Veterans for Common Sense

For Soldiers’ Farewell, a Crucial Drill — Burial Teams for War Dead Often Trained on the Fly

By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 16, 2005; A01

CORAOPOLIS, Pa. — The pallbearers held the coffin at a perilous tilt. Their fitful marching was nowhere near “left-right-left” synchronicity. Even the flag draped over the coffin was rumpled at the corners.

“Hold it. Hold it!” Army Chief Warrant Officer Paul Dziegielewski said, shaking his head.

“Once you get the coffin up, keep it straight and level,” he said, slashing a line through the air with his hand. The flag has to be draped smoothly, he chided, unfurling it at the sides.

“You have to remember, everyone is going to be watching you. . . . Let’s try again.”

The Army Reserve’s 99th Regional Readiness Command relies on its assistants and supply clerks to fill out burial teams. (By John Heller For The Washington Post)

In less than 48 hours, the volunteers from the Army Reserve’s 99th Regional Readiness Command would be participating in a funeral, and it was immediately clear to Dziegielewski that the group of soldiers needed all the practice it could get.

The 99th, based in this town just west of Pittsburgh, doesn’t have a full burial team. Until the Iraq war, it didn’t need one. Now, it can be called on to perform at the funerals of soldiers from reserve units in Maryland, Virginia, the District, Delaware, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

That means that Dziegielewski, the command’s casualty officer, relies on volunteers he fondly calls “pencil pushers” — the administrative assistants and supply clerks whose usual job is to get other soldiers ready to deploy.

For all that the novices learn in his crash courses, often given just a day or two before a funeral, Dziegielewski acknowledged that “we are not the Old Guard,” the soldiers who make funerals at Arlington National Cemetery legendary.

Only about 150 of those killed in Iraq and about 20 killed in Afghanistan have been buried at Arlington. Many more are buried across the country in cemeteries closer to home. And with the deaths of World War II veterans, the demand for burial teams is such that some have resorted to using a bugle outfitted with a device that plays a recorded version of taps.

For this funeral, Dziegielewski had a real bugler borrowed from the Pennsylvania National Guard. It was everyone else he was worried about.

He was asking a lot of this hastily assembled band of ordinary soldiers. They not only would be representing the Army and the country, but also playing a part in a centuries-long tradition of nations honoring their war dead.

They had to be perfect.

“It’s rough when you start out,” Dziegielewski told the group before training began. “There’s a lot of pressure. You cannot make one mistake.”

The Firing Party

As Dziegielewski struggled to get the pallbearers in sync, Sgt. 1st Class Don Hammons was having just as hard a time with the firing party. At “Ready,” their feet swiveled at wildly different paces. “Aim” brought their rifle barrels out in a disjointed wave. “Fire” triggered a salute so scattered it sounded like popcorn popping.

“It’s going to take some repetition,” Hammons said. “We have to do this as one, in sync.”

All afternoon, he walked them through the movements. When they couldn’t get it right on their own, he set their arms and legs in place with his own hands, as if molding pieces of clay. Count out the steps in your mind, 1-2-3-4-5, he urged. And: “Use your peripheral vision to key off the people next to you so you can keep tempo with them.”

Hammons knows the consequences of war — and the importance of honoring its fatalities. He served with the elite 101st Airborne during the Persian Gulf War. A father of five boys, he is headed to Iraq this fall, another reason he wanted his soldiers to get the steps right.

“I would want my family to get the same treatment,” he said.

After a few wobbly practice runs, he grew impatient. “Stop,” he said. “Watch.” He tackled the routine with the controlled beauty of a dancer, tight and sharp: swivel right, back step, barrel up, aim, fire, cock the rifle, begin again.

“Like that,” he said after he finished. “Like that, but faster.”

Yet no matter how often the group went through its moves, Sgt. Sarah Williamson was almost always a half-step behind — late in swiveling, late in bringing up her rifle, late in getting off the shot. Sometimes she never got it off at all.

Slight and soft-spoken, she joined the Army 2 1/2 years ago not just for the benefits that would make being a single mother of a 5-year-old boy easier, but because “I wanted to do something with my life.”

By the second day of training, the pallbearers were so good that Dziegielewski let them quit at lunch. The firing party was coming along, too.

Williamson, though, was still lagging late into the day, and time was running out. Then she committed one of the worst mistakes for a soldier: Her rifle went off accidentally. Everyone around her jumped at the loud, unexpected BANG. It was just a blank, but Hammons scowled.

