Winter Soldier (22 page)

In basic training there was a young, female recruit who was engaging in sexual relations with one of the drill sergeants. When we found that out, it was disgusting and demoralizing. It got exposed and he never tried to approach me or the other women and hit on us, but the dynamics were there.

I joined the New Jersey National Guard in 1997. I was a medic, a very woman-heavy field. We didn’t have the same sort of experiences as women in mechanic fields do. When 9/11 happened our unit was called up to do post–9/11 relief. At that moment, I just figured my life would change. We were going to war. But what I also knew that I could get pregnant. So I said to myself, “What happens if I get pregnant?” Maybe I wouldn’t have to go if I was having a baby. We’d have to be deployed in the next nine months and we could deploy a year later, I’d still have to go anyway. Then I’d have a three-month-old baby that I can’t stay with because I waited too long or because I did it too quickly. This is the type of math that people do.

A lot of men think oh, you’re a sellout or you’re a punk. You joined the military, why are you gonna get pregnant? You see? This is the type of tension that happens. I don’t think it’s important to go into my experience, but I just want you to know that many women do get pregnant. Many women do end up having abortions and many women did have babies. After 9/11.

Who are these women? These members of the National Guard are mothers and grandmothers. So now you have guys at home saying “Baby, I’ll go. You stay. Let me go for you,” and we know that that’s not reality. That’s not how it works. When you get called up, you are the one that has to go.

I can speak on behalf of a good friend of mine who was raped and there was no evidence. That’s a huge problem, that there’s no evidence. When there’s no evidence you don’t qualify for benefits and you can’t claim that you have PTSD because there’s no documentation of the crime. When one does try to document the crime, they’re coerced and told that they’re a sellout, and other men who might want to be on your side are also coerced and made to feel like if they speak up they’re turning against their own. That’s not just against the women, because these young men have to live with that too. They have to decide whether they want to be on the side of the victim or the victimizer, when in fact we are all in a situation where all are being forced into an occupation that none of us are really happy about.

When we have women in command, will that solve the problem? There are people who are lobbying to say that women should be higher up and they should have more power. I’m not convinced that having women in command will change the nature of our situation in the occupation itself. There are women who are trying to fight, there are women who are trying to speak out. The military is scared out of its mind to have this panel right here. This panel is history. Because women are in combat now, and they’re so scared that this is gonna get out.

Eighteen American war veterans kill themselves every day.1 One thousand former soldiers receiving care from the Department of Veterans Affairs attempt suicide every month.2 More veterans are committing suicide than are dying in combat overseas. These are statistics that most Americans don’t know, because the government has refused to tell them. Since the start of the Iraq War, official Washington has tried to present it as a war without casualties.

In fact, these statistics never would have come to light were it not for a class action lawsuit brought by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth on behalf of the 1.7 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two groups allege the Department of Veterans Affairs has systematically denied mental-health care and disability benefits to veterans returning from the conflict zones. The case, officially known as Veterans for Common Sense v. Peake, went to trial in April 2008 at a federal courthouse in San Francisco. The two sides will no doubt be battling it out in court for years, but the case is already having an impact.

That’s because over the course of the two-week trial, the VA was compelled to produce a series of documents that show the extent of the crisis affecting wounded soldiers.

“Shh!” began one e-mail from Dr. Ira Katz, the head of the VA’s Mental Health Division, advising a media spokesperson not to tell CBS News that one thousand veterans receiving care at the VA try to kill themselves every month. “Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?” the e-mail concludes.3

Leading Democrats on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee immediately called for Katz’s resignation. The chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Bob Filner (D-CA), weighed in as well. “We should all be angry about what has gone on here,” Filner said. “This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know then the problem will continue and people will die. If that’s not criminal negligence, I don’t know what is.”4

It’s also part of a pattern. The high number of veteran suicides weren’t the only government statistics the Bush administration was forced to reveal because of the class-action lawsuit. Another set of documents presented in court showed that in the six months leading up to March 31, 2008, a total of 1,467 veterans died waiting to learn if their disability claim would be approved by the government. A third set of documents showed that veterans who appeal a VA decision to deny their disability claim have to wait an average of 1,608 days, or nearly four and a half years, for their answer.5

Other casualty statistics are not directly concealed, but are also not made public on a regular basis. For example, the Pentagon reports regularly on the numbers of American troops “wounded” in Iraq (32,224 as of June 1, 2008) but neglects to mention that it has two other categories: “injured” and “ill” (together 39,430).6 All three of these categories represent soldiers who are so damaged physically they have to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment, but splitting up the numbers minimizes the sense of casualties in the public consciousness.

Here’s another number that we don’t often hear discussed in the media: 287,790.7 That’s the number of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who had filed a disability claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs as of March 25, 2008. That figure was not announced to the public at a news conference, but had to be obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.

Each number in these statistics represents the suffering of a patriotic American who signed up for the U.S. Armed Forces and agreed to go anywhere in the world at the order of their commander in chief. As the testimony offered at Winter Soldier shows, veterans have been lied to twice—first about the reasons for going to war and second about the government’s commitment to take care of them when they get home.

Regardless of your political viewpoints, regardless of your personal feelings, one day the United States military will leave Iraq. When we do, all we will have to show for it is thousands of dead Americans. In the meantime, the war ends every single day for our soldiers, because someone is discharged from the United States military every single day. They’re discharged with no assistance getting into the VA system. Some people are discharged without knowing that they qualify for veterans’ benefits, like I was.

I served on the USS John F. Kennedy and deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2004. I worked as an aircraft director on the flight deck. I was one of those guys with the yellow vest and the orange sticks that helps direct the planes on take-off and landing. But in the fall of 2004, I was pulled off my ship and was sent to take part in the second siege of Fallujah, which we called Operation Phantom Fury.

Fallujah was declared a “free-fire zone” in November 2004 and we told the civilian population that they had to leave because the entire city was going to be deemed hostile territory. Some of them left. They carried TVs or food and sat outside the city and waited for the firefight to be over so they could go home. Some of them didn’t leave. At the time, that possibility didn’t even enter my head, that some of these people wouldn’t leave.

We are all trained to kill, and we do it well. The standard procedure that we followed in Fallujah whether written or unwritten was to leave dead Iraqis in the streets to be buried by their own. This presented a problem because the sewage system was shut down so sewage started to back up into the streets. There were dead bodies floating in sewage. The smell, I’ll never forget the smell. I can smell it right now.

We would just leave the dead Iraqis in the streets and they piled up. It was disgusting. We ended up sighting in our weapons on these dead bodies. We’d been trained to keep our weapons “on point.” You always want your weapon to be sighted in. So when we didn’t have a target to shoot we sighted our weapons on dead people and dead animals. That happened a lot at the tail end of Operation Phantom Fury.

Later on I was discharged with no assistance getting into the VA system. The processing of my application for VA health care took at least three months. When I was finally able to request mental health over the phone, I was told that I could not get an appointment for three more months, and I did not make an appointment. A few days later I looked up the law, and the law says that the VA only has a thirty-day maximum to provide an appointment for someone requesting an appointment. So I called this wonderful organization back and I cited the laws of our wonderful country, and I was given an appointment, and like every other appointment that I’ve ever had from the Veterans Administration it was thirty days later.

So I went and I showed up at this appointment, and I was inducted into what is a processing system set up to deter people from seeking help. I was spoken to with no compassion. Every single phone call I make to the VA I’m asked if I’m going to kill myself or somebody else in the most inhumane way you could imagine, by the most inhumane people you could imagine.

So after going through this process, the first thing they tried to do was medicate me. No therapy was recommended. Medications were recommended. They gave me three different medications. The first was Trazodone. The second was Paxil. And the third was gabapentin, a generic form of Neurontin. My doctor did not give me any information on these medications. He told me that PTSD treatment is not a science and that there is no science to it, and that you can mix and match these medications, and something may work for you that doesn’t work for another vet.

So I left my appointment that day, and I went home and I did research on the medications that I was given. And I found out that the main side effect of all three medications is suicidal thoughts and suicidal tendencies. And that’s disgusting, and that man should be disgusted with himself, and every doctor that does that should be disgusted with himself.

So upon deciding not to take the medication, I decided I would try therapy. Once again I called the VA and requested therapy. I was told that I couldn’t get an appointment for several months, and I cited the law again, and I was given an appointment thirty days later. So now I get to go to a fifteen-minute therapy session once every thirty days. And when I show up to my fifteen-minute therapy session, there’s fifteen other Vietnam vets that have the same 8 a.m. appointment that I do, and we all wait around in the lobby.

Every single one of these vets is there seeking help and treatment for the same thing that I’m seeking help and treatment for, and they’re all thirty years older than I am. They’ve been in the system thirty years longer. They’ve been taking the same medications for thirty years, the same therapists for thirty years, and they’re still there and they still have the same problem. So obviously it doesn’t work. There’s no solution with the current situation.