Veterans for Common Sense

Former G.I.’s, Ordered to War, Fight Not to Go

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops.

Many of these former soldiers – some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years – object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty.

They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000 other members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a corps of soldiers who are no longer on active duty but still are eligible for call-up.

In the last few months, the Army has sent notices to more than 4,000 former soldiers informing them that they must return to active duty, but more than 1,800 of them have already requested exemptions or delays, many of which are still being considered.

And, of about 2,500 who were due to arrive on military bases for refresher training by Nov. 7, 733 had not shown up.

Army officials say the call-up is proceeding at rates they anticipated, and they are trying to fill needed jobs with former soldiers as they did in the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

Still, the resistance puts further strain on a military that has summoned reserve troops in numbers not seen since World War II and forced thousands of soldiers in Iraq to postpone their departures when their enlistment obligations ended.

Tensions are flaring between the Army and some of its veterans, who say they are surprised and confused about their obligations and unsure where to turn.

“I consider myself a civilian,” said Rick Howell, a major from Tuscaloosa, Ala., who said he thought he had left the Army behind in 1997 after more than a decade flying helicopters. “I’ve done my time. I’ve got a brand new baby and a wife, and I haven’t touched the controls of an aircraft in seven years. I’m 47 years old. How could they be calling me? How could they even want me?”

Some former soldiers acknowledge that the Army has every right to call them back, but argue that their personal circumstances – illness, single parenthood, financial woes – make going overseas impossible now.

Others say they do not believe they are eligible to be returned to active duty because, they contend, they already finished the obligations they signed up for when they joined the military. A handful of such former soldiers, scattered across the country, have filed lawsuits making that claim in federal courts.

These former soldiers are not among the part-time soldiers – reservists and National Guard members – who receive paychecks and train on weekends, and who have been called up in large numbers over the last three years.

Instead, these are members of the Individual Ready Reserve, a pool of former soldiers seldom ordered back to work. Ordinarily, these former soldiers do not get military pay, nor do they train. They receive points toward a military retirement and an address form to update once a year.

When soldiers enlist, they typically agree to an eight-year commitment to the Army but often are allowed to end active duty sooner. Some of them join the Reserves or National Guard to complete their commitment; others finish their time in the Individual Ready Reserve.

For officers, the commitment does not expire unless they formally resign their commissions in writing, a detail some insist they did not know and were not told when they signed their contracts, although Army officials strongly dispute that.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, a spokeswoman for the Army, said people in the service are well aware of the provision. “We all know about it,” Colonel Hart said.

She said problems with the call-ups of former soldiers have involved a relatively small number of people, are being worked out, and are hardly unique to this conflict. In the first gulf war, she said, more than 20,000 former soldiers were called up. With medical problems and no-shows, only about 14,400 were actually deployed, she said.

Most of the deployments in the first gulf war lasted 120 days, the Army said. The current call-ups are more likely to last a year.

Of those seeking exemptions now, the Army is studying each person’s case individually, Colonel Hart said, and has no set rule on what allows a person to avoid deployment. Army officials are still weighing more than half of the requests. So far, only 3 percent of requests for exemptions have been turned down, while 45 percent have been approved.

As for the former soldiers who failed to appear at bases by their assigned dates, the Army is trying to reach them, one by one, to discuss their circumstances, Colonel Hart said. In late September, some Army officials suggested that they would pursue harsher punishments – declaring people AWOL and possibly pursuing military charges – but the Army has since taken a quieter, more conciliatory approach.

“These are challenging times in their lives,” Colonel Hart said, adding that some former soldiers who failed to report might have moved and not received the Army’s notice. “We’re contacting them as best as possible.”

For the rest, though, some questions linger over who really qualifies for the callback.

Colette Parrish said she burst into tears the evening that her husband, Todd, walked into their house in Cary, N.C., with a letter from the Army calling him back to service. “We had no idea this could happen,” she said. “We hadn’t been preparing for any of it because we thought it wasn’t possible.”

At first, Mr. Parrish, 31, said he was convinced that the letter was just an administrative error because he believed that his time in the Individual Ready Reserve had ended.

