One-quarter of Iraq, Afghanistan veterans filing injury claims

McClatchy Newspapers
Publication Date: 03/13/07

WASHINGTON -- More than a quarter of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have filed injury claims with the government, according to an internal Department of Veterans Affairs report.

Of the nearly 690,000 veterans who served in those combat zones, more than 180,000 had filed claims by the end of last year, the report showed.

That's more than a 50 percent increase over where claims stood near the end of 2005, when the number of claims from the war was 115,000, according to the VA.

Veterans advocates said that the numbers likely would continue to climb, and not just because the number of troops has been escalating. Some soldiers wait years to file injury claims, they said, while some injuries, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, can take years to surface.

Steve Smithson, deputy director for claims at the American Legion, said the numbers "seem like a lot, but there may be a lot more. It's a cost of war that we don't always figure into the budget and we don't always realize. This is also a cost, taking care of the wounded, and we're going to be seeing more of this as the war continues."

VA spokesman Jim Benson said that every injury claim by an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran might not be a result of their deployment. The injury could have occurred either before or after they served overseas, he said.

The VA awards compensation for health problems when veterans can prove their injuries were related to their military service. Like the military's health care system for active-duty troops, the VA is under intense scrutiny in light of the treatment scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Several blue-ribbon panels are looking into how to ensure that both veterans and troops face fewer bureaucratic obstacles to treatment and benefits.

"I think Walter Reed is the tip of the iceberg," said Democratic Rep. Bob Filner of California, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. "What we saw is they were deliberately trying to keep the claims down."

The VA has granted 132,000 of the 180,000 benefit claims, which have been filed since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to the report. The balance includes claims that have either been denied or are pending.

In 2006, the department signed off on nearly 57,000 claims -- an average of more than 150 per day.

"This is good news that VA is processing so many more claims," said Paul Sullivan, veterans advocate and former VA project manager. "However, it's ominous that the claims activity continues to surge."

© The St. Augustine Record

A quarter of US war vets diagnosed with mental disorder: study

2 hours, 25 minutes ago

A quarter of the Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans treated with US government-funded health care have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to a study published Monday.

And when psychosocial disorders such as domestic violence were included, the number of war veterans suffering from mental illnesses rose to 31 percent.

The instances of mental illness among recently discharged troops and members of the National Guard are significantly higher than those of a study published last year which examined active duty troops, the lead researcher told AFP.

That study found that while a third of returning troops were accessing mental health services, only 12 percent were diagnosed with a mental illness or psychosocial disorder.

"That's a big difference," said Karen Seal, a physician and researcher at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Of significant concern was the finding that 56 percent of those diagnosed had more than one mental illness, Seal said.

"When people have more than one diagnosis they become more challenging to diagnose and, more importantly, we believe are more challenging to treat," she explained.

The study comes just days after the Bush administration vowed a "comprehensive review" of veteran care following revelations that soldiers being treated at the renowned Walter Reed Army Medical Center were living in a building with mold-covered walls, infestations of mice and cockroaches, and holes in the ceiling.

That scandal exposed a broader problem with the under-funding of the VA system, said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

With a backlog of more than 860,000 medical claims and waiting times of up to a year for treatment, many of the troops coming home are not getting the help they need, Davis said.

And that includes treatment of mental disorders, which are a predictable result of the kinds of stresses troops face under combat, Davis said.

"War changes everybody and everybody is going to have to deal with it in one way or another," Davis said.

"The military is not doing enough on the preventative side or the treatment side because the military's role is to patch them up and send them to the VA. The VA is not doing enough because they did not prepare for the huge influx of new customers coming in from the wars and they haven't budgeted for it."

Early detection and treatment is critical, the study authors wrote, if the military is to prevent chronic mental illness among troops "which threatens to bring the war back home as a costly personal and public health burden."

The results also "signal a need for improvements in the primary prevention of military service-related mental health disorders, particularly among our youngest service members," the authors concluded.

The researchers examined the records of 103,788 veterans of these operations who were first seen at Veterans Affairs facilities between September 30, 2001, and September 30, 2005. About 29 percent of war veterans accessed VA health care facilities, the study found.

The most common diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder among 13 percent of troops, followed by anxiety and adjustment disorders among six percent of troops and depression and substance abuse among five percent of troops.

More than half of the troops studied were younger than 30 years of age, 13 percent were women, nearly a third were members of ethnic minority groups and nearly half were veterans of the National Guard or Reserve components, the study found.

The troops most at risk were those aged 18 to 24, the study found, but mental illnesses were common among all subgroups.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Archives of Internal Medicine.

Under VA Chief, Effort to Aid Wounded Vets Stalled, Ex-Employee Charges

A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.

As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA program manager Paul Sullivan.

The program, called the Contingency Tracking System, had been approved by Nicholson's predecessor but died once Nicholson took over the VA, Sullivan told ABC News.

Sullivan said he was told the cost of the system -- less than $1 million to build and requiring a handful of staff to maintain -- was prohibitive.

When asked about the Contingency Tracking System at the White House Wednesday, Nicholson told ABC News, "I'm not sure I know what program you're referring to." He added that "when the VA gets patients...we instantly create an electronic medical record for them."

In testimony before Congress today, a VA official confirmed that its current tracking system still depends on paper files and lacks the ability to download Department of Defense records into its computers, a key flaw originally identified as leading to veterans getting lost between the cracks.

Throughout 2004, the new program sat on a shelf while returning veterans struggling with serious brain injuries, psychological trauma, paralysis or worse spent weeks and months fighting the VA bureaucracy to receive the benefits they deserved after being discharged from the armed services, veterans advocates say.

"In that gap...people find themselves not being able to pay for their car, their mortgage, they may have marital problems because they can't pay their bills," said Steve Robinson, director of veterans' affairs for the advocacy group Veterans for America. "You find suicide, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, domestic violence."

Yesterday, President Bush put VA Secretary Nicholson in charge of an interagency task force to determine what can be done to deliver benefits and health care now to thousands of wounded vets who have struggled to receive care.

The announcement came almost exactly two years after Nicholson had received the newly designed system, itself the result of an internal VA task force studying how to make sure wounded soldiers were "seamlessly" transitioned from military service to veteran status with the care and benefits they'd earned.

Despite Nicholson's apparently cool reception to the inexpensive solution, others thought the system had merit. "It was a great idea," said Cynthia A. Bascetta, a congressional expert on veterans' health care who was briefed on the project just prior to its completion. After the briefing, she said, she didn't hear any more about it.

Newspaper exposes in 2004 prompted former VA Secretary Principi to come up with a plan to fix the problem of wounded vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and not receiving timely care and benefits.

"You read a story about someone who was caught in between and I said, 'Wait a minute. We have to do better than that,'" Principi, now a lobbyist for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company, told ABC News.

Sullivan and his team designed the "Contingency Tracking System" (CTS), a secure online database that would capture Department of Defense data on soldiers wounded on the battlefield and track their status through their medical care and treatment at both Defense and VA facilities.

To keep costs down, he said, he cadged computer hardware from other offices which weren't using theirs.

