Veterans for Common Sense

Inquiry Opens After Reservists Balk in Baghdad

The Army is investigating members of a Reserve unit in Iraq who refused to deliver a fuel shipment north of Baghdad under conditions they considered unsafe, the Pentagon and relatives of the soldiers said Friday. Several soldiers called it a “suicide mission,” relatives said.

Some 18 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, based in Rock Hill, S.C., were detained at gunpoint for nearly two days after disobeying orders to drive trucks that they said had not been serviced and were not being escorted by armed vehicles to Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad, relatives said after speaking to some of the soldiers.

Jackie Butler of Jackson, Miss., the wife of Staff Sgt. Michael Butler, 44, said she was awakened about 5:30 or 6 a.m. Thursday by a call from an officer from Iraq. He told her “that my husband was being detained for disobeying a direct order,” Ms. Butler said, “and he went on to tell me that it was a bogus charge that they got against him and some of those soldiers over there, because what they was doing was sending them into a suicide mission, and they refused to go.”

A senior Army officer said that 19 soldiers from the unit had been assembled Wednesday morning to deliver fuel but that some had refused to go. He denied they had been held under guard.

The officer said the soldiers raised “some valid concerns.”

“Unfortunately it appears that a small number of the soldiers involved chose to express their concerns in an inappropriate manner,” said the officer, who discussed the preliminary findings only on the condition of anonymity. Insubordination in wartime is a grave offense, and an inquiry is under way, the officer said, to determine if the Uniform Code of Military Justice was violated and whether disciplinary measures were warranted.

It is unclear if this is the first time a group of soldiers in Iraq has refused to carry out orders, and the military is playing down the incident as an isolated event. But the small rebellion suggests that problems linger with outfitting soldiers with adequate equipment in an increasingly dangerous country.

“I know soldiers are deeply concerned and have been deeply concerned about the equipment shortages,” said Paul Rieckhoff, who was an Army lieutenant in Iraq for almost a year, until February this year, and is now executive director of Operation Truth, a New York advocacy group working to draw attention to the needs of soldiers in Iraq and returning veterans.

“When you don’t have proper equipment, you feel vulnerable,” Mr. Rieckhoff said. “We haven’t evolved quickly enough to meet the enemy threat, which is rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.”

On average, American soldiers were attacked 87 times a day in August, the latest figures available, a sharp increase from a year earlier. In September, 41 soldiers died from rocket attacks and gunfire, up from 11 a year earlier.

The incident, which was first reported in The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., where several of the soldiers live, apparently began after the company tried to deliver a shipment of fuel to a base, but was turned away because the fuel was unusable, according to family members.

According to relatives and the Army officer, they returned to their base in Tallil, where they were told to deliver the fuel to Taji. The group refused, citing the poor condition of their vehicles and the lack of an armed escort, family members said. American convoys, which are usually accompanied by armored cars and sometimes by aircraft, are often attacked by insurgents.

“Yesterday we refused to go on a convoy to Taji,” Specialist Amber McClenny, 21, said in a message she left on the answering machine of her mother, Teresa Hill, in Dothan, Ala. “We had broken-down trucks, nonarmored vehicles. We were carrying contaminated fuel.”

After the soldiers were released, Specialist McClenny called her mother again and explained that the jet fuel the convoy had to carry had been contaminated with diesel, and that because it had been rejected by one base, it would likely be rejected by the Taji base.

Taji is in the volatile Sunni-dominated swath of Iraq, and Ms. Hill said her daughter felt “that if you go there, it’s a 99 percent chance you will be ambushed or fired upon.”

“They had not slept, the trucks had not been maintained, they were going without armed guards, it was just a bad deal,” Ms. Hill said. “And that’s when the whole unit said no.” She said their defense is “cease action on an unsafe order.”

Relatives said that prior to the incident, soldiers had complained to them that their equipment was shoddy and put them in greater danger. The relatives said they did not know if such complaints were made to the unit’s command.

Patricia McCook of Jackson, Miss., said her husband, Sgt. Larry O. McCook, 41, had told her “that these vehicles were unsafe.”

“He said, we go out on these missions, you know, he was afraid they were going to break down, that they were no good, they were just piecemealing something together, and set up for people to come ambushing you,” she added.

The senior Army officer said the military was investigating the issue of vehicle maintenance.

Phillip Carter, a former Army captain and expert on legal and military affairs, said the kind of insubordination the unit showed had been more common during World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, when the draft was still in place and the average conscript’s goal was survival. The formation of an all-volunteer Army was supposed to address these problems, Mr. Carter said.

But the continually shifting war in Iraq is testing the preparation of the military, especially the Reserve and the National Guard, military experts said. Since last year, Reserve and National Guard units have complained about lack of proper equipment and training. Those in rear service units, like cooks and truck drivers, often had minimal combat training. The Army has moved to change that, but experts like Mr. Carter call the effort inadequate.

