Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

  It was all a bonanza for Big Pharma, which raked in billions of dollars of taxpayer money: in 2007 alone the DOD spent $3 billion on contracts for its ballooning pharmaceutical needs. The powerful Big Pharma lobby in turn pushed the military to continue drugging their soldiers and the military brass didn’t demur: the pharmaceutical industry was becoming a full-fledged part of the military-industrial complex. It was a natural progression since their lobbying had already worked in wider society. In the general population over the previous decade, the number of Americans taking one or more prescription drugs had risen from 44 to 48 percent, while one 2009 drug-abuse survey found that 2.8 percent of the US population used prescription drugs in non-medical ways—up from 2.5 percent the year previous. The next front for the lobby was service members. “Armed with potent drugs and new technology, a dangerous breed of soldiers are being trained to fight America’s future wars,” warned one magazine at the time.44 Soldiers were to be the guinea pigs for a burgeoning field of research. “Improved drug delivery systems and improved neurological understanding could make today’s drugs seem rudimentary, giving soldiers a superhuman strength and awareness,” wrote Wired magazine.45 A report released by the intelligence unit of the DOD in 2008 contained a multitude of suggestions on how to manipulate the minds of soldiers using new research on brain functions. Perhaps the most sci-fi element of the report was its description of so-called “pharmacological landmines,” using chemicals to incapacitate the enemy. But amazingly it wasn’t the enemy that was being plied with dodgy drugs during the War on Terror, but US troops themselves. In 2008 an ABC News and Washington Times investigation revealed that the VA was testing the anti-smoking drug Chantix on veterans who knew nothing about its side effects until three months in.46 The side effects were not innocuous either, including as they did psychosis and potential suicide. “Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero,” said former US army sniper James Elliott when asked how he felt.

  Even the military had gone too far this time, and they duly incurred the wrath of then presidential candidate Barack Obama who came out to denounce the testing. “It is outrageous and unacceptable that our government would irresponsibly endanger veterans who have already sacrificed so much for our country,” he said. “Our veterans—particularly those suffering from mental health injuries—should have the very best health care and support in the world, they should never be needlessly exposed to drugs without proper notification of the dangers involved or effective monitoring of the side effects.”47 Obama was right that veterans deserved access to the best health care, but they would never receive it. Even back in the US—where much of the alcoholism and drug abuse played out in the most traumatic way among the families of veterans and those in their community—the military looked the other way. “We better be ready to offer compassion and treatment—not just a jail cell—when it comes to helping our brothers and sisters heal from the damages of war,” said Tony Newman, communications director at the Drug Policy Alliance. “Let’s hope that we support our current troops better than we supported the veterans who fought in Vietnam.”48 But they weren’t treated any better—and only a brave few spoke out. “The war is now and the problems are now,” said Richard A. McCormick, a senior scholar for public health at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who served on a Pentagon task force.49 “Every day there is a cohort of men and women being discharged who need services not one or two or five years from now. They need them now.” While the military dithered on how to deal with an impending crisis, drug use was endemic. “Lots of soldiers coming back from Iraq have been using drugs,” Specialist William Swenson, who was deployed to Iraq, told ABC News. “Right when we got back there were people using cocaine in the barracks, there were people smoking marijuana at strip clubs; one guy started shooting up.”50 The VA soon had the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest provider of substance-abuse services, looking after 350,000 veterans per year, of which 30,000 needed treatment for opiate addiction.51

  It wasn’t helping the domestic US criminal justice system either, with troubled veterans spilling into the country’s jails at unprecedented levels. “A small fraction wind up in prison for homicides or other major crimes. Far more, though, are involved in drunken bar fights, reckless driving and alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Whatever the particulars, their stories often spool out in unwitting victims, ruptured families, lost jobs and crushing debt,”52 wrote the New York Times. The army claimed it was doing all it could, of course. That was its default position. “The Army takes alcohol and drug abuse very seriously and has tried for decades to deglamorize its use,” said a spokesman.53 “With the urgency of this war, we continue to tackle the problem with education, prevention and treatment.” How seriously did it take the problem? In 2010 it put $2 million into starting up its “That Guy” website, which aimed to stop binge-drinking among veterans because it detracts from the “things they care about: family, friends, dating, sex, money and reputation.”54 It was completely inadequate: a single stitch to rescue an unraveling group of soldiers. By 2008 it was clear the situation was now a full-blown crisis destroying the emotional and psychological wellbeing of US service members across the board. A Pentagon investigation found that the psychological problems among troops were “daunting and growing” and betrayed a “fundamental weaknesses” in the military’s approach. In reality it was out of control: nearly 40 percent of soldiers, half of all National Guard, and a third of Marines were reporting serious mental health issues.55 Many were committing suicide.

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE COMES HOME

  I was in no condition to leave. I’m an infantryman. If I’m screwed up in my head, it could cost my life or the lives of the men with me.