CTS would record each vet's diagnosis and help VA staff make sure he or she received all of the dozens of benefits they might qualify for as soon as possible, from rehabilitative care to disability payments, vocational training and more.

"Before the CTS, VA had no nationwide system for tracking casualties from the battlefield," Sullivan said. Instead, the department relied on a haphazard system of casualty records manually kept on spreadsheets at several locations, which sometimes did not match up with Defense Department casualty records. That process hampered vets' timely access to medical care and other benefits after discharge, Sullivan said.

Sullivan left the VA in March 2006; he is now an advocate for improving care for veterans. He reacted with dismay at yesterday's announcement that Nicholson would be leading the new effort to make sure wounded veterans get the care and benefits they deserve.

"I don't think it's a good idea for the people responsible for the problem to be in charge of fixing it," he told ABC News.

In a written response to ABC News, the VA said a new tracking system "very near deployment" would allow them to track casualties soon after they left the battlefield, much the way CTS was designed to do in 2004.

This post has been updated.

March 7, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (34)

Halliburton linked to Shameful Walter Reed 'Mess'

Committee subpoenas former Walter Reed chief

Posted : Saturday Mar 3, 2007 9:31:09 EST

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who was fired as head of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after Army officials refused to allow him to testify before the committee Monday.

Read complete coverage of the Walter Reed controversy.

Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and subcommittee Chairman John Tierney asked Weightman to testify about an internal memo that showed privatization of services at Walter Reed could put “patient care services… at risk of mission failure.”

But Army officials refused to allow Weightman to appear before the committee after he was relieved of command.

“The Army was unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for the decision to prevent General Weightman from testifying,” committee members said in a statement today.

The committee wants to learn more about a letter written in September by Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi to Weightman.

The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”

The letter said Walter Reed also awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

They also found that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed had drooped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with only 50 private workers.

“The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful,” the letter states. “Part of our mission on the Oversight Committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers.”

The letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty – a process that began in 2000.

“But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002,” the letter states.

During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states. “The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”

The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission had grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.

“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer

Related reading

Original letter asking Weightman to testify.

'It Is Just Not Walter Reed': Soldiers Share Troubling Stories Of Military Health Care Across U.S.

By Anne Hull and Dana Priest

Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, March 5, 2007; A01

Ray Oliva went into the spare bedroom in his home in Kelseyville, Calif., to wrestle with his feelings. He didn't know a single soldier at Walter Reed, but he felt he knew them all. He worried about the wounded who were entering the world of military health care, which he knew all too well. His own VA hospital in Livermore was a mess. The gown he wore was torn. The wheelchairs were old and broken.

"It is just not Walter Reed," Oliva slowly tapped out on his keyboard at 4:23 in the afternoon on Friday. "The VA hospitals are not good either except for the staff who work so hard. It brings tears to my eyes when I see my brothers and sisters having to deal with these conditions. I am 70 years old, some say older than dirt but when I am with my brothers and sisters we become one and are made whole again."

Oliva is but one quaking voice in a vast outpouring of accounts filled with emotion and anger about the mistreatment of wounded outpatients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. They describe depressing living conditions for outpatients at other military bases around the country, from Fort Lewis in Washington state to Fort Dix in New Jersey. They tell stories -- their own versions, not verified -- of callous responses to combat stress and a system ill equipped to handle another generation of psychologically scarred vets.

The official reaction to the revelations at Walter Reed has been swift, and it has exposed the potential political costs of ignoring Oliva's 24.3 million comrades -- America's veterans -- many of whom are among the last standing supporters of the Iraq war. In just two weeks, the Army secretary has been fired, a two-star general relieved of command and two special commissions appointed; congressional subcommittees are lining up for hearings, the first today at Walter Reed; and the president, in his weekly radio address, redoubled promises to do right by the all-volunteer force, 1.5 million of whom have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But much deeper has been the reaction outside Washington, including from many of the 600,000 new veterans who left the service after Iraq and Afghanistan. Wrenching questions have dominated blogs, talk shows, editorial cartoons, VFW spaghetti suppers and the solitary late nights of soldiers and former soldiers who fire off e-mails to reporters, members of Congress and the White House -- looking, finally, for attention and solutions.

Several forces converged to create this intense reaction. A new Democratic majority in Congress is willing to criticize the administration. Senior retired officers pounded the Pentagon with sharp questions about what was going on. Up to 40 percent of the troops fighting in Iraq are National Guard members and reservists -- "our neighbors," said Ron Glasser, a physician and author of a book about the wounded. "It all adds up and reaches a kind of tipping point," he said. On top of all that, America had believed the government's assurances that the wounded were being taken care of. "The country is embarrassed" to know otherwise, Glasser said.

The scandal has reverberated through generations of veterans. "It's been a potent reminder of past indignities and past traumas," said Thomas A. Mellman, a professor of psychiatry at Howard University who specializes in post-traumatic stress and has worked in Veterans Affairs hospitals. "The fact that it's been responded to so quickly has created mixed feelings -- gratification, but obvious regret and anger that such attention wasn't given before, especially for Vietnam veterans."

Across the country, some military quarters for wounded outpatients are in bad shape, according to interviews, Government Accountability Office reports and transcripts of congressional testimony. The mold, mice and rot of Walter Reed's Building 18 compose a familiar scenario for many soldiers back from Iraq or Afghanistan who were shipped to their home posts for treatment. Nearly 4,000 outpatients are currently in the military's Medical Holding or Medical Holdover companies, which oversee the wounded. Soldiers and veterans report bureaucratic disarray similar to Walter Reed's: indifferent, untrained staff; lost paperwork; medical appointments that drop from the computers; and long waits for consultations.

Sandy Karen was horrified when her 21-year-old son was discharged from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego a few months ago and told to report to the outpatient barracks, only to find the room swarming with fruit flies, trash overflowing and a syringe on the table. "The staff sergeant says, 'Here are your linens' to my son, who can't even stand up," said Karen, of Brookeville, Md. "This kid has an open wound, and I'm going to put him in a room with fruit flies?" She took her son to a hotel instead.

"My concern is for the others, who don't have a parent or someone to fight for them," Karen said. "These are just kids. Who would have ever looked in on my son?"

Capt. Leslie Haines was sent to Fort Knox in Kentucky for treatment in 2004 after being flown out of Iraq. "The living conditions were the worst I'd ever seen for soldiers," he said. "Paint peeling, mold, windows that didn't work. I went to the hospital chaplain to get them to issue blankets and linens. There were no nurses. You had wounded and injured leading the troops."

Hundreds of soldiers contacted The Washington Post through telephone calls and e-mails, many of them describing their bleak existence in Medhold.

From Fort Campbell in Kentucky: "There were yellow signs on the door stating our barracks had asbestos."

From Fort Bragg in North Carolina: "They are on my [expletive] like a diaper. . . . there are people getting chewed up everyday."

From Fort Dix in New Jersey: "Scare tactics are used against soldiers who will write sworn statement to assist fellow soldiers for their medical needs."

From Fort Irwin in California: "Most of us have had to sign waivers where we understand that the housing we were in failed to meet minimal government standards."

