Irregular Army

by Matt Kennard

  But it was evident, despite the crocodile tears, that exploitation of the veteran community was no aberration for financial institutions. “I just think JP Morgan ignored it, they didn’t care about it, they didn’t want to know about it,” Bob Filner, a Congressman from California and ranking member on the House Veterans Affairs Committee, told me. “And I think the other banks are doing the same thing.” Veterans are a particularly vulnerable group, he added. “They get too discouraged and they feel powerless, so they can’t fight back.” Filner had been approached by mid-level staff at JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo who told him the lawsuit was part of something much bigger. And leading veterans’ groups supported these claims. “There’s been a constant stream of veterans complaining of overcharging and problems with banks,” Selena Coppa, who dealt with veterans’ financial difficulties for Iraq Veterans Against the War, told me. “This is an industry-wide issue, it’s not solely limited to JP Morgan. Too many financial institutions see service members as numbers in ledger that they can exploit because of their unique vulnerability.” When in the military, service members can be hit with a criminal charge for being overly indebted, which causes some to accept bad practices. “Let’s say you are being exploited by a bank: in the civilian world you would dispute that, you wouldn’t pay it,” Coppa said. “But if you’re in the military even if it’s an unfair charge they are forced to pay under threat of jail under military law.” It was even tougher for those veterans with PTSD who lived so close to wire anyway, meaning that one small economic injustice could be devastating. Many winded up being evicted. “I had a friend of mine, she was incorrectly charged for a late fee, they refused to grant her time to pay it, especially, vets suffer from PTSD [and] have difficultly navigating bureaucracy,” said Coppa. “There is also the problem with the veteran population that they are very proud, which makes it difficult for them to come forward and talk about it”—and easy for unscrupulous creditors to prey on them: aware of the vulnerability of service members, loan-shark-type schemes are often set up around military bases.

  The situation got much worse as the financial crisis hit in 2008 and the number of foreclosed veterans rose significantly. “I’ve noticed this being a problem for the last few years,” Joe Sharpe, economic director at The American Legion, the largest veterans’ group in the US, told me. “This had included vets having a problem paying mortgages while they are deployed. It’s a shock once they return to discover their home mortgage has tripled or been foreclosed.” According to Sharp it has even affected the operational readiness of the force. “I remember it came to a head recently, it became such a problem that unit commanders were concerned they couldn’t deploy large numbers of soldiers because they were in financial trouble.” Soldiers have the added problem that when they are away, they are not aware of what’s happening at home. Thanks to the extended deployment periods they also had less time or opportunity to respond to legal issues. Because of this, default judgments were often entered against them unfairly. “I think lives were destroyed. I said the banks could be guilty of homicide,” Bob Filner added. “We are at an all time high for the number of people committing suicide on active duty—higher than Vietnam. Financial stress is the second leading cause. Now who knows how many people did that because not just JP Morgan, but Bank of America and Wells Fargo didn’t do what they should have. If they were foreclosed on illegally, and the wife left them, and he felt he couldn’t support his family, I have no doubt that if we looked into the record closely we would find that.” The Department of Veterans Affairs does offer its own mortgage scheme which has better terms, but not all service members chose to use it because it is incredibly complicated. The VA told me they helped 66,000 veterans fight foreclosure in 2010 through interceding with the lender (but there were 20,000 more who sought help but could not forestall the loss of their homes). “What has happened is that the vets with VA home-loans have fared best,” says Joe Sharpe. “Those that did not get VA home-loans are the ones that are getting in trouble.” Those with VA loans have, indeed, demonstrated the lowest serious delinquency and foreclosure rates, but even the VA admit that their loan scheme is very difficult for veterans to use because its terms are so opaque. “We recognize it is a complex law,” Michael Frueh, VA spokesman, told me by way of an explanation.

  Unsurprisingly, in this climate, homelessness among returning veterans remained extremely high during the War on Terror. The most extensive survey of the problem, published by the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) and VA, found that nearly 76,000 veterans were sleeping rough on any given night in 2009.100 On top of that, nearly 140,000 veterans spent at least one night in a shelter during the same year. Some of those are older soldiers, but the study also found that 11,300 younger veterans, aged eighteen to thirty, were in shelters at some point during 2009. Nearly all of them had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Ronte Foster was one of them. When he came home in late 2004, he had changed radically. His wife no longer recognized the affectionate family man she had married and waved off to Iraq just a year earlier. He was drinking every day, taking a cocktail of drugs, and erupting in fits of anger as he tried to self-medicate his way through the PTSD he didn’t even know he had. She stood it for six months, eager to salvage their eight-year marriage, but then she broke, no longer able to put up with the consequences for her and their two young children. “She told me to leave and at that point I had so much trauma in my head, I just had to get away,” Ronte tells me. He had been deployed to Tikrit, hometown of the erstwhile Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and had duly witnessed one of the bloodiest and most chaotic periods of the war. “The unit that I went with, we saw a lot of roadside bombs and a lot of RPG’s, you saw that on a daily basis,” he says. He was also involved in firefights which led to deaths that still haunt him. “I had to do some things I didn’t want to do,” he says. “There was this one incident where some insurgents tried to rush the gate of the base, I was there at Camp Anaconda and we killed one and three were captured, it’s still with me.” When he left his family in Danville, Virginia, he went as far as possible, running from the war and the memories that were still fixed in his head. He relocated to Los Angeles and slept in the car and at friend’s places. “I would get very depressed, I felt this intense isolation,” he says. “I realize now that I was experiencing a lot of the PTSD symptoms, I had a hard time remembering things and concentrating for any period of time.” Ronte got lucky and was taken in by a Salvation Army shelter where he became a resident floor manager. But seven years on from his return from Iraq, Foster is still not housed in permanent accommodation. “It’s not perfect but I’m much luckier than other people I know of.” He has no job and cannot afford his own food.

  There are thousands of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with similar tales, but these are stories it is painful for America to hear. In 2011, however, the budget deficit and the search for programs to cut put the problem firmly back on the agenda. The HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program, or HUD-VASH, is a flagship scheme working to help homeless veterans by issuing vouchers which can be used to pay for accommodation. Since 2008, it has issued around 30,000 vouchers and by 2011 the program had placed 21,000 veterans in permanent accommodation. But in the Republicans’ proposed budget for the fiscal year 2011 it was completely eliminated, which caused outcry amongst Democrats and in a veteran community that had already been subjected to outrageous cuts to its health facilities by the GOP during the Bush era. The Republicans’ “decision to slash funding for housing assistance to thousands of homeless veterans shows a total lack of humanity,” said Barbara Boxer, a Democratic Senator from California.101 After a compromise, the program was salvaged, but the department only got about 7,000 vouchers, less than the typical 10,000, after the Republicans bargained them down.102 With veterans continuing to stream home, most analysts said this was far from enough and left community-based organizations to pick up the pieces. One of those community-based groups, US VETS, runs th
e shelter that Ronte Foster now lives in. The organization was started in 1993 in response to chronic levels of homelessness among the veteran population and it now has 2,000 beds in five states, making it the largest non-governmental provider in the country. “There is a lot of PTSD around because it is an all-volunteer [military] and they are doing everything they can to keep soldiers,” said Steve Peck, chief executive. “They are going on multiple deployments . . . which is exacerbating the problem. The DOD is aware of the problem and they are doing something, but it’s a lot bigger than they can handle.” The lack of funds for medical and psychological treatment made the situation worse. When soldiers are discharged they are not required to go back to the VA for treatment, and it is estimated more than half were not accessing the treatment they need. Even those who did seek help were often told by the VA that there was a three or four month waiting list, which for someone with PTSD can be extremely difficult. By 2010, veterans were committing suicide at the rate of eighteen per day, many of them after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.103

  The military’s use of soldiers outside of the regular army, as they strived to keep up troop levels, had a particularly negative impact. “What makes this different from Vietnam is that half of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan are reservists and national guardsman,” John Driscoll, chief executive of the Coalition for Homeless Veterans, told me. For reservists the pressures from combat and training are particularly stressful because they lack the experience of their regular army peers. This is compounded when they come home, as they do not go through the typical transition program to help them adjust. “Anyone in a combat role knows you need decompression time, you need transition time to get your issues back in order,” added Driscoll, himself a veteran. “During that time you have spent away from home you have changed. The way you communicate is different, so when you add to that extreme economic pressure from the housing crisis and economic slump it’s not a pretty picture.”

  At the same time that it was exploiting veterans, corporate America was enjoying the fruits of the markets these same veterans had prized open for them in the Middle East. As the US began the withdrawal of its remaining 40,000 troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, US officials were trying desperately to shore up the position of the American business community. With domestic economic growth slowing fast (and hurting veterans), US companies were increasingly keen to exploit the potential of Iraq’s post-war recovery. One example was 360 Architecture, a Kansas City–based design company, which was busy drawing up plans for a glitzy $800-million sports complex in the southern oil center of Basra. With the 2013 Gulf Games scheduled to be held in Iraq, the public-relations-conscious government was looking to build a stadium and facilities for athletes. “It will be like an Olympic training ground for Iraqi national athletes of all sports,” John Radtke, 360’s project director, told me excitedly. But there were surely better things to spend Iraq’s new oil money on. How about schools? In 2008, only 50 percent of primary school age children were attending school, down from 80 percent in 2005. Or foodstuffs? By 2007, 28 percent of Iraqi children were malnourished. But such concerns didn’t interest the State Department, which in the same period hosted a forum focused on “promoting commercial opportunities in Iraq” with representatives from nearly thirty major American companies—including Goldman Sachs and Monsanto. They joined Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, alongside other senior US and Iraqi officials to discuss economic opportunities in the “new Iraq.” “Basically, the bottom line is we want to send a message that Iraq is open for business,” a senior US official told me. “The US government will do whatever it can to get them into the market.” Around that time, Caterpillar, the Illinois-based construction equipment and natural-gas turbine manufacturer, won part of a $6.3 billion contract to build fifty new power plants in Iraq as the country sought to increase its electricity output; while Lockheed Martin, the arms manufacturer, announced that it had a deal in the pipeline with Iraq and Oman for the sale of eighteen F-16 fighter jets, to be ready by 2012. The Maryland-based company said it expected up to one hundred additional orders from Iraq by the end of the decade.104 America’s veterans—and the large numbers of Iraqis mired in poverty—would see none of the profits.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Plump, Young, Dumb—and Ready to Serve

  THE BAGHDAD BULGE

  Obesity is not just a public health issue. It’s also a national security concern as well. We’re not physically fit to defend ourselves.

  Dr. Carlos Crespo, associate professor of social and

  preventive medicine at the University at Buffalo, 20021

  America is getting fatter. It has been for decades. But only during the years of the War on Terror did the country’s obesity problem become a full-on, deadly serious national security issue. Nothing was more likely to put Al-Qaeda at ease than the thought of a waddling phalanx rumbling towards them in Iraq or Afghanistan, but as the wars got underway, that’s what happened as standards in the US military relating to body fat and fitness were relaxed: as the recruiting pool shrank, the waistlines of soldiers got bigger. The US soldier in the War on Terror weighed thirty-seven pounds, or 25 percent, more than his ancestor in the Civil War,2 and obesity was by far the most common medical reason why prospective soldiers were refused entry into the military. And the situation was getting dramatically worse. In 1993 about 23 percent of prospective recruits would have been overweight—a pretty significant tranche. By 2006 this had increased to just over 27 percent, or more than a quarter of potential recruits. In the same period, obesity countrywide had increased from 2.8 percent to 6.8 percent. “We’re not physically fit to defend ourselves,” complained Dr. Carlos Crespo, a University of Buffalo professor. “As a society, we need to be physically prepared to respond to natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or any other emergency.”3

  The military gauges the physical fitness of its recruits using a measure called the body mass index, or BMI, which measures body fat as a percentage of overall weight. The BMI of a prospective soldier must not be more than 26 percent for a man and 32 percent for a woman. “An increasing number of young adults in the general population do not meet the current weight-for-height standards,” lamented one military report. Among eighteen-year-olds who applied for military service in 2006, 35 percent of males and 28 percent of females had a BMI above 25, it added.4 “I’d say that out of every 10 applicants that come in, probably three we couldn’t take—they are obese,” said Sergeant Darryl Bogan, a recruiter in Columbia, South Carolina. “We are getting heavier as a nation as far as our young people are concerned.”5

  Until 1960 there were no regulations on obesity; when soldiers were weighed it was to find out if they had enough not too much weight.6 But that was before America ballooned. “There is no question soldiers are getting bigger—just look at photos of soldiers from the 50s,” said Lieutenant Colonel Karl Friedl, the army’s director of operational medical research, adding that that difference is a reflection of general weight gain among the whole population.7 But something had to change. “The fatter America gets, the more lenient the military is going to get with their regulations,” he added. Even before the war in Iraq was launched the Pentagon knew what a stickler this could prove. “If at some future time the federal guidelines are adopted, the impact will be to shift a sizeable group of personnel from a category of meeting weight standards to a category of being overweight,” a leaked Pentagon report said.8 “Such a change would have negative implications for perceptions of readiness of the forces.” But readiness was of less importance than maintaining the force. And some believed it was purely a perception thing: did it actually matter? “The military, of course, has standards for appearances: you don’t want a bunch of fat guys marching in your parade. But how critical is it? It is of significance, but in critical terms, that significance is marginal,” said Arthur Frank, a medical director at George Washington University.9

  Untightening the Belt

  The most obvious way around the problem
was the use of “medical waivers” to make exceptions for overweight recruits. In 2006, medical waivers constituted about 30 percent of all army waivers and 25 percent of those for the marines.10 But this still wasn’t enough, and in 2004 the military began a string of programs aimed at recruiting the fat of America into its fighting force. First, the army set up a program with the Olympian title of Assessment of Recruit Motivation and Strength, or ARMS, which was designed to cut some slack for recruits who didn’t quite meet the army regulations on body fat. It became a sort of “automatic waiver” for recruits who had body-fat percentages up to 30 percent for men and 36 percent for women. Like being back in gym class, the recruits who fell in the upper margins of this criterion would be made to do a different “Harvard step” test exercise to other recruits, one which involved stepping onto a platform 120 times per minute, followed by a number of push-ups. If you made it through, there was no need to worry about being overweight, you were deemed army good and had a full year to get yourself in shape. One lucky beneficiary was Kyle Kimball who in 2006 wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and enlist in the marines. The problem was that he weighed 250 pounds, about 35 pounds over the cut-off for a marine of his height. But he went to Westover Joint Air Reserve Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts, and became one of the first to take advantage of the ARMS scheme, taking fitness tests as a way around his weight problems. “I can get there,” he told the Boston Globe, “I know I can lose the weight.”11