US Fallen Soldiers Families Pay the Price

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/opinion/24herbert.html

US Fallen Soldiers Families Pay the Price
By BOB HERBERT
December 24, 2004

In addition to these I hope the plight of all the Iraqi chilren with dead parents, siblings, relatives, adn friends is also not forgotten. For the 1000+ US Soldiers there are possibly over 100,000 dead Iraqis, and probably and equal number of Dead Iraqi soldiers.

"It's like watching your son playing in traffic, and there's nothing you can do." - Janet Bellows, mother of a soldier who has been assigned to a second tour in Iraq.

Back in the 1960's, when it seemed as if every other draftee in the Army was being sent to Vietnam, I was sent off to Korea, where I was assigned to the intelligence office of an engineer battalion.
 
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Twenty years old and half a world away from home, I looked forward to mail call the way junkies craved their next fix. My teenage sister, Sandy, got all of her high school girlfriends to write to me, which led some of the guys in my unit to think I was some kind of Don Juan. I considered it impolite to correct any misconceptions they might have had.

You could depend on the mail for an emotional lift - most of the time. But there were times when I would open an envelope and read, in the inky handwriting of my mother or father or sister, that a friend of mine, someone I had grown up with or gone to school with, or a new friend I had met in the Army, had been killed in Vietnam. Just like that. Gone. Life over at 18, 19, 20.

I can still remember the weird feelings that would come over me in those surreal moments, including the irrational idea that I was somehow responsible for the death. In the twisted logic of grief, I would feel that if I had never opened the envelope, the person would still be alive. I remember being overwhelmed with the desire to reseal the letter in the envelope and bring my dead friend back to life.

This week's hideous attack in Mosul reminded me of those long ago days. Once again American troops sent on a fool's errand are coming home in coffins, or without their right arms or left legs, or paralyzed, or so messed up mentally they'll never be the same. Troops are being shoved two or three times into the furnace of Iraq by astonishingly incompetent leaders who have been unable or unwilling to provide them with the proper training, adequate equipment or even a clearly defined mission.

It is a mind-boggling tragedy. And the suffering goes far beyond the men and women targeted by the insurgents. Each death in Iraq blows a hole in a family and sets off concentric circles of grief that touch everyone else who knew and cared for the fallen soldier. If the human stakes were understood well enough by the political leaders of this country, it might make them a little more reluctant to launch foolish, unnecessary and ultimately unwinnable wars.

Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville of the Scripps Howard News Service have reported, in an extremely moving article, that nearly 900 American children have lost a parent to the war in Iraq. More than 40 fathers died without seeing their babies.

The article begins with a description of a deeply sad 4-year-old named Jack Shanaberger, whose father was killed in an ambush in March. Jack told his mother he didn't want to be a father when he grew up. "I don't want to be a daddy," he said, "because daddies die."

Six female soldiers who died in the war left a total of 10 children. This is a new form of wartime heartbreak for the U.S.

We have completely lost our way with this fiasco in Iraq. The president seems almost perversely out of touch. "The idea of democracy taking hold in what was a place of tyranny and hatred and destruction is such a hopeful moment in the history of the world," he said this week.

The truth, of course, is that we can't even secure the road to the Baghdad airport, or protect our own troops lining up for lunch inside a military compound. The coming elections are a slapstick version of democracy. International observers won't even go to Iraq to monitor the elections because it's too dangerous. They'll be watching, as if through binoculars, from Jordan.

Nobody has a plan. We don't have enough troops to secure the country, and the Iraqi forces have shown neither the strength nor the will to do it themselves. Election officials are being murdered in the streets. The insurgency is growing in both strength and sophistication. At least three more marines and one soldier were killed yesterday, ensuring the grimmest of holidays for their families and loved ones.

One of the things that President Bush might consider while on his current vacation is whether there are any limits to the price our troops should be prepared to pay for his misadventure in Iraq, or whether the suffering and dying will simply go on indefinitely.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

The Permanent Scars of Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/magazine...nted=print&position=

The Permanent Scars of Iraq
By SARA CORBETT
Sara Corbett is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
February 15, 2004

Robert Shrode can't sleep.

At night, in the fly-speck town of Guthrie, Ky., in the rented farmhouse he shares with his 20-year-old wife, Debra, he surfs the Internet, roams the house. He lies down and gets up again. He drinks a beer and stares out the window at the black fields beyond. Hours pass. He can't sleep. Before the war, he could have six beers and sleep like a baby, but now that works against him. Drinking may help get his head to the pillow, but it also ratchets up the nightmares. For a while, he sweated out his bad dreams on the living-room couch, and it drove Debra crazy. She would come down from the bedroom, touch his shoulder, ask what the problem was. Shrode would just turn his back to her and not say a word. Now she knows better than to ask, though occasionally when the silence between them gets too deep, she'll put it out there, What're you thinking about?