Soldiers back from Iraq worry that their psychological problems are only beginning to surface. "The hammer is just coming down, I can feel it," said retired Maj. Anthony DeStefano of New Jersey, describing his descent into post-traumatic stress and the Army's propensity to medicate rather than talk. When he returned home, Army doctors put him on the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. "That way, you can screw their lights out and they won't feel a thing," he said of patients like himself. "By the time they understand what is going on, they are through the Board and stuck with an unfavorable percentage of disability" benefits.

Nearly 64,000 of the more than 184,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have sought VA health care have been diagnosed with potential symptoms of post-traumatic stress, drug abuse or other mental disorders as of the end of June, according to the latest report by the Veterans Health Administration. Of those, nearly 30,000 have possible post-traumatic stress disorder, the report said.

VA hospitals are also receiving a surge of new patients after more than five years of combat. At the sprawling James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., Spec. Roberto Reyes Jr. lies nearly immobile and unable to talk. Once a strapping member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, Reyes got too close to an improvised explosive device in Iraq and was sent to Walter Reed, where doctors did all they could before shipping him to the VA for the remainder of his life. A cloudy bag of urine hangs from his wheelchair. His mother and his aunt are constant bedside companions; Reyes, 25, likes for them to get two inches from his face, so he can pull on their noses with the few fingers he can still control.

Maria Mendez, his aunt, complained about the hospital staff. "They fight over who's going to have to give him a bath -- in front of him!" she said. Reyes suffered third-degree burns on his leg when a nurse left him in a shower unattended. He was unable to move himself away from the scalding water. His aunt found out only later, when she saw the burns.

Among the most aggrieved are veterans who have lived with the open secret of substandard, underfunded care in the 154 VA hospitals and hundreds of community health centers around the country. They vented their fury in thousands of e-mails and phone calls and in chat rooms.

"I have been trying to get someone, ANYBODY, to look into my allegations" at the Dayton VA, pleaded Darrell Hampton.

"I'm calling from Summerville, South Carolina, and I have a story to tell," began Horace Williams, 62. "I'm a Marine from the Vietnam era, and it took me 20 years to get the benefits I was entitled to."

The VA has a backlog of 400,000 benefit claims, including many concerning mental health. Vietnam vets whose post-traumatic stress has been triggered by images of war in Iraq are flooding the system for help and are being turned away.

For years, politicians have received letters from veterans complaining of bad care across the country. Last week, Walter Reed was besieged by members of Congress who toured the hospital and Building 18 to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions. Many of them have been visiting patients in the hospital for years, but now they are issuing news releases decrying the mistreatment of the wounded.

Sgt. William A. Jones had recently written to his Arizona senators complaining about abuse at the VA hospital in Phoenix. He had written to the president before that. "Not one person has taken the time to respond in any manner," Jones said in an e-mail.

From Ray Oliva, the distraught 70-year-old vet from Kelseyville, Calif., came this: "I wrote a letter to Senators Feinstein and Boxer a few years ago asking why I had to wear Hospital gowns that had holes in them and torn and why some of the Vets had to ask for beds that had good mattress instead of broken and old. Wheel chairs old and tired and the list goes on and on. I never did get a response."

Oliva lives in a house on a tranquil lake. His hearing is shot from working on fighter jets on the flight line. "Gun plumbers," as they called themselves, didn't get earplugs in the late 1950s, when Oliva served with the Air Force. His hands had been burned from touching the skin of the aircraft. All is minor compared with what he later saw at the VA hospital where he received care.

"I sat with guys who'd served in 'Nam," Oliva said. "We had terrible problems with the VA. But we were all so powerless to do anything about them. Just like Walter Reed."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Valor and Squalor: PAUL KRUGMAN - Walter Reed

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Valor and Squalor

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 5, 2007

The horrors of Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s outpatient unit are no aberration.

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

***

The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

And Mr. Waxman, who will be holding a hearing on the issue today, appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo from last year, that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.

--MORE--

Bushnazis Censor Wounded GIs from Talking About Their Neglected Treatment by the Bush Administration

Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet

Posted : Tuesday Feb 27, 2007 22:09:20 EST

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot mold, mice or other problems in their quarters.

They were also told they would be moving out of Building 18 to Building 14 within the next couple of weeks. Building 14 is a barracks that houses the administrative offices for the Medical Hold Unit and was renovated in 2006. It’s also located on the Walter Reed Campus, where reporters must be escorted by public affairs personnel. Building 18 is located just off campus and is easy to access.

The soldiers said they were also told their first sergeant has been relieved of duty, and that all of their platoon sergeants have been moved to other positions at Walter Reed. And 120 permanent-duty soldiers are expected to arrive by mid-March to take control of the Medical Hold Unit, the soldiers said.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Army public affairs did not respond to a request sent Sunday evening to verify the personnel changes.

The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel, saying in an e-mail to spokespeople: “It will be in most cases not appropriate to engage the media while this review takes place,” referring to an investigation of the problems at Walter Reed.

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer

Hundreds of Iraq Vets Are Homeless

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are ending up homeless. How could this happen?

WEB EXCLUSIVE

By Sarah Childress

Newsweek

Updated: 12:41 p.m. MT Feb 24, 2007

Feb. 24, 2007 - Kevin Felty came back from Iraq in 2003 with nowhere to stay, and not enough money to rent an apartment. He and his wife of four years moved in with his sister in Florida, but the couple quickly overstayed their welcome. Jobless and wrestling with what he later learned was posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Felty suddenly found himself scrambling to find a place for himself and his wife, who was six-months pregnant. They found their way to a shelter for homeless veterans, which supported his wife during her pregnancy and helped Felty get counseling and find a job. A year later, he's finally thinking his future. "I don't want to say this is exactly where I want to be—it's really not," he says. "But it's what I can get at the moment."

Young, alienated and often living on their own for the first time, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans increasingly are coming home to find that they don't have one. Already, nearly 200,000 veterans—many from the Vietnam War—sleep on the streets every night, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. But young warriors just back from the Mideast—estimated around 500 to 1,000—are beginning to struggle with homelessness too. Drinking or using drugs to cope with PTSD, they can lose their job and the support of family and friends, and start a downward spiral to the streets. Their tough military mentality can make them less likely to seek help. Advocates say it can take five to eight years for a veteran to exhaust their financial resources and housing options, so they expect the number to rise exponentially in a few years. "Rather than wait for the tsunami, we should be doing something now," says Cheryl Beversdorf, president of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

The problem is mainly a lack of resources, advocates say. There are only about 15,000 beds available in VA-funded shelters or hospitals nationwide, and nearly every one is taken. In some smaller cities there simply aren't many places for a homeless veteran to go. And as affordable housing units shrink nationwide, veterans living on a disability check of, say, $700 a month, (which means a 50-percent disability rating from the VA), are hard-pressed to find a place to live. Most shelters require veterans to participate in a rehabilitation program, but a "fair amount" of veterans just go back to the streets once they leave, says Ed Quill, director of external affairs at Volunteers of America, the nonprofit housing group for veterans that helped Felty.

