Utah VA Creating Movie to Help Police Deal with Combat Veterans

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Team VCS

February 6, 2009 – There’s a training video in the works, targeting a troubling trend among American combat veterans. Some who struggle with mental health issues end up in deadly standoffs with police, and the state Department of Veterans Affairs hopes the video will do something to prevent it.

Here’s the scenario: A recent combat veteran walks into a convenience store with an assault rifle. He orders the clerk to call the police and kicks her out. This vet struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and wants a confrontation with police. He may even want to die in a hailstorm of police bullets.

“These folks are still in combat mode. So as a result, they are more aggressive than someone might normally be,” said Terry Schow, director of the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs.

Last year, at least three young vets committed suicide by cop. The Utah VA is making the video to better train law enforcement for those situations and these individuals.

“As they approach a situation, hopefully one of the questions they ask is: ‘Are you a combat veteran?'” Schow said.

Here’s one of the messages in the training: Law enforcement should look for clues that might tip them off that the person they’re encountering is a combat veteran.

“They’re going to have arousal response. They’re going to be hyper-vigilant. They’re going to have things the normal person on the street is not going to experience as a threat, they’re going to see as a threat,” explained Darin Farr, outreach and research director for the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs.

The video aims to reduce the stigma of P.T.S.D. and show law enforcement officers they can reduce the volatility of encounters with combat veterans, especially if they better understand the vet’s experience and use that in a clam approach.

“Some of them are on their second and third deployments. You keep having that chronic exposure, that just compounds it with P.T.S.D.,” Farr said.

Empathy goes a long way to diffuse the situation. “If you’ve got a combat-mode guy and a law enforcement combat-mode guy, those two things clash. But if there’s an understanding of what’s going on with these guys, it can make a big difference and, ideally, save the lives of the veterans in trouble,” Schow said.

The $5,000 to fund the video comes from a House bill passed a few years ago to provide support for returning veterans with mental health problems.

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Editorial Column: Army Suicides May Pass Army Combat Deaths in January 2009

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Team VCS

February 7, 2009 – The continued rise of OEF/OIF veteran suicides reported by the military over the past weeks isn’t very surprising news for longtime followers of this issue; but, it’s no less alarming.

Swamped with conferences, classes, and organizing a Feb. 13 event, Renaissance by Fire: Returning Veterans, Society & the Forging of a New Enlightenment, at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the Vet Art Project, I’m only now able to offer a few reflections on this troublesome news. First, let’s gauge where we’ve been before looking at the latest data.

In December 2007, prepping for my testimony before Congress, I tallied up all of the available officially-reported DoD/VA suicide figures and felt what I’d found was significant: If we added these reported OEF/OIF veteran suicides to the running Afghanistan and Iraq KIA count, the total casualties at the time would have been at least 10 percent higher.

In September 2008, I did another count of the official OEF/OIF suicide data (full breakdown and lots of other related stats collected there) reported by the DoD and VA. During this layman’s research, I found that the suicide portion of the overall KIA count had increased to nearly 15 percent.

Over the past few weeks, we have learned that 1) both the Army and Marines have seen increases in their 2008 active-duty suicides — even in the face of aggressive campaigns to reduce their incidence — the Army’s rate higher than at any other point in the 30 years that they have been tracking such figures; and 2) that, judging by January’s reported record-shattering month of Army suicides — where more active-duty soldiers killed themselves than were killed-in-action fighting the enemy on Afghan and Iraqi combat fields — 2009 is trending ominously.

Last week, preparing for an interview by NotAlone.com (the audio has not been posted as of yet, but I would highly recommend your checking out their work in the meantime), I added up the just-released figures:

128  – confirmed 2008 active-duty Army suicides
15  – suspected 2008 active-duty Army suicides
41  – confirmed 2008 active-duty Marine suicides
—–
184 active-duty 2008 Army/Marine suicides

Per icasualties.org, 2008’s total OEF/OIF KIA count was 469.

Doing the math quickly: 184 of 469 — or 28 percent — of our OEF/OIF veteran casualties seem to be as a result of suicide: an astonishing jump. And it’s important to note: This figure only reflects the active-duty element in the Army and Marines.

This number does not include Air Force or Navy suicides, nor veterans separated from service but not yet in the VA system, nor any suicides of veterans in the VA system.

So, the reality is much more dire than what the numbers being bandied about in the news today reflect, unfortunately.

On January 29, 2009, PBS NewsHour covered the story:

More bad news arrived Thursday. NPR (full audio at link):

    In January, 24 U.S. soldiers are believed to have committed suicide — seven confirmed cases and 17 more awaiting confirmation. By comparison, last January there were only five suicides in the Army.

    Last month’s total is not just the highest monthly total since the Army started counting in 1980; it is more deaths than were sustained in combat last month by all branches of the armed forces combined.

    Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, says that the Army is actively looking into the deaths and is trying to figure out why the suicides are happening.

    “If we knew why, in every single instance we would, in fact, be able to stop this problem,” Chiarelli tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “We’ve got to try to find out why the numbers continue to go up.”

Friday MSNBC interview with General Peter Chiarelli:

Much more in extended.

Click on ‘Article Link’ below tags for more…

In educational interest, article(s) quoted from extensively.

Let’s start off with a sliver of good news amidst all the bleakness.

Many military families who have lost loved ones over the years have been consistently advocating for a change in the way the military prepares its troops before — and after — combat.

Not only should attention be paid to physically preparing the body for combat, but service members deserve to have the very best psychological support and training as well to better manage the stresses of going into battle and reintegrating once home. At long last, they no longer appear to be the lone voices advocating for this change. Suzanne M. Schaferr, AP:

    To battle a growing suicide rate, the Army may have to start teaching soldiers how to handle stress from the first day they take their entry oath, the service’s top trainer said Friday.

    “The new idea I suppose I would offer is getting at it right from the beginning of the career,” said Gen. Martin Dempsey, the new four-star commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, which operates 33 schools and training centers at 16 Army installations.

    Dempsey, who led soldiers during two combat tours in Iraq, was questioned about the issue after addressing 1,150 soldiers who graduated from basic training at Fort Jackson, the Army’s largest training installation. …

    Dempsey said the issue was vital to an Army that has been at war for seven years and may well be at war for several more.

    “I think we need to take a look at a comprehensive fitness program … that right from the beginning of a young man or woman’s experience in the Army, we begin building coping skills before the stress comes. Because once the stress hits, then you are really into last-minute intervention,” Dempsey said.

    The general said the Army is working with the Department of Defense on new approaches, and he hoped some action might be taken “within the next year.”

    Dempsey said the new training could include elemental things, such as learning to balance a checkbook so a soldier with a young family doesn’t fall into debt and open the way to further stress.