“The paradigm shift that’s happening is that a truck driver is just as likely to see combat as soldiers in infantry unit,” he said. “There’s better training now of support units now as they go out. They’ve gotten better about equipping support units, but those moves have still been incremental moves. There hasn’t been a wholesale push to change the Army to face the kind of the threat it faces in Iraq today. There are no rear units in Iraq any more.”

The Army officer who discussed the case said service records of the 343rd indicated that it has performed well for the nearly nine months it has served in Iraq.

Though the soldiers have been released from detention, they could face anything from reprimands to courts-martial.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Norimitsu Onishi from Baghdad.

Operation Truth Media Campaign!

Today, Operation Truth is launching a new television advertisement, and we need your financial help to get it on the air. Beginning October 12th, our goal is to raise $200,000 in five days. Why am I, an Iraq Vet, trying to do this? Because this ad will help me tell my story.

Watch the Ad! – Click on the desired format:   Windows Media File     Quicktime

I am Robert Acosta. When my country called, I went to Iraq without hesitation. Make no mistake, I am proud of my service and proud of my fellow troops. But for many troops like me, there was a tremendous cost. See, while driving with another soldier, a grenade was tossed into the cab of my truck. I saw the pin was pulled and smoke was starting to come out of the top. I struggled to reach the grenade as we sped off, but I couldn’t get to it in time. My leg was severely injured and I lost my arm as a result of the explosion. I swore I was going to die, and even told my friend who was driving to tell my parents that I loved them.

I’m not looking for pity by telling my story or by being in this ad, I’m a soldier and do what I have to do. But, I’m trying to make an important point. The Pentagon will only refer to me as a number — one of the 7,700 wounded in action. They don’t want you to know who I am or who the others coming back severely injured are. They don’t want you to see what we see in the mirror everyday. I’ll be the first to tell you, it’s tough to look at. But it’s important because no American can make a fully informed judgement about the war without looking at and listening to the men and women coming home.

That’s what Operation Truth is allowing guys like me to do – show you my face and tell you my story. That’s why it’s important that you donate right now to get this ad on the air, and tell as many friends as you can. They have to see and hear guys like me if they want to make a real judgement about the war.

Please take the time to watch the ad, donate as much as you can to Operation Truth, and forward this message on to as many friends and family as you can.

Thank you for supporting us troops and God bless,

Robert Acosta

Federal judge rules Ohio voters may cast ballots at wrong polling place

TOLEDO — A federal judge here ruled today that Ohio voters who show up at the wrong polling place on Election Day can still cast ballots as long as they are in the county where they are registered.

U.S. District Judge James Carr issued a temporary injunction in a lawsuit filed Sept. 27 by the Ohio and Sandusky County Democratic parties against Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

The decision makes it easier for people to vote and blocks a directive from Mr. Blackwell, a Republican, that poll workers must send voters to their correct precinct.

“Denying any voter the right to a provisional vote will erode confidence in the election and lessen the incentive to vote,’’ Judge Carr wrote in his decision.

The state will file an immediate and expedited appeal with the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Mr. Blackwell announced.

Judge Carr ordered Mr. Blackwell to file a directive that complies with the Help America Vote Act by 4 pm. Monday.

More than 100,000 provisional votes were cast in Ohio in the 2000 election — or about 2 percent of the total vote in the presidential election. President Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore in Ohio by 3.6 percentage points.

Bradbury plans to investigate election complaint

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
The Associated Press
10/13/2004, 12:33 a.m. PT

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) — Secretary of State Bill Bradbury and Attorney General Hardy Myers plan to investigate allegations that a paid canvasser might have destroyed voter registration forms.

“There have been allegations made that someone threw out some voter registration forms that had been submitted to them,” Bradbury told The Associated Press late Tuesday. “This is a violation of the law and I will meet with the attorney general in the morning to talk about what we can do to pursue this, and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Bradbury learned of the conduct from KGW-TV, which interviewed Mike Johnson, 20, a canvasser who said he was instructed to only accept Republican registration forms. He told the TV reporter that he “might” destroy forms turned in by Democrats.

“I have never in my five years as secretary of state ever seen an allegation like the one that came up tonight — ever,” Bradbury said. “I mean, frankly, it just totally offends me that someone would take someone else’s registration and throw it out.”

Bradbury said the law requires that groups registering voters submit forms no later than five days after they were filled out. He added that canvassers can’t turn away a voter because of his or her party affiliation.

Rory Smith, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party in Oregon, said the young man interviewed by KGW-TV was not in their rolls. “We do not condone this type of behavior,” Smith told the Portland-based station.

In Nevada earlier Tuesday, KLAS-TV, a CBS affiliate, interviewed an employee of a private voter registration organization who said hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Democratic registration forms had been destroyed.

Eric Russell, a former Voters Outreach of America employee, told the TV station he had personally witnessed his supervisor take out Democratic registration forms from the pile and shred them.