  Michael De Vlieger, gunner with the 101st Airborne in Iraq, 200956

  In July 2007, Army Specialist Travis Virgadamo returned home on a “rest and relaxation” break to the serene mountain surroundings of Pahrump, Nevada, after an arduous tour of Iraq as violence in the country peaked. It was immediately obvious to his family and friends that he was in a bad way and had dipped into a severe depression while out in the desert. Back in the US he kept telling his grandmother about the horrendous things he had seen: images so distressing that he thought he could never go back. But in the military, refusing to go back into service can land you a prison sentence. Even so, Travis was thinking of going AWOL and fleeing to Canada, as many had done during the Vietnam War. His grandmother was more cautious and counseled him against it, advising that he tell the army to stop feeding him Prozac. “I told Travis when he was going back to Iraq in July to make sure to tell his doctor and chaplain that he wanted to go off,” his grandmother said. “I had read that sometimes it had caused the opposite effect on young people. Instead of being an antidepressant, it caused them to commit suicide.”57 Travis simply told her, “Grandma, I did that, and they put me on something else. They changed my medicine, gave me a week of stress management.”58 There was no sympathy from the military: weeks later, with his leave time up, Travis was sent back to Iraq along with his Prozac. But his superiors obviously knew something was wrong as they placed him on suicide watch and removed the bolt from his rifle, rendering it useless. He was given more pedestrian desk jobs as he tried to sort out his head. If they had to send him back, it appeared a good course of action. But, inexplicably, Virgadamo was cleared for combat the following month, and on the night of August 30, 2007, was given his rifle bolt back. Three hours later he walked out of his barracks and shot himself in the head. The army told his family he had died from a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound, avoiding the word “suicide,” now a dirty word for them. “I don’t think he should have ever been sent there,” his grandmother said in the aftermath. “Why would you deploy someone who was a danger to himself and maybe others? When they know, it’s just unacceptable, pushing them out there.”59 In fact, Travis’s whole time in the military had been extremely dangerous. Even though he had always wanted to be a soldier, it was in an emotional period after h
is father moved to the Philippines that he eventually decided to enlist. He was just seventeen years old. “He had a difficult time in boot camp,” said his grandmother. “They sent him to anger-management classes. Feeling somewhat deserted by his father—he was so young.” She added, “They had also put him in suicide watch in boot camp.”60

  Despite these serious signs of frailty, a year later Virgadamo was deployed to Iraq, with the Prozac he had been given by the military. The military belief in medicating away mental strife had many tragic consequences similar to that experienced by Travis. “Even though he was still on active duty (placing him under DOD jurisdiction), this incident only reinforces the fact that we need to place more emphasis on the mental health of service members in or returning from combat,” said Shelley Berkley, a Representative in Congress from the State of Nevada, his home state.61 The whole thing had uncomfortable echoes of Vietnam, where soldiers helped themselves to psychotropic drugs, while psychologists were singing the virtues of a myriad of different brain drugs to help troops concentrate, boost their energy, and ostensibly dull mental health problems. Medical opinion was, however, unambiguous about the dangers of pumping drugs into unstable soldiers: “There are risks in putting people back to battle with medicines in their bodies,” said psychiatrist Judith Broder, founder of the Soldiers Project. Travis’s grandmother agreed. “That is a suicidal medicine, especially with teens. I was livid. I just couldn’t believe they put him on Prozac,” she said.62

  Unfriendly Fire

  As medication became the primary and often only treatment for the psychological problems suffered by soldiers, more suicides followed. The Pentagon reported that in 2007, 115 US troops committed suicide: the highest toll since the military had tracked such figures.63 The military rate was thirty times higher than for the general US population and it was getting worse year-by-year: by 2009 the number of suicide victims had reached 245. In June 2010 alone, 32 soldiers killed themselves, the highest number of military suicides in one month since the Vietnam era. Of those, 21 were on active duty, seven serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.64 It was even worse for those who had been discharged. Three times as many young California veterans were killing themselves at home than California service members were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The Pentagon and VA don’t count the dead after they come home, but an examination of coroners’ reports showed that more than 1,000 veterans under thirty-five died in California between 2005 and 2008.65 Despite these horrifying statistics, it took until 2009 before the mental health problems afflicting US troops were revealed to mainstream America by the military. In that year, an army report from Fort Carson was initiated after six 4th Brigade Team soldiers had been charged with murders on their return home from the Middle East. The substance abuse among some troops, pre-existing mental illness in recruits, and the failure of the army to provide help were major factors in the violence—a spate of crime that included the rape and murder of a nineteen-year-old girl and one soldier’s murder of his child. All in Colorado, all in six months. “Those three [factors] in combination are a really toxic mix,” said Lieutenant General Eric Schoomaker, Army Surgeon General.66

