by Matt Kennard
He was updating his will and preparing to return to Iraq when he broke down. His wife, Christine, found him awake in the middle of the night, rocking while babbling incoherently. Frightened, Christine called his squad leader, who took him to the base emergency room. Doctors then sent him to a nearby private psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for 16 days, receiving medications to calm his panic and treat his blood pressure and depression. The doctors released him with four prescriptions.
But merely eighteen hours after his release from hospital, he was on a plane destined for Iraq after being told by a non-commissioned officer that he was needed back there. Decisions on whether to retain soldiers are taken by military commanders instead of qualified medical professionals, which puts the occupied populations at the mercy of thousands of unstable soldiers. De Vlieger later said, “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.” But he did manage to stay alive. A lot of troops suffering mental health problems and sent back into the firefight weren’t so lucky. Private First Class Jason Scheuerman was stripped of his gun when he wrote his mother a suicide note from Iraq in 2005. He was later accused of inventing his mental health problems in an effort to be discharged and was warned that he could be disciplined. Three weeks later he was dead, after shooting himself in the head with the gun the army had returned to him. Needless to say, it is unknown how many Iraqi and Afghan civilians have been sacrificed to this policy.
Bradley Manning, the alleged US military source of the Wikileaks data, was another example of the mental health of recruits being ignored. He was in such a disturbed mental state before his deployment that he wet himself, threw furniture around, shouted at his commanding officer, and underwent regular psychiatric evaluations, according to the Guardian. Manning was a “mess of a child” who “should never have been put through a tour of duty in Iraq,” said an officer from the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Manning trained in 2007.78 He was sent anyway—a decision which came back to bite the US military. Chase Madar, the author of a recent book on Manning, told me, “He would never have been kept in the army if not for record-low recruitment levels in 2007 when he enlisted. Manning spent a few weeks in the ‘reject barracks’ at Fort Leonard Wood where he did basic training and that sounds like absolute hell, being confined with tons of criminals and young guys not right in the head.” The only reason Manning made it on to active duty in Iraq, after repeated warnings about his fitness at all three of his stateside deployments (Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Huachuca, Fort Drum), was the army’s “utter desperation for soldiers with IT and analytic skills during its historic low in recruitment.” A portion of the chatlogs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker informant who turned him in, notes how the military, desperate for recruits, ran only minimal background checks on him. There is no mention of how he almost got discharged right away at basic training, which is no doubt a painful memory he’d rather not bring up:
(12:06:18 PM) [email protected]: how did this not come up as an issue in your background check? I’m guessing you have an S and not a TS.
(12:06:29 PM) bradass87: TS/SCI
(12:06:47 PM) bradass87: i enlisted in 2007 . . . height of iraq war, no-one double checked much
(12:07:06 PM) [email protected]: Well, hell, if you made it in, maybe I should reconsider the offer I got from what used to be JTF-CNO.
(12:07:09 PM) bradass87: background checks are jokes anyway
(12:07:23 PM) [email protected]: It’s hit-or-miss.79
The Support
Throughout the War on Terror money was consistently pulled from programs set up to put homecoming soldiers back on the straight and narrow. A Pentagon survey in 2007 found that 38 percent of soldiers who returned from combat said they had experienced psychological problems, from depression to anger, but the same report disclosed there had been “dramatic decreases” in the number of health care professionals assigned to the military since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had begun.80 With billions of dollars being expended on quashing the insurgencies the report concluded that the US military “currently lacks both funding and personnel to adequately support the psychological health of service members and their families.”81 At the time of the report’s publication there were only 500 mental health professionals employed in an army of more than a million soldiers.
It was clear that caring for veterans was just too expensive for the Bush administration. In 2005, only two years into the war in Iraq, Bush was widely condemned for his budget for veterans’ health care, which fell well short of maintaining the levels of the years before, bearing in mind the huge numbers of new soldiers returning from war.82 In that year not only did Bush try to double the co-payment that veterans would pay for prescription drugs, but he also proposed a new flat $250 fee for some veterans to use the health care system. Even Senator Daniel K. Akaka (D-HI) warned at the time that this could force 192,000 veterans out of the health care system because of the price hike. Later in 2005 it was revealed that the Bush administration had left a $1 billion shortage for veterans’ health care that had to be plugged by emergency supplemental funds voted for by Congress again.83 In 2006, with discretionary spending apparently needing to be cut to deal with the massive deficit, the White House predicted a 16 percent cut in veterans’ health care, despite the increasing numbers of veterans needing the services.84 In that budget year Congress had to add another $2.7 billion emergency funding to the VA on top of Bush’s budget.
