GI rights/resistance | DMZ Hawai'i/Aloha 'Aina

Aid sought for 'Atomic Vets'

Post Date August 17, 2009

Comments 4 Comments

Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090817/NEWS01/908170340/0/NEWS01/Aid-sought-for–Atomic-Vets-

Posted on: Monday, August 17, 2009

Aid sought for ‘Atomic Vets’

Bill would facilitate care for U.S. veterans exposed to radiation

By John Yaukey
Advertiser Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – Charles Clark knew something was wrong when he started losing his teeth at age 37.

“They just fell out – no blood,” the Hawai’i resident said.

He is virtually certain it had something to do with his Navy service in the Pacific during World War II, when he was exposed to atomic bomb radiation.

On Sept. 23, 1945, the 17-year-old sailor entered Nagasaki, Japan, where six weeks earlier the world’s second nuclear weapons attack had killed 80,000 people. Some died due to massive doses of radiation.

Clark remained in Nagasaki for five days, setting up ship-to-shore communications. It would forever change his life.

Since then, “I’ve had more than 180 skin cancers removed from my face,” he said in a recent interview. “Even today, the cancer keeps recurring. It never stops.”

Clark is among a group called the “Atomic Vets” – American military veterans exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons.

Between 1945 and 1962, half a million U.S. troops participated in more than 250 atmospheric and underwater atomic bomb tests, most in the Pacific and Nevada. Many of these veterans have since suffered a panoply of illnesses commonly associated with radiation exposure, but many have had trouble getting the care they need.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai’i, has introduced legislation that would streamline the process and add transparency.

“These veterans are dying every day from diseases caused, at least in part, by their service in atomic tests and other nuclear weapon-related activities,” the 11-term congressman said.

The treatment process is run through the Department of Veterans Affairs using data from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Typically, the process entails a veteran approaching the VA with a claim. At that point, the agency sends the information to the DTRA, which decides whether the veteran’s service record indicates past exposure to high doses of radiation.

This process, known as “dose reconstruction,” can take months and occurs behind closed doors, critics say.

It can be cumbersome and mysterious, especially for someone already dealing with a life-threatening illness.

The DTRA and the VA recognize 22 types of cancer that qualify as caused by radiation exposure. Some cancers must occur within a particular time frame, such as 20 years from exposure, to qualify.

More than 90 percent of the veterans who apply for benefits outside the set parameters are denied, according to research Abercrombie’s staff has done.

Abercrombie’s legislation, the Atomic Veterans Relief Act, would add transparency by opening up DTRA’s analysis methods.

There is no companion bill yet in the Senate. Abercrombie introduced his legislation around Memorial Day. He hopes it will pick up momentum as stories like Clark’s circulate, and as lawmakers gain appreciation for the sacrifices of war through the prism of two ongoing conflicts.

“We’re trying to get some certainty in the process,” said Abercrombie, who is running for governor in a state with a large retired military population.

DTRA spokeswoman Kate Hooten said the agency has well-established protocols for determining radiation exposure, and she noted that over the decades, many veterans have scattered across the globe and are out of touch with government health care networks.

“This is an important issue,” she said. “We’re always interested in finding out how we can reach out to the public.”

Vets remember

To make the case for his reform legislation, Abercrombie has collected the narratives of some veterans who worked around nuclear tests and are suffering multiple cancers and other ailments.

Edward Blas, who lives on Guam, was stationed in the Marshall Islands during the cleanup on Eniwetok Atoll after 43 nuclear tests there.

“The evidence was overwhelming that we were exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation while we lived on ground zero,” he wrote.

Despite the fact that he has never smoked, Blas is anemic and diabetic and weighs half the 220 pounds he did in the service. But his medical claim was denied on the grounds that veterans who served there after the nuclear tests were not considered “atomic vets.”

But those were different times. Not much was known about radiation exposure.

In the early days of the nation’s nuclear program, Cold War imperatives overrode most other concerns.

“I’ve talked to people who were pretty casual about radiation in the early going,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the 900-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.”

“We were at war and we had to take some risks,” Rhodes said in an interview this week.

For Clark, the risks went further than his own body.

His daughter lost both breasts, while his granddaughter suffers from skin ailments, all of which he is convinced can be traced back to Nagasaki.

“We just never understood what we were getting into back then,” Clark said. “We were young kids.”

Army on track to surpass 2008 suicide numbers

Post Date August 15, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, War and Peace

Army on track to surpass 2008 suicide numbers

By Michelle Tan – Staff writer

Posted : Friday Aug 14, 2009 18:40:55 EDT

As many as 12 soldiers killed themselves in July, the Army announced today, and the service remains on course to setting a record for suicides in a single year.

Of the 12 deaths, eight were active-duty soldiers and four were National Guard or Army Reserve soldiers who were not on active duty at the time of their deaths.

All 12 deaths are possible suicides and remain under investigation.

Typically, about 90 percent of these investigations are ruled suicides, Army officials have said.

In June, there were 13 confirmed or possible suicides; nine were active-duty soldiers and four were soldiers who were not on active duty. As of Aug. 13, four of those 13 deaths had been confirmed as suicides.

Between Jan. 1 and July 31, there have been 96 reported active-duty suicides. Of those, 62 have been confirmed as suicides and 34 are still under investigation.

There were 79 suicides among active-duty soldiers for the same period in 2008.

Among soldiers who were not on active duty, there have been 17 confirmed and 28 possible suicides so far this year. During the same period last year, there were 32 suicides among reserve component soldiers who were not on active duty.

The Army reported 140 suicides in 2008 and is on track to surpass that number this year.

To reverse the increase in soldier suicides, the Army has implemented a number of programs and put Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli in charge of the service’s suicide prevention efforts.

Among those efforts, which included a service-wide stand down and a series of chain-teaching sessions, is a $50 million, five-year study on suicide conducted in conjunction with the National Institute of Mental Health.

In addition, the Army’s Suicide Prevention Task Force has put in place a number of improvements to the army’s health promotion, risk reduction and suicide prevention programs. They include major revisions to the Army’s health promotion policy and augmenting behavioral health staff at many installations to enhance access to counseling services for soldiers and families.

Source: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/08/army_suicides_081309w/

Study seeks clues to soldier suicides

Post Date August 13, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, Social and Economic Impacts, War and Peace, Youth and Militarization

The military is trying to find the cause of suicide in soldiers’ genes or psychological profiles? Why isn’t the military looking at the insanity of militarism and war itself.

I spent two hours last night talking with a vet who was harassed, isolated and tormented by his chain of command in Iraq to the point that he took his rifle and nearly blew his brains out, and all because he had reported his superiors for violations. Instead of immediate mental health attention, this soldier was charged with assault against an officer. The military culture can easily slip into a corrupt gangsterism. After that, it”s not far to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

On the Honolulu Advertiser website comments, HawaiiRon summed it up well:

take a sane person, teach him to kill and place him in an insane situation. How many times can you look into the eyes of another and pull the trigger before you go insane?

I am a Viet Nam era veteran, I never saw combat but I have talked to enough combat veterans to see the pain in their eyes and I hear it in their voices. killing is not normal … it’s opposite of what we are told all our lives .. even knowing you can kill scars you.. screw the study, take the 50 million and provide mental health care for all veterans … PTSD is a killer of military families.

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Updated at 7:55 a.m., Monday, August 10, 2009

Study seeks clues to soldier suicides

Washington Post

WASHINGTON – Doctors leading the largest study ever of suicide and mental health among military personnel are developing intensive soldier surveys that they hope will provide clues as to why suicide rates among Army personnel have grown dramatically in recent years.

The study, a collaboration between the National Institute of Mental Health and the Army, will seek data from every soldier recruited into the Army over the next three years as well as from about 90,000 soldiers already in the service, and the project could eventually involve half a million participants.

The soldiers will be asked to volunteer personal information that can be used to make psychological assessments. Family members might be contacted. In some cases, saliva and blood samples will be collected for genetic and neurobiological studies.

The information will serve as an “ongoing natural laboratory,” officials said, as researchers follow these soldiers for years, looking for commons strands as to which individuals are more likely to commit suicide.

“We’re looking at suicide as the culmination of a long chain of events,” said Robert Heinssen, the NIMH study director.

In 2008, 143 soldiers committed suicide, the highest number in the three decades that the Army has kept records.

“The most frustrating thing is trying to find a cause,” Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 30.

The five-year, $50 million study, which stems from an agreement in October between the Army and NIMH, is an ambitious attempt to solve the mystery.

Last month, Robert Ursano, chairman of the psychiatry department at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., was named to lead an interdisciplinary team of four research institutions involved in the project.

The study will be “complex in its design, and it’s looking at a rare phenomenon,” Ursano said.

A number of factors may play roles in suicide, according to Ursano, including post-traumatic stress disorder, family issues, alcohol abuse, and neurobiological factors.

Repeated deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere since 2001 is another factor, but one that does not by itself account for the increases in suicide, Ursano said.

“It’s a much more complex aggregate of factors,” Ursano said. “Deployment increases the stress on a family, but it’s clearly not the deciding factor.”

While the study will continue for years, the researchers are expected to quickly identify and report on potential risk factors to help the Army prevent suicide.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/200908100754/BREAKING/90810004

This is Where We Take Our Stand

Post Date July 28, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category Afghanistan, GI rights/resistance, Iraq, War and Peace

Check out the documentary series “This is Where We Take Our Stand” by Displace Films, featuring the Iraq Veterans Against the War Winter Soldier Hearings. There are two episodes now up on the site. The first is entitled “For Those Who Would Judge Me”:

Here’s an excerpt from the site:

Where’s the debate?

Are we watching passively while Barack Obama carries out the same policies as George W. Bush?

When an American bombing raid this May killed over two hundred civilians in a village in Afghanistan, it was met with a deafening silence. When Obama’s promised “withdrawal” from Iraq leaves 130,000 troops there for at least two more years and 50,000 permanently, it’s hailed as an end to the occupation. And who is demanding to know just what the mission really is when 30,000 more troops are sent to Afghanistan?

Where’s the debate?

In March of 2008, two hundred and fifty veterans and active duty soldiers marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by gathering in Washington, DC, to testify from their own experience about the nature of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was chilling, horrifying, and challenging for all who witnessed it. Against tremendous odds, they brought the voices of the veterans themselves into the debate. That was then.

This is now. Today, we present to you This is Where We Take Our Stand, the inside story of those three days and the courageous men and women who testified. And we present this story today, told in six episodes, because we believe it is as relevant now as it was one year ago. Maybe more.

Here is our challenge to you: Watch the series; spread it far and wide; and ask yourself is this about the past, or the present and future. Then add your voice.

If you are a veteran or active duty, present your own testimony. If you are not, but you are still a living, breathing member of the human race, then do whatever you can to join and fan the flames of debate.

Camp Lejeune male breast cancer epidemic

Post Date July 05, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance

This article reveals a shocking epidemic of male breast cancer among veterans and other men connected to Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base. The main culprits suspected are Trichloroethylene (TCE) and Perchloroethylene (PCE) in the base drinking water. These are the same contaminants found in ‘Aiea and Wahiawa groundwater from military bases. The article mentions a website by survivors of Camp Lejeune contamination: http://tftptf.com/5801.html. It contains lots of good information.

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http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/veterans/article1015699.ece

More vets report cancer

By William R. Levesque, Times Staff Writer

Published Friday, July 3, 2009

Scientists studying drinking water contamination at Camp Lejeune were startled when 11 men with breast cancer and ties to the North Carolina base were identified over the last two years.

Six more have been found in one week.

Five additional men with breast cancer and a sixth who had a double mastectomy after doctors found precancerous tumors contacted the St. Petersburg Times last week after reading a story about the 11 men with the rare disease.

“This male breast cancer cluster is a smoking gun,” breast cancer survivor Mike Partain said on Friday. “You just can’t ignore it. You don’t need science to tell you something is wrong. It’s common sense. It begs to be studied.”

Partain, 41, of Tallahassee, was born at the Marine Corps base and diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007. He has worked for two years to find other men with breast cancer who lived at Camp Lejeune.

He found the first nine men before the Times profiled his search in a story on June 28, a story that noted the newspaper had found another man not on Partain’s list.

In the days after that story, other male breast cancer survivors called or e-mailed the Times.

Scientists studying what some call the worst public-drinking water contamination in the nation’s history said the numbers are unsettling.

“My gut tells me this is unusual and needs to be looked into,” said Richard Clapp, a Boston University epidemiologist who has studied Camp Lejeune water. “I’m sure there are still more out there in other states.”

Camp Lejeune’s drinking water was contaminated for 30 years ending in 1987 with high levels of industrial degreasers called trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE). Clapp said both have been linked to other suspicious male breast cancer clusters elsewhere.

The chemicals were dumped there by the Marine Corps and a private dry-cleaning business, according to investigators.

Congress, which has dubbed ill Marines “poisoned patriots,” ordered the Marines last year to notify those who might have been exposed. Some estimates put the number at up to 1 million people.

Many Marines, however, are still unaware.

One who didn’t have a clue about the contamination is South Florida resident Jim Morris.

Morris said he was astonished when he was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 at the age of 54. His family had no history of breast cancer. He didn’t realize men could get the disease.

Few do.

Male breast cancer is exceedingly rare. Just 1,900 men are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year compared with nearly 200,000 women, the American Cancer Society says.

A man has a 1-in-1,000 lifetime chance of getting the disease.

Men who get it are often over 70, though it is rare even in older males. Of the 17 men identified by Partain and the Times, just three are over 70 – the youngest was Partain at 39 – and many have no family history of breast cancer, male or female, according to interviews.

Morris said his sister lives in Pasco County and saw the Times article about Partain. She immediately called her brother.