''Iraq,'' he'll say. And then the silence falls again.

He pops Ambien to coax some sleep. The results are mixed. On the advice of his doctors, he is taking three different pills for pain, a pill for swelling and another pill for depression. There are days when he is unrecognizable to himself, a guy who a few years ago was a party-loving bartender at a Mississippi casino and who is now 29 and engaged in what can feel like a never-ending battle to see his own future brightly.

The only person who understands him is his buddy Brent Bricklin, a restless, dark-haired 22-year-old and fellow Army specialist in the 101st Airborne Division, who is also home after serving in Iraq. Most mornings, Shrode picks up Bricklin at Fort Campbell, the sprawling base that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee state line where both men are stationed, and they go driving. It's always more or less the same. They drive through the buttressed gates of the base, patrolled by armed National Guardsmen, and turn onto Fort Campbell Boulevard, passing the check-cashing outfits, the strip clubs and gun-and-ammo shops that, during peacetime anyway, boom with military business.

Shrode sometimes jokes that he loves his Chevy Tahoe more than his wife, and it's half true. The Tahoe is a big upholstered bubble, a place where he can watch the world drift by harmlessly. Inside it, he shares more with Bricklin than he does with Debra, whom he met at a nightclub in 2002 and married three months before going to war. ''I can talk to him -- I can't talk to my wife,'' Shrode says. ''But 30 seconds with him, and I feel better.''

Not far from the base, they pass a pint-size Kia driving in the next lane. Someone has used soap to write a self-congratulatory ''Back From Iraq'' in large letters across the rear window. This being December, the only soldiers back from Iraq are ones sent home because of expired enlistments or for medical reasons or those on their way to being transferred elsewhere. The bulk of the division -- some 20,000 local soldiers -- remains at war. Shrode and Bricklin stare down at the Kia.

''Dumb idiot,'' Bricklin says. Shrode says nothing.

It's been nearly six months since Shrode and Bricklin arrived home from Iraq. Shrode lost most of his right arm, which was amputated just below the elbow in a Baghdad field hospital. Even healed, his face is pitted with purple shrapnel scars the size of raindrops. Bricklin, a broad-shouldered former competitive swimmer who came home honeycombed with shrapnel, bears larger, raw-looking scars from his thigh to his neck. Both men have significant hearing loss, cocking their heads like a couple of old-timers in order to grasp what's said. They are plagued by headaches and are convinced they've had some memory loss. Between them, they've had nine operations since getting, as they like to say, ''blown up'' in Iraq. Shrode, who is shorter and stockier than Bricklin and speaks with a soft Alabama accent, still visits the base hospital five days a week for occupational therapy. Once a month, he sees a military therapist. He has tried, without luck, to persuade Bricklin to get individual counseling too.

''He says I took it harder than I say I do,'' Bricklin says with a deflective smile.

''He did,'' Shrode says.

''He's says I'm messed up in the head.''

''You are,'' Shrode says earnestly.

It's a subject Bricklin doesn't want to discuss. He playfully jabs a finger near the stump of his friend's arm: ''How much feeling you got left in this thing, anyway? Let's find out.''

Both men say they feel more vulnerable since coming back from war. When someone recently dropped a tray in the hospital cafeteria, Shrode dove, horror-struck, beneath the table. A crackling summer thunderstorm sent Bricklin into a panic, convinced he was caught in the back blast of a grenade again. Both say they have frequent nightmares. And then there's something less tangible, a visceral undercurrent of anger that makes them walk around feeling ready to explode. ''I can go from being happy-go-lucky and joking to having someone's throat in my hand, like that,'' Bricklin says, snapping his fingers. Shrode nods. ''My fuse is short,'' he says. ''It's real short.''

Shrode and Bricklin are 2 of the 2,600 United States soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of early this month, according to the Department of Defense. The basics of their stories are hauntingly familiar: just after midnight one night in June, a rocket-propelled grenade shrieked out of nowhere and hit their Humvee, which sat parked at a police station in the Baathist city of Fallujah. What was reported in the news bore the standard sterility: ''One soldier killed; five others injured.'' What wasn't said was that Branden Oberleitner, the private who died standing almost shoulder to shoulder with Shrode, was a car buff who once planned to become a firefighter or that he was killed two weeks shy of his 21st birthday. It didn't say that his blood was all over the road.