    “What we are trying to do is identify skills we can give our soldiers, whether they are intellectual skills, physical skills, spiritual skills … so that when the stress hits, you are armed to deal with it,” Dempsey said.

Back to the bleak via Barbara Starr and Mike Mount, CNN:

    Col. Kathy Platoni, chief clinical psychologist for the Army Reserve and National Guard, said that the long, cold months of winter could be a major contributor to the January spike.

    “There is more hopelessness and helplessness because everything is so dreary and cold,” she said. But Platoni said she sees the multiple deployments, stigma associated with seeking treatment and the excessive use of anti-depressants as ongoing concerns for mental-health professionals who work with soldiers.

    Those who are seeking mental-health care often have their treatment disrupted by deployments. Deployed soldiers also have to deal with the stress of separations from families. …

    Platoni also said that while the military has made a lot of headway in training leaders on how to deal with soldiers who may be suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, “there is still a huge problem with leadership who shame them when they seek treatment.”

    The anti-depressants prescribed to soldiers can have side effects that include suicidal thoughts. Those side effects reportedly are more common in people 18 to 24.

Luis Martinez, ABC News:

    The numbers prompted enough concern among the Army’s senior leadership that Army Secretary Pete Geren made the unusual decision of briefing Congress on the increase and ordering the data’s public release.

    The release of last year’s numbers prompted the service to order a “stand down” for a window of 30 days beginning Feb. 15, when soldiers will be trained to help identify behaviors that could lead to suicidal behavior and help them intervene.

    The stand down will be followed for three additional months by a “chain-teaching program” focused on suicide prevention. It is the Army’s biggest initiative ever to battle the rising number of suicides. …

    Last year’s Army suicide rate of 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers was also the first time since the Vietnam War that the rate was higher than the adjusted civilian rate. …

    The number of Army suicides last year was spread fairly evenly among the ranks of those serving at home and abroad. Thirty-seven soldiers committed suicide while deployed overseas — mostly to Iraq and Afghanistan, 50 of the suicides occurred after their return and 44 were by soldiers who had never deployed. Fifty-three percent of the suicides among those back from overseas deployments occurred more than a year after their return. …

    The total number of [Army] suicides in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 now stands at 171. The overwhelming majority of the suicides in Iraq and Afghanistan last year, or 78 percent, were among first-time deployers.

And what of the non-active-duty Afghanistan and/or Iraq veteran suicides that don’t show up in the latest Army/Marine figures? They should be counted, too. I continue to collect these incidents for the PTSD Timeline, as I have done since 2005, but classes have postponed my physically adding them for the time being. Unfortunately, they continue to pile up. One recent case reported by Christian Jennings, WALB-Channel 10 [NBC-Georgia]:

    One family in Thomasville knows first hand what it’s like to loose a son struggling with PTSD. Pvt. Joseph McMath died at the young age of 24 on January 13, 2009, from a drug overdose. Proud parents David and Linda McMath can only smile at the memory of their beloved son. “He was just a good hearted person,” said Joseph’s mother Linda McMath.

    Pvt. Joseph Aaron McMath was a veteran of the United States Army. He served in the Striker Brigade Unit in Iraq.

    “It was 9/11/2001…he signed up, and went to Iraq in 2004, and he did 2 tours of duty, back to back,” she said. He was stationed in Ft. Lewis, Washington for three years….but it was his year overseas that changed him forever.

    “He did have a nervous breakdown over there. There was also we found out a shockwave from a bomb that went off close to him and it slung him 500 feet,” said his mom. When he returned from war in February of 2005, his life began a downward spiral.

    “For four years after the war, he was not Joseph, he was somebody else,” said his father David McMath.

    “We finally got him diagnosed with severe PTSD and also with traumatic brain injury,” said Ms. McMath. … Joseph’s doctor told the McMath’s that their son’s case was the worst he’d ever seen.

    “He would be very very depressed to the point that he would not even get out of bed. He got to the point where he didn’t really enjoy life like he did at one time. Flashbacks, he had flashbacks so severe during the night he would have to just about have to be knocked completely out with medications in order to get any sleep,” his parents said.

    And on January 13, 2009 it was a deadly combination of drugs that took his life. Joseph McMath overdosed on his medications, his mother saw her son lying lifeless on his bathroom floor. … “The guys that come back, they do have a different personality, and they do have addictions and problems. But these people need all the support they can get, please don’t turn your back on them,” she said.

This family is struggling to pay their son’s funeral expenses.

Details on offering them some help can be found at WALB’s website (scroll down to the bottom of the page). [On a related note, see Are PTSD-Medicated Veterans Dying in Sleep — or Committing Suicide?]

Another recently-reported suicide: Michael Palmer, 23, a two-tour Iraq vet and father of one who killed himself at the end of January. The cases are seemingly endless.

Another look at how suicide affects units large and small comes from Matthew D. LaPlante, Salt Lake City Tribune:

    Since 2005, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the lives of two soldiers from the Utah National Guard.

    Suicide has claimed 10.

    In response to an alarming increase of suicide in its ranks, the military has hired a virtual army of social workers, mental health professionals and suicide-prevention counselors to work with its members. But for the fourth consecutive year, the Army has reported an increase in the number of soldiers it has lost to suicide. …

    The Utah guard lost three soldiers to suicide in 2005, four in 2006, one in 2007 and two in 2008. Officials said statistics from prior years were unavailable because the Guard’s personnel officers didn’t track suicides separately from other deaths until 2005, but at least one soldier killed himself in 2004 while on duty in Afghanistan with the 211th Aviation Battalion. …

    Veterans advocacy groups say the military’s data undercounts the problem. That’s because it doesn’t include people like Jason Ermer — an Iraq War veteran who killed himself after leaving the service. The 28-year-old shot himself in the head in the foothills near his Ogden home on Dec. 31, 2007.

    Ermer’s mother believes that the Army abandoned her son. She says he was forced out of the service after returning from combat with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

    “He was heartbroken,” Rosa Ermer said. “He went over to Iraq, he served his country with pride, and then they took everything away from him. They knew he had problems and they didn’t take care of them. They just got rid of him.”

The fact that there was no tracking prior to 2005 shows the absolute disinterest in understanding the full scope of the after-effects of war at the time…dismaying to say the least for anyone interested in researching and understanding this issue, maddening for military families dealing with these losses.