The VA says it's making a concerted effort to reach out to vets before they hit bottom, says Pete Dougherty, the VA's coordinator for homeless programs. Intake counselors are trained to ask questions, especially of newer veterans, to seek out mental health or other problems that could lead to homelessness. "We're much more sensitive than we were 40 years ago for signs of problems," he says. And they have expanded some services. Last week, the VA approved $24 million to boost aid for the homeless, which will allow them to add about 1,000 more beds and increase the number of grants to help the growing population of homeless women veterans and those with mental illnesses.

Much of the work with new veterans is being done one soldier at a time. At New Directions in Los Angeles, a center that rehabilitates homeless veterans, Anthony Belcher, a formerly homeless Vietnam vet who now works at the center, looks out for one particular Iraq veteran who shows up at the center about once a month, filthy, drugged out and tortured by PTSD. "He's a baby," Belcher says. "You can see it in his eyes." So far, the young vet is too wary to accept more than a night's bed or a hot meal. But as Belcher says, at least he has a place to go. That's more than many of the thousands of vets on America’s streets can say tonight.

The Pentagon lies go on and on: understate disabled veterans job woes

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The Pentagram doesn't like my 'tude. They check in once in awhile. Find out if they're checking up on you: IP Blocks Used by US Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Abstract

• Military Personnel: Additional Actions Needed to Improve Oversight of Reserve Employment Issues, GAO-07-259, February 8, 2007
  Highlights-PDF PDF Accessible Text

  Since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DOD) has mobilized more than 500,000 reservists. As reservists demobilize, concerns exist about difficulties with their civilian employment. Public Law 109-163 required GAO to report on reservists' civilian employer data and employment matters. GAO assessed (1) the status of DOD's efforts to capture reservists' employer data; (2) DOD, Labor, Justice, and Office of Special Counsel processes to track and address reservists' Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) complaints; and (3) the four federal agencies' efforts to track reservists' USERRA complaints related to disabilities incurred while on active duty. GAO reviewed policies and procedures for reporting and tracking complaints; DOD's civilian employer database for reservists and reservists' USERRA complaints; and data reliability and quality checks.

  DOD has made progress in capturing employment information on reservists, but challenges remain. The percent of reservists reporting employer information increased from about 60 percent in August 2005 to about 77 percent as of August 2006. However, only one of seven reserve components has met DOD's employment reporting goal of 95 percent for the Selected Reserve--the largest category of reservists. DOD does not have specific time frames for reserve components to achieve the reporting goals. In addition, some employment information reported may not be current because the services have not established a formal mechanism to remind reservists to update their reported employment information. Finally, DOD's verification process is not adequate to verify civilian employer data for 24 percent of reservists that reported employer information. The four federal agencies responsible for assisting reservists with USERRA complaints--DOD, the departments of Labor and Justice, and the Office of Special Counsel--track and address these complaints. Between fiscal years 2004 and 2006, the four agencies addressed approximately 16,000 informal and formal complaints. However, no one agency has total visibility over all the complaints, and only a small percentage of complaints are reported to Congress. For example, DOD has visibility over all complaints in its system, but its visibility over complaints in Labor's system is limited to those originally filed with DOD and then later refiled with Labor. The Department of Labor does not make aggregate complaint data available to DOD. Furthermore, Labor's annual report to Congress on reservists' complaints for fiscal years 2004 and 2005 did not include almost 10,000 informal complaints filed with DOD, or 80 percent of the total informal and formal complaints addressed by the four agencies during this period. Labor is required to report formal complaints addressed by the three agencies, but not DOD. Consequently, Congress does not have the comprehensive information necessary to allow for complete oversight of reservists' employment and reemployment problems. Finally, the information GAO obtained on the approximately 16,000 reservists' complaints filed between fiscal years 2004 and 2006 showed that the nature of those complaints has not been uniformly categorized to completely reveal trends in the kinds of problems some returning reservists experience because the agencies use different complaint categories to characterize the complaints. Agencies responsible for assisting reservists with USERRA issues can not systematically record and track disability-related employment complaints because they do not use consistent and compatible complaint categories or have a mechanism in place for distinguishing disability-related complaints from others. Without the ability to track disabled reservists' USERRA complaints, DOD may be unaware of the effect disabilities incurred while on active duty have on reservists' employment and what additional assistance may be needed to help transition this population back into the workforce.

  Subject Terms

  Armed forces reserves
  Employment
  Federal aid programs
  Interagency relations
  Military reserve personnel
  Performance appraisal
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America Cannot Win the War in Iraq

Thu, 01/11/2007 - 9:07pm

America Cannot Win the War in Iraq

Introduction

On May 10th, 2003, less than two months after the first combat units rumbled across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, President George W. Bush dawned a flight suite and delivered a speech from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. In this now infamous speech, later dubbed the 'Mission Accomplished' speech, the beaming Commander-in-Chief proclaimed a halt to major combat operations in Iraq. America and its peace meal coalition had succeeded in toppling the notorious Saddam regime. For the moment, the world breathed a sigh of relief, seemingly casting aside all pre-war doubts regarding flimsy intelligence and weak rationale for an invasion. Maybe preemptive war IS tolerable. After all, the world now had one less dictator to stomach.

Three and a half years after this speech, optimism has given way to pessimism. And for good reason. The situation in Iraq is deteriorating, maybe even spiraling out of control towards all out civil war. The insurgency movement in Iraq is growing, making nation building on the part of America and its allies ineffective. The U.S. military finds itself stretched excessively thin, with many members serving unprecedented two and three tours of duty in Iraq. Casualty counts, both civilian and military, are on the rise and expensive, but delicate, military hardware is grinding to a halt under the stress of combat in such a rugged environment. America has poured vast sums of its fortune into Iraq, hoping to kick-start a new nation. On the home front and throughout the world, support for the war is waning. Moreover, in Iraq itself, the very people America purports to have liberated from Saddam Hussein now clamor for liberation from what they believe is an occupation by meddling Westerners.

In the coming months, America will have to confront some difficult choices. With the results of the 2006 general election, it is clear that American voters have already voiced their opinion that efforts in Iraq are not working. It has become clear that America cannot win the war in Iraq and it is time for a change in course.

Historical Precedent

History may well be the best indicator when making predictions about the eventual outcome of the Iraq war. The United States historically has found exceptional difficulty in waging war against a foe which resorts to guerilla warfare and unconventional tactics, which is undeniably now the case in Iraq. No other conflict in American history illustrates this fact better than the 10 year “police action” in Vietnam, where American conventional forces were pitted against an earlier resourceful and determined guerilla force.

America lost the war in Vietnam but it was not because the pajama-clad communist guerilla forces American service members faced in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia held all the decisive advantages. As is true today in the Middle East, American combat troops of the 1960's and 1970's were better equipped, better trained, and enjoyed better support than the forces they opposed on the battlefield.

During the Vietnam years, America leveraged its super power status, pouring vast portions of its ground forces, air assets, and naval might into the struggle, while the communists relied on a resilient ground force equipped with little more than a Chinese AK-47 Assault Rifle, a knowledge of their own territory, some determination, the will to win, and time-tested guerilla warfare tactics. Where Iraq is concerned, this recipe has not changed. The AK-47 carrying guerilla fighter in Iraq willingly trades archaic mortars and crude explosives and booby traps for a lack of air superiority, high troop mobility, and multi-million dollar machines of war in the hopes that history will repeat, and a global super power will be defeated.