But for whatever societal void the dead disappear into, it is the wounded who must live with the confounding mix of anonymity and exposure wrought by surviving a war. On and off the Army base, Shrode is approached by strangers who size up his military haircut and missing arm and feel compelled to heap on the thanks for serving in Iraq. They all but ignore Bricklin, who is often with him but whose injuries remain hidden. Shrode finds the situation reliably awkward, sensing a whiff of pity riding on the backside of flattery. The people who open doors for him, he says, make him feel handicapped. And then there are those whose gazes follow him wordlessly as he makes his way down the buffet line at the China King restaurant near the base -- drawn, it would seem, to the spectacle of a one-armed man working to load his plate.

The discomfort feels irresolvable. ''Somebody stares at it, I get mad at them,'' Shrode says. ''Somebody looks away, and I get mad at that.''

For both soldiers, the tension between themselves and the rest of the world builds up quickly and with no real outlet. Bricklin has had one run-in with the police and says that he's been a jerk ''to anyone who didn't go'' to war. Even when someone shows concern for their well-being -- when Debra touches her husband's shoulder or a stranger flashes a kindly smile -- the effect can be abrasive. One day, as Shrode was walking down a hospital hallway, a civilian passing by happened to toss out an innocent ''Howyadoin','' which somehow, in that moment, became the last straw. ''Ninety-nine percent of the time, I tell them what they want to hear,'' Shrode says. But in this instance he couldn't help blurting out a truth that was becoming more evident each day. ''Buddy,'' he said, ''I'm going to hurt the rest of my life.''

very other Tuesday, Shrode drives over to Fort Campbell's mental-health building to attend a support-group meeting for injured soldiers. Before going to Iraq, before being wounded, he wouldn't have been caught dead doing something like this. Support groups were the stuff of Oprah -- helpful for others, maybe, but not for him.

Given the uncomfortable silence before a session begins, it is clear that Shrode is not the only squeamish one. The soldiers -- usually anywhere between 5 and 15 of them -- sit in a circle of couches and chairs in the cramped linoleum-floored waiting room of the mental-health building, looking almost like a roomful of unusually clean-cut college kids gathering for a study group. Except that one walks with a cane. Several others have burn sleeves covering their arms. A woman with a bobbed haircut wears an arm splint. There's a guy -- an Apache helicopter pilot -- who has balance problems. His neighbor, a muscled young corporal, winces as he takes a seat. When they make chitchat, it tends to be about skin grafts and medication and how there aren't enough handicapped parking spaces on base. Occasionally, some will compare scars, hiking up pants and shirts and inspecting the wreckage of someone else's limb or torso. ''Hey, yours is growing hair back!'' one soldier says to another. ''That's pretty good.''

For every broken body in this room, there are hundreds more confined to hospital beds across the country and hundreds more again who, by choice or by circumstance, are gutting out the effects of their injuries without the help of peers or mental-health counselors. It has been suggested that the wounded are the hidden casualties of the Iraq war, stranded somewhere between our grief for the dead and a wartime patriotism best stirred by the belief that our troops are both productive and healthy. Thanks to the lifesaving properties of body armor and largely impenetrable Kevlar helmets, combined with highly advanced battlefield medicine, more soldiers are surviving explosions and gunfire than in previous wars. The downside of this is that the injury rate in Iraq is high: an average of nine soldiers have been injured per day. The pace shows little sign of slowing, which means it's possible we will bring home another 1,500 wounded before the start of summer. Some military experts worry that in the next four months -- as the U.S. rotates roughly 110,000 new troops into Iraq, many of them reservists and National Guardsmen with less combat training than the full-time soldiers they are replacing -- injury rates could climb even higher.

The government's reports on the wounded can be confusing. In early February, the Department of Defense Web site listed 2,600 soldiers as wounded in action in Iraq and another 403 as injured in ''nonhostile'' incidents like helicopter or motor-vehicle accidents. Meanwhile, the Army Surgeon General's office said that only 804 soldiers have been evacuated with battle wounds and that over 2,800 have been injured accidentally. In addition, the Surgeon General's office reported that another 5,184 soldiers have been evacuated from the theater for other medical reasons, which could include anything from kidney stones to nervous breakdowns. To date, 569 of these have qualified as psychiatric casualties.

Although many of the soldiers who attend the support group at Fort Campbell have escaped enemy fire, their injuries reflect the full spectrum of what can go wrong during war: Sgt. Jenni McKinley had her right hand crushed when her Humvee blew a tire and flipped over on a sandy road outside of Baghdad. Chief Warrant Officers Emanuel Pierre and Stuart Contant were pilots whose Apache helicopter reportedly malfunctioned and then crashed in Afghanistan, requiring them to spend months in the hospital and to endure multiple operations. There is a medic who is physically uninjured but tormented to the point of agony by memories of treating his wounded and dying colleagues. And then there is a quiet young private who comes because her hair is falling out and her fingers are numb and nobody seems able to tell her why.

These soldiers generally are no less disabled than those who were hit by AK-47 fire. Sgt. Jeremy Gilbert, another medic, laments that he never made it into Iraq at all, since a week before the invasion, a Kuwaiti civilian driving 90 miles per hour plowed into Gilbert's Humvee, shattering the soldier's right leg and pelvis and relegating him to a wheelchair for five months. ''There's nothing glamorous about the way I got hurt,'' says Gilbert, who wept in frustration as he watched the first live footage of the Army's invasion of Iraq from a bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. ''But it sure has trashed my life.''

Operating with a blend of military toughness and quiet empathy, the injured soldiers' support group -- believed to be the first of its kind on an Army base -- has taken on everything from fractured self images and faltering marriages to traumatic memories of Iraq and the pervading question of what each soldier's future looks like in the wake of both war and injury. Yet there is little that's 12-step about it. You won't find group hugs or even metaphorical handholding here. Nor is there any second-guessing whether it was worth it to go to war in the first place. In the context of the Army's rigid hierarchy and low tolerance for weakness, the power of the support group, it seems, comes from its ability to listen.

The first time I visited, in late November, conversation was dominated by one soldier, a newcomer who looked to be in his early 30's, with a spinal injury that had required some of his vertebrae to be fused together. As a result, his neck appeared stiff and unyielding; his back, ramrod straight. He spent the better part of an hour raging about various things that angered him, mainly the way his commanders were treating him and issues he had with his medical care. When he spoke, it was at a full shout, letting out a stream of emotion so potent and vituperative that it seemed his rigid body might launch right off the chair. The other soldiers listened, expressionless except for Brent Bricklin, who leaned back in his chair with a smirk, as if he wasn't buying a word of it. It wasn't until the newcomer mentioned that he wished he were back in Iraq that anybody else chimed in.

''I miss it, too,'' another soldier said. ''At least there was a purpose.''

''I wish I was in Iraq because my buddies are there,'' Robert Shrode offered.

Heads in the group began to nod. The atmosphere seemed to lighten. But then the newcomer -- or Angry Neck Man, as some of the others would later call him -- charged headlong into another furious rant.

A while later, sitting with Terry James, the easygoing retired first sergeant who moderates the group and works as a counselor at Fort Campbell, I remarked upon how unnerving I found the soldier's anger, how potentially violent it seemed. James just laughed. ''That's how they all come to us,'' he said. ''Pretty much everyone starts out mad. Any other place in the military would've cut him off, wouldn't have let him get his anger out.''

The line between venting and sniveling, however, can be imperceptibly thin. One soldier's fury may set off another's, as was the case in a meeting where a soldier ran on too long, in Shrode's opinion, kvetching about a minor gunshot wound in his shoulder: ''He was whining and complaining and I said: 'Shut up. I'd love to be in your situation. There's a lot of people worse off than you and worse off than me.''' At another meeting, a soldier who had been run over by a truck complained to the group he hadn't received a Purple Heart -- the medal reserved for soldiers injured or killed in combat. ''I told him to get lost,'' says Shrode, who received a Purple Heart last summer. ''And then I got up and left.''

A number of soldiers confess that they were initially put off by the concept of group therapy, figuring it was going to be ''a bunch of guys crying and wiping snot on their sleeves.'' Most insist they attend not for emotional release but rather to receive information -- about disability benefits or discharge procedures. The soldiers' questions often reflect a me-against-the-world mistrust of what's to come, an indistinct but entirely accurate perception that this country has failed veterans of past wars. The war will stay with them, they realize, but after a point the Army won't.

For many, including Robert Shrode, the question is when and how to formalize their separation from the military. Everyone in the group is an active-duty soldier, though many say they are doing little more than showing up for morning formation these days -- either too consumed by pain and doctors' appointments or simply uninspired to work while their units are still in Iraq. Yet there is little that's light about what they face. In order to be medically discharged, soldiers must go before the Army Physical Evaluation Board, which assesses their injuries and then either approves or disapproves the discharge. Eventually they receive a ''disability rating'' from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which determines how much money they are eligible for. A soldier deemed ''100 percent disabled'' is granted a base payment of $2,239 monthly. (The payment can be supplemented depending on the severity of the injury.) Though the V.A. judges each case individually, an amputated arm generally gets you a 60 to 90 percent disability rating. Shrode has been told that his hearing loss and depression will likely further increase his rating.

It's the promise of a new arm that keeps him in the Army. When I met him, Shrode was waiting to get a state-of-the-art prosthetic, worth $35,000 and paid for by the government. The Army had flown him several times to Walter Reed to work with its best occupational therapists, training the tiny reflexive muscles in his elbow so that they eventually could control the carbon-fiber myoelectric hand that was being custom-built for him in Nashville. If the new arm didn't work out well, Shrode faced a cruel choice: he could have his elbow amputated in order to be fitted with a different and more effective type of prosthetic.

When it came to fake arms, though, he was hardly optimistic. In August, he had been given a low-tech prosthetic, with a hook where the hand should be, and while he had quickly proved to be a whiz at putting pegs into the pegboards they thrust at him at occupational therapy, he hated both the look and feel of it, preferring to master real-life tasks with his one good arm. He had proudly learned to lace and tie his boots and was working on figuring out how to cut a steak. When we went driving, Shrode smoked a cigarette with his left hand, ably piloting the Tahoe with one knee. In the meantime, his right arm -- or the piece of plastic that was supposed to pass for it -- rolled around neglected in the back seat.


A tornado siren blasts, and Jenni McKinley rips up her pickup truck, hunting for a gas mask. A car backfires, and she dives for cover. The panic is instant and the charge for safety instinctive and ultimately embarrassing as she climbs to her feet again, bug-eyed and looking for snipers, instead finding the Kroger parking lot full of oblivious cart-pushing families. A person can come to doubt her sanity this way.

Then there is the dead marine who visits her as she tries to sleep. A young guy, he can be angry, accusative, and sometimes he just shows up quietly and stares at her until she's jarred awake, heart racing -- another night's rest stolen away.

McKinley is 27 and a career soldier, having logged eight years with the Army, and is hoping to stay until she has earned her military retirement benefits after 20 years of service. Off duty, she has a gentle manner, a dry wit and a penchant for good wines. On duty, she has worked hard to achieve the rank of sergeant, completing tours in Korea and Kosovo, where she led a small team of mostly men. As a female soldier, McKinley says she feels the pressure to constantly prove herself, to remain emotionally bulletproof. But Iraq really got to her.

''I didn't handle war the way I thought I was going to,'' she told me one night over dinner at a Red Lobster on a strip-malled stretch of road not far from Fort Campbell. ''I thought I was going to do my job, be strong. But three days into it, I broke down crying. The scuds were flying. We were waking up to the sounds of explosions over our heads. It was terrifying.'' Whatever fear she felt, nobody saw it: she ducked into an empty field tent to do her crying. Three days later, in 115-degree heat, McKinley's Humvee rolled over, pinning her beneath it and all but destroying her right hand.

Since arriving back in the United States in April, McKinley has been told she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which garnered recognition in the years following the Vietnam War and today is used to describe the most crippling psychological effects of trauma. The name may be new, but the concept isn't. Research on World War I veterans showed that even those who might be termed well adjusted still reported that they were quick to anger, forgetful, anxious and regularly suffering from headaches and dizziness. Traumatized World War II vets were commonly referred to as having ''battle fatigue.'' Today the military uses the term ''combat stress'' to describe a range of symptoms including anxiety, sleeplessness and depression, but post-traumatic stress disorder itself generally is diagnosed only when the symptoms become ''intrusive'' -- in other words, when they start to really mess up a soldier's or veteran's life.

McKinley has a difficult time parsing the source of her post-traumatic stress disorder. Does it stem from the shock of the Humvee accident? Was it the flying scud missiles or the sirens that wailed nearly hourly early on in the war, signaling possible incoming chemical or biological weapons? Or maybe it was the marine who lay bleeding on the stretcher next to hers at a desert combat support hospital. He was younger than she was and had been shot in the face several times. As McKinley lay watching in a morphine haze, a doctor and team of nurses worked to stabilize him. Just as they moved on to examine her mangled hand, he flat-lined and the doctor rushed back to revive him. But the soldier flat-lined again. The doctor jump-started the marine's heart twice, three times, only to have it fail -- again and again -- until the nurses finally pried him off the soldier's body. After a time, McKinley boosted herself up and took a long look at the dead man's face -- maybe to honor him and maybe to learn something. She still doesn't know why.