He had gone to college on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, then served four years as a field artillery officer. He said he resigned his commission after that, became an engineer, and still owed the Army four years in the Individual Ready Reserve to complete his total obligation.

To Mr. Parrish, who has filed a lawsuit against the Army in federal court in North Carolina, that obligation ended on Dec. 19, 2003. But the Army apparently does not agree, and says that it never accepted Mr. Parrish’s resignation as an officer.

As the court fight has continued, Mr. Parrish’s date to report to Fort Sill, Okla., has been pushed back, again and again, one month at a time. Instead of thinking about long-term plans, for his wife and their future family, he is living in 30-day increments.

He said he always looked back on his service years fondly, and with a deep sense of patriotism.

“I guess I feel disillusioned now,” he said. “This isn’t about being for or against the war. It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s just a contract, and I don’t think this is right. If they need more people, shouldn’t they get them the right way? How many more like me are there?”

Mark Waple, Mr. Parrish’s lawyer, said he had received calls from 30 other former soldiers in recent months, all of whom had heard of Mr. Parrish’s case and had similar stories.

At least two other former soldiers have filed suit over the question.

In Hawaii, David Miyasato, a former enlisted soldier who served in the first gulf war, said he would never go AWOL; he would have gone to Iraq, he said, if need be.

But Mr. Miyasato also said that his eight-year commitment ended nearly a decade ago. After he received his letter calling him back to service, he said, he called the Army repeatedly to argue that he was not eligible. Finally, he said, with his date to report to a base in South Carolina just days away, he contacted a lawyer and filed suit on Nov. 5.

“This was actually my last resort,” said Mr. Miyasato, a former truck driver and fuel hauler who said that, at 34, he led an entirely different life, with an 8-month-old daughter and a window-tinting company to run. “I had been calling around everywhere for help.”

On Nov. 10, Mr. Miyasato said, he learned that the Army had rescinded his orders.

In New York, Jay Ferriola, a former captain in the Army, filed a suit saying he had resigned his officer’s commission in June and no longer qualified for call-up in the Individual Ready Reserve. On Nov. 5, the Army rescinded his orders and honorably discharged him.

“This shows that the system works,” Colonel Hart said. “If the soldiers bring their situations to our attention, we’re going to do what’s right.”

Barry Slotnick, Mr. Ferriola’s lawyer, said he wondered how many other soldiers might be in similar positions, but without the money, the contacts or the certainty to sue. Mr. Slotnick said he had received numerous calls from others since he filed Mr. Ferriola’s case in late October.

“We might as well add another phone bank,” Mr. Slotnick said. “What I can see is that there are many, many cases of people being called up that shouldn’t have been. This is a backdoor draft. I also have to wonder how many are already in Iraq who shouldn’t be there, who just didn’t think to question it.”

The Army’s current plan is to fill 4,400 jobs through March from among 5,600 former soldiers ordered to duty. But an Army official said last month that more former soldiers, perhaps in similar numbers, might be called on later next year, as well.

For now, those being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are being asked to handle a variety of support positions, including truck drivers and fuel and food suppliers.

Months ago, the Army said some of the former soldiers would be needed to play the French horn, the clarinet, the euphonium, the saxophone and the electric bass as part of the military’s bands, but the notion drew criticism from members of Congress who questioned the need to order people to give up their civilian lives to play instruments. Colonel Hart said the Army has since filled the musician jobs with volunteers.

Before going to Iraq, former soldiers are receiving as many days of training as they need, an Army spokesman said. Some of the soldiers said they were worried, though, about the prospect and safety of trying to get up to speed in a few months.

“These guys like me are basically untrained civilians now,” said Mr. Howell, the former helicopter test pilot. Mr. Howell said he left the Army years ago with an injured back, knee and elbow, leaving him wondering about his own physical condition.

“I don’t even have a uniform anymore,” he said. “But they don’t have any more reserves left, so we’re it. All they want is some bodies to go to Iraq, just someone to be there, to sit on the ground.”