Megan Feldman and Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer Blogs:

    Jeffrey R. McKinney, Andrew Velez and Ted Westhusing are not statistics. They are sons, husbands, brothers and fathers who committed suicide while fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. But in recent months, they have become nothing more than numbers that keep adding up to what’s become one of the most under-reported stories to emerge in wartime …

    “This story’s on the back burner now,” says Charles McKinney of Bedford, whose son, 19-year veteran First Sergeant Jeff McKinney, killed himself in front of his men in Adhamiyah, Iraq, on July 11, 2007. “I understand there are more pressing issues, like the economy. And the war in Iraq appears to have toned down. But now we’re feeling the after-effects. This was my son’s second tour. But after his first tour, he told me — and there had been a real bad incident where kids were killed — he told me, ‘I’ll never be the same again.'” …

    Since Jeff McKinney’s death, his father has been in constant contact with Stephen L. Robinson, the director of veterans affairs for Veterans for America and a former Army Ranger who’s served as a sort of liaison between vets’ families and politicians. [Robinson is the greatest force on this, along with Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense, that I have personally ever come across in four years of covering this issue…]

    There had been an attempt to hold Congressional hearings concerning soldiers’ suicides: Last May, Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri introduced the so-called “HONOR Warriors Act,” which would “improve and enhance the mental health care benefits available to members of the Armed Forces and veterans” as well as “enhance counseling and other benefits available to survivors of members of the Armed Forces and veterans.” But the bill — co-sponsored by, among others, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama — got nowhere.

    Republican Senator John Cornyn called for an investigation into the suicides at the Houston Recruiting Battalion. Charles McKinney hopes that, sooner than later, there will be a full inquiry throughout the military.

    “I can’t bring my son back,” says McKinney, himself a former Marine. “But I just want to call attention to this. It’s a problem and not being addressed fully. The military has taken steps, but so much more can be done. I get angry, and that doesn’t do em any good. I’m not going to let Jeff’s death be in vain. He was a 19-year-veteran, he had a beautiful wife, a newborn son, and he was ready to retire. … These are not statistics. This is real. And it did not need to happen.”

Jon Soltz, OIF vet and VoteVets chairman, MSNBC this week:

While it’s great to see any discussion at all on this topic in the national media, I wish that other voices could also be included when such issues are tackled. While Soltz did a good job, I think there are family members who have lost loved ones following their return home who, in the wake of that jarring loss, have been stirred to do remarkable work on the specific issue of veteran suicide. Why aren’t we seeing them interviewed? Why aren’t they able to share what they’ve learned with us, to share the resources they have found in the wake of their loss?

I would challenge the media to offer these families more seats at the table when discussing the one issue that they know more intimately than any of us would care to know. Non-profit groups, community counselors and others should also be tapped for their knowledge and resources at such times. It’s not enough to just present the data, explain things away by pointing to the past administration or the strain in the military or VA or personal lives of our veterans, and then simply move on to the next story without offering any direction for those still alive and struggling today.

Our media needs to be more responsible than that.

NPR, not surprisingly, did give room for such a voice when it rebroadcast a 2008 interview  presenting one family’s experience following the 2005 combat zone suicide of their son, Jason Scheuerman (sigh — why do so many of these stories reflect such a high level of disregard for both our troops and military families by those in position to do better by dealing more sensitively and forthrightly with such tragedies?):

    When Chris Scheuerman found out his son had died in Iraq, he says, he knew something was amiss.

    “I believe we found out on Aug. 1, which is the worst day of my life,” he says. “I was coming home from dinner and a minivan pulled up to the house and from the minivan came an officer and a chaplain and I knew, right then, why they were there. I knew that my son was dead.”

    Scheuerman is no stranger to military operations. He’s a retired master sergeant and trains soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

    “Eventually, that evening, they said it was from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. At that point I asked them, ‘How could that be?'” Scheuerman says.

    Because the Army was reluctant to provide details, it would take Scheuerman the good part of two years to answer that question. Only after filing numerous Freedom of Information Act requests and appealing to a local member of Congress for help, was he able to fit the puzzle pieces together, he says. The resulting image would haunt him and leave him revving to change the military’s mental health system.

Scheuerman went on to testify before Congress and has continued to work to ensure that other military families are spared having to go through what they had to go through. Obviously, there is no end in sight for this work.

Kudos to Lizette Alvarez for her coverage this week in the New York Times. These are the voices and this is the information that we need to have reported far and wide in all media channels:

    Linda Bean, whose son, Sgt. Coleman S. Bean, killed himself in New Jersey in September after two tours of duty in Iraq, one on active-duty with Army and the other with the Maryland National Guard, said it was essential for the Army to persuade soldiers to get mental health help. But Ms. Bean said the reality was that most soldiers were reluctant to seek help for fear it would derail their careers.

    The Army needs to encourage its soldiers to get help outside the military system, she said. There are a number of groups willing to help counsel service members and veterans – Give an Hour, The Soldiers Project, Vets4Vets – but the information is not widely available.

    “Soldiers won’t take advantage of the Army’s programs because they don’t want an official jacket following them,” said Ms. Bean, whose son received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder after his first deployment but showed no signs of distress after his second tour of duty. “Let the grateful nation do its part. These groups want to do their part.”

More  combat stress resources.

And, finally, the Air Force has released a number of suicide prevention videos over the years. An especially poignant one:

There is still so much to discuss on this issue, but this is all I have time to post on for now. It’s an understatement to say we are not doing well by our military families as a society.

Deplorable state of affairs.

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Obama Team Outlines ‘New Realism’ for Afghanistan

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Team VCS

February 8, 2009 – The Obama administration today today outlined a new campaign strategy for the war in Afghanistan, scaling back the ambitions of George Bush in a shift which senior officials and diplomats described as a “new realism”.

Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama’s new envoy for Afghanistan, General James Jones, the new White House national security adviser, and General David Petraeus, the new commander of the Afghan campaign, all stressed that the US president’s policy on the Taliban and al-Qaida would be governed by “attainable goals” matched by “adequate resources”.

In the first major foreign policy speech from the new administration, the vice-president, Joe Biden, told a security conference in Munich that the strategic review on Afghanistan under way in Washington would “make sure that our goals are clear and achievable”.

Notable by its absence in any of the speeches from the American team was any mention of building democracy in Afghanistan. Instead, the emphasis was on creating sustainable security to try to prevent the Taliban from extending their grip on the country.

“Obama’s objectives will be much more moderate,” said a senior European policy-maker involved in discussions with the Obama team. A senior Nato official said Washington’s emphasis on Afghanistan was shifting to “being much more realistic”, adding: “It doesn’t need to be a democracy, just secure.”

“The new policy will be not just winning hearts and minds, but winning hearts, minds, and stomachs,” said another senior diplomat working in Kabul. “It’s realistic. Realism is good.”

The Obama team and Nato leaders are due to finalise a “comprehensive” review of the Afghan strategy by April when the US president arrives in Europe for a Nato summit in France and Germany.