The company has been largely funded by the Republican National Committee, the station reported.

A spokesman for the Las Vegas bureau of the FBI said he did not know if an investigation had been initiated.

Soldiers Once … And Young

After serving a 12-month tour of duty in Iraq last year, Marine Lance Corporal Jeff Lucey returned home to his relieved family with no injuries – or at least none that were visible. “When we didn’t see him tremendously traumatized when he returned, we thought, ‘Oh, thank god,’” says his father, Kevin Lucey. “And then it exploded.”

For months the 23-year-old battled his wartime demons; nightmares, bouts of depression and anxiety, and crushing guilt – classic symptoms of acute post-traumatic stress.

“He told me he was a murderer,” says Jeff’s sister, Debra. “He said, ‘Don’t you understand? Your brother’s a murderer.’”

On June 22, 2004, Jeff Lucey lost his battle. He hanged himself from a rafter in the cellar of his family home.

“He did something, or he saw something, that destroyed him,” ventures his mother, Joyce. “So that when he came back, he took his own life.”

The story of Jeff Lucey is the emotional centerpiece of Patricia Foulkrod’s short documentary, “The Ground Truth: The Human Cost of War,” a collection of interviews with Iraq combat veterans whose experiences have, up until now, remained largely invisible to the American public. Producer/director Foulkrod lets her subjects tell their stories without interruption or prompting, and the effect is nothing less than devastating.

Like most of the young vets in “Ground Truth,” Rob Sarra went to Iraq trusting in the rightness of his mission. Today he is a tormented man, haunted by a memory.

Sarra’s unit had just been in a firefight when he saw an elderly burkha-clad woman carrying a bag on her arm walking toward a nearby armored vehicle. The soldiers raised their weapons and began yelling at her to stop. Sarra, a Marine sergeant, then made an instantaneous and fatal assumption: if the woman did not respond, she must be carrying a bomb.

She did not stop.

Sarra had a clear shot and he took it. As soon as he fired his second shot, his fellow soldiers opened fire and cut her down.

“She fell to the dirt and as she fell she had a white flag in her hand, that she had pulled out of her bag,” says Sarra, staring past the camera into the distance. “At that moment right there I lost it, I threw my weapon down on the deck of the vehicle, I was crying, I was like, Oh my god what are we doing here.”

Pressure Trap

One of the most treacherous aspects of battling the insurgency is that much of the combat takes place in the streets, intersections and marketplaces of urban neighborhoods – places that are often crowded with innocent Iraqi civilians.

“There are no clear enemy lines,” says Steve Robinson, the film’s narrator and executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. “The battlefield completely surrounds the soldier: it’s above you, it’s below you, it’s to the left, it’s to the right. It’s 360 degrees you don’t know where the enemy is. That is an incredible amount of pressure to operate under.” Robinson believes that post-traumatic stress disorder will be this war’s most destructive legacy, just as Agent Orange afflicted Vietnam veterans for decades, and Gulf War Syndrome still sickens soldiers who served during the first Iraq war.

Having lost their son, the Luceys worry about what other veterans and military families may be going through. “We’re just wondering,” Kevin Lucey says, “to what extent are so many young men and women coming back [unable to] deal with the experience of being over there?”

Denver Jones, a specialist in the National Guard whose spine was shattered in a truck accident in Iraq, describes seeing a soldier drive over an Iraqi child who had walked into the roadway. “But the Army told us,” Jones says sadly, “if someone got in front of the truck, to run over them.”

U.S. Army Sergeant Terry Atchison confirms the directive: “If someone jumps out in front of your vehicle, regardless adult or child, then … just run ‘em over. When you value life, you don’t really want to do it. But then again, if you value your life enough, you’ll do it. It’s a very hard decision. I’m glad I never had to face that decision.”

“This war just emotionally destroyed me in a lot of ways,” says Marine Lance Corporal Michael Hoffman. “I just break down some nights knowing that I took part in something like this; that I took the lives of people. I see pictures of Iraqi children in hospital beds, and I can’t help but wonder – was it my unit that did this? Was I part of this?”

Yet the same military that trains these soldiers to be killers, gives them little support when they return bearing the scars of psychological wounds.

National Guardsman Paul Rieckhoff, who came home in February, kept hearing from guys in his unit who had suffered injuries over the course of a year of combat and were fighting to get adequate medical treatment, disability pay or benefits from the Army. So the fiery, articulate lieutenant founded Operation Truth, to help his fellow servicemen and to educate the public. Rieckhoff – who is still on active duty and could be sent back to Iraq – is appalled at the shoddy treatment that wounded veterans are receiving from their government, especially National Guardsmen and reservists.

“You come home and you have to deal with the nightmare that is the Army’s bureaucracy,” Rieckhoff says. “They’ve got to battle, bite, beg and steal to get taken care of or even to get looked at by the VA. And that’s just unconscionable.”