When he left the military in 1997 as part of a reduction in forces, Mr. Howell said, he saw a note in the “little print” in his annuity agreement about a future commitment. But he said he was told that his obligation to the Individual Ready Reserve would be brief and meant little anyway. “They said it was just a way of having me on the books,” he said.

After that, Mr. Howell said, he jumped into the civilian world. He got married. He and his new wife began building a house. They struggled to have children.

In September, his first child, Clayton, was born. Just before that, his orders arrived.

“It does rip my heart out that these young men and women are over there, and there is part of me that wants to be with them,” he said recently. “But I have responsibilities here now.”

Mr. Howell said he had applied to the Army for an exemption but was recently turned down. If he loses his appeal, he will be given a new reporting date. His best hope, he said, is that his appeal is buried somewhere at the very bottom of a big stack of them.

Report Links Exposures To Gulf War Syndrome

The federal government has acknowledged that illnesses afflicting many veterans during the 1991 Persian Gulf War resulted from exposure to hazardous substances, but that hasn’t helped the ill veterans still waiting for benefits, family members say.

Diane Dulka, 44, whose husband, Joseph, died of pancreatic cancer after the war and whose son, Joseph, was born with a cleft pallet, said Friday severely sick veterans are still being denied benefits. In the past few years, Dulka, of Windsor Locks, has tried, often unsuccessfully, she said, to help hundreds of Gulf War veterans whose requests for medical assistance have been rejected by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

After more than seven years of fighting for her widow’s benefits and medical benefits for her son, Dulka obtained the necessary approvals from the VA about five years ago. In the meantime, she became an advocate for other Gulf War veterans, a job she does when she is not working as a paralegal or caring for her 12-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter, Lindsay.

For more than a decade, high-level federal health and military officials, sometimes during testimony under oath before Congress, denied U.S. and allied service members were sick from wartime exposures. The hazards included warfare gases, depleted uranium munitions dust, oil well fires, experimental drugs and vaccines and other pollutants. The Pentagon and federal health agencies have spent more than $100 million on inconclusive Gulf War illness investigations and studies.

On Friday, a federal panel of scientific experts and military veterans, called the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses, concluded progress in understanding Gulf War illnesses has been hampered by a lack of coordination and availability of data within both the VA and the Defense Department.

The panel said there is significant evidence linking chemical warfare exposures to the so-called Gulf War syndrome, a connection Pentagon officials have repeatedly rejected for many years. The research panel, set up by Congress and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, concluded veterans have long term, multi-symptom illnesses that cannot be explained in terms of stress or psychiatric illness that the Pentagon has long favored.

Asked why the report’s findings are being released more than 13 years after the Gulf War ended, Dr. Lea Steele, scientific director for the panel, said, “I don’t know. All the answers already have been found. So the reason is not scientific.” Steele added that there could be only two reasons for not getting the answers until now, scientific or political, and she would not speculate on the political possibility.

Jonathan Perlin, the VA’s acting undersecretary of heath, said, “This report opens up new doors in terms of research, but it doesn’t provide a level of proof” for making specific health claims from the VA.

Other committee findings include:

Thousands of veterans have significant nervous system disorders consistent with low-level exposures to deadly warfare gases, including sarin.

Treatments to improve veterans’ health are still badly needed.

A host of other wartime exposures, including depleted uranium munitions dust from U.S. and British weapons explosions, may also have contributed to the illnesses.

Significant questions about the health of service members’ children and immediate family members and their relationship to soldiers’ exposures remain unanswered.

Veterans’ health has to be closely monitored for disease patterns and causes of death to determine if they are connected to wartime service

And research on these veterans’ illnesses has important implications for other recent wars and the current conflict in Iraq. Some 32,000 service members are said to be sick from hazardous exposures in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The panel estimates the research needed to connect a specific illness to its cause will cost another $15 million.

In the 1991 Gulf War alone, roughly 697,000 U.S. troops served. By last year, 591,000 had left the service and of those more than 26 percent were disabled and receiving medical benefits. Another 11,074 have died, most from illnesses or accidents, after the war. The average age of those service members when they went to war was 36.