“It was almost a relief to find out my cancer actually came from somewhere,” said Morris, who has worked as a surveyor. “I’m not just some idiot who got breast cancer for no reason. I never expected to find out. It was going to be one of those lifetime puzzles you never figure out.”

Scientists, however, are careful to say that it is extremely difficult to prove a link between pollution and a disease. The Marine Corps declined to comment for this story.

Two federal studies are expected to be completed in coming years that will look at the incidence of all disease among those who lived at Camp Lejeune. The stakes are enormous, with potentially billions of dollars in health claims by more than 1,500 people who say the water made them ill.

University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center epidemiologist Devra Davis also is preparing a case report on the breast cancer cluster.

Partain is among those who believe Camp Lejeune’s water may have caused a variety of cancers and other ailments. A growing community of Camp Lejeune veterans, including many who say they are ill, have connected on the Web, many at a popular Internet site called tftptf.com.

More than 10,000 Floridians with Lejeune ties have signed up for a health survey, the most from any state except North Carolina.

Joe Moser, 69, of Riverview was diagnosed with breast and thyroid cancer in February 2008. He was stationed at Camp Lejeune from 1957 to 1960. He said he didn’t know about water problems at the base and was stunned to read about the breast cancer link.

“This is too weird,” Moser said. “All these men with breast cancer? Come on. There’s got to be a lot more of us out there. God, so many of the guys I served with were from Trenton or Philadelphia, all over the place. Who knows if they’re sick, too.”

William R. Levesque can be reached at levesque@sptimes.com or (813) 269-5306.

Killed in action

Post Date July 01, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, Social and Economic Impacts, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands)

Killed in action

Adrienne LaFrance
Jul 1, 2009

A suicide epidemic has soldiers killing themselves in record high numbers. Some months this year saw more American soldiers die by suicide than in combat. Hawaii has sent a vast number of troops to Iraq-more, at times, than any other state. Now, with a flood of soldiers now returning from Iraq, the ramped-up U.S. presence in Afghanistan and some local units preparing for their fourth and fifth deployments, Honolulu Weekly examines the toll that war is taking on our soldiers and their families, and what the agencies designed to serve them are doing about it.

The letter began, “Hey babe, if you get this, I’m no longer around.” It came in a package from Iraq, along with a miniature American flag, stained with blood and tucked into the pages of a book. Jeffrey Lucey, a then-22-year-old lance corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve, said he had found it in the hands of a four-year-old Iraqi boy who was lying dead in the street. He sent it, along with the letter, to his girlfriend Julie back in Massachusetts before he died.

But Lucey was still alive when she received it. It wasn’t until later, nearly 6,000 miles away from Baghdad, that the war finally killed him.

“We still have the video of his return,” said Jeff’s father, Kevin Lucey. “He was smiling, a little bit thinner, but so happy to be back.”

Five years ago-and nearly a year after Jeff’s homecoming-his father found him hanging from the basement rafters of their home in Belchertown, Mass., a garden hose double looped around his neck.

In the years since Jeff’s suicide, concern about the rising number of suicides across all branches of the military continues to grow. In the Army alone, including cases still being investigated, the Pentagon finds that 117 active duty and reserve soldiers killed themselves from January through May. That’s just 11 fewer suicides than the at least 128 confirmed in all of 2008-already a three-decade high.

“Army leadership is very concerned about the increased suicide rate we’ve seen within the Army the last four or five years,” said Col. C.J. Diebold, chief of psychiatry at Tripler Army Medical Center and psychiatry consultant to the surgeon general. “The geographic separation, the inherent dangers of the combat zone and we now have soldiers in their fourth and fifth deployment. If you look just at the history of the 25th [Infantry Division] in the past five years, they’re now getting through their second full deployment and ramping up toward their third. That’s certainly stressful.”

Already there have been months this year in which more soldiers killed themselves than were killed in combat. And as the National Institute of Mental Health and the Army scramble to jump-start a collaborative five-year $50 million study aimed at better understanding and preventing military suicide, local military entities, as well as agencies devoted to caring for veterans, are implementing new programs and promoting outreach in an effort to save the lives of service members across the Islands.

On the homefront

Here in Hawaii, where the military makes up nearly 10 percent of the population-that’s more than any other state-the threat of suicide looms large. An employee at Honolulu’s Department of the Medical Examiner who asked not to be named says that in addition to noticing a significant increase in military suicides on a local level, she suspects that more than half of those who kill themselves on Oahu are military servicemen and servicewomen.

In an e-mail obtained by the Weekly, Tripler Army Medical Center public affairs officer Les Ozawa wrote to Lt. Col. George Wright, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, that there have been two “recent” Army suicides in Hawaii. Ozawa says an Army directive prevents discussion or confirmation of any specific cases.

And while the Army has set an example for other branches of the military with relative transparency on the issue, the extent to which information is safeguarded, undisclosed or otherwise convoluted-the Department of Veterans Affairs tracks the number of suicides among Hawaii veterans as part of a larger group that includes cases throughout California-creates startling distance from the reality of what’s actually happening.

“There’s no doubt that there’s an agenda there,” said Kevin Lucey. “You don’t want to really have the complete knowledge because if you do, aren’t you going to have to do something about it?”

Losing the battle

The spike in suicide among enlisted soldiers also raises concerns about an already overburdened U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs system. With estimates that as many as one-third of soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan with diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD (not to mention the mental health needs of countless veterans of previous conflicts), there simply aren’t enough resources to get every solider the help he or she needs in the time that he or she needs it. Hawaii has its own set of regionally-specific challenges.

“What’s different about our community is that we’re spread out,” said Susan Bass, suicide prevention coordinator at the Honolulu Department of Veterans Affairs. “We cover Guam, we cover American Samoa, all of the neighbor islands, even sometimes the Philippines. Some of these places don’t have the community resources for outreach. Some are in rural places.”

In addition to covering a wide region, the local VA has fewer amenities for its large military population than its counterparts in other areas of the country.

“We don’t have a VA hospital,” said Michael Kestner, a suicide prevention case manager at the VA in Honolulu. “Many times we have to rely on Tripler or other hospitals in the community, so it’s a little more difficult for us to access services. We try to work around those difficulties. The police department has occasionally done health and welfare checks on our veterans.”

Tripler Army Medical Center is home to one of the National Center for PTSD’s seven sites across the country, but many active duty soldiers and veterans have mental health needs that fall outside of the realm of PTSD. Just last year, Tripler paid $800,000 to settle a lawsuit that charged it failed to adequately treat a bi-polar veteran who jumped to his death from the hospital roof after twice pleading for help and expressing suicidal ideations in the Tripler emergency department.

Nationwide Veterans Affairs centers, too, have faced criticism repeatedly in the years since it was revealed that the Army’s flagship medical center, Walter Reed, was deteriorating and failing to meet its patients’ needs. A five-month CBS News investigation in 2007 found that across the 45 states for which records could be obtained, there were 120 veterans who killed themselves per week, which amounts to at least 6,256 suicides in 2005 alone.

On the floor of the U.S. Senate last September, Chair of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) addressed the rising suicide rate among veterans.

“Suicide among Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans is at an all-time high,” said Akaka. “The number of veterans found to have service-connected PTSD is not just rising, it is rising several times faster than service-connected disabilities overall…Veterans are committing suicide at a higher rate than their civilian counterparts. A recent RAND study found that nearly three out of four veterans in need of mental health care receive inadequate care or no care at all.”

Warning signs

In the six months leading up to his death, the Luceys knew that Jeff was in desperate need of help. But for months before that, Jeff’s family thought his behavior was just part of the readjustment period they’d been told to accept. For example, Kevin says his son refused to go outside on a trip to the beach with his girlfriend.

“He always loved the ocean, but he said to her he had seen enough sand to last him a lifetime,” said Kevin. “These comments, we knew something was going on, but we thought it was just minor readjustment.”

By the following winter, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. Jeff was drinking more and more, bowing out of family events like the Luceys traditional Christmas dinner and lashing out, calling himself a “murderer.”

“Jeff would start talking and his voice would become very monotone and he would get that thousand-mile gaze, like he wasn’t talking to anyone,” Kevin said. “He told his mother about how he had to throw grenades up on the roof of a building because there were snipers. He spoke about how the rules of engagement had been called off and he saw some elderly people get killed. And then he spoke about shooting two unarmed Iraqi soldiers. Now the Marines did an investigation and said they never found anything to support this, but I believe him. He said he was ordered to shoot them and as he was holding up his gun, it was shaking. He looked into the kid’s eyes and started wondering if this kid was there like he was-maybe he didn’t want to be there either-and whether he was somebody’s father or brother or son. He described the sound of the shooting and that burned its way into Jeff’s heart.”

Jeff was also throwing up every morning, which the Luceys later learned to be an indication of PTSD, and suffered frightening hallucinations.

“While he was in Iraq, he wrote about the camel spiders-these big five-inch spiders that he could hear climbing on the tents,” said Kevin Lucey. “Even as a little boy, Jeff was terrified of spiders and he would call for his mother. So when he got home from Iraq, he could hear the camel spiders in his room and he would look for them with a flashlight. Jeff would also hear voices. He never said what they were saying or if they were even in English. He was tremendously scared to go to sleep.”

Too little, too late

“I don’t know why I am going fucking crazy,” Kevin Lucey remembers his son saying in the last weeks of his life. Jeff had applied for a job with the Massachusetts State Police and was afraid that seeking mental health services would disqualify him from the applicant pool.

It was Memorial Day weekend and Jeff had been drinking heavily the day he finally agreed to go to the VA. Frustrated, he punched a hole in the wall before leaving the house, and when he got to the VA, he didn’t want to stay. A breathalyzer recorded his blood-alcohol level at .328 some four hours after his last drink.

“There was this male nurse there and as it turned out, he was also in the Marine Corps,” remembered Kevin Lucey. “That made a huge difference. Jeff immediately started cooperating. We may have strong feelings about the VA system but there are some very good people who work there. This nurse stayed with Jeff the entire evening.”

A week before his death, Jeff agreed to go to the VA a second time.

“Jeff was going to try to get into a PTSD unit but the VA hospital said he was going to have to be sober for three to six months, which infuriated me,” said Kevin Lucey. “On the way back home, though, he was talking. He hadn’t been drinking the past four nights. He really felt there was hope.”

But days later, Jeff came unglued again. The night after father’s day, he flew into a rage. After two calls for help to the VA, Jeff finally relaxed.

“He calmed down and we talked, watched the Red Sox, and Jeff came over to me and said, ‘Dad, can I sit in your lap?’ And we rocked there for 45 minutes in total silence. I was scratching the back of his neck. He loved steak and we talked about going to a steakhouse, we planned it for the next night.”

But the next day, Jeff killed himself. Kevin Lucey found him hanging above a stack of photographs-most of them of his family, and one of himself wearing his Marines uniform.

“I remember screaming and running over to him and putting my knees underneath him to get him down,” said Kevin Lucey. “That was the last time he would be in my lap.”

Erasing the stigma

Kevin Lucey said it’s now obvious to him that his son was battling severe PTSD, but that he hadn’t known what symptoms to look for. This is part of the reason that military leaders-particularly in the Army-are emphasizing family education as a tenet of suicide prevention.

“In the old days, people only used to go to the doctor because they were sick,” said Diebold. “From a medical model, we’re doing primary prevention, giving people information. When you look at heart disease, that’s telling people to eat right, get blood pressure checked, exercise, things like that. Well it’s the same thing when you’re trying to reduce the risk in people before they get to a point where they get so desperate that they are contemplating hurting themselves.”

And in the Army at least, leaders are making an effort to normalize mental health needs. All enlisted soldiers are required to watch a series of DVDs about suicide prevention and are required to carry an ACE card-a playing-card sized shortlist of instructions on how to intervene when a fellow soldier may be suicidal. Army leaders are also working to give soldiers more ways to seek help-both at home and during deployment.

“Each unit has a chaplain,” said Schofield Barracks Chaplain Maj. Victor Richardson. “When they go to the field, we go. When they eat, we eat. Where they sleep and under the conditions they sleep, we do the same. That connection is invaluable because someone may not want to come to the chapel, but if you’re walking down the street with them, or eating in the same mess hall, doing the same training, they are more apt to come to you and start talking.”

But the suicide rate continues to go up-Richardson says there’s still a strong stigma against talking to a chaplain, despite the assurance of confidentiality – and the stigma against seeking help doesn’t seem to be going away.

“We work in a macho organization,” said Tripler’s Diebold. “For the longest time, unfortunately, the direct message was that if you admit you can’t do something you’re viewed as weak. But we need to continue to send the message that we’re human and we’re in a stressful environment and it may get to the point where you need to ask for help. We want you to get the help you need so that you’re fully functioning, enjoying what you’re doing, enjoying your family, enjoying your life.”

Earlier this year, the Luceys accepted a $350,000 settlement from the Justice Department in a wrongful death lawsuit they brought against the VA. They still live every day with memories of the son they sent to war. They remember a time when Jeff was happy and the light they used to see in his eyes.

“He was your everyday kid,” said Kevin Lucey. “He was a rascal and an imp-he added many white hairs to my head. Everybody still talks about his smile. He just loved life… I guess his mother said it best: The body of our son came back from Iraq but his soul didn’t. It was the shell of Jeff but our little boy wasn’t there anymore.”

Today, Jeff’s mother wears her son’s dog tags. He had worn them until the day he died, when he left them lying on his bed. The Luceys had Jeff buried in his dress blues, that tiny, blood-stained American flag resting on his chest.

24-hour suicide hotline (press 1 for military): 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
How to help

If someone you love has displayed suicidal tendencies or expressed a desire to hurt him or herself, call 911 right away.

• Take it seriously. Suicidal behavior is a cry for help.

• Listen

• Ask: Are you thinking of killing yourself?

• Do not leave him or her alone

• Urge professional help

More resources:

The Mayo Clinic on suicide

[www.mayoclinic.com]

National Center for PTSD

[www.ncptsd.va.gov]

The VA is also in the midst of developing a 24-hour suicide computer chat-line.

Source: http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2009/06/killed-in-action/

Hawai'i based soldier charged in death of fellow soldier

Post Date June 19, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, Iraq, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands), War and Peace

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Schofield soldier charged in death of comrade negotiating plea

Associated Press

BAGHDAD – A Schofield Barracks soldier charged with involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a comrade in Iraq has entered plea negotiations instead of facing a hearing, the military said today.

Sgt. Miguel A. Vegaquinones, 33, of Havelock, N.C., also has been charged with lying to investigators in the death of Pfc. Sean P. McCune.

Vegaquinones had been due to face an Article 32 hearing – the military equivalent of a grand jury – but has entered plea negotiations instead, the U.S. military said in an e-mail.

McCune, 20, of Euless, Texas, died after Vegaquinones allegedly discharged a round of ammunition while cleaning his weapon, the military said. The death occurred after the two men had finished a guard duty shift on Jan. 11 in Samarra.

Vegaquinones and McCune were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, which is based at Schofield Barracks.

Involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, while making a false official statement can bring a sentence of up to five years, according to the military.

Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, is a former Sunni insurgent stronghold. It has seen a drastic drop in violence after local tribal leaders joined forces with the Americans against al-Qaida in Iraq.

It also was the site of a 2006 bombing that destroyed a golden-domed Shiite mosque, triggering months of retaliatory sectarian violence nationwide.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090618/BREAKING/90618018/Schofield+soldier+charged+in+death+of+comrade+negotiating+plea

Chris Hedges: War is Sin

Post Date June 04, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, War and Peace, Youth and Militarization

War Is Sin

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090601_war_is_sin/

Posted on Jun 1, 2009

By Chris Hedges

The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.

The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain … how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?”

“Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a jungle clearing,” Mahedy writes. “How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?”

Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war.

There is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The first is killing. The second is murder. But in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, murder occurs far more often than killing. Families are massacred in airstrikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods after an improvised explosive device goes off near a convoy. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind.

The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions-whose texts are unequivocal about murder-to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.

We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.

Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army they were looting, raping and killing the Serb residents in the city. And those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen-the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys-those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them. And when the wars are over what they have to say to us in their thick memoirs about war is also hollow, vacant and useless.

“In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”

The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or organize the war. They do not seek to justify it or explain its causes. They are taught to believe. The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers in combat see the myth used to send them to war implode. They see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death.

War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.

Soldier kills five comrades at Baghdad base

Post Date May 11, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, Iraq, War and Peace, Youth and Militarization

washingtonpost.com

Five U.S. Soldiers’ Deaths Came at Hands of Comrade, Military Says

Gunman Opened Fire at Baghdad Base, Wounded Three Others

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 11, 2009 1:30 PM

BAGHDAD, May 11 — An American soldier opened fire on comrades Monday on a large military base in Baghdad, killing five and wounding three, the U.S. military said.

The shooting at Camp Liberty, one of the largest bases in Baghdad, occurred about 2 p.m.

Lt. Col. Brian Tribus, a U.S. military spokesman, said the gunman was taken into custody.

A U.S. military officer in Baghdad said the shooting occurred at the base’s combat stress clinic.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the incident shook up soldiers, many of whom are in their third and even fourth tours. Some broke down in tears, he said.

“A lot of soldiers are wondering why,” the official said. “We will be asking as leaders: What could we have done? How could have we protected the soldiers?”

Most military facilities in Iraq have combat stress clinics, where soldiers seek counseling and are at times prescribed medicine for anxiety and depression.

The Army is grappling with a growing incidence of suicide cases, which military leaders attribute to the stress inflicted by multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Defense Department official in Washington said three people were wounded, but he did not know if they were military or civilians.

“It’s some form of isolated incident, an unfortunate one at that,” he said.

The military did not immediately say what the motive might have been.

“Anytime we lose one of our own, it affects all of us,” said U.S. military spokesman Col. John Robinson. “Our hearts go out to the families and friends of all the service members involved in this terrible tragedy.”

The incident was among the deadliest attacks for U.S. troops in recent months. It appears to be the deadliest incident in which U.S. deaths were caused by a fellow U.S. soldier since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The shooting was particularly chilling for soldiers based at Victory Base Compound, which includes Liberty, because it is regarded as one of the safest installations for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Control to the compound is tightly restricted, but American soldiers carry weapons on base.