“That’s how people get killed,” he groused as they continued practicing into the hot afternoon.

No More Rehearsal

On the day of the funeral in Erie, Pa., the pallbearers stood expressionless in a row against a wall of the funeral home. The training had been so focused on getting it all right that Staff Sgt. Victor M. Cortes III, the man they had come to bury, had seemed an abstraction.

Suddenly, here were his family and friends, real and crying. The soldiers wondered who was who as they shuffled in and out of the viewing. Was the sobbing woman his mother? The two damp-eyed men his brothers? Could the woman who had slipped out to the hallway to change a baby’s diaper be the girlfriend?

They knew only what little Dziegielewski had told them about Cortes as they trained. He was 29, an Army mechanic from Erie. He died of “noncombat-related injuries” in Baghdad, a gunshot wound to the head, and the incident was under investigation. It didn’t matter how he died, Dziegielewski added quickly as he saw the soldiers’ baffled glances. Cortes had been a soldier serving his country, and they were going to honor him.

Finally, after everyone left, the pallbearers entered the viewing room. Before carrying the coffin out, they huddled around the snapshots next to it. Here was Cortes as a baby, as an adolescent mugging for the camera with his brothers, then grown and in uniform, stern and stolid. Here he was as a father holding the infant they had seen in the hallway.

“That was his baby,” one of the soldiers gasped.

The family was at the cemetery when the pallbearers arrived, marching the coffin toward the fresh grave. They looked majestic in their uniforms, clicking in step, the flag draped softly at the sides. They folded it into neat origami creases and marched off just as they had practiced.

Then it was the firing party’s turn.

“Detail, present arms!” came the command. At “Ready!” the soldiers began their five-step dance, fluidly and together. Williamson swiftly pointed her rifle out at “Aim!” Then at “Fire!” — BANG — she got the first shot off clean. BANG, came the second, still in cadence as the shots echoed across the cemetery, over tombstones and hedgerows in the late-morning humidity. BANG, came Williamson’s third, right on time.

The soldiers saluted during taps. Then the family was whisked away in a caravan of limousines. As the team relaxed for the first time all day, emotion seeped onto their faces. Master Sgt. Rhonda Beck’s blue eyes were red and damp, and she complained that these funerals always leave her with a throat made sore by choking down tears.

Williamson, though, couldn’t help but smile. After all the worry, she had nailed it. “It just came to me,” she said. “I didn’t even have to think about it.”

Dziegielewski was relieved but less enthusiastic. Their performance was dignified, workmanlike, perhaps as good as they could get with two days of training. But it was not perfect. There was a bit of a delay in the firing party’s second volley, he said, causing a slight crackle instead of a unified pop.

Still, he was satisfied and congratulated the soldiers for doing their duty. Best of all, he said, the family seemed satisfied and had invited them to lunch at a club.

The place was packed by the time the soldiers arrived. They huddled awkwardly off to the side, not sure about where to sit. After a brief moment, family members noticed them and guided them in with welcoming waves toward the buffet. Sit, they said. Eat, drink, stay a while.

Cortes’s uncle, a middle-aged man with silver hair and a dark suit, got up from the bar, made his way through the small crowd that had coalesced around the soldiers and shook Williamson’s hand. Then he went up to every one of the soldiers, patting them on their backs and looking at them with a sad, tight face.

“Thank you,” he said again and again. “Thank you.”

2004 Vote Fraud?  Did party politics cloud non-partisan voter registration efforts during the 2004 election?

by Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas, July 14, 2005

A huge expense

In the months before the presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group-run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party-had been hired by the Republican National Committee.

Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states–and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in “conspiracy theory.”

It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?

If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.

In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.

How the true figures came to be revealed

On Dec. 3, 2004, the Republican National Committee filed their Post-General Report with the FEC, accounting for all expenditures between Oct. 14 and Nov. 22.

Among the Itemized Disbursements there were listed six expenditures to Sproul & Associates, amounting to a total sum of $4.5 million. Three of them were for “Political Consulting,” and the other three were for “Voter Registration Costs.” The RNC paid Sproul the biggest amount on the day before the election: $1,668,733.

On Jan. 7, 2005 and again on May 3, 2005, the RNC sent in revised reports. Those items were unchanged in all of them.

After they received the RNC’s second revised report, the FEC expressed dissatisfaction with the vague phrase “Voter Registration Costs.” In a May 18 letter to Michael Retzer, Treasurer of the RNC, the FEC requested that itemized disbursements labeled thus be further clarified.