Figures from the VA show 182,000 disability claims granted, 27,270 denied and 26,507 still pending, almost 14 years after the end of the war.

Five thousand British service members of the 53,200 who served are reported ill from the first Gulf War with about 2,000 of them awarded war pensions, The Guardian Limited reported. More than 660 have died since the war. Thousands of other allied force soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who became sick from hazardous exposures have also died.

The Defense Department, according to a report issued in June by the Government Accountability Office, underestimated the exposure of chemical warfare agents such as nerve and mustard gas. Defense models of the effects of toxic plumes of chemical agents did not “realistically simulate actual bombings or demolitions,” the GAO report said.

Despite these reports, Dulka said, many veterans and service members from other recent wars are not getting the help they need. Today, Dulka said, she is still trying to help a New Jersey widow get death benefits after her husband died of leukemia in 1994, apparently from constant Gulf War missions hauling fuel from depots. The widow gave birth to a child the year her husband died, and already had two toddlers, said Dulka.

It is well documented with the VA that some soldiers repeatedly exposed to petroleum developed leukemia and they have been approved for VA service-connected disabilities, Dulka said.

The Army’s long arm

GREENVILLE, Pennsylvania — Three years after he was honorably discharged from the Army, Frederick Pistorius was surprised to learn he was a deserter.

But there it was, on his doorstep: a letter from Barry W. Kimmons, Deputy Chief, Deserter Information Point Extension Office of the Army Reserve Personnel Command.

“On 12 July 2004 you were involuntarily mobilized to active duty in the United States Army,” the letter says. “To date you have not reported to your mobilization station as required by your orders.” Possibly Pistorius had not responded for two reasons. The Pistorius family had moved from the address in Sharon, Pa., to which the Army had sent its first letter. More saliently, having served honorably in not one but two branches of the U.S. military, with no additional obligation showing on his discharge papers, Pistorius would have had no reason to think he was subject to anything but his civilian job at a local steel plant.

Wendy Pistorius opened the letter and immediately telephoned an official at the Army reserve command in St. Louis.

“I told him there must be a mistake, because my husband had fulfilled his obligation,” she said. “He basically told me that the Army does not make mistakes and that the orders were valid and if he did not show up as per the orders he would be prosecuted and taken to jail.”

So began a two-month journey through the Army of Franz Kafka.

The paper trail is fairly straightforward on this one. Pistorius joined the Marine Corps in 1993. When he left the corps, he had a reserve obligation that expired June 25, 2000. The pool into which he would have gone is called the Individual Ready Reserve — essentially former military available for service in times of emergency. After a few months of knocking around for work, Pistorius decided to go back into the military, get more training in his specialty — cook — and complete his reserve obligation with full-time duty. The Marines weren’t taking back departed members who’d been out for a year, so, in 1998, he joined the Army, signing a three-year contract.

Pistorius was honorably discharged from the Army in July 20, 2001. His certificate of release attests to his accomplishments: Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Sharpshooter qualification. The upper corner is the spot in which the military lists a departing member’s reserve obligation, the amount of time discharged soldiers, sailors and Marines remain subject to recall. For Pistorius, the boxes contain a succession of zeroes.

Because he was discharged well after his prior reserve obligation had passed, the Army laid no further claim to him, until someone in St. Louis ignored those zeroes and went hunting for a fresh body to fill a manpower shortage that grows more painful with every Iraqi sunset.

“They basically told me that my Marine Corps time doesn’t count as military service,” Pistorius said. Faced with a threat of AWOL charges, and worried that a spotless military record was about to be stained, Pistorius headed last month to Camp McGrady in South Carolina.

“The first thing they did was thank us for showing up,” Pistorius said. “They had 150 that were supposed to show up and about 75 did. Of those 75 maybe only 40 or 50 are medically fit.”

Here, Pistorius’s Army recruitment contract comes into play. It was the one document he says he had not kept, figuring his military days were over. The Army public affairs office did not return phone calls asking about the matter so we have only Pistorius’ version. He said he asked for a copy, but was always told the thing was “in transit” from St. Louis. The contract would settle any questions about whether he might have, inadvertently, signed up for another round of reserve duty, but it seems implausible.