There are several other similarities when comparing the two struggles, notably on the home front. Both conflicts have generated civil strife, amassed protests, and seen waning public support as the war progressed. Political backlash, both domestic and international, are commonalities. Finally, as the body counts rise, so does the media's scrutiny.

On April 30, 1975, the South Vietnam capitol of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, ending a decade long struggle which claimed the lives of over 2 million Vietnamese and over 58 thousand Americans. In the end, a simple David, armed only with primitive tools of war, slew a modern day Goliath - a hulking beast built for war. If history is an indicator, Goliath is poised to fall once again.

Military Limitations

Militarily speaking, the United States has consistently won all the key battles in Iraq but one has to wonder if we are not losing the war in the meantime. Many indicators point to a grand defeat. Most notably, the Pentagon appears to be struggling, both in terms of manpower and in financing the war.

National level decision makers, hoping to avoid the backlash that accompanied the Vietnam era draft, have forgone the use of conscripts, relying instead on the nation's relatively small volunteer force. The “grunts” of the Army and Marine Corps have been been forced to endure most of the workload in Iraq, resulting in a seemingly never-ending rotation in and out of battle. Many of these troops return home physically maimed and psychologically effected for the rest of their lives after just one deployment. The odds increase with multiple deployments, and the troops know it.

The limited number of units military tacticians have available for rotation has also resulted in a heavy reliance on part-time Reserve and National Guard personnel, with many of them being called to serve up to two years at a time. This level of demand has led to sagging troop retention and poor recruitment, forcing the Pentagon to offer costly enlistment and reenlistment bonuses, further indebting the taxpayer already footing the bill for the war in Iraq to the tune of over 350 billion dollars thus far.

In spite of all the stubborn “stay the course” rhetoric coming from an Administration mired in stalemate, certain policies seem to be free to tinker with. In order to swell the ranks, higher educational standards and character requirements have been relaxed at recruiting stations throughout the country. In essence, the high standards of quality in our volunteer military are being compromised for the sake of quantity in hopes of ensuring a steady line of clean boots for the front. The long-term negative effects of this knee-jerk reaction will not be felt for years, but rest assured; America will have to rebuild a diluted military one day.

In another feeble attempt at plugging the holes, thousands of service members are subjected to a mandatory stop-loss program, keeping them in uniform far beyond their enlistment contract. Many view this as a “back door draft” which hurts morale, forcing many to vote with their feet once the stop-loss order is lifted. Ironically, several Congress members have begun calling for a draft in recent months, hoping this tool of last resort will somehow prevent a complete depletion of the volunteer force.

The signs of desperation in our war machine are easy to detect. The brass in the Pentagon has been busy trying to ensure a victory in Iraq with limited options. The quick fixes and temporary bandages will hurt America's military branches in the end while simultaneously draining the nation's coffers. Perhaps preservation of individual careers and the influence of the politics of war are more powerful forces than the realities of war, especially for civilian and high-ranking chess players in the Pentagon who carry on their days without fear of being killed by a roadside bomb. Whatever the case, the course the Pentagon is on now will only result in prolonging the inevitable - that America cannot win militarily, in Iraq.

Qualified Opinions

One does not have to look very hard to find qualified personalities who concede that a victory in Iraq is untenable. Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon, recently stated during a televised interview that a military win in Iraq is impossible (Panja, 2006):

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

It should be noted that Kissinger's tenure as Secretary of State spanned the last two years of the Vietnam Conflict, which raged from 1965 to 1975. Given his historical perspective, the point can be argued that perhaps no other living human being is more qualified to draw the conclusion that an American military solution in Iraq will not succeed.

Former foreign relations gurus are not the only ones sounding alarm bells. The current UN envoy to Iraq, Special Representative Ashraf Qazi, fears all-out civil war (Herald Sun, 2006). Citing the devastation caused by recent tandem car bombings in the Baghdad burrow of Sadr City which killed approximately 200 Iraqi civilians, he warns, “Iraq would continue to descend into a civil war situation and people would become the victims of an unprecedented human rights catastrophe.”

None of these warnings have been wasted on our service members. In fact, history will likely show that some of the first rumblings regarding America's dire consequences in Iraq have originated from those experiencing it first-hand. While deployed to Iraq in 2004, one “old and seasoned Non-Commissioned Officer with nearly 20 years under [his] belt” (Lorents, 2004) offered his belief in an essay that America's preference for politics and wholesale refusal to accept the reality of the guerrilla war in Iraq runs parallel with Vietnam, and will ultimately cost us another victory.

Conclusion

As of Sunday, November 26, 2006, America's military involvement in the small Middle East country of Iraq has carried on longer than the U.S. engagement in World War II (Forbes, 2006), a war that spanned the entire globe. The only other war that America lost lasting longer than our WWII involvement was Vietnam -a localized guerilla war, just like Iraq. If history is an indicator, America cannot win in Iraq.

Vic Blazier, Iraq War Veteran and Proud IVAW Member
"Bullies kick butt. A leader can take a whooping every now and then."

by Vic Blazier

Secret Pentagon Documents Classify Veterans for Peace as a Threat

Secret Pentagon Documents Classify Central Coast Group as a "Threat"
Santa Barbara Chapter of Veterans for Peace
revealed to be a Pentagon surveillance target

By: Matt Cota

Friday, November 24, 2006

New details tonight about a secret Pentagon database used to monitor anti-war protests and activists. Recently-disclosed documents reveal that some of the surveillance targets include an organization with ties to the Central Coast.

Secret Pentagon documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union provide details of how the organization called "Veterans for Peace" was considered a threat.

Every Sunday for the past three years, members of the Santa Barbara Chapter of Veterans for Peace place a cross in the sand near Stearns Wharf for every American soldier killed in Iraq.

First started in Santa Barbara, the "Arlington West" display has been copied by other chapters of Veterans for Peace in communities all across the country. It's intended to honor and acknowledge those who have lost their lives and to reflect upon the costs of war.

The actions of this veterans organization have not gone unnoticed at the Pentagon. A previously secret intelligence report calls the group a "threat to military installations." The report lists the group's upcoming events and warns that while it's a "peaceful organization," "there is potential that future protests could become violent."

"As to attacking any base or anything else, that is ridiculous," says Veterans for Peace group member Ron Dexter. "We support the troops one hundred percent."

Ron Dexter isn't surprised by the revelations that the Department of Homeland Security is checking up on his organization.

"If we aren't investigated by the government, we probably aren't doing our job," says Dexter. "That is pretty radical, but anybody who has been a real threat to what government wants to do, they are going to check on them and try to stop them."

The documents also suggest for the first time that agents of the Department of Homeland Security played a role in monitoring anti-war activities.

The Pentagon admits it made a mistake in collecting information on anti-war protests, but claims the problem has been fixed.