Blood Memories

At 18, Robert Acosta didn’t think his future in Santa Ana, Calif. looked too bright, so he was an easy mark for Army recruiters and their promises of excitement and adventure. After being deployed to Iraq, Acosta lost his hand and the use of his left leg when a grenade thrown into his vehicle exploded before he could toss it back out the window.

Acosta believes that the American public does not understand the enormity of this war’s toll. “People hear ‘injured’ … but they don’t realize that ‘injured’ is missing both his hands, or his legs, or whatever,” he says.

Double amputations, crushed spines, and severely disfiguring burns were some of the physical trauma Dr. Gene Bolles saw on a daily basis as the chief neurosurgeon at Landstuhl Hospital in Germany. The average age of the soldiers he treated was 19 and a half – just kids, he says, who put their lives on the line not for abstract concepts of patriotism, but for the powerful bonds of camaraderie.

“Kids don’t go to war and put themselves in danger for the good of the country, or anything else,” says Bolles, a civilian doctor who is also a Vietnam veteran. “They go there because they’ve learned to love their buddies … And when they get hurt, they feel guilty because they’re hurt and they can’t be there for their unit. It’s an intense training process. And all of a sudden, it’s over. They’re hurt, they’re wounded, they’re out of the service and it’s over. And that, in and of itself, is very traumatic.”

Brokenhearted War Story

Even at just 30 minutes long, “The Ground Truth” packs a powerful cumulative punch. This is documentary filmmaking that has no need for showy cinematic tricks or grandstanding; the narratives are eloquent, raw, and unforgettable just as they are. Says Foulkrod, who is working on a feature-length version of the film, “I don’t want you to ever look at a veteran again, from any war, in the same way.”

She’s right; you won’t.

“These guys are brokenhearted because they really love their country and they really thought this was going to be a good experience,” Foulkrod continues. “You can play hardball and say, well, what did they expect? And that’s a good question: what should they expect?”

U.S. Army Reserve Specialist Rebekah Roberts didn’t expect much of anything – she wanted to serve her country. She joined up during the invasion of Afghanistan, convinced she was doing the right thing, “because of what happened on Sept. 11.”

If Roberts was a true believer in the cause when she left for Iraq, she harbored few illusions by the time she returned home. President Bush’s dogged assertions that the war is going well are a slap in the face to soldiers like Roberts who know firsthand that we are losing ground every day; that the military is overdeployed and weakened by rising numbers of casualties; and that Iraq has become a quagmire of ruinous proportions.

Roberts, who appears in the documentary at an anti-war demonstration marching in her battle fatigues, agonizes both for the troops still fighting in Iraq and for the Iraqis.

“I just believe in my heart I was lied to by somebody,” she says, her voice choked with emotion and anger. “There’s people over there dying now, in the heat of battle, getting shot at. The last thought maybe in their head is, Why? What’s the whole purpose?”

Visit TheGroundTruth.org to read more about the project and to order a copy of the 30-minute DVD or VHS. Purchases and donations will help fund the feature-length version of the film. Copies are free to veterans and military organizations through October.

Attend the premiere! Join filmmaker Patricia Foulkrod along with Ed Asner, Robert Greenwald, Jodie Evans, Mary McDonnell, Dylan McDermott, Esau Morales and many others at a screening of “The Ground Truth: The Human Cost of War,” Thursday, Oct. 14 at 7:30pm at Laemmle Monica Theater, 1332 2nd Ave., Santa Monica, Calif. Following the film will be discussion with 1st Lt. Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Operation Truth; Specialist Robert Acosta, U.S. Army; Lila Lipscomb (military mom featured in “Fahrenheit 911”); Ed Ellis of Veterans for Peace; and Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center. Musical performance by Sara Lovell. RSVP at thegroundtruth@yahoo.com

New law limits details on injured troops

Relatives, even Congress, can be left in the dark about casualties

A few days after enemy fire in Vietnam left him badly hurt, Wally Ladik’s story made the papers back home.  It was December 1965.

Medical Privacy

Photo/File

Wally Ladik was injured in Vietnam, and his friends and family followed his recovery in the paper.

What The Law Says

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996:
“If the information identifies or provides a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify an individual, it is considered individually identifiable health information. . . . Individuals have the right to request a restriction on certain uses or disclosures.”
The Privacy Act of 1974:
“No agency shall disclose any record . . . by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.”

Ladik, who enlisted in the U.S. Marines after graduating from Milwaukee’s Marshall High School, felt a sense of pride as he recuperated in a military hospital that folks back home could read about his sacrifice.

“I knew all my friends were worried,” he recalls. “When they could see something in the paper, in a way they could connect with it.”

But stories of battlefield heroics are getting harder to come by, as heightened concerns about medical privacy constrict information about wounded U.S. soldiers.

The latest barrier to full disclosure: a federal law called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Military families, veterans groups and even members of Congress are discovering that the new privacy law makes it difficult to get details about America’s mounting war casualties in Iraq.