Equally implausible were the men who turned up at Camp McGrady last month.

When I first spoke to Pistorius, by telephone from the camp, he said nobody had been given a physical. He told his Army commanders that he had a permanent back injury from a car crash. They were unimpressed by a letter from his chiropractor. His pre-deployment health assessment lists him in this word: “Deployable.”

Pistorius spoke with his captain.

“He said everybody here’s going to Iraq,” Pistorius said. “It’s unbelievable some of the guys they’re bringing down there.”

One man arrived with a hospital identification band still on his wrist. He’d just had knee surgery. One 48-year-old from Alabama had a hip replacement and fused vertebrae in his back.

“He showed them the documents, but they still made him come down to be examined by their doctors,” Pistorius said. Pistorius spoke of a man called back from upstate New York.

“He had no teeth and he had arthritis in his leg,” he said.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and now a professor at Boston University, wasn’t surprised at the report.

“The Individual Ready Reserve — that title is a misnomer. They’re not ready,” Bacevich said. “It’s the equivalent of me walking out here on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and taking the first 5,000 people I meet and saying ‘you’re now in the military.’ ”

At Camp McGrady, Pistorius kept up his campaign to convince the Army they had essentially drafted a civilian. Back home, Wendy Pistorius assembled a list of numbers: St. Louis, her senator’s office, the White House. One person would tell her that her husband shouldn’t have been called up. Another would tell Frederick Pistorius that it was simply his turn.

He said at one point an Army lawyer in South Carolina held out the receiver so he could hear the person on the other end explain that his big problem was showing up. So many people had either moved or ignored their orders to report that the Army was loath to part with a reasonably healthy one that had.

Suddenly, on Nov. 5, Pistorius was ordered to pack up. He was driven to the airport and told he was going home. At the last minute, he was handed a letter declaring: “You are released from active duty, by reason of physical disability.” He had already packed up the pre-deployment assessment that said precisely the opposite. The letter also says he’s subject to reserve obligation until Feb. 26, 2006.

The Pistorius family, with its three children, ages 6, 5 and 2, is now trying to figure out what to do without a month’s wages. “I just put everything off,” Wendy Pistorius said. “I paid only the bills I absolutely had to.”

The Army took back the family separation allowance he was given when called to Camp McGrady. Frederick Pistorius is working a swing shift at the local tube plant and trying to figure out if the Army still considers him a reservist and if he’s going to get another letter from St. Louis.

“I don’t want to get arrested in front of my kids,” he said.

(Dennis Roddy can be reached at droddy@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1965.)

US report links toxins to Gulf war syndrome

James Meikle, health correspondent
Saturday November 13, 2004, The Guardian 

Troops who have fallen ill since the first Gulf war may have fallen victim to a ticking toxic timebomb, advisers to the US government said last night.

Scientists and veterans from the 1991 conflict went further than any previous official body either side of the Atlantic in identifying a complex chemical cocktail of nerve agents, pills to protect troops from those agents and multiple pesticides as a possible cause for their health problems.

Psychiatric illness, combat experience or other stresses from deployment did not explain ill health in the “vast majority” of 100,000 sick US veterans, according to the advisers’ report. On the contrary, evidence supported a “probable link” between the toxins and veterans’ illness.

Many troops had been exposed to substances belonging to a class of compounds that affected the nervous system and a “growing body of research” indicated that ill veterans differed from healthy ones “on objective measures of neuropathology and impairment.”

Animal studies indicated that exposure to nerve agents at levels too low to produce acute symptoms could result in “chronic adverse effects on the nervous and immune systems”. In addition, research suggested that if the neurotoxins were combined, they would be more poisonous.

Lord Morris of Manchester, who has campaigned for veterans both here and in the US, said: “This is a major development in unravelling the truth about thousands of still unexplained Gulf war illnesses. Scientific opinion in the US increasingly rejects the old medical consensus attributing the illness to wartime stress and psychiatric illness. I am calling for an urgent ministerial statement here in the UK.”