“Barack Obama is a pragmatist. He knows we must deal with the world as it is,” said Jones. He added that there had been a “failure to harmonise” the various strands of the campaign in Afghanistan. The new policy would place greater emphasis on “going beyond military capacity” to dealing with good governance, judicial reform, a focus on the police, and the “war on drugs”.

General John Craddock, the Nato commander, said alliance forces in Afghanistan would launch attacks on opium and heroin cartels “within a few days”, a decision that has triggered some dispute among some European Nato allies.

Petraeus made it plain that the Americans expected the Europeans to ­contribute more troops to the campaign in Afghanistan, although there were no troop pledges made over the weekend.

John Hutton, the British defence secretary, was the sole European voice todaycalling for more troops to be dispatched. “It is better to volunteer than to be asked,” he said, denouncing the European habit in Nato of “looking to the Americans to do all the heavy lifting”.

Hutton delivered an unusually robust attack on Nato’s bureaucracy, arguing that the operations to counter the Taliban represented the alliance’s future.

“This is not an aberration. This is the pattern of future conflicts. I do not believe we are properly preparing for it,” he said.

Nato should show a “wartime mentality” over the campaign in Afghanistan, but instead it possessed a “peacetime culture obsessed with process”, he added.

Hutton’s attack on Nato’s indecision was welcomed by Petraeus, who described the remarks as “a terrific message”. The US is expected to almost double its contingent in Afghanistan to about 60,000 troops.

Holbrooke signalled a sharp change of tack on Afghanistan, saying: “We’ve inherited a situation of grand rhetoric and inadequate resources, both military and civilian. We need to understand what our goal is in Afghanistan.”

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Shinseki Wants Electronic System to Deal with Claims Backlog

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Team VCS

February 5, 2009 –  The Veterans Affairs Department needs an electronic claims system if it is ever to eliminate its massive claims backlog, new VA Secretary Eric Shinseki told a House committee Wednesday.

“If you go into the adjudication rooms where decisions on claims are made, you’ll see individuals sitting at desks with stacks of papers going halfway up to the ceiling,” Shinseki said. VA has 11,100 people processing claims, and is scheduled to hire another 1,100 this year to keep up with the work. About 885,000 new claims were filed in 2008 on top of a backlog estimated at more than a half a million, Shinseki said.

“If we don’t – create a paperless process, I’ll report a year later that we hired more people,” Shinseki told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “We need to very quickly take this into an IT format that allows us to do timely, accurate, consistent decision making on behalf of our veterans.”

Previous VA leaders set a deadline of 2010 to put an electronic claims system in place, but Shinseki said he hasn’t explored whether that’s a feasible deadline.

“My intent is to get to a paperless system as soon as possible,” Shinseki said. He plans to send out a policy letter to VA employees within a week stating his support for continued centralization of IT and systems.

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., agreed with the need to go paperless. “Have you ever gone into a file room? It’s almost dangerous as some of these file rooms are overwhelmed by individual files that will be three, four or five feet tall,” he said.

Electronic storage of pdf files into one document will be more efficient than keeping paper files and a much more efficient way to search through data, he said.

Shinseki also said he will push to make VA and Defense Department medical records more compatible, a project that has been mired in red tape for decades. He said he will meet with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a few weeks to plan how to speed up the project.

When an active-duty military member “comes to us as a veteran, those records are going to be transferable, accurate and complete,” Shinseki said, adding that personnel records, not just medical records, should be compatible and available for doctors to review.

He added that requiring military members to enroll with VA when they leave the military will force the two departments to collaborate.

Lawmakers also discussed the need for timely VA appropriations. Shinseki said he will get a timely request to President Barack Obama in hopes of an on-time 2010 budget.

Ranking Member Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., encouraged Shinseki to pursue energy-saving initiatives, including solar and wind power for buildings and using solar panels to heat water.

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Feb 9, Part Two of Salon Suicide Series: Coming Home to Fort Carson – Profile of Adam Lieberman

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Team VCS

“The Death Dealers took my life!”

Adam Lieberman tried to kill himself when he returned from Iraq. Only then did the Army take his mental health seriously. Salon Editor’s note: This is the first story in a weeklong series called “Coming Home.”

February 9, 2009 – The day before Halloween 2008, Army Pvt. Adam Lieberman swallowed handfuls of prescription pain pills and psychotropic drugs. Then he picked up a can of black paint and smeared onto the wall of his room in the Fort Carson barracks what he thought would be his last words to the world.

“I FACED THE ENEMY AND LIVED!” Lieberman painted on the wall in big, black letters. “IT WAS THE DEATH DEALERS THAT TOOK MY LIFE!”

Soldiers called Lieberman’s unit, the 1st Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment, the Death Dealers. Adam suffered serious mental health problems after a year of combat in Iraq. The Army, however, blamed his problems on a personality disorder, anxiety disorder or alcohol abuse — anything but the war. Instead of receiving treatment from the Army for his war-related problems, Adam faced something more akin to harassment. He was punished and demoted for his bad behavior, but not treated effectively for its cause. The Army’s fervent tough-guy atmosphere discouraged Adam from seeking help. Eventually he saw no other way out. Now, in what was to be his last message, he pointed the finger at the Army for his death.

It would be a voice from beyond the grave, he thought, screaming in uppercase letters. The last words, “THAT TOOK MY LIFE!” tilted down the wall in a slur, as the concoction of drugs seeped into Adam’s brain.

Late last month the Army released figures showing the highest suicide rate among soldiers in three decades. The Army says 128 soldiers committed suicide in 2008 with another 15 still under investigation. “Why do the numbers keep going up?” Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a Pentagon news conference Jan. 29. “We can’t tell you.” The Army announced a $50 million study to figure it out.

It is not just the suicides spiraling out of control. Salon assembled a sample of 25 cases of suicide, prescription drug overdoses or murder involving Fort Carson soldiers over the past four years, by no means a comprehensive list. In-depth study of 10 of those cases revealed a pattern of preventable deaths. In most cases, the deaths seemed avoidable if the Army had better handled garden-variety combat stress reactions.

Interviews, Army documents and medical records suggest that Adam might not have attempted suicide if he had received a proper diagnosis and treatment. His suicide attempt seems avoidable. But the Army’s mistreatment extended well into its aftermath.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

At the last minute on Oct. 30, Lieberman stumbled out of his room and dialed 911. He lived.

Five days later Adam’s mother, Heidi Lieberman, sat opposite the desk of Lieberman’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Lance Kohler, at Fort Carson. Nobody from the Army had bothered to call her in Rochester, N.Y., to tell her about Adam’s suicide attempt. There was no requirement to alert parents of an attempt, the Army said, only a successful suicide.

