Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

  His second guess was the right one. Unfortunately for both the troops and the people being policed by them—who belonged to societies with deep sensitivities about alcohol—the discharge figures were a chimera: there was no sudden improvement in the treatment of addicted soldiers. What the figures revealed, rather, was a military that could just no longer afford to discharge them and increasingly failed to send them to the one place they might be able to get help. Medical professionals within the military were aware of this huge problem, even though the military continued to look the other way. “It’s clear that we’ve got a lot of significant alcohol problems that are pervasive across the military,” said Dr. Thomas R. Kosten, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Houston. “The treatment that they take for [combat stress] is the same treatment that they took after Vietnam . . . They turn to alcohol and drugs.”5 The increasing number of “moral waivers” provided to recruits for previous alcohol and drug offenses made the problem even more serious.

  Through 2005 and 2006, when the need was at its greatest, military spending on programs to reduce alcohol abuse, alongside a few other addictions like smoking, dropped from $12.6 million to $7.74 million.6 A staggering 39 percent decline. It was this dereliction of duty to serving men and women that aroused the interest of Senator Clair McCaskill (D-MO), one of the few lawmakers to pick up on the issue and bang heads. In 2007 she wrote a letter to General Peter Chiarelli, senior military assistant to the Secretary of State, asking him to investigate allegations that a tranche of 150 soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, were not able to get the counseling they needed and wanted because of staff shortages at the base. McCaskill didn’t mince her words, saying the base’s program had been “in a shambles” for years, before adding, “If it was that bad at Fort Leonard Wood, it very well could be an Army-wide problem.”7 Her hunch was right, and the army-wide problem was causing untold suffering for the service members fighting in the Middle East and around the world. “How is it that a program can so deteriorate at a time when drug use and alcohol abuse is known to be closely tied to PTSD, suicides, criminal behavior, divorce and domestic abuse, all of which have substantially increased in recent years in the Army?” McCaskill asked the general.8 But it was two years—during the War on Terror not a shabby response time for a generally unresponsive military—before General Chiarelli eventually acted, sending a memo to army leaders in 2009 lamenting the lack of discharges as regulation permitted, before pressing commanders to address the shortage of qualified counselors to help the soldiers through their addictions. “Our soldiers need this resource and I expect you to provide it for them,” he instructed. Until then the best the army could point to was the relatively puny growth of its Substance Abuse Program, the budget for which grew from $38 million to $51 million between 2004 and 2008.9 It was peanuts.

  Back home, alcohol use among the general US population was increasing as well, hitting 67 percent of citizens in 2010, its highest since 1985, according to a Gallup poll, with an increasing number of states allowing Sunday liquor sales and moving sales start-time to 6 a.m. It was even worse within the military. The Pentagon’s own health study found that binge drinking surged by 30 percent from 2002 to 2005, prompting the conclusion that it “may signal an increasing pattern of heavy alcohol use in the Army.”10 More than a quarter of army servicemen said they often drank heavily, which was defined as five or more drinks in one session. It constituted the largest proportion of the military since (again) 1985.11 One academic study in March 2009 found that of the 16,037 active-duty personnel surveyed, 43 percent reported binge drinking in the previous month, a rate very similar to that of college students.12 One of the biggest problems for the military was the same as in Vietnam: easy access. In Iraq it was easy to get your hands on what the troops call “hajji juice” or “hajji hooch,” the locally produced 90 percent proof whiskey that the soldiers who participated in the Mahmudiyah massacre were supping before embarking on their crimes. This is sometimes combined with amphetamines provided by medical staff to keep troops alert on missions. In Iraq, despite the pro forma ban, soldiers would squeeze ampoules of food coloring into bottles of clear liquor and transfer it to bottles of mouthwash. Army medics, in a mild dereliction of duty, had been known to fill IV bags with vodka in lieu of saline solution. By 2010, the US military itself was spending $602,189.90 per year on alcoholic beverages.13