“You’re creating a bit of a communications nightmare,” said Paul Burke of Seymour, family coordinator for a Wisconsin National Guard unit stationed in Iraq.

Implemented about a year ago, HIPAA prohibits hospitals and other health care providers from releasing information about a patient without consent from the patient or next of kin. It also is intended to give people more control over their health records.

But the law’s far-reaching implications have, in some cases, prompted public health officials to withhold information about communicable disease outbreaks, hospitals to refuse clergy information about ailing parishioners, and nurses to hesitate to leave information on a patient’s telephone answering machine.

Now, military officials are citing the law in refusing to identify soldiers wounded in Iraq or disclose details about their injuries.

When eight members of a Waukesha-based National Guard unit were hurt Sept. 12 by a suicide car bombing in Baghdad, the military, citing HIPAA, would say only that none of the injuries was life-threatening and that three soldiers had been hospitalized. Family members later revealed that one of the most seriously hurt was the unit’s commander and that another soldier had nearly lost a leg in the explosion.

Army spokesman Jaime Cavazos said soldiers have the same privacy rights as civilians under HIPAA.

“We don’t apply them any differently than any hospital would,” he said of the restrictions.

Even before HIPAA, military officials say, the Privacy Act of 1974 put severe restrictions on what information the Army, Navy and other armed services could disclose about soldiers wounded in combat.

But such privacy rules are enforced more universally today because of heightened concerns about lawsuits, identity theft and other pitfalls of disclosure, said John Peterson, chief information officer for the Army Medical Command, which oversees all Army hospitals.

Peterson said even members of Congress have been turned away when looking for details about wounded soldiers from their districts.

“There are a lot of heroes who want to maintain their privacy,” he said.

Secrecy suspected

Some critics question whether the military’s true intention in adhering so stridently to HIPAA is privacy – or secrecy.

A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of HIPAA’s chief architects, said the senator never intended the law to keep Americans from learning about casualties in important military missions like the current war on terrorism.

Agreeing that soldiers have privacy rights, too, Kennedy spokesman Jim Manley said the military should be more assertive about obtaining consent from wounded soldiers so the public knows what is happening on the battlefields.

Asked whether the Pentagon might be exploiting the privacy law, Manley replied: “I have to be concerned that they are.”

Ladik, the Vietnam veteran, shared his skepticism. Now 58 and a retired police officer who lives near Madison, he noted that widespread news coverage of casualties in Vietnam turned public opinion against that war during the 1960s and ’70s.

The government’s strategy today, Ladik said, seems to be maintaining public support by restricting such information.

“That really turned on them in the Vietnam War,” he said.

Army spokesmen and other government officials deny such a theory, pointing out that fatal combat injuries are still disclosed publicly and often marked by widespread news coverage of funerals and memorials.

Bill Pierce, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said Kennedy and others in Congress could have structured the law to allow easier disclosure of military injuries.

Pierce described the current criticism from the Kennedy staffer as election-year politics.

“That’s just over the line,” he said. “We’re talking about medical privacy here.”

As of Friday, 1,055 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, and thousands more wounded.

Of the wounded, more than 400 have become patients at the Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Milwaukee, where division manager Jean Bromley has no complaints about how information is being handled.

The hospital must protect patient privacy, Bromley said, but she added that nothing really has changed since the days of the Privacy Act.

Burke, family coordinator for the Waukesha-based 118th Medical Battalion Company B of the National Guard, got a first-hand brush with HIPAA when members of that group were wounded in the recent Baghdad car bombing.

Although being coordinator means he is supposed to disseminate information to families of Company B members, Burke found himself caught in an information bottleneck.

Military officials provided few details about the bombing and gave him explicit instructions on how information about the incident should be presented, Burke said. But many of the wounded soldiers contacted loved ones themselves and divulged details that were supposed to be kept under wraps.

In the end, Burke said, the military’s handling of the situation raised more questions than it answered for some families – and left him worried.

“In an effort to protect everyone’s privacy, we’re pseudo-censoring what information we put out,” he said. “It definitely seems that it’s having effects that the people who created it didn’t intend.”

Families plan to skip military draft

ASHLAND, OREGON — Opposed to the Iraq war, some Ashland and Talent teens and their parents are getting their ducks in a row, fearing a revival of the military draft.

They are creating conscientious objector files and searching out safe-haven countries, all in case what they consider likely or even inevitable comes to pass, regardless of who is elected president.

Nationwide rumors of a renewed draft, dormant since the end of the Vietnam War, have reached fever pitch with a hotly contested presidential election and the Selective Service System’s stepped-up efforts to recruit volunteers for the 1,980 draft boards around the country. That attempt at readiness appeared to propel speculation that was already traveling fast.

The U.S. House moved quickly Tuesday to quell draft fears by killing a long-dormant Democrat-sponsored bill that would have required two years of mandatory military service. The House vote was 402-2, with only two Democrats voting for the measure.