Heidi had watched her son’s mental health deteriorate precipitously after he returned from Iraq in late 2006. He had suffered from a laundry list of symptoms typical of post-traumatic stress disorder, including insomnia, depression, panic attacks and flashes of violent anger.

Two days after he swallowed the pills, Adam called his mother himself from the hospital. Still slurring his words from the effect of the meds, Heidi could barely understand her son. When Heidi asked him where he was, Adam had to ask someone.

Sitting across from the lieutenant colonel’s desk, Heidi wanted to know why the Army had not moved her son into a unit supposedly dedicated to healthcare where he might get better treatment.

“Well, he has legals,” Kohler told her. Legal trouble. She knew Adam was struggling. Mostly Adam had been silencing his demons with 30 beers a day plus some Jameson. He’d puke in a bucket and start over. Mental health professionals call it self-medicating when a soldier comes back from war and turns to booze when he can’t get help, another typical reaction. Just as predictable is the bad behavior that comes with it.

To Heidi, Kohler’s response showed that the Army considered Adam a discipline problem, but didn’t seem particularly concerned about why.

“What legals?” Heidi asked.

Adam had broken into a candy machine, so petty larceny. He had also gone AWOL for a short time to say goodbye to an Army buddy in Texas headed off to a second tour in Iraq. The Army denied Adam’s request for leave. He went anyway.

“And defacing government property,” Kohler added to the list.

“When did he do this?”

“Within the last couple of days,” Kohler responded, staring.

Heidi thought. No. Couldn’t be.

“What did he deface?”

Kohler stared. “The wall in his bedroom.”

Heidi met his stare, exasperated. “You mean his suicide note?” Kohler just looked at her.

The next day Heidi called Adam’s company commander, Capt. Phelps.

“You know,” Heidi fired at Phelps, “I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that my son is being charged with defacing government property and you people are more concerned about your wall than my son,” she stammered. Then she threatened, half jokingly, “I will paint that wall and make this stupidity go away.”

A pause, and then Phelps snapped, “We’ll contact supply and have them bring you the matching paint.”

And so, the Army allowed a mother to paint over her son’s suicide note. Heidi’s handicapped sister helped.

“I was kind of surprised that they took me up on that,” she said late last year sitting at her dining room table in her home in Rochester, N.Y. Heidi’s sister took photos of her, paint roller in hand, erasing what was supposed to be her son’s last message. “He agreed that if I painted that wall that charge would go away,” she recalled about her talk with Adam’s captain. “It didn’t.”

Just before Christmas, MPs fingerprinted and booked Adam for defacing government property.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

A blondish crew cut tops Adam Lieberman’s lanky, lumbering 6-foot-6 frame. He makes little eye contact. Adam joined the Army at age 17. In late 2005 he deployed to Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division as a forward observer, a radioman. He is all of 21 now.

More than two years after his return from Iraq, where several close explosions rocked his skull, his memory sometimes fails him. He carries a notebook to keep track of appointments. He still writes the occasional letter backward.

Adam is now at the stage of digesting (or at least sharing) his experiences in Iraq in a passive tense — he describes things happening to him and around him, rather than by him. He arrived at the scene of a roadside bomb attack on other U.S. troops in Sadr City in Baghdad. “A guy’s face was blown off from his nose to his chin,” he said as we sat at his dining room table with Heidi while he was home on leave recently. The U.S. soldier was gagging, drowning in blood without a mouth or nose. A medic performed an emergency tracheotomy. The soldier died anyway.

Adam didn’t even bother to inspect the nearby Humvee that took a direct hit. He could see through the windows that inside the vehicle, “It was blood soup.”

During another engagement a gunner atop Adam’s Humvee suddenly collapsed in Adam’s lap. Only a thin flap of skin attached the gunner’s head and torso. Beheaded. Adam vomited.

He once saw the lower half of a friend’s body sheared off by a roadside bomb. In the seconds that followed before he died, his friend still moved his right arm and tried to talk. He looked at Adam. Adam described the look in his eyes as “terror.”

Adam once took a sniper’s bullet to the chest. It shattered his digital camera and hit his body armor. On two separate occasions he lost consciousness because of head blows.

Heidi noticed a difference in Adam when she met him at the airport in December 2006. “When he got off the plane and we were walking, I saw his eyes shifting through the crowd,” she remembered.

Crowds freaked him out. Adam had a panic attack in a Wal-Mart. He started getting into fights at bars. He couldn’t sleep. “You become a new person,” he explained. “You are raised as a person and they send us over there and we become a new person.”

The Army “screened” Adam for mental health problems upon his return from Iraq, a process Adam describes as, “You stand in a line and go to a bunch of tables where people are sitting.” He filled out some forms. Some soldiers aren’t yet aware of their problems at that point. Some lie because they just want to go home with their wives. Others say they report problems but receive little follow-up.

“Nobody is willing to help anybody,” he said about his experience at Fort Carson after returning from Iraq. “You have to understand. We are just pieces of equipment.”

The Army says it is working hard to erase the stigma of seeking mental healthcare. It isn’t working at Fort Carson. Adam says he was actively discouraged from looking for help.

“If you have a problem, you are going to be a problem,” he explained. “You don’t ask for help — ever. That is just the Army’s way. Always will be.”

A document obtained from another unit at Fort Carson supports Adam’s description of a culture that discourages “weakness.” Someone in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team prepared a mock official form called a “Hurt Feelings Report,” and left a stack of copies near a sheet where soldiers sign out to see a doctor. (View it here.)

“Reasons for filing this report: Please circle Yes or No,” the Hurt Feelings Report directs. Options include: I am thin skinned; I am a pussy; I have woman-like hormones; I am a queer; I am a little bitch; I am a cry baby; I want my mommy; All of the above. A blank appears after, “Name of ‘Real Man’ who hurt your sensitive feelings.”

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, the Fort Carson commander, admits that the attitude of Army personnel toward mental healthcare needs work. “Because of the focus we have had on behavioral health, we have seen an increase in soldiers coming forward to get help,” he told me. “Is it as many as we think are out there? No, it is not. Do I think that we still have a stigma challenge here? Absolutely, we do.”

By December of 2007, Adam was getting increasingly violent. “I fucking punched a guy,” he recalled about a fight in the barracks. “I dragged him out of my room and threw him down the stairs.” On Dec. 20, 2007, he filled out an Army “PTSD checklist.” He checked off being “extremely bothered” by flashbacks, nightmares, bad memories, emotional numbness, insomnia and angry outbursts. He also reported panic attacks and jumpiness, among other things.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army’s top psychiatrist, ticks off a series of initiatives to improve Army mental healthcare, including the hiring of 250 new mental health providers through civilian contracts and more than 40 marriage and family therapists since the spring of 2007. Ritchie said an August 2007 Army directive ensures PTSD screenings for soldiers with disciplinary problems so serious the Army wants them out. She added that the Army surgeon general issued a memo in May 2008 requiring additional review of any diagnoses short of PTSD to make sure the Army gets it right. “We’ve really tried to enhance our access to care,” she said in a telephone interview.

