has awarded more than a half-billion dollars to people who have been discriminated against in violation of the ADA

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO allies would look kindly on new appeals for back-up help to African troops in Sudan’s violent Darfur region, but rule out for now a major deployment of their own, NATO diplomats said on Tuesday.

Fears that Western soldiers would be unwelcome and even counterproductive in Sudan, along with the strain of existing alliance peacekeeping in Afghanistan, mean there is little appetite for rushing into a new NATO ground mission.

“I don’t think anyone wants that,” said one senior alliance diplomat of calls from aid groups and politicians for NATO to send thousands of its own soldiers to bolster an over-stretched, 7,000-strong African Union (AU) force there.

“The focus is more about extending our support role in the transition from an AU to a blue helmet (United Nations) force,” said the diplomat, who requested anonymity. Last year NATO began help in training and transporting AU troops, insisting back then that it did not seek a major presence on the ground.

The U.N. Security Council assigned Secretary-General Kofi Annan this month to draw up options for a UN force to take over from the AU in a renewed bid to end mass killings and rape in a three-year-old war between the government and rebels.

U.N. officials point to the Western armies of NATO as having the equipment, training and transport to make a real difference in Darfur, echoing aid groups who have long urged a NATO role.

Humanitarian groups Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group urged U.S. President George W. Bush in a letter this month to rally NATO allies to offer troops and equipment toward a force numbering as many as 20,000.

Others, including a number of U.S. Democratic senators, have appealed for a NATO contribution of up to a few thousand. But those calls are unlikely to be answered.

AFRICAN SOLUTIONS

While Annan emerged from a meeting with Bush in Washington on Monday confident the United States was committed to helping, he insisted it was too early to discuss any U.S. presence.

One obstacle is that many in the alliance doubt that Sudan would accept Western soldiers on its soil.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stressed at a conference in Munich this month the need for “African solutions for African problems” and said he hoped many of the AU forces would be retained within a future UN operation.

More fundamentally, some NATO allies such as France have doubted whether the alliance should have any role at all in Africa, insisting it cannot be the “gendarme of the world.”

Despite recent visits to NATO headquarters by Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN’s top peacekeeping official, and Jan Pronk, Annan’s representative to Sudan, there has been no formal UN or AU request for it even to consider providing more help.

“As a result it is simply too early for any kind of formal discussion,” said one NATO official. Others said Darfur had not come up in meetings of NATO envoys in Brussels nor featured much at talks among alliance defense ministers in Sicily last week.

Those talks, days after NATO troops in north Afghanistan were attacked by protesters angered by European cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad, highlighted for some a need to bolster existing missions rather than embark on new ones.

“We had great difficulty mobilizing for south Afghanistan,” said one senior diplomat of a plan to extend NATO’s presence with a further 6,000 peacekeepers this year. “Those attacks showed the need to consolidate in the north too,” he added.

Since the AU made a first request for help last April, NATO planes have transported some 4,000 African soldiers into Darfur, trained AU officers and helped with troop rotations.

Diplomats said there was a willingness to extend that help if requested, and possibly help to better arm the AU troops. “There is no serious discussion of anything else,” said one

OP-ED: The Dictator Defense

Bush’s attorney general won’t dare explain the real basis for warrantless spying on Americans: Pure, unbridled executive power.

By David Cole, Salon, Februrary 10, 2006

The congressional inquiry into President Bush’s authorizing the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans without warrants has now been locked away behind closed-door briefings. But if the public Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week is any guide, the Senate and House intelligence committees can expect to get no help from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. He avoided far more questions than he answered in Monday’s hearing. In one sense, Gonzales did a masterly job of defending Bush’s position, by never acknowledging what he knows that position to be: an extraordinary claim to unchecked executive power.

When asked about facts, Gonzales declined to answer, saying that he could not discuss the operational details of the program. (Except, of course, where selectively disclosing details made the program appear narrow and reasonable, in which case he disclosed them.) And when asked about the law, he repeatedly refused to answer any questions about the consequences of the administration’s legal theory by insisting that the questions were hypothetical and did not concern “this program.” It was the perfect Catch-22: The senators couldn’t ask him about the facts or the law. An exasperated Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee’s ranking Democrat, had it right when he remarked after yet another Gonzales dodge: “Of course, I’m sorry, Mr. Attorney General, I forgot you can’t answer any question that might be relevant to this.”

Most revealing was the attorney general’s persistent refusal to address recurring questions on one essential point: Given Bush’s brazen assertion of power, how far does his inherent authority as commander in chief extend? Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked whether this slippery slope would authorize the president to violate the prohibition on covert illegal propagandizing within the United States. The attorney general declined to answer. Sen. Lindsay Graham asked whether the president could override the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, which Congress recently reaffirmed in the McCain Amendment. The attorney general again refused to answer. Sen. Edward Kennedy asked whether the president could open domestic first-class mail; Sen. Charles Schumer asked whether Bush could order warrantless searches of Americans’ homes; and several senators asked about the wiretapping of wholly domestic calls. Each inquiry met with the same essential response: “It’s hard to answer a hypothetical question.”