Her case of post-traumatic stress disorder most likely stems from the combination of these events. Researchers believe that the condition is not always connected to a specific incident and can, in fact, be spawned by repeated exposure to fear or by bearing witness to something violent or traumatic or by experiencing moral uncertainty connected to these things. Depending on the intangibles of a person's background and ability to either process or shut out stress, there are those who come through war relatively unscathed and those who don't. It's as if every psyche has a reservoir for trauma, and some fill faster than others -- each soldier's breaking point different from the next one's. And while many G.I.'s manage to hold it together during a deployment, the repression of emotion over time can lead to a tumultuous homecoming. Post-traumatic stress disorder is considered controllable but not curable, and often it will flare up years after the original trauma. In 1994, for example, Veterans of Foreign Wars officials noticed a significant spike in claims of post-traumatic stress disorder -- not from soldiers returning from Operation Desert Storm or Somalia but rather from World War II veterans whose nightmares were revved by the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

Since McKinley returned to the United States in April, the vision of the dead marine's face has sat in her mind like an elephant blocking the road. ''When I first got home, the nightmares were him basically calling me selfish, asking why didn't I help save him,'' she said, her voice so grave and quiet that it was nearly inaudible. ''And now it's changed to he's asking me why I didn't go with him.''

McKinley has two children, ages 4 and 6, who live with her ex-husband 50 miles away in Nashville but spend weekends at her two-bedroom apartment close to Fort Campbell. With virtually no use of her right hand, she has struggled with the smallest of maternal tasks, from opening jars to cutting vegetables and carrying laundry. Before she began treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, a child's simple request for apple juice could send her into a tailspin; her sleepless nights left her snappish, unloving. ''My husband would come pick the kids up on Sundays,'' she said, ''and before they'd get halfway home, I'd be calling on the cellphone, crying and asking if I could apologize to them for how I'd acted.''

The low point came on the day she managed to change the sheets on her queen-size bed -- a task that, one-handed, became a two-hour ordeal. In the end, she was nothing short of triumphant, with a bed orderly enough to pass a military inspection. And then the children arrived, tumbling through the door as they always did, eventually settling down on McKinley's bed to watch TV as she cooked dinner. But sitting on the bed led to jumping on the bed, which in turn led to tearing off the sheets in an exuberant frenzy. McKinley became unhinged. ''I completely lost my mind on them,'' she said, sounding as if she were still startled by it. ''I was throwing sheets and screaming.'' For a full month afterward, she slept on the living room couch, unable to confront the bed again.

It was pure desperation that led her to the support group, which she learned about through her occupational therapist at Fort Campbell's hospital. ''I didn't know what was wrong with my head,'' she recalled. But hearing other soldiers talk about what they were grappling with helped her understand that she needed -- and had access to -- help. ''After the first meeting, I almost cried with relief,'' she said. The sessions also gave her the courage to see a therapist, who prescribed Clonazepam for her anxiety and Lexapro, an antidepressant. On her third visit to the group, she managed to sputter out the story of the dead marine before breaking down in tears. When she tried to stuff the emotion back inside, it wouldn't go. ''I didn't want anyone to see me that weak, so I grabbed my keys and started to get up to leave,'' McKinley remembered. And then came the kind of touchy-feely moment so many of the soldiers claim they're not looking for: the guy sitting next to her, one of the wounded helicopter pilots, laid a friendly hand on her shoulder, coaxed her back into her seat and, without saying a word, let her know that it was O.K.


Often during my visits with injured soldiers at Fort Campbell, I would ask what they envisioned as happening in the next few months when the rest of the 101st Airborne -- plus another 100,000 or so troops around the country -- began arriving home as part of the largest troop rotation since World War II. Would returning soldiers suffer the same nightmares and anxiety, the same alienation from both intimates and the world at large, that so many of the soldiers I encountered described having? In essence, I wondered whether the wounded, as the first large group to come back from Iraq, were like canaries in a coal mine, their postwar struggles foretelling those of thousands soon to come. Usually the answers ran along the same lines. ''There will be problems,'' Robert Shrode said. ''There'll be a lot of short fuses, a lot of intolerance. People are going to have to be patient with these guys.''

The fact that post-traumatic stress disorder can develop from fear and anxiety raises particular implications in a war like the one in Iraq, where a seemingly straightforward army-versus-army scenario has long been dispensed with, replaced by the uncertainties of guerrilla warfare. Though military researchers have estimated that 25 percent of soldiers on the front lines of a war will experience combat stress, it seems possible that for Iraq the numbers will be even greater. ''These troops know no front line,'' says Alfonso Batres, the clinical psychologist in charge of readjustment counseling services for the 206 Vet Centers around the country. ''It's just like Vietnam. They have to be on guard with everyone; they're always facing an unknown. In some ways, fighting a conventional war is a lot easier on the psyche.''