Though Adam filled out his checklist in late 2007, the initiatives Ritchie describes did not trickle down to him. Throughout this entire period, Adam’s medical records show, the Army focused almost completely on his misbehavior, like drinking and fighting, and demoted him from specialist to private, but did not address the root cause. The Army enrolled Adam in an Army substance abuse program he called a “joke.” The Army wanted him to work on anger management. “I was like, ‘I don’t have anger problems. You people are causing me to be angry.'”

 

By the spring of 2008, Adam’s condition had deteriorated. “He called me in April and said he really wanted to die,” Heidi recalled. “He told me he had his Mustang up to 120 and pointed at a cliff. I told him he needed to get help now. No more dealing with it on his own.”

This time Adam checked himself into a private facility. A doctor soon informed him he had PTSD from his experience in Iraq. “That’s when I started figuring it out myself,” Adam told me. “I realized I was not an alcoholic, I was just self-medicating.”

After a few weeks, however, Adam had to return to Fort Carson, where the Army still basically considered him a drunk and a discipline problem.

That’s contrary to proper treatment of PTSD. “The best way to treat it is to identify it appropriately,” said Dr. Anthony Ng, a psychiatrist and board member of Mental Health America.

In addition to hundreds of pages of medical records he gave me, Adam agreed to hand over a copy of his illustrated journal. An undated entry from after his private hospitalization notes that, “Since returning from the hospital my ball of twine has been unraveling fast. … The woman at [Fort Carson’s] mental health dismissed me as if I were a bum asking for money,” he wrote, and then recorded one of those flashes of anger common to soldiers with PTSD. “I wanted to rip her jaw off and scrape the skin off her face with her Goddamn teeth.”

“But I wasn’t surprised,” Adam’s entry continues. “That’s Army health care.”

In June or July 2008, he got a call from an Army psychologist. “She didn’t even know my name,” he told me. “I’d seen her three times. How is she going to help me if she can’t even remember my name?”

The Army also seems to have resisted recognizing Adam’s likely traumatic brain injury, given his head blows in Iraq and subsequent memory loss and other symptoms. The Army put him through a battery of tests on Oct. 15 to determine if he might be eligible for disability pay for a brain injury. Adam tested “within normal limits,” his medical records show. “There is no evidence of clinically significant cognitive impairments.”

(Civilian neurosurgeons generally say that doctors should stash the tests and MRI exams for the most part, since TBI is notoriously difficult to pin down that way, and look to behavior instead. Patients with a history of head trauma who present with obvious symptoms should receive swift treatment for TBI).

Adam’s Army medical records from Oct. 30, the day of his suicide attempt, look similar to all of his Army medical records. The Army psychologist noted “alcohol dependence with continuous drinking behavior,” depression and anxiety disorder — his problems, not the Army’s.

A diagnosis of PTSD from combat would require the Army to pay Adam a lifetime of benefit checks. The Army would not have to pay if a doctor were to find instead that his mental problems were preexisting and/or unrelated to his Army service. Adam said his Army psychologist “has been trying to give me a personality disorder since Day One, that I wanted to kill people before I got into the Army.” Soldiers also don’t get benefits if they are ushered out the door with dishonorable discharges for misbehaving.

On Oct. 30 the Army psychologist noted “homicidal ideation,” or thinking about murder, but “no homicidal plans.” She also noted “no suicidal ideation.”

Adam admitted he lied on that one. He had made up his mind. “I didn’t want her to interfere,” he said. “I was thinking about killing myself, but I was restricted to post for drinking on duty so I could not get my gun. I went to my room and swallowed all my pills.”

Adam painted his note on the wall. And then he changed his mind. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital. He “remember[s] them trying to get me to drink this charcoal stuff” at the hospital, but not much more. “I woke up and I was chained to the bed.”

Nine days after Adam’s suicide attempt, the Army psychologist changed her diagnosis, according to Adam’s medical records. He had “chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.” It was the first time the Army seemed willing to admit that a year of war caused Adam’s problems. “It took me trying to kill myself for her to put it on there,” Adam told me.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Unfortunately, the problem likely goes beyond Fort Carson. Maj. Gen. Graham, the Fort Carson commander, makes noted efforts to recognize and address the problems. “Our goal is to get in front of this,” Graham said in a telephone interview. “Instead of doing the investigation following a suicide, to find out how this happened and how we could have prevented it, what we want to do is actually prevent them and get in front of this and figure out how you help a soldier before it gets to a point of critical mass and something horrible is going to happen,” he added. “Are we perfect? No. Are we trying? We are. Can we do better? Of course we can.”

Graham’s power to do better is limited, however. The Army Medical Command runs medical care at Fort Carson and other Army posts. MEDCOM reports to the Army surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, not Graham.

And some Army fighting units, or “line” units, stationed at Graham’s post have failed to incorporate the prevention, recognition and treatment of combat stress into their wartime mission. At Fort Carson a mental problem from combat is still a scarlet letter.

Meanwhile, the deaths keep coming. At least three Fort Carson soldiers died in apparent suicides in January. (Fort Carson quibbles with this statistic, claiming that one of the three had not completed the paperwork to be officially stationed at Fort Carson. The death of a second soldier, found dead in his home from a “drug interaction,” is still under investigation.)

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Army Re-Opens Iraq War Electrocution Investigations – Soldiers Possibly Killed by Faulty Contractor Wiring

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Team VCS

February 6, 2009 – Amid an escalating controversy that has lawmakers and family members clamoring for answers into the electrocution deaths of soldiers in Iraq, Army criminal investigators have re-opened three additional cases that initially had been ruled accidents.

Army Criminal Investigation Command said today that it has re-opened three other electrocution death cases in January, along with the re-opening of the case of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, an Army Special Forces soldier who died Jan. 2, 2008, when he was electrocuted in his barracks shower in Baghdad.

“We currently have four ongoing investigations involving electrocutions, one of which is the Maseth death case, CID spokesman Chris Grey told Army Times.

Results of Maseth’s investigation are not complete, but his family was notified in December that Maseth’s death, initially listed as “accidental,” is now considered “negligent homicide,” The Associated Press reported.

Army CID would not comment, saying that the investigation is ongoing.

Naval Criminal Investigative Service also has reopened the investigation into the death of Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class (FMF) David Cedergren, who died Sept. 11, 2004, in an outdoor shower at Forward Operating Base Iskandariyah, Iraq.