On June 17, the RNC submitted a (third) revised report. In it, those three suspicious Sproul expenditures labeled “Voter Registration Costs” had been changed to “Political Consulting.” As a “clarification,” it was as vague as possible. Although it only raised more questions, there seems to be no letter in the FEC database concerning that unedifying correction.

Moreover, there are some big surprises buried in the paperwork. It turned out that the RNC paid Sproul not only for their pre-election work, but also paid them for work after the election. According to their Year-End Report, filed on Jan. 28, 2005, the RNC paid Sproul for “Political Consulting” in December-long after all the voter registration drives had ended.

And two months later, when the RNC filed their amended Year-End Report on May 3, the dates of those December expenditures mysteriously changed. A payment of $210,176, once made on Dec. 20, was changed to Dec. 22. A payment of $344,214, initially recorded on Dec. 22, was changed to Dec. 9.

As to why Sproul was being paid in December, and why the dates were changed, one can only speculate. But it may be worth noting that the Ohio recount took place from Dec. 13 through Dec. 28.

Because these amendments were made in 2005, the Center for Responsive Politics’ opensecrets.orgmistakenly allocated that money to the 2006 cycle. When we informed them of these missing numbers yesterday, CRP was quick to adjust them. They also included two more expenditures: a $323,907 payment for more “Political Consulting” (10/12/04) and $450,257 for “Mailing Costs” (10/04/04).

And there was more-much more.

Fuzzy math

The documents also suggest that the RNC may have changed the dates of nine payments to suggest expenditures in 2005, thereby shifting focus from the 2004 election.

In going through the documents, CRP located nine expenditures from the future: Sproul somehow received a total of $1,323,154 between Sept. 2 and Sept. 29, 2005. Another $472,642 is hidden in 2005. Four of those prospective items were (or will be) for “Generic Media Buys” or “Lodging, Transportation.” The other four are (or will be) for “Voter Registration Efforts”-surely an expense incurred in September of last year, not this year.

Larry Noble, executive director of CRP, considers such future expenditures for, say, “Lodging, Transportation” rather odd, but he gives the RNC the benefit of the doubt. “My guess is that it’s an error,” he suggests. “It’s possible that they’re cleaning up voter registration lists in September, but it’s also possible they made a mistake.”

Even if that mistaken date is just a typo, it is, to say the least, not likely that they made the same mistake in nine uniquely dated items for 2004.

In any case, all the payments by the RNC to Sproul add up to a whopping $8,359,161-making it the RNC’s eighth biggest expenditure of the 2004 campaign.

Sproul is currently under investigation by the Oregon Attorney General’s office, for altering the voter registration forms of several thousand students in that state. Whether the new numbers are in part mistaken, they represent a huge expense for the Republicans. Given Sproul’s history of serious electoral mischief, affecting countless Democratic voters in the last election, it is important that we ask some sober questions: Where did all that money come from? Why did the RNC suppress their real expenditures? And what exactly did Sproul do for all that pay? If we’re going to get some reasonable answers, the FEC must understake a very thorough audit of the books.

Last February, a week after returning from his second, stress-filled tour in Iraq, Marine Lt. Col. Richard M. Wersel Jr, 43, had a fatal heart attack while lifting weights in a base gymnasium at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Had the decorated Marine died under identical circumstances in Iraq, his widow, Vivianne, would be eligible for an additional $238,000 in death benefits to help raise her two children, ages 12 and 14.

But Congress earlier this year, adopting a plan agreed to by top Pentagon civilians but opposed by military leaders, established the first two-tier military death benefits package. It also voted to pay the higher benefits retroactively for war zone deaths and combat-training or hazardous duty deaths, back to Oct. 7, 2001, the start of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Denying the increases to survivors of 3000 other servicemembers who died on active duty since late 2001 has begun to raise morale-jarring issues for military leaders, the kind they warned Congress that a two-tier benefit might create.

Vivianne Wersel said she has no doubt that multiple deployments over 30 months, including a trips to Central and South America to train indigenous troops to fight drug traffickers, were the “silent bullet” that took her husband’s life. Before his death, she said, Rich had no history of heart disease, hypertension or cholesterol problems.

His final assignment was with Multi-National Force Iraq in Baghdad, serving as plans chief for the Civil Military Operations Directorate. Vivianne heard from colleagues that Rich had worked many long days there, under tight deadlines, in a tense environment that included random mortar attacks.