Even as the military works to provide mental-health care, history shows that the vast majority of soldiers returning from war will never seek help. Or they will do it years later, when the psychological afterburn has wreaked havoc on their lives. Steve Tice, a retired Vet Center counselor and disabled Vietnam veteran, refers to the legions of soldiers who live alone with destructive war memories as the ''invisible wounded.'' Says Tice, ''There's this unfortunate stigma we attach to soldiers who say, 'I hurt.' And so soldiers don't say anything.''

In this respect, it is conceivable that the physically wounded may have a slight advantage over their peers. Whereas most soldiers without major injuries will touch down on American soil and undergo a relatively impersonal and perfunctory post-deployment medical screening before returning to duty, many of the injured soldiers have already spent months being routinely examined, assessed and questioned about their well-being -- arguably making it easier to ask for help.

One morning I stopped in on Jeremy Gilbert, the medic hurt in Kuwait, as he sat on a hospital bed, awaiting the fourth operation on his leg in six months. His cane lay hooked over the arm of a nearby chair. Two weeks earlier, just as he sensed he was making progress healing, an infection flared up and remained untamed by antibiotics. This was his 10th day as an inpatient, and he was accordingly listless. He had brought his Xbox and was playing video games to pass the time. ''My morale is kind of down,'' he confessed.

Across the hallway from Gilbert's room on Ward 4A-B, the beds were full -- two to a room -- of soldiers freshly evacuated from Iraq. I had met a National Guardsman from Kansas who had been hit by an improvised explosive device in the Sunni Triangle, an Army sergeant from California who had had his leg fractured in a roadside ambush and a small-framed 21-year-old New Yorker who had collapsed during a long march and now had permanent nerve damage in both legs. For the most part, they seemed stunned, anxious to be cleared to go home on convalescent leave, and not quite ready to talk about what had happened.

But Gilbert, who as one of the first casualties to be flown out of the gulf seemed to relish the role of elder statesman, used his own experience to predict what lay ahead. ''At first you're like, wow, I'm injured,'' he told me. ''The news on television is all about Iraq. You're like, this is good; I was part of something good. But then suddenly the news is bad -- it's all about soldiers dying -- and you're not healing the way you thought you would. You start thinking, I wish they'd cut my leg off. You think maybe I was supposed to die.''

Gilbert refers frequently to his ''bitter period,'' which stretched through the summer and involved a lot of sitting around in a wheelchair, playing solitaire, watching ''M*A*S*H'' reruns and refusing to leave the house except for doctors' appointments. It ended, slowly, after his wife, Andrea, who was pregnant with their first child, begged him to ask his doctors for antidepressants. He says he resisted, knowing his request would become part of his medical records, potentially affecting security clearances and promotions in what he hoped would be a full military career. (This was a sticking point for a number of soldiers I spoke with: patient privacy laws apply only loosely in the military, where commanders have access to a soldier's medical history, including what goes on in counseling sessions.) For Andrea Williams-Gilbert, the kick in the pants she gave her husband represented a small bit of military-spouse activism. ''Wives and family members shouldn't have to go through some of what we have to because their spouses are afraid to go on antidepressants,'' she told me. ''It's not fair to anyone.''

Even stabilized with Elavil, Gilbert said he has cycled through ups and downs, and Andrea, an outgoing blond Arkansan who was hugely pregnant when I first met her, does what she can to ride the waves. ''He'll say something touchy, and I'm out of there,'' she told me in November. ''I just head out the door and go walking.'' A week or so later, just before Thanksgiving, their daughter, Lauren, was born. Until he was hospitalized again, Gilbert had been more buoyant, regularly reporting for physical therapy, taking classes at a local university and doting, as best he could, on his wife and child. He was hoping to stay in the Army for a few more years after he recovered, but worried that if he ''toughed it out'' for a while, the fact that he was able to perform his duties (though in pain) would lower his disability rating when he did leave the service -- a difference of potentially thousands of dollars. And as it often does, fatherhood also rearranged his priorities. While earlier he was eager to get well so he could be redeployed to the Middle East, he announced to the support group in December that he'd changed his mind. ''I'm not going back there,'' he said, imagining a conversation with some higher-up in the Army. ''I'm not going to die for you.''