Republicans charged that Democrats created the bill to stir up fear and distrust of the Bush administration, while Democrats countered that Tuesday’s quick vote avoids a substantive discussion of how the military will accomplish its goals in Iraq and elsewhere with a volunteer force that is stretched too thin.

Although she expressed her opinion for this article before Tuesday’s House vote, Beckie Elgin, mother of three teens, was clearly worried about the possibility.

“I’m very concerned and scared about it and so are my kids,” said Elgin. “The lives of our children are more valuable than any reasons we’re at war.

“… I’ll do whatever I have to do to not to let this happen. If it takes hiding them, I will.”

For the last five months, Ashland-based Peace House, the Quaker church and a committee of “worried, anxious parents” have set up a draft counseling network, said Ashland activist Wendy Harris, mother of four boys ages 13 to 21.

“About 20 people came to the first meeting where we all shared our fears about the draft coming back,” she said. “The issue is resonating in the community.”

Many peace activists, conscientious objectors and military veterans from the Vietnam War era have joined the effort, creating a volunteer staff that will conduct training on draft resistance, Harris added.

One veteran of the 1970s draft-resistance movement, Dr. Robin Rose of Ashland, said she’s advising teen patients who have a “particular appreciation for world peace” on the need to establish their status as conscientious objectors early on, because “you just can’t show up and say you’re a CO like in the old days.”

Rose said she sees this as part of her “holistic health perspective to help patients not participate in military action, because it’s bad for their health.”

Rose said a well-documented file for conscientious objectors could include letters from ministers, doctors and others attesting that the draft-age person has a long, deeply held belief in peace that precludes participating in military conflict and committing violence against other humans.

Ashland High School nurse Susan Bizeau, mother of an 18-year-old boy, said they found guidance on the Web — even from the Selective Service’s own Web site — on how to apply for conscientious objector status to avoid the draft.

Bizeau’s son has joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a longtime interfaith peace group. She also said her son practices Tibetan Buddhism, whose followers vow not to kill.

While Bizeau’s son didn’t want to register with Selective Service as required by law when he turned 18, he did to get access to college financial aid, she said.

Many parents have filed forms with Ashland High School requesting their child’s name not be reported to the Selective Service during their junior year as required by President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, said Principal Jeff Schlecht, who mails the “opt-out forms” quarterly with the school’s newsletter to parents.

Schlecht also enforces a policy barring military recruiters on campus except in counseling offices and only if a student requests an appointment.

Army recruiter Sgt. 1st Class James Kaetzel of Medford said schools provide a list of all students and that becomes the database for volunteer recruiting.

Krista Johnson, mother of two teen boys, said she’s “alert, but not joining in the hysteria” because stories on National Public Radio have reported Congress will not revive the draft. She has not started conscientious objector files for her sons.

But others see what they think is a clear slide toward mandatory military service.

“Anytime you’re attacked on your own soil, it’s a different ball game,” Bizeau said. “If there aren’t enough soldiers to fight and if the National Guard isn’t allowed to come home after one and two tours, it’s only logical the draft will be used.”

Harris agreed: “Both Bush and Kerry say ‘no draft,’ but they’re also not elected yet. If there’s another terror attack or if we go to war in Iran or North Korea, there won’t be enough troops.”

Harris said she is researching countries that wouldn’t extradite draft evaders and so far has come up with Nigeria, New Guinea and the Seychelles Islands.

“My sons are very dedicated to peace,” said Harris. “Most kids can’t grasp what’s happening, but we should all have a plan. I’m in wait-and-see mode now, but I wouldn’t rule out leaving the country. It’s just not my first choice to live on a Third World island for the duration.”

John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org

The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.

Oct 11 – In the wake of a July study’s revelation of a “significant risk” of increased mental disorders for soldiers returning from active combat duty in the Middle East, some veterans’ groups voiced their concerns that Congress has allocated insufficient funds to effectively address this problem. The July 1 report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was the product of a 2003 study by a group of doctors from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

Participants answered questions that evaluated symptoms of generalized anxiety, major depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome and alcohol misuse. Results were obtained via anonymous questionnaires given to 2,530 soldiers awaiting deployment to Iraq and 3,671 soldiers who had been in the US for three or four months after returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. The study reported that between 11 and 17 percent of returning troops, depending on branch of military and country assignment, suffered from one or more symptoms of a mental illness compared to 9 percent of soldiers awaiting deployment.

Of those with symptoms of mental disorders, only 23 to 40 percent, depending on branch of military and country of deployment, requested mental health care. The report found that troops who had symptoms of mental disorders were twice as likely as other respondents to perceive obstacles for military personnel who wish to seek mental health care, including risking stigmatization.