Also on Monday, the military said an American soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Iraq. The attack occurred Sunday at 2 p.m. in Basra province. U.S. soldiers recently deployed additional troops to the province to replace British troops, who formally ended their mission there last month.

Liberty is one of three U.S. military bases adjacent to Baghdad International Airport.

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this article.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051100265_pf.html

Army drops 3 charges against Lt. Watada

Post Date May 07, 2009

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Author Laurel Mei-Singh

Category GI rights/resistance, Projects and Campaigns, The Military in Hawai'i (All Islands), War and Peace

HonoluluAdvertiser.com

May 7, 2009

Army drops 3 charges against Iraq war objector Watada

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

The Army yesterday said it has given up efforts to retry 1st Lt. Ehren Watada on three charges for refusing to deploy to Iraq in 2006, but has not made up its mind about two other court-martial charges or the possibility of administrative punishment.

More than a year and a half after he would have left the Army – had he deployed as ordered – the 1996 Kalani High School graduate still reports to a desk job at Fort Lewis in Washington state.

Watada is likely to continue to have to do so as the Army weighs its next move.

The Honolulu man, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq, said the war was illegal and unjust, and that participating in it would make him a party to war crimes.

Watada, who said he would have deployed to Afghanistan, also accused the Bush administration of deception in starting the Iraq war.

Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek yesterday said the Army was informed late last week that the U.S. Justice Department – which represents the Army in the case – had decided against continuing with an appeal of an October 2008 federal court ruling.

U.S. District Judge Benjamin H. Settle of Tacoma ruled at that time that the Army could not retry Watada on a charge of missing his Stryker brigade unit’s movement to Iraq, and two specifications of conduct unbecoming an officer for taking part in a press conference and participating in a Veterans for Peace convention.

Watada raised double jeopardy, the constitutional protection against being tried twice for the same crime, after a military judge declared a mistrial at Watada’s first court-martial in February 2007.

Two other charges of conduct unbecoming an officer were withdrawn, but not dismissed, as a result of Watada’s court-martial, officials said.

The Army appealed Settle’s October ruling, but the Justice Department under the Obama administration has now dropped that appeal.

Asked why the appeal was dropped, Piek said, “That would be a question you would have to ask (the Justice Department). I don’t know.

“Right now, the other two specifications of conduct unbecoming an officer are still relevant in the case.”

He said the leadership at Fort Lewis “is considering a full range of judicial and administrative options that are available, and those range from court-martial on those two remaining specifications, to nonjudicial punishment, to administrative separation from the Army.”

‘Significant victory’

At one time, Watada faced up to six years in prison for refusing to board a plane for Mosul, Iraq. Jim Lobsenz, an attorney for Watada, in October said his client at most faced one to two years on the remaining two charges. But the attorney said he was confident the remaining two charges, if pursued, would be thrown out as well.

Ken Kagan, another attorney representing Watada, yesterday said the Army conceivably could have drawn out its appeal on the three charges against Watada into late 2010 or early 2011.

“So having this one cleared away and no longer an issue is a significant victory in the sense that now we can focus on really getting this thing resolved,” Kagan said.

Kagan said the Justice Department’s solicitor general “sought to take that leadership position” in dropping the Army appeal.

“It’s obviously a bold decision to depart from past policies, so we’re very pleased they saw fit to do that,” he said.

Kagan said discussions continue with the Army “to see if we can find some common ground” on the remaining issues.

global spotlight

Watada gained international attention as an Iraq war objector, and he served as a rallying point for the antiwar effort.

But he also was reviled by many in the military who said he violated his oath as an officer, and that he had no right to decide whether the Iraq war was just or unjust.

Piek, the Fort Lewis spokesman, said Watada’s service in the Army was scheduled to end in December 2006, but the soldier was subject to “stop loss” – the ability to keep troops in for deployment – and was subject to his unit’s deployment to Iraq.

His brigade returned from Iraq in September 2007 after 15 months, and Watada would have been eligible then to leave the Army.

Piek said Watada now is part of the rear detachment headquarters for I Corps.

“He’s still coming in doing PT (physical therapy) and then works from 9 to 5 and occasionally I see him here at the gym,” Piek said.

Piek added that “what is most disturbing for us, is that this case really needed to be heard by a jury and to be decided by a jury, and it’s very unfortunate that more than two years ago the first court-martial ended in a mistrial on a technicality.”

Lt. Col. John Head, the military judge, made the decision to call off the court-martial in its third day as Watada was ready to take the stand in his own defense.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090507/NEWS08/905070367