The report was published by the US department of veterans affairs. The committee responsible included Robert Haley, the scientist who has suggested that three types of Gulf-related cell damage exist in veterans, the worst associated with confusion and vertigo, another related to thinking problems, depression and sleep disorders, and a third to pain.

This is not accepted here although there is consideration as to whether some of the 6,000 British veterans who have complained of illness should undergo similar brain scans. The Ministry of Defence insists there is no Gulf war syndrome, and no more deaths among veterans than among troops who never went to the Gulf.

It accepts that many more veterans who served there report illness. Research led by Simon Wessley of King’s College, London, has suggested that people who had a battery of vaccinations and received them in the Gulf area, rather than before deployment, were more likely to report illness.

The new report says no further research into stress as a primary cause of the illnesses should be funded under federal Gulf war programmes. Instead, more work should be done to investigate the chronic effects of exposure to pesticides and nerve gas, as well as the effects of tablets taken to protect against nerve gas.

Earlier this year, a Congressional investigation blamed the bombing of weapons dumps during the war, or their destruction aftewards, for releasing chemical agents that might have spread wider than previously thought.

It said the destruction of weapons bunkers at Khamisayah in southern Iraq in March spread into Saudia Arabia and well into Iran. This is not accepted by the British government.

The research committee also wants the health of veterans’ children monitored, and will pursue further research into infections diseases, vaccines, smoke from burning oil wells and depleted uranium in anti-tank shells.

Draft coming, students told

By SUSAN ELAN

THE JOURNAL NEWS

November 5, 2004

Reinstatement of the military draft is imminent, war correspondent and author Christopher Hedges told a crowd of more than 120 students and residents yesterday at Manhattanville College.

“We are losing the war in Iraq very badly, but the Bush administration will not walk away from the debacle without trying to reoccupy huge swaths of the territory they have lost,” Hedges said. While working for The New York Times, he covered fighting in Central America, the Balkans and the Middle East, including Iraq during the first Gulf War.

To regain territory lost in Iraq, it will take double or triple the current 140,000 troops, Hedges said during the last lecture in a series called “The Costs of War.”

The reservists and National Guard members who make up half of the U.S. forces are stretched to the breaking point and need relief, he said, and the draft is the only way to assemble the numbers needed. Reintroduction of the draft will be made in the name of the war on terrorism soon after an attack in the United States or abroad, he predicted.

“The war in Iraq will no longer be an abstraction,” he said. “It will become deeply personal. In the next few weeks look for shifts in administration policy leading in the direction of an escalation of the war.”

Hedges encountered no detractors at Manhattanville, unlike his experience at Rockford (Ill.) College in May 2003, when he was booed off the stage while giving a commencement speech shortly after President Bush’s battleship announcement that the U.S. mission in Iraq had been “accomplished.”

On the contrary, many in the audience last night said they had braved rainy weather to hear Hedges indict the seductiveness of war and the dangers of mindless jingoism as an antidote to their depression over the results of the presidential election.

“It’s been a hard week and there are much harder times ahead. That’s why it is so important for us all to be together tonight,” said Connie Hogarth, who has a peace and justice center on the Manhattanville campus named after her. “After we finish grieving, we have to get back to working for peace and justice, and an end to this war and its killing.”

Hedges’ audience remained rapt as he wove poetry, mythology, history and Freudian psychology with anecdotes about colleagues lost on distant battlefields and his own brushes with death. He criticized military heroic ideals that thrive during war and the way war distorts the human imagination. In the fervor of war the individual sacrifices thought for a false sense of belonging to something larger, he said.

“At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat,” Hedges said. “We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn’t a pretty sight.”

Those who confuse his anti-war stance with an anti-soldier position are mistaken, Hedges said. “War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics.”

Reach Susan Elan at selan@the journalnews.com or 914-696-8538. Reach Susan Elan at selan@the journalnews.com or 914-696-8538

The costs of war

Bill to taxpayers will soon exceed $260 billion

Daytona Beach News Journal Editorial Board

In a September 2002 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Lindsey, then director of the Bush administration’s National Economic Council, predicted that invading Iraq would cost up to $200 billion. He didn’t make clear whether the price tag would include occupation and reconstruction, although however spent, it would still all be taxpayer money. It was a rare moment of unscripted candor from the White House, and Lindsey paid for it. Bush fired him 10 weeks later.

