Mentally Unfit, Forced to Fight

from: williambowles.info

Pentagon Traitors Devise Exciting New Way To Kill More U.S. Troops: Part 2:

“The U.S. Military Has Knowingly Sent Mentally Ill Troops To Iraq, In Conflict With Its Own Regulations”
“They’re Going To Take Whoever They Can Get, And They’re Going To Keep Them If They Can”

EDDIE BRABAZON, above, is seen a family photo the day he joined the Army, at age 18. (Mark Mirko) May 12, 2006. Hartford Courant

“If you aren’t using the form any better than you did when you deployed my son, what makes anyone think you’re doing it any better now?” she says.

“And it’s a piece of paper. It was useless.”

May 15 2006 By MATTHEW KAUFFMAN And LISA CHEDEKEL, The Hartford Courant [Excerpts]

In the 17 months after their son, Eddie, announced he was heading off to fight the war on terror, Margaret and Edward Brabazon of Bensalem, Pa., had held their breath.

They were accustomed to holding their breath with the boy they had taken in as a foster child at age 3 and adopted at 12: the boy who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention-deficit disorder by the time he was 10, and who had spent his early teenage years in a psychiatric hospital and group homes for the emotionally disturbed.

They watched with bewildered pride as the young man they had affectionately nicknamed “Crazy Eddie” was handed a uniform and an M-4 rifle and accepted into an elite fraternity – the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Although Margaret protested, the 18-year-old soldier also had informed his parents that he had stopped taking his psychotropic medications because he “wanted to be like everyone else,” Margaret recalled.

“We were surprised they took him, with the kind of mental problems he had, but we figured the Army must know what they’re doing,” Margaret said. “We didn’t think they’d send him into combat.”

Today, the Brabazons regret those assumptions.

On March 9, 2004, less than three months into his second deployment to the Middle East, Spec. Edward W. Brabazon shot himself in the head with his rifle at a palace compound in Baghdad, the Army has concluded. He was 20.

The Brabazons say they have trouble making sense of the Army’s investigation into his death, which notes his psychiatric past.

“They talked about how he had a history of mental problems,” Margaret said. “I said, `No kidding. If you knew he had mental problems, then why was he there?’”

Eddie Brabazon was there because the U.S. military has knowingly sent mentally ill troops to Iraq – in conflict with its own regulations – and turned a blind eye to the mental fitness of thousands of other service members, a Courant investigation has found.

Despite a congressional mandate to assess the mental health of every soldier sent to a combat zone, interviews and Defense Department records obtained by The Courant reveal a fractured pre-deployment screening process in which less than 1 percent of deploying soldiers ever see a mental health professional.

It is a practice that has put unfit service members in harm’s way, increasing their risk for suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The military’s own studies suggest that as many as one in 11 troops is suffering from a major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder or PTSD that substantially impairs their ability to function at the time they are deployed to war. But military screeners have arranged mental health evaluations for fewer than one in 300 deploying troops, according to a Courant analysis of screening data for more than 930,000 troops processed from March 2003 through October 2005.

And some troops have been sent to war in violation of military regulations, which bar the deployment of troops with mental disorders that can interfere with their duties.

In addition, despite the military’s promises to pay closer attention to the mental health of service members following a spate of suicides in 2003, the data indicate that soldiers who report psychological issues are more likely to be deployed now than at the start of the war.

Overall, soldiers who screened positive for possible mental health problems were deemed fit for war 85 percent of the time, according to the data.

Those deployment decisions were made with more than 93 percent of troops who screened positive never receiving a referral for a mental health evaluation.

With the military scrambling to find enough combat troops, some soldier advocates say the reason for the inadequate mental health screening is evident.

“Command pressure to deploy their people has kind of swept away any efforts that might have been made to improve screening,” said Kathleen Gilberd, who counsels service members in San Diego and serves as co-chairwoman of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

For some, that pressure may have proved fatal.

Defense Department records show that those who conceal past mental health care are almost never questioned about their mental fitness. Since the war began, service members who checked the `no’ box on the mental health question had a less than one in 1,000 chance of being referred for a mental health evaluation.