These five cases under investigation are among 18 deaths by electrocution, including those of 16 service members and two contractors, being investigated by the Defense Department.

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Editorial Column: The Empire v. The Graveyard

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Team VCS

February 5, 2009 – It is now a commonplace — as a lead article in the New York Times’s Week in Review pointed out recently — that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires.” Given Barack Obama’s call for a greater focus on the Afghan War (“we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq…”), and given indications that a “surge” of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan’s dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration’s policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into “Obama’s War.”

In other words, “the graveyard” has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the “empire” part of the equation. And there’s a good reason for that — at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation’s capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the “graveyard” for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.

In truth, to give “empire” its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington’s politicians, the Soviet Union, that “evil empire,” that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness — as in “mutually assured destruction” — simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)

In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.

The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its “near abroad,” to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet’s “sole superpower.” Huzzah!

Masters of the Universe

The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: “hubris.” The ancient Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those years.

Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two losers in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.

In the 1990s, “globalization” — the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches, the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse — was on all lips in Washington, while the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to themselves, as “masters of the universe.”

The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name of the superhero action figures his protagonist’s daughter plays with in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. (“On Wall Street he and a few others — how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe…”) As a result, the label initially had something of Wolfe’s cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, however, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.

In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to “discipline” them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countries to the deregulatory wonders of “the Washington consensus.” (Just imagine how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered doors with a similar menu of must-dos!)

Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to Russia and China, world leaders blame the Bush administration’s deregulatory blindness and Wall Street’s derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the global economy, it’s far more apparent that those titans of finance were actually masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it’s clearer that, in those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits, that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.

Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:

    “Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union’s growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use. America’s was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme.”

Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly don’t. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which his firm’s losses reached $27 billion.

At least now, however, no one — except perhaps Thain himself — would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse laid low.

As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American “masters of the universe,” even if never given that label. I’m speaking of the top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and military policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, and that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been reduced to solitaire.

For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghanistan.

Twice in the Same Graveyard

It’s here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard, but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush administration invaded anyway — and with a clear intent to build bases, occupy the country, and install a government of its choice.

When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S. military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.

Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn’t possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conquered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again — this time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more like the Russians.

What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Soviet Union. George W. Bush’s crew, it turned out, didn’t need another superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden could muster.

They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet’s “sole superpower” came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American landmarks of power — financial, military, and (except for the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.

Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their “caliphate” a joke, and Afghanistan — for anyone but Afghans — truly represented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do less harm than we’re going to do with our prospective surges in the years to come.

The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush’s people really wouldn’t have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn’t atomic science or brain surgery. They needn’t have been experts on Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires,” by former CIA station chief in Pakistan Michael Bearden, which concluded: “The United States must proceed with caution — or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history.”

They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s rollicking novel Flashman, and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England’s disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a night’s reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.

Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union’s Afghan catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had repeated “all of our mistakes,” which he carefully enumerated. “Now,” he added, “they’re making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright.”

True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world. Yes, they believe — and say so — that we’re, at best, in a stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it’s going to be truly tough sledding, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result won’t be victory. Yes, they want some “new thinking,” some actual negotiations with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to “lower expectations.”

As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:

    “This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan… If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money.”

Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an “Asian Eden,” but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That’s a new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the planet.

Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a “multi-polar world,” rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a relatively distant moment when the U.S. will have “reduced dominance,” as Global Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s “top analyst,” suggested of the same moment:

    “[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military.”

Still, it’s a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).

For all their differences with Bush’s first-term neocons, here’s what the Obama team still has in common with them — and it’s no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven’t accepted that they can’t, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can’t imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote President Jimmy Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.

In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a “bleeding wound.” Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn’t be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and “people power” rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.

Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets’ “Afghanistan” on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team’s plans are more or less “successful” in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.

After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a “mere” 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster — unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.

Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don’t expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?

Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

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Parents of Ex-Marine Who Killed Himself Sue VA

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Team VCS

February 5, 2009 – The Oak Beach parents of a 21-year-old ex-Marine who died of a heroin overdose are suing the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying admissions personnel at a VA hospital in Pennsylvania incorrectly advised their son that he was ineligible for medical coverage assistance when he sought treatment there the day before he died. The suit alleges that VA officials told Robert Cafici he was ineligible because of his less than honorable discharge.

Cafici had gone to a VA hospital in Lebanon, Pa., on Dec. 13, 2007, complaining of symptoms of jaundice, according to his parents, Vincent and Concetta Cafici.

The lawsuit claims that a routine check of VA medical records would have shown VA personnel in Pennsylvania that Cafici was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and other unspecified ailments at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs VA Medical Center at Northport. Doctors there considered him a suicide risk because of a similar overdose six months earlier, according to the records.

The lawsuit, which was drafted last year, comes amid allegations by veterans groups that Washington has been incompetent in addressing the psychological needs of U.S. troops and veterans stressed by more than seven years of war. Last month, both the Army and the Marines released figures showing sharp increases in suicides among uniformed personnel.

“I don’t know if the public is informed about how our boys are being treated,” Vincent Cafici said. “A lot of them need help, and I don’t know if they are getting it.”

A spokesman for the VA, Phil Budahn, said the department does not routinely comment on pending lawsuits.

He also said “for most veterans, the VA will only care for problems caused by or aggravated during their military service, and that in some circumstances, a less than honorable discharge can limit a veteran’s eligibility for medical care and other VA services.”

Cafici’s parents said their son, who lost 100 pounds in order to join the Marines, and served between December 2003 and March 2006, began struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder while he was stationed in Iraq. Concetta Cafici said her son was particularly distraught after having to pull the bodies of two Marines from a Humvee that was immolated during an attack.

She said her son fell into a depression after receiving a less than honorable discharge when he was discovered to have used an illegal steroid to bulk up as he prepared to again be deployed to Iraq.

She said she persuaded him to get treatment at Northport beginning in September 2006 after his anxieties worsened, and he began secluding himself in his bedroom at his parents’ home.

But he continued to struggle with depression and anxiety. In May 2007, he went into heroin-induced cardiac arrest at his parents’ home, according to their lawyer, Ray Negron, of Mt. Sinai. Negron said Northport doctors indicated in Cafici’s records that they considered the overdose to be a suicide attempt.

Negron said Robert Cafici moved to Pennsylvania to get away from bad influences after the overdose, but continued to attend counseling sessions at Northport.

According to the lawsuit, when Cafici sought treatment for jaundice at Lebanon, Pa., personnel there told him he was ineligible for care because of his discharge status, and that he would have to pay for care.

