Military Neglecting Fort Hood Soldiers’ Medical Needs
11 June 2010 By Dahr Jamail
At least 50 soldiers from Fort Hood
who have medical profiles that should prohibit them
from military training have been sent to the National
Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California,
regardless of their conditions.
Truthout spoke with some of these
soldiers on June 7, before they were to fly back to
Fort Hood the next day.
“We were brought out here to NTC
after being told we would be given some of the best
medical treatment out here,” a soldier who is an Iraq
war veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress
disorder (PTSD), speaking on condition of anonymity
because he feared military reprisals, told Truthout.
“But when we were here at Ft. Irwin, nobody would see
us. It took my wife calling the Chaplain to get my
medication refilled. We’ve gone a month without seeing
a psychiatrist. Some of us see them weekly, some twice
a week and we haven’t been able to receive any of
this.”
This, despite the soldier having
been given his PTSD diagnosis by the military itself.
He admitted to Truthout that he
needs the medication because of anxiety, depression
and homicidal thoughts.
“There’re people out here who’ve
had to cancel 17 psychiatric appointments to be out
here,” the soldier added. “There are people needing
physical treatment that have thrown out their backs.”
The soldier, who is based at Fort
Hood, explained that his commander, Capt. Ryan
McDonald, “talked to my doctor and told him I could
continue my treatment at Ft. Irwin. This obviously
isn’t happening, so my doctor has been trying to get
me back and I’ve been unable to see anyone. They are
two months behind here and can’t see us, but said they
couldn’t help anyway because we’re not permanently
stationed there, we’re supposed to be at Fort Hood.”
Captain McDonald heads a unit that
has, according to the soldiers Truthout spoke with at
Fort Irwin, at least 55 members at the NTC who have
medical profiles that are supposed to exclude them
from being around combat training, weapons and
ammunition.
Brandi Owen, whose husband was sent
to the NTC along with the rest of the 3rd Armored
Cavalry Regiment (ACR), told Truthout she believes
that Captain McDonald is responsible for pressuring
doctors of many of the 3rd ACR soldiers into allowing
them to be sent to the NTC.
“[My husband's] psychiatrist here
at Fort Hood cleared him to go [to NTC] at the last
minute because his commander told him he’d get the
same treatment there as he did here,” Owen explained
to Truthout. “He left here May 16 and his next
appointment was supposed to be the next day. He had
none of his sedating medication. He was given a
profile by his doctor saying he was not to have combat
training exposure, but NTC is training soldiers for
deployment.”
Owen’s husband, an Iraq war veteran
who has also been diagnosed with PTSD, suffers from
that along with anxiety disorder and depression.
“His doctor released him to go to
NTC, assuming he’d get treatment,” she continued.
“Since he’s been there, not once has he seen a doctor.
It took them three days to fill his meds. Once you’re
off those meds, you get suicidal.”
Cynthia Thomas runs the Under the
Hood Café in Killeen, Texas, on the outskirts of the
base. The café is described as a place meant to
provide support for soldiers and their families.
“There are dozens of spouses here
at Fort Hood whose husbands who are soldiers here have
been diagnosed with PTSD, traumatic brain injury (TBI)
and other problems and they are being sent to NTC
anyway,” Thomas told Truthout. “Even though their
doctors are telling them they can’t be around
live-fire or weapons, they are being sent there
anyway.”
Captain McDonald, who is in charge
of many of the soldiers, has, according to Thomas and
all of the spouses Truthout spoke with, been “calling
their doctors and telling them the soldiers can be
taken to NTC and that they would be given medical
treatment there.”
Brandi Owen, outraged at the lack
of medical treatment for her husband, contacted her
Congressman, John Carter, of the 31st District of
Texas.
“I contacted Congressman Carter on
May 13, just before my husband was sent to NTC and his
aid told me that there had already been 26
Congressional complaints about these guys being sent
to NTC,” Owen explained.
Her attempts to get answers via her
husbands’ chain of command and various generals have
only been met with frustration.
“I’ve talked to all of his chain of
command, the generals here and at Ft. Irwin, they
always transfer me to someone else, or say they can’t
help me or there is nothing they can do,” Owen said.
“I have a notebook full of numbers they refer me to,
or tell me to make an IG [Inspector General]
complaint, which I do, but I still haven’t heard from
any of them. The Chain of Command doesn’t do anything.
He’s going on two and a half months without seeing a
doctor. He needs meds! He needs a doctor! NTC has
given him flashbacks from Iraq. He can’t sleep and
can’t eat. Now I’m worried about what he’ll be like
when he gets back. It’s going to be worse than when he
left.”
Truthout spoke with another soldier
at the NTC, a facility that describes itself as “The
World’s Premier Training Center for the World’s Finest
Military.”
“About three days before I was told
I was leaving for NTC, I went home to pack and flipped
out and tore my house apart,” the soldier, speaking on
condition of anonymity because he, too, feared
reprisals for speaking to the media, told Truthout. “I
went to the ER, they talked about putting me in the
psych ward, but they put me on homicide watch because
they feared I would kill my chain of command. They
sent me out here, supposedly with a 30-day supply of
narcotics, but I ran out. I went four days without my
meds and they didn’t even fill one of them.”
The soldier, an Iraq war veteran,
said of his time there, “I had friends blown up. I’ve
seen all kinds of shit I’d really preferred not to
have seen and it is messing with my head.”
“I can’t be around simulated combat
or combat exposure,” he explained while talking with
Truthout from the NTC on June 7. “But I’m here on a
FOB, there are 50 caliber machine guns and ammo
everywhere and I have access to all this and nobody in
my chain of command gives a shit. I can’t sleep at
night. It’s ruthless shit out here. I haven’t seen
anything like this before.”
The soldier believes he is not
going to be deployed because his medical profile lists
him as being “non-deployable.”
Truthout asked him why he believed
he was sent to NTC.
“I got sent out here because they
get $8,000 per head for every soldier out here for
their budget,” he said. “You have people here on
respirators, people with cervical cancer, it’s not
just me … there are about 50 soldiers here that should
not be here, just from my unit, 3rd ACR. There’re
about 5,500 soldiers in the regiment right now and
about 50 of us that are absolutely not supposed to be
out here, period.”
Crystal Hess, herself a veteran of
two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, is dismayed
by the fact that her husband, Spc. Cory Hess, despite
his having a broken hand and PTSD, was sent to NTC.
“He was sent to NTC in order to
prepare to deploy to Iraq in August,” Hess told
Truthout. “He’s got anger and depression issues. He’s
been blown up multiple times in Iraq, he has issues
with his knees, back, shoulder and I’m pushing for him
to be screened for TBI, because he has persistent
headaches.”
Hess explained that she has tried
talking with commanders at Fort Hood about her
situation, “and asked them to step up and take care of
this, because it’s affecting our home life. Cory has
anger issues because of his deployment.”
While her husband was sent back to
Fort Hood early from NTC only because “I called the
Department of Army IG and bitched them all out and
said, ‘fix it.’ So they said he needed immediate
surgery and sent him home. Now he’s been home for six
days, he has no medicine, he’s in pain, every move he
makes with his hand leaves him on the ground in pain.
I’m probably going to have to take him to the ER to
get him pain meds. They are doing nothing to help
him.”
Hess also blames Captain McDonald
for having pressured Cory’s doctor into sending him to
NTC, despite his injuries.
Captain McDonald was deployed to
Iraq from 2007-2008 out of Fort Riley, Kansas, as a
logistics adviser with the National Police Transition
Team and the Iraq Assistance Group. In 2009 he became
the deputy regimental S4 with the 3rd ACR. This is
apparently his first time in direct command of
soldiers.
“Captain McDonald was not deployed
with the guys in 3rd ACR but took command of the unit
after they came back from Iraq in January 2009,”
Thomas explained. “The soldiers could not tell me much
about him other than that McDonald has no leadership
skills and does not take the family members into
consideration.”
According to Thomas, McDonald is
not married, “Which could explain why he doesn’t give
a crap what the spouses have to say.”
She added, however, that the
problem is not only with Captain McDonald, but also
with “the entire chain of command at Fort Hood.”
When asked about this situation, a
public affairs officer at Fort Hood told Truthout,
“All the soldiers sent to NTC have, when necessary,
been cleared to go by both their commanders and their
doctors.”
“The military are not taking care
of our husbands,” Stephanie Wallin, whose husband was
also sent to NTC despite his having a medical profile,
told Truthout. “Honestly they don’t care about our
soldiers, or the families. My husband has PTSD and
should not have been sent to NTC, but they sent him.
And when they sent him, they said he’d get meds and
attention and he didn’t.”
Wallin explained that she and
several other wives called a military chaplain to
plead for help.
“I told them I was scared because
my husband was saying he didn’t know what to do and
couldn’t deal with it anymore,” she said. “It’s really
hard on me. My husband has homicidal thoughts and I
have three kids. So I don’t know how he’s going to
deal with the kids. I want to know why the chain of
command lies. I don’t know why they say they are all
about soldiers and families and they’ll make sure
they’ll get the help they need. They don’t. He was
diagnosed with PTSD. It’s very, very hard. I’m very,
very stressed out. My husband is not the man I
married. They pushed him until he broke and then
they’ve pushed him beyond that.”
Wallin said that she has “talked to
everyone; generals, chaplains, commanders and nobody
wants to listen to us spouses.”
Wallin said that when she attempted
to talk to her husband’s commander about the situation
to ask for help, “they told my husband, ‘Why don’t you
have your wife on a leash?’ Then they tried to punish
him for my coming there to try to help him and said I
was trying to get him in trouble.”
“The Army is not what it says it
is,” Wallin continued. “Recruiters make it sound so
good, but once you sign up, you’re screwed. My kids
wonder what they did wrong because of what the Army is
doing to their father. They feel like they’ve lost
their father. I don’t know what to do anymore. There’s
a whole bunch of soldiers who need this story out.
They need help and they are not getting the medical
help they need.”
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