The report found that troops who had symptoms of mental disorders were twice as likely as other respondents to perceive obstacles for military personnel who wish to seek mental health care, including risking stigmatization. “There’s a lot of peer pressure and pressure from military authorities [not to report mental illnesses],” said Dave Collins, Austin, Texas spokesperson Veterans for Peace, a member and foundation funded peace group founded by American veterans. “Guys kind of absorb the mentality that, ‘If I say anything, I’m a wimp.'”

NEJM’s report recommended that military brass and lawmakers ensure increases in confidentiality and access to mental health services become a top priority in future planning.

The “attitudes of a warrior culture when it comes to seeking help” aside, said Dave Collins, “what’s within our power is the funding [of veteran’s care.]”

“All this is occurring within a context of rapidly increasing health care for all of us,” Collins said. Countrywide, health care costs rose at 2.6 times the rate of inflation in 2003 according to numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“There’s going to be a lot of health issues for veterans,” he says. “The bottom line is we’re going to see a lot of psychiatric problems,” he said, noting the study did not include soldiers who had been injured. “We don’t look at those costs when we look at the costs of the war.”

The Veteran’s Administration (VA) needs mandatory funding, Collins said. “What happens now is every year it’s a political football,” he said. “But this is an ongoing program that’s expected to last many, many, many years.”

“All categories of spending that are considered discretionary become fair game for arm twisting and debate and compromise,” Collins said. “The political process overwhelms the question of need.”

Every year, the President and the Congress must decide how much is spent on discretionary funding and what programs that funding will cover. Mandatory spending is authorized by permanent laws, not by annual appropriations bills, and accounts for about two-thirds of all government spending. It includes entitlement programs, like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, as well as interest on the national debt and government securities and bonds.

“When it comes to the VA, you are really talking about matters of life and death,” Collins added. Unlike building roads, which are subject to the push and pull of discretionary funding, he said, the VA should be a program that is fully backed by mandatory government spending.

Right now, about half of the VA budget, primarily health care costs and general administrative costs, come out of discretionary spending.

“The Pentagon’s got as big a budget as it had at the height of the Cold War,” says Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) Director Charles Sheehan-Miles. According to the group’s website, the member and foundation funded VCS was founded by veterans in 2002 in response to what they describe as an abrupt turn towards unilateralism in American foreign policy.

“But we’re spending [too much] money on things like missile defense. The money’s there [to provide additional support to vets], but it’s being spent elsewhere.” However, even with increases in funding to the VA, Sheehan-Miles says, more veterans are using its services, so spending is not keeping up with demand.

Last year, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report also noted that at least 23 percent of the growth in veterans health care costs are due to the rise in the number of dependents being added to vets’ health care plans, as well as the increasing number of veterans entering retirement. In terms of funding the VA, said Collins, “The general trend is up. The reason the trend is up is because the general trend of health care [expenses are] up.”

According to a summary of the VA-HUD FY 2005 budget put out by the House Committee on Appropriations, the House budgeted an increase in VA discretionary spending of $1.9 billion up from 2004, for a total budget of $30.3 billion, less than 10 percent of the Pentagon’s overall military budget.

But maneuvering on the VA budgets’ periphery can shield millions of dollars in reductions from the public eye. Vets groups have also been critical of the Bush Administration’s plans to include additional user fees tacked onto services for some veterans, while trying to sell vets’ out-of-pocket expenses for services as budget increases. This summer, Appropriations Committee members backed the president’s proposed fee increases in the FY 2005 budget

In 2003, a CBO report estimated DoD medical budgets could see an annual increase of $7 billion, or 15 percent of the total “operations and support” budget by the year 2020 if benefits are extended to retirees under 65 and reservists – many of whom are serving on the frontlines in Iraq.

Since embarking on the invasion of Iraq, the Department of Defense has experimented with different types of health care modifications for reserve members and their families, notably waiving deductible payments for reserve families. The Bush Administration’s unprecedented use of reservists since 2001 – what some critics have referred to as part of a backdoor draft — has stirred grievances among reserve members and their loved ones, especially among reservists who may have lost their jobs as a result of extended service.

© 2004 The NewStandard. See our reprint policy.

Guardsman could survive 1st Gulf War, but not the second

National Guardsman Jeffrey Sloss was a tough guy. He made it through the first Gulf War. He was State Trooper of the Year in Union, S.C. He volunteered to stay in the Guard even after returning from Iraq in 1992.

But three days before his plane was scheduled to leave for Iraq in April 2003, he began behaving erratically. He bought a $27,000 Mustang and told the officers in his unit that the plane they would take to Iraq was “flying back to South Carolina and not overseas,” his medical records show. Worried about his health, his wife of two weeks traveled to Camp Attebury in Indiana to visit him in the hospital there. Later, he was transported to Fort Knox, Ky., where doctors attributed his problems to “high stress and poor sleep.”

“At this time, there is no evidence to suggest further non-deployment,” wrote psychologist Christopher Knipple in a memorandum to Sloss’ commander on May 6, 2003. “Recommend (Sloss) be considered deployable and fit-for-duty without restrictions.”