  Partying It Up

  In a warzone, a culture of binge drinking is dangerous for the same obvious reason that drunk driving is dangerous: drunk people aren’t in full control of what they are doing. As the UK Daily Mail reported in March 2007, “Figures forced from the Pentagon by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act make shocking reading: 240 of the 665 cases of military indiscipline in Iraq and Afghanistan involved drugs and alcohol. Seventy-three of those 240 cases were the most serious yet known from these two wars: murder, rape, robbery and assault.”14 Many of these cases were fatal for Iraqis and US service members. In May 2004, as Bush was infamously pronouncing mission accomplished in Iraq, Private Justin Lissis went on the rampage with a stolen Humvee and his M-16 rifle in a residential district in Balad after getting drunk on whiskey smuggled into the base by Iraqi contractors.15 Just six months on, Private Chris Rolan of the Third Brigade was having a heated argument with a fellow US soldier after a heady cocktail of alcohol and ended up shooting him with his 9mm pistol.16 And it wasn’t just Iraq. In 2006, one of the many errant airstrikes carried out by NATO in Afghanistan killed seventy civilians after the strike had been called in on Germany’s instructions but carried out by American pilots. When staff at NATO’s Kabul headquarters were to be questioned on the event the command found that they could not be interviewed because they were “either drunk or too hungover.”17 General Stanley McChrystal subsequently banned alcohol at the base, laying into the forces for “partying it up” when it emerged that there was a serious scene there. He said they did not have “their heads in the right place” after the attack.18 It’s hard to know what is more worrying: that the strike may have been called in by people either hungover or drunk, or that they decided to go on a binge after taking out seventy civilians. Binge drinkers, one academic study worryingly found, “report being drunk while working and being called to work during off-duty hours and reporting to work drunk.”19 The idea they may have been drunk was implied when a spokesperson said: “General McChrystal is extremely focused on the mission and he feels that the folk who are here at the headquarters level need to be at the top of their game in terms of supporting the folks out in the field.” One insider was more explicit. “Thursday nights are the big party nights, because Friday’s a ‘low-ops’ day. They even open a bar in the garden at headquarters,” they said. “There’s a ‘two can’ rule but people ignore it and hit it pretty hard.”

  This was now starting to endanger even the safety of America’s own diplomats as well, as allegations of drunken brawls and lewd behavior at the US embassy in Kabul led to another drink ban being imposed. An independent group sent a ten-page dossier to Secretary of State Clinton containing evidence that security guards at the embassy had been having “drunken parties involving prostitutes” and forms of “ritual humiliation associated with gang initiation”.20 The dossier included an email from a guard serving in Kabul describing guards and supervisors “peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity.”21 In Tokyo, the US navy imposed a movement and alcohol ban after a Japanese taxi driver was found dead with a twenty-centimeter kitchen knife blade stuck in his neck in Yokosuka, just south of Tokyo, where the US has a naval base.22 The culprit, Olatunbosun Ugbogu, was a Nigerian national and US sailor, one of the many foreign citizens enfranchised to fight by the War on Terror. Even animals weren’t safe. Over at Baghdad Zoo, a drunk soldier shot and killed a Bengal tiger on one of
the Thursday binge nights. “The soldiers arrived in the evening with food and beer, accompanied by a group of Iraqi police officers,” head of the zoo, Adel Salman Musa, said of the incident. “One of the soldiers, who the Iraqi police said had drunk a lot, went into the cage against the advice of his colleagues and tried to feed the animal who severely hurt his arm,” he added. The tiger, said the news agency, tore off the soldier’s fingers and mauled his arm and another US soldier immediately fired at the animal and killed it. “The soldiers don’t have the right to behave like that. That was the most precious and valuable animal in the whole zoo. It was fourteen years old and had been born here,” Musa said.23

  In a Birthday Cake

  The problem with illicit drug use was even worse in US-occupied Afghanistan, the country with the biggest poppy harvests in the world, producing 9,000 metric tonnes of opium each year, which is chemically treated to make heroin. Production had not slowed down substantially during the occupation, and soldiers found they could buy heroin quicker than they could buy a bottle of water. There were even rumors that the US was not getting a handle on the drug production because it was too lucrative. General Mahmut Gareev, a former commander during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, alleged that the US was paying for its occupation through the harvests, which could yield up to $50 billion a year.24 Whatever the reason, US service members using heroin frequently went unpunished by the military. “They don’t do anything to you,” one soldier said. “Two from my unit were sent home after they got caught more than once.” Asked what was done to them, he replied, “Nothing. They’re still in the unit. Just got sent home.”25 It was so rife that a top military commander said he would be surprised if the army had not turned into a drug-dealing cartel. “I’d be astonished if we don’t see soldiers who find ten kilograms of heroin and pack it up in a birthday cake and send it home to their mother,” said General Barry McCaffrey, a former “drug czar” under President Clinton.26

  Experts think it could be a decade before the true scope of heroin use in Iraq and Afghanistan is known. Dr. Jodie Trafton, a health-care specialist with the VA’s Center for Health Care Evaluation, predicted that the scale of the problem will not be gaugeable until five or ten years after the wars are over and veterans enter the system in significant numbers. “We’re just starting to get a lot of Gulf War veterans,” she said. But the signs were definitely there. “I asked to buy heroin a dozen times during two trips a year apart and never heard the word ‘no,’” said a filmmaker who had been to Afghanistan on numerous occasions. “I also saw ample evidence that soldiers were trading sensitive military equipment, like computer drives and bulletproof vests, for drugs.”27 The results were appalling for the many soldiers whose lives were ripped apart by addiction. The Veterans Health Administration counted over 3,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as diagnosed with potential drug dependency from 2005 to 2007. This was a monumental rise on previous years. From 2002 through 2004 only 277 veterans were diagnosed with a drug dependency.28 “It’s a huge concern, it’s a national concern,” Lynn Pahland, a director in the Pentagon’s Health Affairs office, said. “Any kind of drug use or health choice that leads to the impairment of a military person leads to the degradation of readiness.”29