  Soldiers involved in crimes related to homicide at Fort Carson were, the report said, “at risk for engaging in violent behavior based on a clustering of known risk factors for violence, namely prior criminal behavior and psychopathology,” possibly with the “moral waivers” in mind. The investigation suggested a possible association between increasing levels of combat exposure and risk of violent outcomes. The Fort Carson report found that eleven of the suspects had been identified with drug or alcohol problems but only half of them had been sent for treatment, as army regulation stipulates they should have been. The army was immediately on the back foot, reverting to their standard evasion tactic, countering that there was no direct link between combat and crime, and reminding a news conference that in the vast majority of cases veterans don’t commit crimes—a true but irrelevant point in the context of the shocking report. Major General Mark Graham, Fort Carson’s commander, added that the report had resulted in more counseling and mental health training for returning soldiers. He also said the base was “stepping up efforts to ensure that soldiers who test positive for drug use or exhibit signs of problem drinking will get substance abuse counseling and treatment.”67 But it was a smoke-and-mirrors exercise to appease the media and lawmakers who were getting increasingly vocal. “The Army’s support for our service men and women is falling short and we need to do better,” Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) said after the report was released. “This situation is unacceptable for our troops, untenable for military families and communities, and incompatible with our priorities as a nation.”68

  Away from its public promises, the military had been doing the opposite and knowingly sending mentally ill soldiers back into the warzone. In 2003, United Press International unearthed an Army Medical Department after-action report which admitted that “variability in predeployment screening guidelines for mental health issues may have resulted in some soldiers with mental health diagnoses being inappropriately deployed”—those like Travis Virgadamo. The public impression was “that some soldiers develop problems in theater,” it added, when in truth, “in some cases, they actually have pre-existing conditions.”69 The report was adamant that the army must change its practices or risk sending soldiers back into combat who had serious mental health problems. “Perhaps stricter predeployment screening is required to keep at-risk soldiers from deploying,” it said; a move which could help “identifying soldiers that may become non-functional in theater due to mental health problems.”70 Pentagon policy is that members of the military must be mentally stable for at least three months before being deployed for active duty, but it wasn’t being applied. The problem was amplified further by the longer and more-frequent tours of duty in the Middle East under the so-called “stop-loss” system—which describes the involuntary lengthening of tours. In 2007, the military had said its active-duty units would now serve in fifteen-month tours instead of the regular twelve months—a big demand. The prolonged periods away from family, friends, and normal life aggravated stress and anxiety. “This policy is a difficult but necessary interim step,” said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the time.71 “Our forces are stretched, there’s no question about that.” Broken would have been a better choice of word.

  For those under occupation by the US military it was even more dangerous. In March 2012, a US soldier, on his fourth deployment in a decade, walked out of his base and went on a shooting spree in southern Afghanistan, murdering more than a dozen Afghan civilians, including nine children. “This is an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent civilians and cannot be forgiven,” said Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, in the aftermath. It was the latest in a long line of repeated demands by Karzai for the US to put an end to the wanton murder of civilians. Then news came that US army staff sergeant Robert Bales, the thirty-eight-year-old suspect, was from Joint Base Lewis-McCord, in Washington state, which just four months earlier had convicted a member of an Afghanistan “kill team” of murder via a military jury. Senator Patty Murray just the week before had been complaining about the military hospital overturning 285 diagnoses of PTSD.72 “I heard something on Facebook about a soldier killing civilians,” a corporal with the Fourth Stryker Brigade told the New York Times. “It’s horrible, but I guess I’ve almost become numb to it.”

  PTSD was not a new phenomenon for the military, but sending soldiers still suffering from severe mental health problems back to the frontline in such large numbers was. “I’m concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country,” complained Dr. Arthur S. Blank, Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist.73 Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) helped create a Task Force on Mental Health in the DOD as the situation spiraled out of control. She mentioned “reports that doctors are being encouraged not to identify mental-health illness in our troops . . . I am asking for a
lot of answers,” she added. “If people are suffering from mental-health problems, they should not be sent on the battlefield.”74 The army’s top mental health expert, Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, explicitly accepted that the reason so many mentally ill troops were being sent back was because of the demands on the military for more and more personnel. “The challenge for us,” he said, “is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge. And so we have to weigh the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”75 In August of 2009, the US army announced a new $117 million program designed to expose its soldiers to “emotional resiliency” classes. The program aimed for so-called “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” which, according to an army spokesman, was designed “to build resilience in soldiers, family members, and Army civilians by developing five dimensions of strength: physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and family.”76

  A rash of suicides was not the only worry; soldiers with mental health problems were more in danger than their healthy counterparts during combat, according to a US navy report from the Vietnam era. It had found that marines who’d been hospitalized between 1965 and 1972 for psychiatric reasons and then sent back into battle were more likely to be injured in combat.77 And there were plenty of tragic examples to bear out this study during the War on Terror, such as Travis Virgadamo. Another was Michael De Vlieger, who went to Iraq in early 2006 as a gunner with the 101st Airborne. Soon after his arrival nine soldiers were killed when two Humvees in his platoon were blown up by a roadside bomb. Just a month later insurgents threw an antitank grenade under his Humvee and his knee shot through the door. He was sent to coalesce at Fort Kentucky but his personality had changed. He turned to drink and attacked his wife’s dog. “I had lost so many friends and went through a near-death experience. I wasn’t who I was when I left,” he said. According to one report: