Iraq: Army Sending Seriously Injured Troops tp Active Duty

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Iraq: Army Sending Seriously Injured Troops tp Active Duty

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

Salon - Mar 26, 2007
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/26/fort_irwin/index_np.html

Army deployed seriously injured troops

Soldiers on crutches and canes were sent to a main desert camp used for
Iraq training.

Military experts say the Army was pumping up manpower
statistics to show a brigade was battle ready.

By Mark Benjamin

Mar. 26, 2007 | Last November, Army Spc. Edgar Hernandez, a
communications specialist with a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry
Division, had surgery on an ankle he had injured during physical
training. After the surgery, doctors put his leg in a cast, and he was
supposed to start physical therapy when that cast came off six weeks
later.

But two days after his cast was removed, Army commanders decided it was
more important to send him to a training site in a remote desert rather
than let him stay at Fort Benning, Ga., to rehabilitate. In January,
Hernandez was shipped to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin,
Calif., where his unit, the 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade of the 3rd
Infantry Division, was conducting a month of training in anticipation
of leaving for Iraq in March.

Hernandez says he was in no shape to train for war so soon after his
injury. "I could not walk," he told Salon in an interview. He said he
was amazed when he learned he was being sent to California. "Did they
not realize that I'm hurt and I needed this physical therapy?" he
remembered thinking. "I was told by my doctor and my physical therapist
that this was crazy."

Hernandez had served two tours in Iraq, where he helped maintain
communications gear in the unit's armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
But he could not participate in war maneuvers conducted on a
1,000-square-mile mock battlefield located in the harsh Mojave Desert.
Instead, when he got to California, he was led to a large tent where he
would be housed. He was shocked by what he saw inside: There were
dozens of other hurt soldiers. Some were on crutches, and others had
arms in slings. Some had debilitating back injuries. And nearby was
another tent, housing female soldiers with health issues ranging from
injuries to pregnancy.

Hernandez is one of a dozen soldiers who stayed for weeks in those
tents who were interviewed for this report, some of whose medical
records were also reviewed by Salon. All of the soldiers said they had
no business being sent to Fort Irwin given their physical condition. In
some cases, soldiers were sent there even though their injuries were so
severe that doctors had previously recommended they should be
considered for medical retirement from the Army.

Military experts say they suspect that the deployment to Fort Irwin of
injured soldiers was an effort to pump up manpower statistics used to
show the readiness of Army units. With the military increasingly
strained after four years of war, Army readiness has become a critical
part of the debate over Iraq. Some congressional Democrats have
considered plans to limit the White House's ability to deploy more
troops unless the Pentagon can certify that units headed into the fray
are fully equipped and fully manned.

Salon recently uncovered another troubling development in the Army's
efforts to shore up troop levels, reporting earlier this month that
soldiers from the 3rd Brigade had serious health problems that the
soldiers claimed were summarily downgraded by military doctors at Fort
Benning in February, apparently so that the Army could send them to
Iraq. Some of those soldiers were among the group sent to Fort Irwin to
train in January.

After arriving at Fort Irwin, many of the injured soldiers did not
train. "They had all of us living in a big tent," confirmed Spc.
Lincoln Smith, who spent the month there along with Hernandez and
others. Smith is an Army truck driver, but because of his health
issues, which include sleep apnea (a breathing ailment) and narcolepsy,
Smith is currently barred from driving military vehicles. "I couldn't
go out and do the training," Smith said about his time in California.
His records list his problems as "permanent" and recommend that he be
considered for retirement from the Army because of his health.

Another soldier with nearly 20 years in the Army was sent to Fort
Irwin, ostensibly to prepare for deployment to Iraq, even though she
suffers from back problems and has psychiatric issues. Doctors wrote
"unable to deploy overseas" on her medical records.

It is unclear exactly how many soldiers with health issues were sent to
the California desert. None of the soldiers interviewed by Salon had
done a head count, but all agreed that "dozens" would be a conservative
estimate. An Army spokesman and public affairs officials for the 3rd
Infantry Division did not return repeated calls and e-mails seeking
further detail and an explanation of why injured troops were sent to
Fort Irwin and housed in tents there during January.

The soldiers who were at Fort Irwin described a pitiful scene. "You had
people out there with crutches and canes," said an Army captain who was
being considered for medical retirement himself because of serious back
injuries sustained in a Humvee accident during a previous combat tour
in Iraq. "Soldiers that apparently had no business being there were
there," another soldier wrote to Salon in an e-mail. "Pregnant females
were sent to the National Training Center rotation" with the knowledge
of Army leaders, she said.

One infantry sergeant with nearly 20 years in the Army who had already
fought in Iraq broke his foot badly in a noncombat incident just before
being sent to Fort Irwin. "I didn't even get to put the cast on,"
before going, he said with exasperation. He said doctors put something
like an "open-toed soft shoe" on his foot and put him on a plane to
California. "I've got the cast on now. I never even got a chance to see
the [medical] specialist," he claimed. The infantry sergeant said life
in the desert was tough in his condition. "I was on Percocet. I
couldn't even concentrate. I hopped on a plane and hobbled around NTC
on crutches," he said. He added, "I saw people who were worse off than
I am. I saw people with hurt backs and so on. I started to think, 'Hey,
I'm not so bad.'"

Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins was one of those soldiers at NTC with a hurt
back, even though late last year, doctors recommended he be considered
for medical retirement. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative spine problem
and a long scar down the back of his neck where doctors fused three of
his vertebrae during surgery. He takes morphine for the pain in his
neck and back.

"I slept on a damn metal cot for 26 days with serious back problems,"
Jenkins told Salon. "It was an unpleasant experience," he said, adding
that his condition worsened while he was there. Hernandez, the
communications specialist, said he reinjured his ankle at Fort Irwin,
leaving him hobbling around in the sand and gravel for a month. When he
returned to Fort Benning, Hernandez had to be put into another cast.
(He is still in that cast now and hopes to start physical therapy when
it comes off on March 26.)

"We could not train," Jenkins said. "Why were we even there?"

Military experts point to the brigade's readiness statistics, including
"unit status reports" that carefully track personnel numbers and are
sent up through the Army's chain of command. "There are a number of
factors used to establish whether a unit is mission-capable," explained
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent organization
that studies military and security issues. "One of them is the extent
to which it is fully manned," he said. Pike says he suspects the
injured soldiers were camped out at Fort Irwin so that on paper, at
least, "the unit would have a sufficient head count to be
mission-capable."

Lawrence Korb, who was an assistant secretary of defense for manpower
during the Reagan administration and is now with the liberal Center for
American Progress, says that the 3rd Brigade can show statistically
that more troops trained in California simply because they were there.
"Basically, they could say 90 percent went through Fort Irwin," Korb
said about the brigade.

But injured soldiers from the brigade were not just shuttled to
California; some were sent on to Iraq. Earlier this month Salon
reported that on Feb. 15, shortly after returning from Fort Irwin to
Fort Benning, 75 injured soldiers from the 3rd Brigade lined up for
screenings at the troop medical clinic. Some of the soldiers there that
day described cursory meetings with a division surgeon -- meetings
designed to downgrade their health problems, the soldiers said, so that
they could be deployed to the war zone. Records for some of those
soldiers show doctors had previously concluded that those soldiers
could not wear body armor because of serious skeletal and other
injuries.

A military official knowledgeable about the training in California in
January and the medical processing of the injured soldiers at Fort
Benning in February told Salon that commanders were taking desperate
actions to meet an accelerated deployment schedule dictated by
President Bush's so-called surge plan for securing Baghdad. "None of
this would have happened if we had just slowed down a little bit," the
military official said. "A lot of people were under a lot of pressure
at that time."

In an interview for the Salon report earlier this month, Col. Wayne W.
Grigsby Jr., the commander of the 3rd Brigade, did not dispute that
injured troops were being deployed, but insisted they would be put in
safe noncombat jobs once they were in Iraq.

Some of those soldiers have since been deployed, while others fought
orders to go to Iraq. Jenkins, with the bad back, even appealed his
case to the Army surgeon general. Three days after he was quoted in the
Salon report, Jenkins received official word through his chain of
command that he would not be going to Iraq. Smith, the soldier with
sleep apnea and narcolepsy, who was also quoted in the Salon report,
also had his deployment orders dropped by the Army in mid-March.

Jenkins said the disregard for soldiers' health motivated him to speak
out, despite his fears that as an active-duty soldier he could suffer
reprisal from superiors. "I am a guy who has been in the Army for 21
years," he said. "For me to speak about this -- and risk everything --
then there has got to be a problem. There has got to be an issue here."

Pete Geren, the acting Army secretary, told a Senate panel on March 14
that the Army would investigate the injured soldiers' claims that their
medical records were modified at Fort Benning in February in order for
them to be sent to Iraq. House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike
Skelton, D-Mo., has asked the Government Accountability Office to
investigate. The Army inspector general has also launched a probe. It
remains unclear if any of those probes will also look into injured
soldiers' being sent to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in
January.

Experts say there is little doubt that military readiness has
diminished with the strain of the Iraq war. But the Army says the
problem is limited to units recuperating in the United States, and that
by shifting around troops and equipment, brigades going to Iraq are in
tip-top shape. "Today's deployed soldiers are the best-trained,
best-equipped and best-led we have ever sent into combat," Army vice
chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody told a House Armed Services Committee
panel March 13. "However, we've done this -- after five years of combat
- -- we've done this at the expense of our non-deployed forces," he
admitted. "We do have shortages with the non-deployed forces." The New
York Times reported on March 20 that of the 20 Army brigades not
currently deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, only one has enough
equipment or soldiers to be sent quickly into combat.

Indeed, there are indications that the problems go beyond Fort Benning.
When Skelton, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, wrote
to the GAO asking for an investigation into the deployment of injured
troops to Iraq, he added in that letter that "the committee has
received a number of phone calls and letters from concerned service
members and their families, including similar allegations that injured
and wounded service members are being deployed into combat despite
their injuries."

"My back was broken while I was in the military, I now have a
ruptured/bulging discs in my lumbar spine," one distressed soldier
wrote to Salon in an e-mail earlier this month. She said she had been
in the process of a medical review that would end her service in the
Army. But upon her return from the National Training Center in
California, she claimed, doctors at Fort Benning "changed my profile
and made me deployable." She pleaded for help in bringing attention to
her case, after frantically seeking help through military and
congressional channels.

"If anyone has the ability to help ... PLEASE do so," she wrote. "I am
heading to Kuwait tomorrow where I will then go to Baghdad with my
unit."

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