But there are deeper flaws. While many soldiers with mental illness opt to stay in the shadows, others, like Army Staff Sgt. Nathan Bailey of Nashville, had made no secret of their psychiatric problems before the military handed them the guns they used to kill themselves.

Bailey took powerful anti-psychotic medication, and most of the time, it was enough to keep him mentally even.

But not always.

In 2002, Bailey’s sister and mother found him in a panicked sweat in his apartment, darting from place to place, telling his relatives that they were in danger, that they were being tracked through their cellphone signals. Doctors at a veterans hospital in Nashville eventually put him in a locked psychiatric ward for several days.

So a year later, when Bailey’s unit was preparing to deploy in support of the Iraq war, his sister, Robbie Snapp, urged military leaders to leave him behind. But his commanders had other plans.

“The only thing they could tell him,” Snapp said, “was that as long as you’re on your medicine, you’ll be OK.”

He wasn’t.

Seven months into his tour, military records show, Bailey placed the muzzle of his rifle under his chin, stretched one hand down the long barrel of the weapon, and squeezed the trigger.

A military investigation into Bailey’s death confirmed his long history of mental illness, and revealed the Army was aware that Bailey had attempted suicide once before, Snapp said.

“If that really happened,” Snapp wonders, “then why would you send somebody to war that has tried something like this?”

Bailey, Brabazon and other mentally ill soldiers were sent to war despite Army regulations designed to keep troubled service members away from the front lines.

The military has acknowledged that certain mental disorders are not compatible with service, and recruiting standards for all of the armed forces identify a number of disqualifying disorders, including a history of suicidal behavior, schizophrenia or post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as current treatment for bipolar disorder or major depression.

The standards for deployment to combat zones are even broader, barring soldiers with “any disorder that has the potential to prevent performance of duty, even if controlled by medication.”

That leaves Patricia Powers of Skiatook, Okla., at a loss to explain how her 20-year-old son, Joshua, was on his way to Iraq barely six months after he enlisted with the Army.

“He did have Asperger’s, which is a form of autism, and I just couldn’t believe that the Army took him in. I just couldn’t believe that,” Powers said.

People with Asperger syndrome tend to be highly intelligent, but have trouble processing social cues, and are often, as Joshua was, quiet loners who have difficulty building relationships.

But Asperger wasn’t Joshua’s only neurological issue. Powers said she read through the medical records of her son’s frequent visits to a base doctor, and “every one mentioned something about severe depression. Every time he went in, they marked that.”

Less than two weeks after arriving in Iraq, Joshua helped find a large cache of weapons, and his mother said he sounded proud and happy in a telephone call.

But a week later – on Feb. 24 of this year – Pvt. Joshua Powers left his barracks after midnight and walked toward the latrine. When fellow soldiers found him, he was dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

Patricia Powers said she is now left with searing grief, and gnawing questions about how and why her son died. She’s heard talk of a sniper targeting Joshua’s base camp. But there are also indications that Joshua was having trouble coping soon after he arrived in the war zone.

At a memorial service in Iraq, Joshua’s commander, Capt. Vaughn D. Strong Jr., told his troops that Joshua’s death was a reminder of the importance of looking after each other.

“We must look for the indicators and signs of struggle within our ranks,” Strong said, “so we can be there to help our comrades fight through their tough times … so that we can all make it home alive and safe.”

Patricia Powers fears her son was a victim of a severely strained Army fighting an unpopular war.

“They have an issue with trying to get people to sign up and to join,” she said. “And I think in that case, they’re going to take whoever they can get, and they’re going to keep them if they can.”

In Bensalem, Pa., Eddie Brabazon was eager to sign up, so on his 18th birthday, he left the group home where he was living and headed straight for a recruiting office.

It wasn’t a surprise to his parents – Eddie had always pretended to be G.I. Joe – but they weren’t sure he had the emotional well-being to survive in the military.

From the time Eddie became their foster child at 3, the Brabazons worked to control his hyperactivity and deal with his short attention span.

By age 5, Eddie would fly into a rage each day at precisely 4 p.m. – an outburst that could only be controlled by a ritual in which Margaret would lift him up and plant him on top of the refrigerator, where he would calmly talk about what was bothering him.