  But the operational readiness of the force was strangely down at the bottom of the list of priorities. Veterans For America (VFA) member Jason Knobloch wrote, “Numerous studies have shown, as VFA has found over and over again, that heavy drinking and drug use are often attempts to self-medicate untreated psychological problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The programs to treat these conditions of both the military and the Veterans Administration are understaffed and underfunded.”30 In fact, the military was making it worse. The number of soldiers seeking help for substance abuse had climbed 25 percent in five years, according to USA Today, but the army’s counseling program remained “significantly understaffed and struggling to meet the demand.”31 The army requires one drug counselor for every 2,000 soldiers, yet in late 2008 it was operating with one for every 3,100 soldiers.32 It didn’t come close to catering to the needs of the service members, many of whom were suffering from a variety of mental health problems and finding no help for them within official channels.

  Guinea Pigs

  It wasn’t just that the military was ignoring the use of alcohol and drugs—in many cases it was promoting it. The streamlined, flexible, and understaffed US military that was Rumsfeld’s dream meant that extra energy and service time had to be squeezed out of existing troops. To do this some were plied with cocktails of narcotics and stimulants. “The capability to resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation will fundamentally change current military concepts of ‘operational tempo’ and contemporary orders of battle for the military services,” states a document from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. “In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a twenty-first-century revolution in military affairs that results in operational dominance across the whole range of potential U.S. military employments.”33 To achieve this operational dominance, amphetamines of all kinds were provided to the US air force—in street parlance, speed. The drug is traditionally used to treat narcolepsy or attention deficit disorder, but for the military’s purposes it was perfect: it increased concentration, energy levels, and adrenalin. But there were psychological drawbacks, which appeared especially relevant to those using bomb-laden aircraft. According to Wired magazine, “serious potential side effects include psychotic behavior, depression, anxiety, fatigue, paranoia, aggression, violent behavior, confusion, insomnia, auditory hallucinations, mood disturbances and delusions.”34 The operational effect of this new “revolution” revealed itself early on in the Afghanistan war effort when in April 2002 a US aircraft dropped a 500-pound bomb on a group of Canadian soldiers at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing four and leaving eight injured. In the resulting investigations the two pilots claimed the air force’s policy of handing out dextro-amphetamine, or Dexedrine, was responsible for the error, not them.35

  Back at base, willing soldiers were welcome to another load of drugs to help them deal with the hell of war. As PTSD developed into a chronic problem, pills took the place of doctors in dealing with the mental health crisis among US troops. One soldier recounts going to talk to a military doctor about the trauma he was suffering as a result of the conflict. “Here’s some medication,” he was told, before being prescribed a cocktail of drugs: “Klonopin, for anxiety; Zoloft, for depression; and Ambien, to help him sleep.”36 Data from a mental health survey by the US army found that 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent in Afghanistan were taking some form of anti-depressant, anti-anxiety drug, or sleeping pill.37 The army itself was more than happy to dispense them: it was much cheaper than increasing the number of medical professionals. By September 2007 prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had reached 50,000 a month, up from 33,000 a month in October 2003.38 In the midst of all this, it came as no surprise that an extensive drug smuggling network involving US soldiers was gradually developed. In 2008, a drug ring suspected of providing steroids to US service members in Iraq was busted in northern Italy. According to ABC News, briefed by government officials, “Dozens of active and former soldiers have abused their military uniforms and authority in a drug smuggling ring.”39 Their list included:

  A U.S. army sergeant fighting the war on drugs in Colombia was recently sentenced to six years in prison for using military aircraft to smuggle cocaine into the United States. In April, an Air National Guard pilot and a sergeant used a C-5 Galaxy military transport plane to sneak nearly 300,000 Ecstasy pills from Germany into New York. In another case, three U.S. airmen were arrested in March for stealing military-issue bulletproof vests from Moody Air Force Base in Georgia and selling them to drug dealers for $100 each.40

  It wasn’t just rogue soldiers procuring ecstasy either. The military was in on it a
s well. In 2005 it moved to start prescribing the rave drug better known in the clubs and discos of big American cities to its soldiers. The scientists trailing the drug were said to be interested in the “emotional closeness” it creates among its users.41 Two years later, the move to medicate PTSD away led to the so-called Psychological Kevlar Act, which was meant to formalize a program of research to help soldiers tackle the problem early on. Its stated purpose was to “implement a plan to incorporate preventive and early-intervention measures” to combat “post-traumatic stress disorder or other stress-related psychopathologies.”42 A drug called propranolol was the talk of the town at the time because if taken directly after a traumatic event it could apparently blunt the force of the experience on the brain. The brave new world was here. The Department of Veterans Affairs conducted its own tests on the drug’s effect on PTSD symptom reduction and found that a single oral dose, compared to a placebo, immediately after reactivation of the PTSD-related memory of the traumatic event “significantly reduced physiological responses.”43