Sloss soon left with the rest of his unit to Iraq, where he worked as communications specialist for the 151st Signal Battalion. Pam Sloss, his wife, returned to South Carolina and waited for her husband to come home. He did come home, on April 18, 2004, “but he was never the same as before,” Pam said.

A little over a month later, one year to the day after he had arrived in Iraq, Sloss came home early from his stepdaughter’s softball practice, pulled his service revolver out from his desk, put it to his head, and shot himself while his wife and stepdaughter watched.

“The whole time he was at practice, he was pacing,” Pam recalls. “When we got home, my daughter and I walked into the apartment ? When I turned around from talking to my daughter, he’d walked out of the bedroom and he had the gun in his hand. I ran up the hall and tried to knock it out of his hands.

“I just wasn’t strong enough.”

Sloss should never have been sent to war, said Stephen Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, who testified before Congress about Sloss’ death. “DOD ignored the law designed to protect soldiers and ensure we send healthy soldiers to fight the nation’s wars.”

The Army declined to comment on Sloss’ case. But Martha Rudd, an Army spokeswoman, said, “Soldiers are given medical screenings before they are deployed. These include mental health issues. If a soldier is having a problem in a particular area, then he or she is referred to a specialist in that area and is evaluated for that particular issue. If a person is deemed medically non-deployable, then he is not deployed.”

Pam Sloss first met her husband in June 2002, when the state trooper stopped her car while conducting routine sobriety checks.

“I saw him. We hit it off. We had our first date a week and a half later,” she said. When he came home from Iraq, Pam said she didn’t see how troubled he was. She had been a military wife for less than a year, and hadn’t seen her husband for most of that time.

 “I can look back and see a few things now,” she said, “He was a little distant, a little despondent about having gained a little weight, but I never thought he would do something like that.”

Sloss’ best friend, too, missed the warning signs. Fellow state trooper Daniel Seaford had been in the Guard with Sloss for 12 years — sharing hotel rooms when they did their weekend service and posing together for a photograph in front of Baghdad International Airport. They were so close that their friends dubbed them “Salt and Pepper” (Sloss was black, Seaford is white).

They also talked each week after their return to South Carolina.

“We had this conversation a few days before he killed himself,” Seaford said. “He was having some issues?about adjusting back to family life, home life.”

In Iraq, life was simple, Seaford remembers Sloss saying. ” ‘All you got to do is eat and survive.’ “

Back home, life was throwing Sloss off. He was forgetting his keys. Forgetting to show up for appointments on time. Making small mistakes on his paperwork. Seaford understood because he was going through the same.

“You could be sleeping, and somebody would slam the door, and you’d be back in Iraq,” Seaford said, “Just the thunder, and the rumbling sound ? For a brief moment, you don’t realize where you are. Your mind races.”

Sloss and Seaford survived 61 mortar attacks on their unit during their time in Iraq. Neither of them had expected that when they signed up for Guard duty.

“Never in a million years did we think we would be sent to Baghdad,” Seaford said. “Five years ago, that would have been impossible. For us to be where we were, it was unbelievable.” In Iraq, the two friends controlled the encryption keys that the 151st Signal Battalion depended on to communicate with the rest of the armed forces in the area. Signal units in wars generally tend to stay toward the rear, but as part of the close-quarters combat on the outskirts of Fallujah, their unit was out front.

“We had so many close calls,” pulling security escorts for people, Seaford said, “That’s something a Marine would do, and we were just National Guardsmen.”

When Seaford and Sloss returned to the states, they went through the Army’s debriefing process to alert them to the warning signs of combat stress and the danger in ignoring those signs.

“But you see, it’s one briefing, and it’s a whole battalion of people,” Seaford said, “To be honest, everybody is just glad to be home.”

Robinson said that when Sloss got back from Iraq, he had no one from the military looking out for his health. “He had served his purpose and was now on his own,” he said.

Pam said she sought help but didn’t know where to turn.

“The only numbers I had were for a major, and an Army chaplain, and those didn’t work” she said. “I finally found one number after looking on the Internet.”

The Army OneSource number she found, given to all veterans during their debriefings, is designed to help with any number of problems, including legal, financial and medical. Sloss wasn’t around long enough to keep the appointment he made, his wife says.

“He killed himself the next day,” Pam said, “Even if he had some numbers to call, considering the state he was in, he probably wouldn’t even have remembered.”

Seaford said he understands how confusing it is for returning soldiers.

“We did get some paperwork that had some numbers for help, but to be honest, I couldn’t put my hands on it if I wanted to,” he said. “It’s all so disorganized.”

Seaford said he isn’t seeking help even though he’s had some of the same symptoms as Sloss. He wants to cope with it himself, if he can. But with Sloss gone, it’s gotten tougher on him.

“I spent hours trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong,” he said. “I can’t ask him those questions now.”