In kindergarten, Margaret recalls, “They were glad when he didn’t come to school, when he was sick or something.”

By sixth grade, he was attending an alternative school, where he was an average student, the Brabazons said. Despite his strong build, he never excelled in athletics; in team sports, coaches would often find Eddie zoned out in the field, unable to concentrate on the game at hand.

Over the years, Eddie had taken lithium for bipolar disorder, the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa and other psychotropic drugs. But shortly after graduating from an alternative high school for students needing education and emotional support, he was headed to Fort Bragg for basic training.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, Brabazon had gotten in trouble for mouthing off at superiors, and two weeks before his death, he was punished again after his weapon accidentally discharged.

While assigned to clean trash out of a Humvee, he told a sergeant how much he hated messing up. “When I let you down, I feel like going into a Porta-john and blowing my … brains out,” Brabazon said, according to a military investigative report.

The sergeant told investigators he talked with Brabazon for two hours until he was satisfied he was not going to kill himself.

Days later, the same sergeant became concerned that Brabazon was suicidal when he took his rifle with him into the portable toilets and stayed there for 45 minutes.

“No, sergeant, it’s not like that. It’s not like that,” Brabazon told the sergeant, explaining that he just needed a peaceful place to think.

But on March 9, 2004, after returning from a night mission, Brabazon made a disparaging remark about a superior officer and was told that he – and his entire platoon – would be punished as a result.

Ninety minutes later, in the pre-dawn darkness, Brabazon’s roommates heard a powerful blast. Turning on the lights, they found Brabazon face down on the floor, lying on top of his rifle, a gunshot wound running from below his left jaw out the top of his skull.

The Brabazons find it hard to believe that Eddie would kill himself. But they are equally perplexed that the Army would send him to Iraq at all.

“Didn’t they look at his records?” Margaret Brabazon asks. “I mean, if you’re flat-footed, you don’t go in. So isn’t there a clause in there if you had mental problems?”

The family of Army Spec. Michael S. Deem also questions the Army’s decision to send the 35-year-old father of two to war.

When Deem transferred from Texas to Fort Stewart in Georgia in 2004 to be closer to his 7-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, he knew he was transferring to a unit that was facing deployment to Iraq, his wife, Lynn Deem, said.

Deem accepted the consequences of his decision, but after his Georgia unit was called up, his longstanding depression and anxiety deepened, Lynn Deem said.

In the weeks before deploying, Deem saw a military psychiatrist for help in handling his heightened stress, his wife said. She said the doctor gave him “multiple drugs,” including “a year’s supply of Prozac.”

There was no discussion of his not deploying.

“The way he portrayed it,” she recalled, “it was not negotiable.”

The year’s supply of antidepressants would be wasted. Less than a month after arriving in Iraq, Deem, an information systems operator in the Special Troops Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division, was found dead in his bunk at Camp Liberty in Baghdad.

The Army determined that he died of an enlarged heart “complicated by elevated levels” of Prozac – the very drug that was supposed to help him through his tour.

Saying the Prozac alone did not kill him and that there was no indication of suicide, the Army has classified Deem’s cause of death as “natural.” But months after the military has closed its investigation, Deem’s family still wrestles with questions.

“To know that he’s got a history of anxiety and depression and to load him up on pills and send him to a war zone – how could they do that?” asks his aunt, Mary Ann Warner, of Lakeland, Fla.

“Michael is someone who was sent with them knowing he had some mental health issues,” said Lynn Deem. “There’s no way they can say they didn’t know.”

The mandate that troops receive a pre-deployment mental health evaluation grew out of the first gulf war, when returning service members reported mysterious illnesses that military officials insisted were unrelated to combat. In response, Congress in 1997 ordered the Defense Department to obtain a clear picture of the baseline health of all troops deploying to war zones, including an “assessment of mental-health.”

To many members of Congress, that meant a face-to-face encounter with a mental health expert, in part to ensure that troops would be adequately screened for mental illness and would not pose a risk to themselves or others.

Instead, the military’s assessment consists of the single yes-or-no question on a form filled out by deploying service members: “During the past year, have you sought counseling or care for your mental health?”