At least one Senate Democrat wants to investigate not just what data was collected by the Pentagon, but why and how it was used.

http://www.ksby.com/home/headlines/4738066.html

The Grind

by Bruce Patterson

[ed. This is an excerpt from Rural Manpower, a work in progress by the author of a little-known but splendid book, Walking Tractor and Other Tales of Old Anderson Valley.]


(Swans - November 20, 2006) It was my experiences in Vietnam that turned me against the war. It wasn't like, after carefully weighing all of the evidence and balancing the pros and cons, I'd up and changed my mind. What happened to me was more like -- the process was so common among us grunts that we had a name for it -- "getting turned around in your boots." It was like an explosion of experiences, with you in the center of the impact dome, with bleeding ears and dust settling, looking down and seeing your boots pointing due north while the rest of you is pointing due south. Arriving in combat ready to play a game, have some fun, become a man, take some scalps, serve your country, and earn the everlasting gratitude and esteem of your countrymen and women and girls, in the grind of days you realize that war isn't a game, it serves no purpose, and the folks back home may as well be living on the moon.

Another bush term for getting turned around in your boots? "Getting your cherry popped."

Out in the jungle -- at least if you were determined to live -- you couldn't even suspend disbelief because belief itself was irrelevant and immaterial, no more important than that flickering beam of moonshine glowing in the mountain blackness under the towering foliage, below your foxhole and at the bottom edge of your field of fire.

In combat human life is cheap, talk is cheaper, and the only thoughts that matter are keeping your eyes and ears open, your nerves taut, your heart cold, and your weapons ready.

Yet, even by totally submitting to the tyranny of your situation and expendability, there's no guarantee that total submission won't be your last one. Everything can change all over again with the crack of a bullet -- the bullet you never heard, the bullet you'd fired mistakenly, or the one that killed your partner.

To armor yourself with your blown-away stateside illusions, or by allowing your old civilian imagination to carry you back to The World with its easy pleasures and all you'd willingly left behind, was worse than useless. Reality was too blaring, too in-your-face and for keeps, for flights of fancy. What you needed to do was to keep your bloody nose to the bloody ground at all times, your mind just a mirror of the bush. You wanted your mind to be just another piece of gear that you were forced to hump around in your rucksack.

In combat the very worst thing that can happen to your morale is to lose your "enemy concept." Even though you and your adversaries are trapped in a symbiotic relationship, and even though you are faced-up across a divide that binds you together, and even though you and they wish for the same things in life and share the very same fears, and even though, like you, they are made of flesh and blood and they cry out lustily when mutilated, they asked for it and they got everything they deserved. They got everything they deserved while your side had been dragged forward kicking and screaming.

Locked in a death grip and eyeball-to-eyeball, each must be the opposite of the other. One must be Good, and the other Evil, and which is which depends on who you talk to.

When I was in Vietnam I not only kept my hatred of the enemy, but during my short tour I tried my best to grow it, to cultivate it, to make it even bigger so I could wrap it around my shivering body like a bulletproof wool poncho. I wanted a magic poncho to keep me warm while I was out sleeping under the cold pelting rain below the slippery-steep rim of some nameless, root-bound vine and thorn-choked summit. I wanted my hatred for the enemy to keep me awake at night in my half-foxhole/half-rock pile while I was sitting a shift of guard duty, blinded by triple canopy darkness, or deafened by splattering rain dropping like bomblets, or gusts of wind rustling and bending the trees, or made totally senseless by all three.

In my hatred for the enemy I wanted a little dose of something to help keep me awake all night long while I was out on a six man ambush detail, my belly to the ground, my eyes pealed and my trigger finger itchy.

Hatred for the enemy was not just energy and purpose; it was guns and ammunition, bountiful rations, cool clean water, ripe old age, eagle eyes, cat-quickness, and the nose of a bloodhound.

In combat the enemy must die so that you can live. If there is anything wrong with that equation, then the last source you want to hear it from is your own weak and wicked mind. If questions like that don't get you or your partners killed or maimed, they'll damn sure make you all the more miserable.

Yet what had originally turned me against war wasn't, I must admit, the killing. The killing -- as terrorizing and hideous as it sometimes was -- was built into the contract I'd signed.

Instead, what had initially turned me against the war was my own nearly constant hunger for food. I'd arrived in Vietnam fourteen days after my eighteenth birthday, and I was still a growing boy with a big, Chicago-bred appetite. And even though back stateside I'd given serious thought to the possibility that I might get killed, or worse, in the service of my country in this outrageously faraway and foreign place, it had never occurred to me that, week after week and month after month, they'd starve me half to death.

I never imagined that -- during desperate times -- while on the run I'd fill my canteens with muddy water scooped from the bottoms of bomb craters. Not only that, but I'd be glad to get it. I'd treat the bomb crater muck with iodine pills and an envelope of Kool-Aid sent from home and then I'd gulp it down like I was some thirsty English lord craving a slug of hot brown tea.

Nor had it ever occurred to my young volunteer ass that when first thing in the morning I got a hole punched into my plastic "tit bag" holding the last of my drinking water, I'd spend a day begging sips of water from my fellow thirsty GI compadres before I managed, before dark, to convince my platoon sergeant, who was flush with water and proud of it, to sell me a quart canteen of it -- just the water, not the canteen -- for ten dollars American and cash up front.

Nor was I prepared for the unrelenting drudgery. True, back stateside, I'd been warned many times and from many sources about what was in store for me once I got out in the bush. And, true, I'd spent a year in vigorous physical, tactical, and psychological preparation for it. Still it'd never occurred to me that, even when the strongest of us were sleepwalking through the jungle, we'd never get a day off.

Mine was an elite, hunter-killer outfit commanded by ambitious officers -- a good percentage of them were West Pointers -- and we American paratroopers under their command were trained to attack and only to attack. It wasn't our job to hold on to territory, nor were we getting paid to guard anything.

But -- here was the rub -- the people we were fighting, which were mostly units of what was then the North Vietnamese Army, saw themselves exactly as we saw ourselves and they saw their mission exactly as we saw ours.

As a result, we bad-assed bush bunnies were not just the hunters, but the hunted. In order to avoid inviting possible annihilation, we were forced to always keep on the move. With swinging machetes we hacked paths through the jungle instead of following established trails, and we never, ever returned the way we came. We never slept anywhere but atop a mountain, and then only after digging a perimeter of holes, cutting out of the bushes fields of fire and communication trails, setting out booby traps and trip flares and sending out three or four overnight ambush details, one or two to cover our tracks and the remainder to stake out the most likely "approaches." Again, to avoid possible annihilation, we never slept on any one mountain twice.

Our cycle began on re-supply day when, after a couple of fat-bellied gunships had swooped over our summit to let the enemy know the sheriff was in town, a Huey dropped into the hole we'd hacked in the jungle canopy. Whatever replacements that had rolled down the pipe would jump from the deck of the Huey and run like hunchbacks for cover while the flight crew, with the help of a detail of us bush bunnies, hurled cargo to the ground like there was no tomorrow (with the wound-up whine of the chopper primed to get back up out of there, you couldn't hear incoming bullets or mortars).