Vivianne said she isn’t angry with the Marine Corps whose efforts to help her and the children have been “fantastic.”

“Rich died doing what he loved most,” she said. “Even going to Iraq the second time, if he had to do it over again, he would have gone. But don’t deny my children benefits as if he wasn’t a casualty of war.”

The Defense Department has begun to pay retroactively the higher death benefits approved as part of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror and Tsunami Relief Act 2005. The lump sum death gratuityis now $100,000, up from $12,420, for survivors of members who die in a combat zone or while training for combat or performing hazardous duty.

On Sept. 1, maximum coverage under Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (SGLI)also will climb for all servicemembers to $400,000, up from $250,000. The government also will pay the SGLI premiums on $150,000 of that coverage for servicemembers in combat zones.

Until the SGLI increases kick in, the law provides for a special death gratuity of $150,000, retroactive to October 7, 2001, and, again, only for survivors of those who died in a combat zone or in training for combat.

So Vivianne’s benefits won’t change. She received a $12,420 death gratuity and $250,000 in SGLI. She is ineligible the added $237,580.

Vivianne said she was reconciled to this disparity until her children began to be denied other perks intended to honor the special sacrifice of families who lost loved ones to the war. One non-profit offers small scholarships, another gives these children a laptop computer. It’s as though her own kids didn’t lose a father fighting for his country, Vivianne said.

The final straw was learning that her daughter, Katie, was ineligible for a “comfort quilt” intended for the children of Marines killed in war.

“While it is true your husband was serving in the military,” the non-profit group told Vivianne in an e-mail, “he was not in an active war theater at the time he died. He lost his life back here at home.”

Defense officials argue there is precedence for a two-tier death benefit. Under the federal Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program, police officers, firefighters and other safety officials receive a death benefit of $275,658 if killed by traumatic injury in the line of duty. Ironically, given Vivianne’s situation, Congress in 2003 extended eligibility for that payment to police and firefighter killed by stress-related heart attacks and strokes.

“What I want to do is stick out my red flag and say, ‘Hey, don’t just look at this pathology of death. Look at his history'” of service as an infantry officer, Vivianne said. On his first tour in Iraq, Wersel was the command operations center’s ground watch officer for Task Force Tarawa for which he received the Meritorious Service Medal. His award commends the precision and clarity of his reports to commanders during the battle of An Nasiriyah.

Three days before Rich Wersel’s death, Gen. William L. Nyland, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, joined other military leaders in warning Congress against establishing two levels of death benefits.

“I firmly believe that we would do great harm to our servicemen and women…were we to make such distinctions in one’s service,” Nyland said.

He said it would be wrong, for example, to pay a family more because a loved one died in Iraq versus in car accident after “a late night at the club, trying to come to grips with what he may have seen over there.”

The House-passed 2006 defense authorization bill would make the two-tier benefit permanent. The Senate bill would too, as written, but floor amendments are still possible. An aide to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said he might propose again to extend the benefit increases retroactively to all active duty deaths since Oct. 7, 2001. An identical amendment was dropped from the supplemental bill earlier this year in final negotiations with the House.

Rove Told Reporter of Plame’s Role But Didn’t Name Her, Attorney Says

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 11, 2005; A01

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame’s role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove’s lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name.

Rove had a short conversation with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003, three days before Robert D. Novak publicly exposed Plame in a column about her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson had come under attack from the White House for his assertions that he found no evidence Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger and that he reported those findings to top administration officials. Wilson publicly accused the administration of leaking his wife’s identity as a means of retaliation.

The leak of Plame’s name to the news media spawned a federal grand jury investigation that has been seeking to find the origin of the disclosure. Cooper avoided jail time last week by agreeing to testify before the grand jury about conversations with his sources, while New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed for refusing to discuss her confidential sources.

To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent’s identity.

Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak’s column was published. In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a “big warning” that Wilson’s assertions might not be entirely accurate and that it was not the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove apparently told Cooper that it was “Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip,” according to a story in Newsweek’s July 18 issue.

Rove’s conversation with Cooper could be significant because it indicates a White House official was discussing Plame prior to her being publicly named and could lead to evidence of how Novak learned her name.

Although the information is revelatory, it is still unknown whether Rove is a focus of the investigation. Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, has said that Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has told him that Rove is not a target of the probe. Luskin said yesterday that Rove did not know Plame’s name and was not actively trying to push the information into the public realm.