“There’s a fair amount of deception,” said David Rudd, former chief of psychology service for the Darnall Army Community Hospital at Fort Hood in Texas. “People simply don’t report mental health problems if they’re trying to get into the service.”

Some suspect the military intentionally does a poor job of screening, in order to deploy as many soldiers as possible.

“It’s still a numbers game,” said Gerry Mosley, a retired Army Reserve first sergeant with the 296 Transportation Company who said medical screeners showed little interest in soldiers’ health when his unit deployed. “I don’t think they really want to know what your mental condition is.”

Mosley, who called pre-deployment screening “grossly inadequate,” said service members with serious mental illnesses are put at great risk when they are sent to war.

“One of two things is going to happen,” he said. “They’re either going to get worse in-country, or they’re going to get a hell of a lot worse when they come home.”

But The Courant found that even among the small fraction of service members who indicate a mental health issue, only a handful receive a full “assessment of mental health” from the military.

Answering yes to the mental health question typically triggers an interview with a medical provider – but it isn’t with a mental health specialist.

Instead, troops are often questioned by physician’s assistants or medical technicians, who, more than 93 percent of the time, conclude on their own that service members are mentally fit for deployment to a war zone, The Courant’s review found.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office reported that among soldiers who screened positive for possible PTSD on a post-deployment questionnaire, only 22 percent were referred for a mental health evaluation. That figure – which caused outrage among some in Congress – is still more than three times as high as the percentage of soldiers referred to a mental health professional after self-reporting problems on the pre-deployment form.

Overall, from March 2003 to October 2005, the military processed 935,797 troops facing deployment. Of those, 2,538 were referred for a mental health evaluation – less than 0.3 percent. That amounts to an average of 18 referrals per week worldwide.

Some troops who have gone through the initial screening interview recounted being questioned briefly by a low-level medical provider.

“They didn’t go into any depth. It was a few-minute, `Why’d you check this? How’s it going?’ type of thing,” said Paul Scaglione, an Army mechanic from Michigan who answered “yes” on the questionnaire before his second deployment to Iraq in November 2004, because he had been treated for depression during his first deployment.

“They don’t go, like, `Here’s what you should do if you’re having problems over there’ or ‘Are you feeling depressed now?’ or anything,” said Scaglione, 23. “I don’t know if I’d really call it `screening.’”

Army Sgt. Thomas J. Sweet, 23, of Bismarck, N.D., also answered “yes,” to the mental health question, based on past diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder and generalized anxiety. But a physician’s assistant ruled that Sweet was mentally fit for combat and that there was no need for a referral to a licensed mental health professional.

“How many hours of mental health training does a physician get, unless they’re pursuing a specialty in psychiatry?” Sweet’s mother, Elizabeth, asks. “Now how many hours in mental health training – in assessment – does a physician’s assistant get? I think it’s pretty negligible.”

A month later, Sweet was sent to Iraq. And 2? months after that, following a confrontation with a superior, Sweet was found sprawled in a stairwell, having shot himself in the head, an Army investigation concluded. It was Thanksgiving Day 2003.

Years before a physician’s assistant declared Thomas Sweet mentally fit for war, experts hired by the military had warned that pre-deployment mental health screening was inadequate.

And six months before Sweet deployed, Defense Department officials were summoned to Capitol Hill, where skeptical members of Congress berated them over flaws in the pre-deployment process.

But despite the tough talk, nothing changed.

At a March 2003 hearing of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, members of Congress, including the subcommittee chairman, U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4th District, challenged the military’s top health official on his interpretation of the law requiring a mental health assessment.

“Let me just tell you, from my standpoint, you’re not meeting the letter of the law clearly, and I don’t even think you’re meeting the spirit of the law,” Shays told William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. “So I’d like to know where it says that this examination should be a self-assessment. Where in the law do you read self-assessment?”

Col. Bruce Crow, an Army suicide prevention expert, told the military-run Armed Forces Press Service in 2004 that none of the soldiers who killed themselves early in the war had a history of mental health treatment, and none exhibited warning signs.

Bailey and Sweet, who had pre-existing disorders, were among those soldiers.