While the replacements were getting "orientated" and divvied-up ("cherries" were sprinkled into the ranks where it was decided they'd do the least damage), the rest of us took turns having at our rations of bounty. The choppers might have brought us letters and care packages from home, or real care packages from the USO to be divvied up within our half-squads. We'd often get clean, fresh water and sometimes we'd get new socks and underwear and complimentary cigarettes from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, or packages of milk chocolate from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Always we'd get more ammunition, munitions, weapons, and medicines as needed. Plus we'd get whatever special orders that our CO had put in through channels; formal written requests for stuff like a new barrel for a machine gun, or a base plate for a mortar, six new helmets, fifty more canteens and the like. Yet special orders, like the care (food) packages sent to us from our families back home had a way of disappearing in the rear areas and either getting devoured on base or sold on the black market in town.

In addition, the re-supply choppers brought us our next stash of C-rations. Since, for reasons of self-preservation, we only got re-supplied once every five days, each of us was issued fifteen boxed and canned C-Rat meals. We'd stack our C-Rats like building blocks inside an empty sandbag, tie the bag shut with a length of parachute cord and then, once it was time for us to move out in the morning, tie our bulging sandbags to the tops of our rucksacks.

More than anything else on re-supply day it was the hot chow brought to us in five gallon cans that we most looked forward to. Even if the monsoon was blowing and half of our turkey and gravy, potatoes and dressing got washed off our trays before we could spoon it up into our mouths, still that hot meal was about the closest we'd ever get to feeling full bellies.

The next morning at first light, we'd all be up and at our battle stations, awaiting a dawn attack ("stand-to," the position was called). Then we'd take turns eating C-Rats for breakfast and then we'd "saddle up and move out," our shoulders straining under our over-stuffed, seventy-pound rucksacks.

During the day we'd play cat and mouse with the enemy until, two or three hours before sundown, we'd climb a mountain, dig in, eat C-Rats, tend to our ammunition, weapons, and equipment and then, from dusk till pitch black, "stand-to" again before beginning our rotation of overnight guard duty.

Barring a fixed-piece or a running battle, or a gauntlet of booby traps, the next day would be exactly the same, as would be the next night, and so on through the five-day cycle. You survive three cycles and, on the 16th day, you get rewarded with a chopper ride back to your forward artillery base -- another carved mountaintop somewhere off in the sticks -- to line up for breakfast and supper in a chow line and then, sitting on the ground wherever it was comfortable and balancing your tray on your lap, devouring what little food they'd given you.

While guarding the "firebase" you'd get the chance to take makeshift soapy showers to scrub the caked salt, stink, bugs, and tropical rot off you. If it was to your liking, you could gather in the bent grass and sit and listen to patriotic sermons delivered by military chaplains enthralled by the universal and everlasting spirit of the M-16. While resting in a firebase, you'd fill sandbags, build bunkers, dig communication trenches between bunkers, run short recon patrols, go out in pairs as "pickets" (human trip wires), sit and GI your equipment, stand guard, write letters home, and listen to the 105mm Howitzers blasting what seemed like all day and all night long.

After five days of rest and relaxation in the firebase, that gave you roughly two-thirds of one month served. Then it was back to the bush for you for another fifteen days. Multiply that bush-to-firebase rotation about sixteen times, and that was a tour.

http://www.swans.com/library/art12/brucep01.html

The Manchurian Veterans

by Jeff Huber
19 November 2006

Stories of American service members returning from the Middle East wars with physical and emotional scars have focused national attention on the plight of the country's combat veterans. But still overlooked are G.I.s who suffered severe damage from service to their country as human test experiments. The tale of the uniformed guinea pigs who participated in America's Cold War mind control program is, perhaps, one of the most disturbing chapters in the history of the country that became the world's "sole superpower."

The Mind Control Gap

The United States Army established its chemical experimentation facility at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland in 1917. But it wasn't until 1954 that Edgewood became a temporary duty station for G.I.s who volunteered to participate in Project MK-ULTRA and more than 150 other projects involved in the Central Intelligence Agency's mind control program.In the early 1950s, reports of Chinese and Russian brainwashing techniques used on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean Conflict had reached American intelligence operatives. In 1953, eager to close the perceived gap in mind control capabilities during the heart of the "red scare" era, then CIA director Allen Dulles launched a mind control program of his own. To head the project, Dulles named Doctor Sidney Gottlieb, a shadowy figure whose personality reflected the bizarre and horrifying nature of the mind control program itself.

The Sorcerer

Born in 1918, Sidney Gottlieb was a clubfoot and a stutterer who earned a PhD in chemistry from the Chicago Institute of Technology. He became chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's experimental interrogation programs in 1953.

By some accounts, Gottlieb often took LSD, locking himself in his office and taking extensive notes of his psychedelic experiences. Gottlieb is also alleged to have been behind plots to disable or assassinate foreign heads of state, including Fidel Castro, by covertly exposing them to deadly or psychoactive drugs.

Much of what is "known" about MK-ULTRA is anecdotal. In 1972, Gottlieb destroyed most of his clinical records by order of Richard Nixon's CIA director Richard Helms. Before he died, Gottlieb testified before Congress that the CIA had administered LSD to at least 40 unwitting subjects who included prison inmates and brothel patrons. Other sources suggest that the real number of unwitting subjects was exponentially higher. Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, authors of Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, state that CIA operatives tested LSD by agreeing among themselves to:

...slip LSD into each other's drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a ... colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.... The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel's back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party ... a Security memo writer... concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did "not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties."

Experiments with consenting subjects were, if anything, even more sadistic. One group of volunteers was given LSD for 77 consecutive days. Other volunteers were given LSD and locked in deprivation chambers. Some were recorded in therapy sessions while under the influence of LSD, then forced to listen to tape loops of their most degrading moments while confined in straight jackets and again dosed with the psychedelic drug.

Another reported experiment involved injecting subjects with barbiturates in one arm and amphetamines in another. That method was eventually discarded because it often killed the subjects.

The Sorcery Unveiled

MK-ULTRA first came to public attention in a 1974 New York Times article. That launched two government investigations into CIA activities, the congressional Church Committee and presidential Rockefeller Commission probes. In an address to the Church Committee, Senator Edward Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Doctor Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Doctor Frank Olson was an Army scientist who worked for Sidney Gottlieb on the MK-ULTRA project. In 1953, he was given a dose of LSD without his knowledge, and shortly afterwards committed "suicide" by throwing himself out of a thirteenth floor hotel window. As a result of the '75 Rockefeller Commission hearings, Congress awarded $750,000 in compensation to Olson's widow. President Gerald Ford invited Mrs. Olson and her eldest son Eric to the White House and made a personal apology to them.

Years later, 54 year old clinical psychologist Eric Olson questioned the government's version of his father's death, and managed to get a court order to have Frank Olson's body exhumed and re-examined. Afterwards, Eric told interviewers that when his father was buried "... the coffin had been sealed. They said he had been so badly mutilated in the fall that it wouldn't be right for the family to see him. But when we opened the casket a lifetime later, I knew Daddy at once. He had been embalmed and his face was unmarked and untroubled. He hadn't been hurt the way they said he had."