Of course, as every lawyer knows, being a lawyer means always asking — and answering — hypothetical questions. The only way to assess whether a legal theory makes sense is to test how it would govern a variety of hypothetical scenarios. That is the premise of the Socratic method, employed in every law school in the country. And that is how legal arguments in court are conducted every day. Surely the attorney general, the nation’s top lawyer, knows that “It’s hypothetical” is not a sufficient answer to a legal question.

The reason Gonzales spent so much time dodging and weaving is not that he was unable to answer, but that he knows that a candid answer would have been politically unacceptable to the senators and to the American people. His honest answer to all of the foregoing questions would have been the same: Yes, the president could order warrantless searches of Americans’ homes, the opening of mail, domestic wiretaps and torture — because there are no limits on the president’s powers as commander in chief to engage the enemy.

That answer is not hypothetical — it is found buried in the footnotes of a detailed 42-paged single-spaced legal memorandum provided to Congress in January. In that memo, which sought to defend the legality of the NSA surveillance program, the Justice Department argues that Congress may not in any way impede the president’s executive authority to choose the “means and methods of engaging the enemy.”

That theory knows few if any limits. The Justice Department argues that since electronic surveillance is a “means and method of engaging the enemy,” Congress cannot restrict it, even when it comes to spying on Americans without judicial approval, and even though Congress made such conduct a crime in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In an infamous August 2002 memo on torture, the Justice Department advanced the same theory to argue that the president could order torture despite the existence of a criminal law and a ratified international treaty flatly prohibiting torture under all circumstances. The memo was withdrawn when it became public and jeopardized Gonzales’ confirmation as attorney general, but the new memo that replaced it pointedly did not reject the presidential power asserted in the August 2002 memo.

And President Bush claimed the same power, albeit in arch legalese, when he attached a signing statement to the McCain Amendment in December, stating that he would enforce the law “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president … as Commander in Chief” — or, in other words, consistent with the president’s authority to violate the law whenever he chooses to do so.

Bush has long sought to cast himself as a disciple of Ronald Reagan — but apparently his true guide is Richard Nixon. In defense of the warrantless surveillance of Americans involved in the antiwar movement of the 1970s, Nixon infamously claimed, “If the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Gonzales surely knows that to directly claim Bush can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to violate would resonate disturbingly with Nixon’s statement — so Gonzales avoided doing so by repeatedly contending that, in this instance, the president was acting within existing statutes, not in contravention of them. That argument not only “defies logic and plain English,” as Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania concluded Monday, but it ultimately rests on an assertion of uncheckable executive authority to violate any law deemed by the commander in chief to be in his way.

The argument that the president’s actions are consistent with the law turns on the theory that Congress authorized the unlimited warrantless wiretapping of Americans when it authorized the use of military force against al-Qaida in September 2001. Congress’ authorization to use force, however, says not one word about the wiretapping of Americans, while another statute, titled “Authorization During Time of War,” addresses the issue specifically. This statute dictates that the president may engage in warrantless wiretapping “for a period not to exceed fifteen calendar days following a declaration of war by the Congress.” The legislative history explains that if the president needs more extended authority, he should come to Congress during that 15-day period to request that the law be amended. If Congress was willing to grant the president only 15 days of warrantless wiretapping when it declared war, surely one cannot interpret a mere authorization to use military force — which is far less severe than a declaration of war, and which is entirely silent on the subject of wiretapping — to authorize unlimited warrantless wiretapping.

Attorney General Gonzales argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, involving the detention of an American citizen captured in Afghanistan as an enemy combatant, supports his reading of Congress’ authorization to use military force. There, the court interpreted the authorization as providing sufficient statutory authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants, even though the authorization did not specifically address detention. The court reasoned that detention is a fundamental incident of war, and therefore one could assume that it was part of the authorization. But the difference is that on wiretapping, unlike detention, Congress had already specifically addressed the scope of the authority it would give the president during wartime. Had there been a statute on the books saying that American citizens could be detained only for the first 15 days of a war, and that any further detention would require specific congressional approval, there is no way that in the Hamdi case the Supreme Court would have interpreted the authorization to use military force as giving the president unlimited authority to detain.

Every time Gonzales was challenged on the implausibility of his reading of the authorization to use military force, however, he retreated, characteristically enough, to the doctrine of “constitutional avoidance.” He said that as long as the administration’s interpretation of the statute was fairly possible, it must be adopted to avoid the serious constitutional question that would be raised if one read the statutes’ “plain English” as prohibiting the president’s action. But that claim ultimately returns Gonzales to the question he repeatedly sought to duck: namely, does the president have the authority to violate a criminal statute barring him from conducting warrantless electronic surveillance on Americans within the United States?

In the end, Gonzales’s argument is circular: You need not reach the constitutional question of executive authority to violate the law, because the president acted consistently with the law. But you must find that the president acted consistently with the law because otherwise the law would be an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s powers. At the center of this circle is an astounding assertion of presidential power — the power to choose the “means and methods of engaging the enemy” without being subject to any legal limits imposed by Congress, whether they be limits on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, torture, or spying on Americans.

What the NSA spying debate is ultimately about is this: Do we want to live in a country where the president, like the rest of us, is bound by law, or do we want to live in a country where the president, by invoking the magic words “commander in chief,” can order that criminal laws be violated in secret? One thing is certain: The Bush administration will never want a hearing on that question.