A month after the March 2003 congressional hearing, the military issued a revised health assessment questionnaire for soldiers, but only for those returning from war. The new form still relied on self-reporting, but added questions designed to evaluate the soldiers’ mental state, not simply whether they had or had not sought counseling.

But the military never changed the pre-deployment form or screening process. And Congress lost the momentum for change.

Class, of the Military Officers Association of America, believes the Defense Department should at least expand the pre-deployment form, to include better diagnostic questions.

“If you changed the post-deployment questionnaire, then why didn’t you make the same changes to the pre-deployment?” Class asked. “It would seem to me as if that would not be a hard thing to do.”

Critics, including the GAO, say the military has been reluctant to offer clear and consistent guidelines on what medical and mental conditions ought to disqualify service members from being sent into battle.

Last year, for the first time, the Army identified broad medical conditions that could be incompatible with deployment to a war zone, including psychiatric conditions that might interfere with duty.

That still leaves broad discretion to commanders, and the GAO recommended more specific guidelines “so that in future deployments (the Defense Department) would not experience situations such as those that occurred with members being deployed into Iraq who clearly had pre-existing conditions that should have prevented their deployment.”

The Defense Department rejected the recommendation.

Some family members of soldiers with psychiatric problems say that regardless of military rules on deployment, their efforts to convince officials that a loved one should not be deployed have been ignored.

Dee Bartlett of San Marcos, Texas, who served seven years in the Army herself, said she had tried to warn her husband’s commander that he was mentally unstable and should not be sent to Iraq in early 2003. Her husband, Chris, an 18-year veteran who was assigned to special forces, had been treated for a back injury and depression and was taking painkillers and Xanax, she said.

“I sat down with his commanding officer about two weeks before they deployed and told him how bad Chris was, that he was just going up and down and using his pain meds to try to sleep,” Dee Bartlett said. “I said, `My concern is he’s going to get himself killed or one of you guys killed.’”

Chris, 40, fell apart within weeks of arriving in Iraq and was evacuated to Germany, then back to the U.S., for psychiatric treatment, Dee said. She said he has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals ever since and has tried to kill himself three times. They are now divorced.

Even within the military, some health professionals have been perplexed by the deployment decisions made by medical screeners. At a hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, Army Col. Holly Doyne began receiving e-mails soon after the war began from the staff of a field hospital in Kuwait, complaining about newly arrived troops who were not fit for duty. Among them: a woman on lithium and Zyprexa who had been released just three weeks earlier from a psychiatric hospital.

Before long, Doyne also encountered troops who were evacuated to her medical center, and who never should have been sent to the Middle East in the first place. Doyne and a medical provider in Kuwait drafted and distributed a pointed e-mail, saying medical screeners were not doing their jobs, and too many unfit soldiers were being sent to war.

Doyne thought her criticism had chastened the screeners, but in 2004, a fresh round of soldiers rotated into the war zone – with some of the same problems she had seen earlier in the war.

Doyne, who returned to Germany after a tour in Kuwait, said she is not currently involved in evaluating troops and could not comment on whether mental health screening had improved.

But deployment statistics from the Defense Department indicate growing pressure to send troops into combat, and suggest that screeners are now more likely to deploy troops with possible mental health problems than they were at the start of the war.

In 2003 and 2004, for example, fewer than 40 percent of service members who were given a mental health referral were ultimately deployed. In 2005, deployments jumped to 50 percent.

Among troops who reported receiving mental health care, 84 percent were ultimately deployed in 2003 and 2004. Last year, the number climbed to 88 percent.

With no change in the pre-deployment form and no apparent improvement in screening, Elizabeth Sweet fears that soldiers with mental health issues are being put in the same danger that led to her son, Thomas,’ death.

“If you aren’t using the form any better than you did when you deployed my son, what makes anyone think you’re doing it any better now?” she says.

“And it’s a piece of paper. It was useless.”

EDDIE BRABAZON, dressed in full uniform, in another family photo taken during his last Christmas with his family, in 2003. Less than three months into his second deployment to the Middle East, Eddie shot himself in the head in a palace compound in Baghdad. (Mark Mirko) May. 12, 2006. Hartford Courant