The lawsuit said Cafici left the hospital thinking he would no longer be able to receive treatment at Northport.

His mother said he called her as he left the hospital, and that she urged him to return to Long Island.

But he stopped at his apartment, where he took a fatal dose of heroin. His bloated body was discovered days later. “I think he was saying, ‘I’ve had enough,'” Concetta Cafici said. “I think he was saying ‘I don’t have anything to live for.'”

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Movie Review: Unembedded Truth – ‘Road to Fallujah’ Iraq War Documentary

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Team VCS

February 5, 2009 – It was with profound shame that I left the theater after the Film Festival showing of The Road to Fallujah – a hatred of myself for not having devoted every minute of my life these past six years to stopping this horrible war. For having gone about my life as if things were normal. For spending most of each day forgetting that a holocaust is being waged in my name on innocent people at this very moment.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” [Edmund Burke] Or not enough.

What could I have done? Witness filmmaker Mark Manning. A former Santa Barbara oil rig worker, Manning took a night class in documentary filmmaking, then headed off to the Middle East. There, he met an Iraqi woman and helped her smuggle medical supplies into a hospital in Fallujah, shortly after U.S. forces converged on and captured it in 2004.

Manning stayed on to film the destruction there and the stories of the Iraqis who had survived it, probably the only unembedded Westerner in the city. What he brought back was devastating, horrifying, shameful. Neighborhoods flattened. Blood-stained walls. Charred bodies and dismembered limbs. Mass burials. Traumatized children, wailing mothers. People who, except for their mustaches and scarves, look like us – only much, much sadder.

Where was the humanitarian aid, the rebuilding we promised the Iraqis? As one soldier said in the film, the military’s “not really set up for that.” I saw no reconstruction. Only utter destruction.

I hope it haunts us forever.

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Feb 7, Head of Associated Press Blasts Pentagon’s $4.7 Billion Propaganda Campaign and Restrictions on Reporters

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Team VCS

Associated Press Chief Executive Officer Urges Better Press Access to Military Operations

February 7, 2009, Lawrence, Kansas (AP) — The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because “we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable.”

Much like in Vietnam, “civilian policymakers and soldiers alike have cracked down on independent reporting from the battlefield” when the news has been unflattering, Curley said. “Top commanders have told me that if I stood and the AP stood by its journalistic principles, the AP and I would be ruined.”

Curley said in a brief interview that he didn’t take the commanders’ words as a threat but as “an expression of anger.” Late in 2007, Curley wrote an editorial about the detention of AP photographer Bilal Hussein, held by the military for more than two years.

Eleven of AP’s journalists have been detained in Iraq for more than 24 hours since 2003. Last year, according to cases AP is tracking, news organizations had eight employees detained for more than 48 hours.

AP, the world’s largest newsgathering operation, is a not-for-profit cooperative that began in 1846 to communicate news from the Mexican War. Curley has been the company’s president and CEO since 2003.

Before his speech, Curley met for about a half-hour with Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, a former spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. Caldwell is commander at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where military doctrines are drafted and a staff college trains both American and foreign officers.

“It’s important for us to be very transparent,” Caldwell said during an interview after Curley’s speech. “If we do those things, ultimately, we’re both trying to do the same thing.”

Curley came to the University of Kansas to receive this year’s national citation for journalistic excellence from the William Allen White Foundation. Curley also won national awards in 2007 and 2008 for his work on First Amendment and open records issues.

Answering questions from his audience of about 160 people, Curley said AP remains concerned about journalists’ detentions. He said most appear to occur when someone else, often a competitor, “trashes” the journalist.

“There is a procedure that takes place which sounds an awful lot like torture to us,” Curley said. “If people agree to trash other people, they are freed. If they don’t immediately agree to trash other people, they are kept for some period of time — two or three weeks — and they are put through additional questioning.”

His remarks came a day after an AP investigation disclosed that the Pentagon is spending at least $4.7 billion this year on “influence operations” and has more than 27,000 employees devoted to such activities. At the same time, Curley said, the military has grown more aggressive in withholding information and hindering reporters.

Curley said a military program to embed reporters with battlefield units in Iraq was successful in 2003, the war’s first year. But afterward, the military expanded its rules from one to four pages, and Curley said they’re now so vague, a journalist can be expelled on a whim if a commander doesn’t like what’s being reported.

“Americans understand hardships and setbacks,” he said. “They expect honest answers about what’s happening to their sons and daughters.”

Caldwell now requires officers who attend Fort Leavenworth’s staff college to blog and “engage” the media. “Not only when it’s good stuff, but when it’s challenging,” Caldwell said.

Curley acknowledged that upon taking office, President Barack Obama rolled back many of the policies instituted by George W. Bush. But he said when the Pentagon faces difficulties again — perhaps in Afghanistan, with the new administration’s focus on it — experience has shown, “the military gets tough on the journalists.”

“So now is the time to re-negotiate the rules of engagement between the military and the media,” he said. “Now is the time to insist that the First Amendment does apply to the battlefield.”

He added: “Now is the time to resist the propaganda the Pentagon produces and live up to our obligation to question authority and thereby help protect our democracy.”

Curley said examining the Defense Department’s spending on its public relations efforts and psychological operations is difficult because many of the budgets are classified.

He said the Pentagon has kept secret some information that used to be available to the public, and its public affairs officers at the Pentagon gather intelligence on reporters’ work rather than serve as sources.

Curley traced the propaganda efforts to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. He cited a 2003 operations “road map” signed by Rumsfeld, declaring that psychological operations had been neglected for too long. Curley also noted that the current secretary, Robert Gates, has defended such efforts, including in a speech at Kansas State University in 2007.

“But does America need to resort to al-Qaida tactics?” Curley said. “Should the U.S. government be running Web sites that appear to be independent news organizations?” Should the military be planting stories in foreign newspapers? Should the United States be trying to influence public opinion through subterfuge, both here and abroad?”

He also said the Bush administration had stripped hundreds of people, including reporters, of their human rights. He noted that when an Iraqi judicial panel reviewed the evidence gathered by the military against Hussein, the AP photographer, it ordered his release. He declined in an interview to say who said AP could be “ruined” for sticking to its principles, but “I knew that they were angry.”

“This is how you improve the standing of America around the world, by taking the universal human rights we enjoy as Americans and ensuring them for everyone,” Curley said in his speech.

Both the award Curley received at the University of Kansas and its journalism school are named for White, who was publisher of the Emporia Gazette until 1944. A Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer, White’s commentary and friendships with prominent Americans made him a national figure.

“There’s no doubt that White would have been angered by the last eight years,” Curley said. “The right to access information and the ability to know the source of that information were diminished.”

Associated Press Writer John Milburn also contributed to this report.

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