The new autopsy confirmed Eric's initial impressions. Conducted by James Starrs, Professor of Law and Forensic Science at George Washington University, it found no evidence of the facial cuts that the original autopsy stated had been caused by Frank Olson's crashing through the window glass. Starr's investigation did find, however, a blood clot on the left side of Olson's skull that had not been noted in the original forensic investigation. Starr believed that the clot had been caused by a heavy blow, probably from a hammer, before Olson's fall from the window. Starr concluded that his forensic discoveries were "rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide."

They Were Expendable

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson authorized scientific experimentation on active duty military members in a document now infamously known as the Wilson Memo. Between 1954 and 1975, more than seven thousand Army and Air Force personnel are thought to have participated in Sidney Gottlieb's mind control program. Many of these veterans have sought compensation for the physical and psychological damage they suffered at the hands of Gottlieb and his assistants, but to date the government has balked at honoring their claims.

James B. Stanley [subscription required] joined the Army at age 15. By the age of 20, he was one of the Army's youngest master sergeants. In 1958, while a volunteer at Edgewood, Stanley was given a clear liquid to drink. No one told him the liquid contained a psychoactive drug, nor did anyone explain to him the hallucinations he experienced, or the nature of the emotional problems he consequently suffered that disrupted his life, leading to a demotion two years after his Edgewood service and to his divorce in 1970. ''I couldn't get along with my family or co-workers or anyone else,'' Stanley later said in an interview with the New York Times [subscription required]. "Even my children were afraid of me, and I'd always been close to my kids. I was afraid to go see the Army doctors for fear I would be thrown out of the Army."
Only in 1975--the year of the Church and Rockefeller Commission hearings--did Stanley figure out what had happened to him when he received a letter from the Army asking him to participate in a follow-up study of former LSD experiment subjects.

Unlike other MK-ULTRA veterans who tried to seek redress through the judicial system, Stanley managed to push his case all the way to the Supreme Court, largely because of his attorney's argument that his covert LSD dosing violated protocols of the 1947 Nuremberg Trials that condemned human medical experiments conducted by Nazi scientists.

Unfortunately for Stanley, a five to four decision ruled that he was barred from suing the government for injuries incurred "incident to service." Nonetheless, two justices delivered scathing condemnations of MK-ULTRA practices. Justice William Brennan wrote:

The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects.... In defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials ... began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor added:

No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi officials who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunals developed to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

They Are Expendable Still

Many of Sidney Gottlieb's test subjects have gone the way of Gottlieb himself--he died in 1999. Many of them still survive, though, and like Master Sergeant Stanley, they are struggling to gain veterans' benefits for themselves and their dependents.

Subsequent to the 1975 Church and Rockefeller commissions' findings, President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order that prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject." Not until 1985, however, did the Department of Defense commission the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to do a comprehensive health study of veterans who had been subjected to chemical tests related to MK-ULTRA and other human experiment programs. The report was titled Possible Long-Term Health Effects of Short-Term Exposure To Chemical Agents, Volume 3: Final Report: Current Health Status of Test Subjects (1985). The study objectives, as stated in the report, seemed sufficiently straightforward and comprehensive.
Long-term health effects of interest were excess cancer and adverse mental, neurological, hepatic [liver related], and reproductive effects that might have resulted from experimental exposure of test subjects to chemicals administered at Edgewood. (Page viii.)
But the report also contained a compendium of apathetic disclaimers:

Considerable discussion and controversy attended the design and analysis problems. Of particular concern [was] the use of a specially constructed but untested questionnaire ... ... Several subjects of concern were not included in the final questionnaire, such as probes for specific symptoms, suicide attempts, diseases, treatments, detailed history of later job-related exposure, accidents ...... Briefly stated, it was felt at the outset by the panel reviewing psychochemicals that data obtainable from a survey might add little to our understanding of the long-term health effects of chemicals tested. (Page 83.)

In other words, the research team admitted from the outset that the study was too flawed to achieve its stated objectives.

The plight of MK-ULTRA veterans went back off the radar until 1991 when DAV, the magazine of the Disabled American Veterans, ran a story on them and other test veterans.1
Since the tests were conducted under a veil of secrecy, records of many participants are unaccounted for, destroyed or lost. Since the burden of proof in making a compensation claim is on the veteran, many of those who participated in chemical tests find themselves trapped in a "Catch 22" corner, unable to obtain from the government the files the government is requesting of them.

The DAV article also stated that while the Veterans Administration had created files on radiation and Agent Orange test victims, no such file had been created for the MK-ULTRA mind control subjects.

In 1993, yet another IOM report titled "Veterans at Risk" concluded that the chemical mind control experiments conducted on active duty members "demonstrated a well-ingrained pattern of abuse and neglect." Upon release of the report, the Department of Defense pledged to help the Veterans Administration locate the MK-ULTRA veterans and other former military personnel who had been subjected to human experimentation.

Time Passed

In 2001, President Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen awarded yet another contract to the IOM to locate the Edgewood veterans and other subjects of DoD chemical testing. In a 2003 article published in Military Medicine2 , the IOM reported that it had conducted a survey of 4,022 Edgewood veterans. But this report focused on subjects of Sarin and other chemical weapon experiments, not specifically on the MK-ULTRA mind control program subjects.

Further confusing the issue was a 2004 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report titled Chemical and Biological Defense: DOD Needs to Continue to Collect and Provide Information on Tests and Potentially Exposed Personnel. The report covered veteran test subjects in a chemical and biological test program known as "Project 112," but also addressed a Department of Defense mandate to investigate all other human test projects conducted since World War II. The report stated that Army documents identified over seven thousand Army and Air Force personnel who participated in these "other tests" conducted at Edgewood and elsewhere, but didn't specifically break out which of these test veterans were involved in Gottlieb's mind control experiments. It also said the GAO had concluded that, "the scope and the magnitude of tests involving human subjects was not available, and the exact number of human subjects might never be known." (Page 20.)

The report also said, "DOD anticipates that it might take up to 5 years to complete the investigation of tests outside Project 112." (Page 19.) That means it will be 2009 at best before the DOD can determine which Edgewood veterans were involved in Gottlieb's mind control experiments, what damage they suffered as a result of their participation in those tests, and what veterans' benefits they're entitled to.

News of mind control experiments on the troops is the kind of news that military recruiters, under pressure to fill uniforms during a time of an unpopular and seemingly unending war, don't likely want their potential enlistees to hear about.
1 DAV Magazine, "Two Decades of Deception," October, 1991, pp. 8-13.2 William F. Page, "Long Term Health Effects of Exposure to Sarin and other Anticholinesterase Chemical Warfare Agents," Military Medicine, 168, 3:239, 2003, pp. 239-245.

About the Author

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) was operations officer of a naval air wing and an aircraft carrier, and he commanded an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft squadron. His satires and analyses of military and foreign policy affairs have appeared in Proceedings, The Navy, Jane's Fighting Ships, and other print periodicals. Some of his essays have been required student reading at the U.S. Naval War College, where he received a master's degree in national security studies in 1995.

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