The effect of turning veterans’ health care from an absolute necessity, among the most important of government responsibilities, into an expendable commitment had painful consequences for those returning from combat. Ever-increasing numbers of soldiers were returning with mental health problems ranging from schizophrenia to PTSD, and one academic study estimated that in 2004, 1.8 million veterans were without health insurance, which amounts to about 12 percent of all uninsured people in the US.85 From 2000, Bush’s first year in office, to 2004, two years into his War on Terror, the number of uninsured veterans grew by 290,000.86 Conditions were deteriorating for the medics as well: the air force lost 20 percent of its mental health workers from 2003 to 2005 while the army lost 8 percent in the same period.87 By 2008, the Bush administration was even employing lawyers to fight a case that had been brought to insist that mental health should be included in health care provisions for veterans.88 Unsurprisingly, Bush didn’t mention this when speaking on Veterans Day in November 2008: “I am committed to making sure that today’s veterans get all the health care and support they need from the federal government for agreeing to serve in a time of danger,” he said just before he left office with the most squalid of records on the topic.89 John McCain’s plan was even worse than Bush’s: he wanted to privatize veterans’ health care, turning it into a market-oriented trust, which would have been devastated by the financial crisis. The Republicans’ claim to be the party of the military (which they used to regularly beat the Democrats) was nothing but a sham from start to finish. To be fair, there was little improvement under the Obama administration as the president came under pressure in 2011 to ensure that veterans’ benefits were delivered amid mounting criticism from different groups. During a Congressional hearing, Patty Murray, chairwoman of the Senate Veterans Affairs committee, chided the VA for reducing the number of eligible participants for a new benefit for critically injured veterans and their caregivers, and was deeply critical of the severe delays to the start of the program. “Families of wounded warriors are waiting for these benefits, and with each day of delay the strain from the sacrifices they make only grows,” she said.90
Easy Picking
The best investigation into the problem was conducted at the height of the War on Terror by the Connecticut newspaper The Hartford Courant, but it had little impact as its revelations were largely ignored by the military. It opened with the story of Specialist Edward W. Brabazon, or “Crazy Eddie,” of the 505t
h Parachute Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. “We were surprised they took him, with the kind of mental problems he had, but we figured the Army must know what they’re doing,” said his mother, Margaret. “We didn’t think they’d send him into combat.”91 But send him they did, and less than three months into his second deployment, Brabazon shot himself in the head at a palace compound in Baghdad. “They talked about how he had a history of mental problems,” Margaret said. “I said, ‘No kidding. If you knew he had mental problems, then why was he there?’” The Courant concluded: “Despite a Congressional mandate to assess the mental health of every soldier sent to a combat zone,” there was “a fractured pre-deployment screening process in which less than 1 percent of deploying soldiers ever see a mental health professional. It is a practice that has put unfit service members in harm’s way, increasing their risk for suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Its analysis of data from the DOD found that one third of soldiers who killed themselves in Iraq did so within three months of being deemed mentally fit and sent into combat. Experts said that the vast majority of those who take their own lives are suffering from depression or bipolar disorder at the time, adding “it is doubtful soldiers would spontaneously develop a serious mental illness so quickly after deployment.” But the required treatment was no longer available, and, even if diagnosed, soldiers would find themselves put back in harm’s way with their minds still traumatized. In fact, the military was also actively working to send soldiers back because it was too expensive to treat them. A stunning investigation in the online magazine Salon revealed the lengths to which the military was prepared to go in order to stop medical staff diagnosing PTSD, on the grounds that the intensive care needed after such a diagnosis would be too pricey. It showed how a veteran from Iraq named only as “Sergeant X,” who had been seeking treatment at Fort Carson for a brain injury and PTSD for more than a year, was misdiagnosed by military psychologist Douglas McNinch with an “anxiety disorder,” not PTSD. The report outlined the case:
Sgt. X believed his traumatic brain injury had been incurred in 2005–6 when his Bradley Fighting Vehicle buckled in an explosion in Iraq. While one of many he endured, this one knocked him out for 30 seconds. Mr McNinch told Sgt. X: “I will tell you something confidentially that I would have to deny if it were ever public. Not only myself, but all the clinicians up here are being pressured to not diagnose PTSD and diagnose [an unspecified] anxiety disorder [instead].” “Unfortunately,” McNinch told Sgt. X, “yours has not been the only case . . . I and other [doctors] are under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD. It’s not fair. I think it’s a horrible way to treat soldiers, but unfortunately, you know, now the V.A. is jumping on board, saying, ‘Well, these people don’t have PTSD,’ and stuff like that.” But this wasn’t an isolated case. Two veterans groups had released an email from Norma Perez, a psychologist in Texas, directing staff at a Department of Veterans Affairs facility. “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Perez wrote in the e-mail, suggesting the staff “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”92
Sergeant X was brave enough to seek help for his problems, but not everyone was. Many soldiers were too scared to come forward because of what the military described as “stigma” in a macho military environment. “Stigma and lack of referral to the Army Substance Referral Program for required substance abuse screening were important barriers to soldiers,” noted the Fort Carson report.93 But this concern among the troops was more a concern about how seeking help would be viewed by their commanders. A 2007 survey found that three in five American soldiers felt that seeking help would damage their career prospects, with around half saying that they thought others would think less of them if they received help for mental health problems.94 That kind of feeling doesn’t develop in a vacuum: the fear of revealing mental problems to medical staff had been consciously fostered by a military unprepared to treat its soldiers. One study found that one in five soldiers who returned from the desert reported the effects of PTSD, but only half went on to receive treatment.