Meanwhile Bush deployed a small platoon of administration officials to contradict Lindsey’s estimate. The White House’s budget director put the cost at $50-$60 billion, tops — less than the $80 billion the first Gulf War cost. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in early January 2003 put the number at “something under $50 billion,” suggesting that other nations would be generous. “How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other countries, is an open question.” By February (one month before the invasion), Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was favoring fuzziness: “I think it’s necessary to preserve some ambiguity of exactly where the numbers are,” he told the House Budget Committee. Post-war costs over five years were estimated at $25 billion to $105 billion.

Not one of those estimates has proven true. Not even Lindsey’s, which under-estimated the costs by a wide margin.

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was getting ready to submit yet another request for emergency war funding immediately after the election. This one would be in the range of $70 billion. It would be the fourth emergency funding request in 19 months for warfare and rebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In April 2003, Congress approved a $78.5 billion request. Last October, Congress approved an $87.5 billion request. In August it approved $25 billion. An additional $70 billion would bring the total costs of the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so far, to $261 billion.

That’s $261 billion since the Iraq war began less than two years ago (and, for perspective’s sake, $8 billion more than was spent on the entire Medicare program in 2002). Military costs alone for Afghanistan and Iraq, previously estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion, are now estimated at more than $6 billion a month, or $200 million per day.

The administration is still downplaying the numbers with trickery and qualifiers. For instance, it points out that one of the appropriations included $21 billion for reconstruction in Iraq, as if taxpayers could itemize the expense as feel-good money.

In fact, that’s $1 billion more than the amount pledged by Bush’s entire “coalition of the willing” for reconstruction. Less than $1 billion of that money has actually been spent on reconstruction, because violence makes reconstruction impossible. And millions of what has been spent on alleged reconstruction and other costs was fraudulently billed to the Pentagon. The administration also points out that up to $10 billion of the money was pledged to Israel and Turkey as part of the coalition-building leading up to the war. That’s still $10 billion taxpayers have to fork over.

Those are just the costs in cold cash. The human costs continue to rise with staggering grimness, too. By Wednesday, 1,250 American soldiers had died in Iraq and Afghanistan (40 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan so far in 2004). Among American forces there’s been 26,000 combat wounded and 7,000 amputees. Most of their medical costs, which will accrue over the years, aren’t included in the tallies. The human costs to Iraq dwarf America’s.

Just as Bush misled the nation on the reason for invading Iraq, he misjudged the costs of invading and occupying it. But it’s too late now. Regardless of what happens on Nov. 2, taxpayers are stuck with the bill. They’re stuck with the open-ended conflict. They’re stuck with a worsening situation that is draining the military of feasible solutions. This is the result of Bush’s war of choice — an oversold threat, an undersold cost, a catastrophic choice all around.

The Forgotten Casualties of War: Over 17,000 U.S. Troops Wounded

President Bush predicted victory in Fallujah and wished U.S. soldiers “Godspeed” in their mission as the bloody U.S. assault on the city entered its third day.

His comments came during a visit of wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC. It was Bush’s sixth visit to wounded troops at the veteran hospital since he launched his so-called “war on terror” in late 2001. He spent two hours with soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush said “It’s so uplifting to see their spirit, their drive to become rehabilitated, their love of their country, their support of the mission.”

While Bush was with the recuperating wounded, American casualties continued to mount. 10 U.S. troops have been killed in the bloody urban warfare in Fallujah. The total U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed 1,100. While the number of U.S. soldiers killed is widely reported, what is rarely mentioned is the many thousands more wounded.

