Page 2 of 2 Hope's gone AWOL in Echo platoon
By Dahr Jamail and Sarah Lazare
His story is one more instance of the troop-unfriendly and skewed practices of
the military machine. Diagnosed with PTSD, he was finally given a medical
discharge for a personality disorder in an effort by the military to continue
their systematic denial of the psychologically destructive effects of war.
Staying AWOL
After his deployment to Iraq, McCormick went AWOL because he felt suicidal and
wasn't getting the help he needed. While in Iraq, he said, "I had a lot of
problems back home. My mom had recently passed away. When I asked for help it
got pushed back in my face. Even the inspector general denied me treatment."
(Essentially, the inspector general represents a soldier's last recourse in
attempting to correct a problem. If the
inspector general refuses to help, there are few alternatives available.)
When, after four-and-a-half-months AWOL, McCormick turned himself in, he was
offered absolution if he agreed to serve again, an absurdity not lost on him.
"They offered me that deal," he exclaims, "when it was a known fact that I had
issues with my mental care. They offered me a chance to go back to the unit!"
His refusal to do so left him languishing in Echo Platoon for eight months
until he finally received a medical discharge.
Even though his decision to go AWOL was in no way a protest against the US
occupation of Iraq, he is now opposed to it. "I personally don't feel we need
to be in Iraq and I've been there and seen it first hand. I think the US being
there is pointless."
His blunt advice to soldiers who go AWOL and intend to turn themselves in is,
"If you're AWOL, f**k going back."
Staff Sergeant Nelbach will have spent over nine months in Echo Platoon by the
time he is tried in October. His court martial will in all likelihood bring
further punishment. Due to his higher rank and the fact that he was a platoon
leader, Nelbach is in charge of making sure that soldiers in the platoon follow
through on their work assignments. He also accompanies people to medical
appointments and does necessary paperwork. He is thus seen by other platoon
soldiers as the one who runs the place. Yet he is aware that none of this will
help him when he comes to trial. "It's inhuman," he insists. "There's no
fairness to it. It's always been mass punishment there."
Warehousing soldiers
Assigned to Echo Platoon in January 2009, Dustin Stevens continues to bide his
time awaiting charges that might still be months away. "[It's] horrible here.
We are treated like animals. We're all so lost and wanting to go home. Some of
us are going crazy, some are sick. And the way I see it, I did nothing wrong.
By reading or talking to people all of the time I try to stay out of this place
in my mind ... There are people here who should be in mental hospitals."
James Branum, Stevens' civilian lawyer, is also the legal adviser to the GI
Rights Hotline of Oklahoma and co-chair of the Military Law Task Force (MLTF),
which offers training to the legal community and information about GI Rights
and military law to service members and their families. He said AWOL troops
make up three-quarters of Echo platoon and that medical cases are the bulk of
the remainder. Accustomed to inordinate delays from the military, he said,
"People are in this unit for months and months. The [authorities] take forever
to do anything. You are going to be there six months if you're lucky, 12 if
you're not."
On the legality of such detention without trial, Branum comments:
"I think there are some illegal elements about how they are running the place,
but the general concept is not illegal. You have people there with legitimate
medical and psychological issues, but instead of proactively helping them, the
military shuffles them off to this replacement [detachment] to be treated like
dirt. They are told they have no rights when they do have a right to talk to
their commander, to have an attorney, and to talk to Congress. Echo, if run
properly, would be a good thing. Not so when people are being warehoused and
told repeatedly they have no rights. That is illegal."
As for the military's goal in running Echo Platoon and other similar units at
military bases around the country:
"To me it doesn't seem productive. Oftentimes, the military doesn't know what
it is doing. There isn't a logical explanation for this. Maybe deterrence is
one. Other soldiers see these guys being ill-treated and don't want to resist.
They also want to break and wear people down so they'll deploy rather than keep
resisting. The army isn't true to its own processes at times. If their goal is
to get folks deployable, this isn't the way. You don't want guys with physical
or psychological issues to deploy."
In 2008, USA Today revealed that more than 43,000 troops listed as medically
unfit had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan anyway.
A yardstick of desperation
In a discussion of her group's role in dealing with the legal holding of
soldiers, MLTF co-chair Kathleen Gilberd commented:
"Fort Bragg is not an isolated situation. Placement in legal-hold [detachments]
where soldiers languish for months is common to all the services. What we're
seeing is the command not making up their minds. Their indecision has severe
consequences for those with open-ended medical issues because they cannot avail
themselves of help until their legal situation is resolved."
Chuck Fager, the director of the Fayetteville Quaker House (the town of
Fayetteville adjoins Fort Bragg) claims that the military is primarily focused
on "making numbers" for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Orders from the
Pentagon say you have to send X [number of] troops," he points out. "The
military does not have them and is constantly looking around for where to get
them. One potential pool is the mass of soldiers gone AWOL. Eventually they
either go back or get picked up ... We are guessing [military officials] think
they can persuade a significant number of these AWOL soldiers to deploy to Iraq
or Afghanistan. "
The US still maintains more than 130,000 soldiers in Iraq and, by year's end,
will have at least 68,000 in Afghanistan, a figure likely to rise in the years
to come.
Echo and other platoons are like grim yardsticks for measuring the desperation
in which a military under immense strain is now operating. Looking up at that
military from Echo's airless limbo, from a world of soldiers who have fallen
through the cracks of a system under great stress, you can see just how
devastating America's two ongoing wars have been for the military itself. The
walking wounded, the troubled, and the broken are now being pressured to
re-enter the fray.
If Chuck Fager is right, the future is bleak for the members of Echo Platoon
who endure poor conditions with little idea about whether their future involves
charges, trial, deployment, or medical release. It is a painful irony that some
of those who volunteered to serve and defend the US are left particularly
defenseless and vulnerable as a direct consequence of its foreign adventures.
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will
to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket
Books, 2009) and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded
Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from
occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and
Turkey over the last five years. His website is Dahrjamailiraq.com.
Sarah Lazare is the project coordinator for Courage to Resist, an
organization that supports troops who refuse to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and is also a freelance writer.
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