In a farcical public relations blitz, a delegation of Hollywood celebrities was dispatched to Baghdad in 2008 to tell the troops it was OK to feel mentally sick. The Stop the Stigma tour was organized by Sopranos star Joe Pantoliano, who had already founded the “No Kidding, Me Too!” group to break down taboos surrounding mental illness. As the group descended on Victory Base Complex, the troops were told by the psychologist accompanying the delegation that “the things that you experience, they are not military problems, they are human problems that happen to occur in the military . . . When you come home, educate us. We need to hear your stories.” But the military knew their stories and was ignoring them. “I know the military is especially concerned; they’ve been willing to be very proactive and they obviously really care about their men and women, so it’s an honor for us to be a part of this,” added actress Lisa Jay, duped into believing the military propaganda.95 To anyone watching the situation it was clear the military didn’t care; it had stood by as the number of PTSD cases had risen exponentially. In 2008, the Rand Corporation released a report, based on surveys of veterans, estimating that of the 1.6 million American military personnel who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least 300,000 were suffering from PTSD or major depression. Rand also estimated that as many as 320,000 may have suffered some form of brain damage from explosion blast waves, affecting their long-term cognitive capabilities.96 The country at large was simply not ready to cope with this new influx. Back home, the number of Americans in the general population seeking treatment for mental health problems, including depression and bipolar disorder, had nearly doubled in the decade to 2006, from 19 million to 36 million. Spending on mental illnesses had skyrocketed in the same period, outstripping that for cancer and heart disease, reaching $58 billion in 2006.97
The Lifeline of Work and a Home
One of the toughest problems for veterans on their return to the US is finding a job, and frequent periods of unemployment are often a factor in the descent into depression and other problems. The unemployment rate for veterans hit 15 percent in 2011, nearly doubling over the previous five years, and leaving returning soldiers with much worse odds than the general population.98 That the help available to unemployed veterans provided by the military was rudimentary became obvious to me when in 2007 I attended the third annual “Salute Our Heroes” veterans job fair in Manhattan, an initiative that aims to ease veterans’ passage back into mainstream society after they retire from the military. An eclectic collection of organizations were in attendance, from financial companies to universities, all of which said they were on the lookout for prospective employees. William Offutt, the Special Assistant of the Veterans Employment and Training Service, told me: “The event is important because it is promoting and prioritizing a big section of the population that deserve recognition. When employers are looking for the best they need to be able to find it, and veterans constitute a highly skilled workforce.” But it became clear that no one was actually offering any jobs. It was another public relations exercise. Sal Manze, sixty-six, was a Vietnam veteran and advertised the fact on his baseball cap as he sauntered around the floor of the hall. He fought for two years from 1965 to 1966. “They don’t interview on the spot,” he told me. “Most of the companies are just giving out information rather than offering jobs. I think if they were able to hire immediately it would be great, but as it is it’s just frustrating.” Now he was working a $7-an-hour seasonal job as a sales associate at Macy’s. “They say age doesn’t come into it but it’s just not true,” he said. “But how can you prove it? Go to the interview with a lawyer?” Others felt similarly. “I want to get into technology now,” said Tyrone Webb, twenty-nine, and a veteran of nearly five years in the US navy. “I used to be an aviation engineer, working on the engines of aircraft. The problem is getting a job with a bad disch
arge from service is very difficult.” Webb was given a dishonorable discharge after his mother contracted cancer and he became disheartened when he was not allowed to visit her and lost focus on the job. “I started being late and just not caring. I was discharged soon after and they gave me Reentry Code 4 on my [discharge form] and so it is impossible to get a job when it says ‘other than honorable discharge’ on my documents.” Since he left the military in June 2006 he has worked mainly in retail sales and phone surveys, and is currently working in a restaurant. “I am angry,” he said. “I have a lot on my plate, I think about children but I can’t have any because of my situation, I can’t even think about girlfriends.”
It wasn’t just the US military helping to ruin active-duty soldiers and veterans through neglect: the private sector contributed too, in its own exploitative way. During the War on Terror, huge numbers of veterans became a target for unscrupulous loaning companies. It emerged that leading banks and lending agencies in the US were failing to adhere to laws governing loan conditions to active-duty and retired soldiers. In 2011, one of the biggest banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase, was forced to announce a raft of new programs for military personnel after three veterans filed a lawsuit against the bank for overcharging interest payments on mortgages.99 Under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which dates back to 1940 but was updated in 2003, interest payments for soldiers cannot rise above 6 percent. Lenders are also barred from foreclosing on mortgages of service members while they are on active duty. “The mistakes we made on military foreclosures are a painful aberration,” said Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan, in the aftermath of a Congressional hearing. “We deeply apologize to our military customers and their families for these mistakes.” JP Morgan then set their interest rate cap for service members at 4 percent.