• Mark Benjamin, UPI Investigations editor. He has been closely following the hidden US casualties from the Iraq war. He was awarded the American Legion’s top journalism award for 2004 for his reporting last year on the plight of hundreds of sick, wounded and injured soldiers at Fort Stewart, Ga.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Mark Benjamin. He is an investigations editor with UPI, who has closely followed the hidden U.S. casualties from the Iraq war. He won the American Legion’s top journalism prize for 2004 for his reporting last year on the plight of hundreds of sick and wounded and injured soldiers at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, and their lack of care. Mark Benjamin, welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK BENJAMIN: Thank you for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the numbers, as you understand them today, of, not the dead, but the wounded?

MARK BENJAMIN: Well, with respect to the wounded, the Pentagon does report a number that it says is the number of soldiers that are wounded in the war. I think we’re running around 7,000 or 8,000 in Iraq. But what that number does not include is the number of soldiers who are wounded or ill, or injured in operations that are not directly due to the bullets and bombs of the insurgents. So, for example, as of mid-September, if you take actually Afghanistan and Iraq together, there were 17,000 soldiers who were injured or ill enough to be put on airplanes and flown out of theater, and none of those casualties, and I call them casualties because they fit the Pentagon’s definition of casualties, none of those casualties appear on any public casualty lists.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you get these figures, and why aren’t they being more reported?

MARK BENJAMIN: You have to ask the right questions. If you go to the Pentagon, and you take their own definitions of casualties and ask you them the right questions, they will give you some answers. So, for example, the reason why I started asking questions is that I visited eight major military facilities around the country — well, in the United States and Europe, and frankly, I just saw more soldiers that were hurt than seemed to be reflected in the Pentagon reports. They — the Pentagon says, when I asked them what was on and not on their casualty lists, they said they weren’t keeping track of the number of soldiers. The Pentagon told me we are not keeping track of the number of soldiers who are wounded or ill or injured that are not hit by the enemy’s bullets and bombs. If you go to the Pentagon’s transportation command, however — these are the people that put wounded soldiers on airplanes and fly them out — they will give you some data. What the Pentagon says is, well, not every single person who is put on an airplane and flown out of Iraq is a casualty; some of them may have appendicitis, and so on and so forth. But they won’t tell you how many of each category there are. So in other words, we know that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of potential casualties that are not being reported.

AMY GOODMAN: And how are these troops being treated? You could refresh people on your groundbreaking story on Ft. Stewart, Georgia, and what was happening there. But what has happened since, as well?

MARK BENJAMIN: What has happened since is that essentially the treatment of the soldier, I think, depends to a certain extent on how badly they’re injured, how they’re injured and what stage of the treatment they’re in. So for example, the military is very, very good at getting to wounded soldiers in the field and putting them on airplanes, flying them out of Iraq, taking them to Lahnstuhl, Germany, taking care of them and bringing them to Walter Reed. These are people hit by, for example, improvised explosive devices and missing arms and legs. As you go down the spectrum of casualties in terms of people that have their backs broken in car accidents, or frankly, people that have mental problems which is a growing and very serious toll from this war, which I think is also underreported, the treatment, at least according to soldiers, is not as good. I would add one other thing. The new, I think the latest, phenomenon that seems to be occurring is we now see an increasing number of soldiers reaching the end of their medical care with the military, and being put out of the military, now in the hands of the VA. And while I believe there’s some very, very capable people and caring people at the Veteran’s Administration, they appear to be overloaded, and we’re reaching a situation now where sick, wounded and otherwise hurt soldiers are being essentially put out of the military and not getting the kind of care that I think they would like at the VA. And I think there are some soldiers that are starting to fall through the cracks.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, as when you see once again, President Bush going to Walter Reed Hospital, your final thoughts?

MARK BENJAMIN: I’m certainly glad that the president is visiting the troops. I think he’s probably seeing part of the picture. For example, I suspect they probably took him to the — one of the wards there where they have more of the traditional war injuries as opposed to, for example, Ward 54, which is where I visited, which is the in-patient psychiatric ward where we have soldiers who frankly have been driven deeply insane by combat. I wish that the American people knew more about what is happening with respect to the toll of this war, because I think it’s a lot bigger and a lot more troubling than most people know.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, I want to thank you for being with us. UPI reporter.

MARK BENJAMIN: Thank you for having me.