Instead, Luskin said, Rove discussed the matter — under the cloak of secrecy — with Cooper at the tail end of a conversation about a different issue. Cooper had called Rove to discuss other matters on a Friday before deadline, and the topic of Wilson came up briefly. Luskin said Cooper raised the question.

“Rove did not mention her name to Cooper,” Luskin said. “This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity. What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren’t true.”

In particular, Rove was urging caution because then-CIA Director George J. Tenet was about to issue a statement regarding Iraq’s alleged interest in African uranium and its inaccurate inclusion in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Tenet took the blame for allowing a misleading paragraph into the speech, but Tenet also said that the president, vice president and other senior officials were never briefed on Wilson’s report.

After the investigation into the leak began, Luskin said, Rove signed a waiver in December 2003 or January 2004 authorizing prosecutors to speak to any reporters Rove had previously engaged in discussion, which included Cooper.

“His written waiver included the world,” Luskin said. “It was intended to be a global waiver. . . . He wants to make sure that the special prosecutor has everyone’s evidence. That reflects someone who has nothing to hide.”

Cooper had indicated he would go to jail rather than expose a confidential source, but he agreed last week to cooperate with the grand jury after getting clearance from his source to testify. Luskin said Cooper had been clear to testify all along — because of the waiver signed 18 months ago — but that the waiver was “reaffirmed” on Wednesday, the day of a hearing to decide whether he and Miller would go to jail.

While You Were Watching the Hurricane: The Weekend in Iraq

The bombings in London and Hurricane Dennis knocked the war off the front pages again this week so let’s do some synthesis here:

Reuters offers a wrap-up of incidents in Iraqon Sunday at Reuters AlertNet:

“BAGHDAD – Four mortar rounds were fired at a police station in the northern Baghdad district of Aadhamiya, Iraq’s defence ministry said. Two people were wounded.
Five U.S. soldiers were wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in southern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.”

Jon Leyne notes some of the oddities in Iraq with a touch of black humor:

“If the insurgents do not get you, maybe the traffic police will. At least, that was my experience in Baghdad.”

It seems to me that the psyops guys are getting a good handle on the message out of Iraq (even the bloggers) and we hear very little of trouble there.

With our shortened news cycles and infotainment riding high on the television sets the public has little taste for the ‘same ole’ death and destruction’ that passes for everyday activity in the new Iraq. A leaked memo (I wonder if it isn’t a very poll-driven leak) discusses troop reductions but a careful reading shows that we are talking about 2007 and to paraphrase a Pentagon spokesman – it’s far from a done deal.

But let us not forget that our Soldiers are striving every day, dealing with the heat, boredom, separation, punishing work schedules, IEDs, suicide bombers, nearly impossible jobs they didn’t sign up for, and the potential for having promises and contracts broken to them. Soldiers and Marines conducted patrols and combat operations on the Fourth of July while legislators went on vacation leaving a nearly three billion dollar shortfall in the VA budget unsolved. The world watched the Live8 concerts while men and women in Iraq tried to shake the dust out of walkmen and orifices. Back in the states, the injured waited in vain for the call for needed treatment from the VA and examined claims summarily dismissed as part of a business model that disenfranchises those that put it on the line for us all.

In Afghanistan, a strengthened Taliban made threats about a SEAL they may or may not hold and men as quiet about their activities as they are dangerous went about their business trying to locate their missing comrade. A half-dozen headless bodies turned up there this week, testifying to a job left undone as NATO follows the model of the British as they retreat to Kabul.

In all of this, I fear that the public conciousness of the war, its origin, and the ramifications teeters near the edge of the news black hole. The country seems to move to a discussion of the London attacks as if they occurred in a vacumn and there is little awareness of malfeasance leading the world to this point. Deaths of Soldiers and security forces in Iraq seem to pale next to that of London citizens as if they were two different species.

I think that it is vitally important to remember the past and that the origins of the attacks both in the West and in Iraq had to do with a questionable policy of our own. Robin Cook talks about the genesis of Al Quaedain the Guardian.

“Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.”

We would do well to remember how we arrived at the place where we are. It didn’t swell up from nature and wash over us like a hurricane. It was created and fed by policy, unexamined acts, and bad deals with bad men.

Failing to demand accountability for these acts and to examine them completely in the light of day will allow both the ideas and the idealogues to scuttle for cover and reemerge on another dark day.

 By: Perry Jefferies