Whether he had wised up or had grown pessimistic, it was hard to say. Knowing that the rest of the 101st Airborne Division was soon to return to Fort Campbell, Gilbert made another prediction from his hospital bed, saying he had a ''bad feeling'' about the homecoming. ''You've got a lot of units pulling security every single day, doing missions every single day,'' he said. ''They're seeing explosions, shootings, burning bodies. And they're going to bring that back to a place where there are lots of people who just won't get it. We're about to have 20,000 people walk through their front door for the first time in a year.'' He pursed his lips, shook his head as if still thinking about it and then laughed. ''If I were a divorce lawyer, I'd be in high cotton this winter.''


Remembering how lonely she was as an inpatient at the base hospital, Jenni McKinley sometimes finishes her daily occupational-therapy appointment on the second floor and wanders up to Ward 4-AB to pop in on new arrivals from Iraq. It was there that she met Caleb Nall, a blue-eyed 23-year-old corporal from Louisiana who was recovering after being hit in the back by a rocket-propelled grenade. His torso had been severely burned; a gaping shrapnel wound had hollowed out part of his pelvis, and his left leg had been damaged. The explosion left him about 70 percent deaf in one ear. ''He was frustrated and tired of being in bed,'' McKinley said. She showed him her scars, invited him to come to the next support-group meeting and then the next day dropped off a few back issues of Maxim magazine and a case of Dr. Pepper.

When it came time for the group's next meeting, Nall showed up. He wore a pile jacket and a pair of jeans, his wounds hidden well away but his anger fully exposed. After a visiting V.A. representative started to natter on about how soldiers needed medical evidence and a formal diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder to receive relevant disability payments, Nall jumped in. ''Would you say waking up with the sound of a mortar round going off next to your head counts?'' he asked, the bitterness thinly wrapped in his Louisiana drawl. ''Jumping six inches off your bed?''

After the V.A. rep left, Nall turned to the group at large. ''Anyone else here having sleep problems?'' he asked.

Brent Bricklin raised his hand. So did Jeremy Gilbert and Jenni McKinley and Robert Shrode, as well as four of the five other soldiers who had come that day. Everybody but Nall burst out laughing.

''Is there something else they did for you?'' he continued, perplexed. ''I'm on morphine, Percocet, Elavil. . . .''

''I did Vicodin and Benadryl, but they counteract each other,'' offered a soldier across the room.

''Have you tried drinking?'' asked another.

Nall nodded earnestly. ''I take two Percocets and drink two six packs of beer, and I still can't sleep.''

This set off a voluble round of pharmaceutical recipe-swapping. Injured soldiers, I have learned, are nothing if not experts on painkillers and sleep aids. And yet little seems truly to work. A few complain that their antidepressants cause them to sleep all the time; more -- like Nall -- report that they sit up half the night in a drugged daze, waiting for sleep to come.

It was on one of these nights not long ago that a garbage truck arrived at 2:30 a.m. to empty the Dumpsters at Nall's off-base apartment. At the first slam of a Dumpster on pavement, Nall, who had been dozing in an easy chair dressed only in his underwear, was back in Iraq. ''My rifle was sitting in the corner,'' he said. ''I grabbed it, ran outside and made a loop around the block.'' Here, he paused to shake his head at just how scary this seemed in retrospect, and how utterly beyond his control. ''I was lucky it was the middle of the night, or I'd be in jail right now.'' The rifle is one of seven guns he keeps at his apartment.

The potential for violence is just one of a list of concerns both the military and veterans' groups have for returning soldiers. Combat veterans have been linked to higher incidences of drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, depression and unemployment. Having learned from its failure to treat traumatized Vietnam War soldiers 30 years ago, the military has dispatched ''combat stress teams'' to Iraq to offer counseling and in some cases dispense antianxiety meds to suffering soldiers. It may be impossible, however, to fully counteract the shock of going from a 24-hour state of generalized fear-apprehension-paranoia, sustained for a year through wartime, to evenings at home on the La-Z-Boy, asked to fulfill the requirements of love and tenderness needed to sustain a family. In a well-publicized string of incidents in 2002, three Special Forces soldiers returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., from Afghanistan and killed their wives in a span of six weeks. All three soldiers committed suicide.

It is unclear whether today's veterans will avoid the hardships that yesterday's continue to know. ''It won't be different for these guys than it was for the Vietnam vets,'' says Shad Meshad, the president of the National Veterans Foundation, who has counseled soldiers and veterans for the last three decades. He says that antidepressants and psychologists can only do so much for a hurting soul. ''There's a voice that rings through all these guys who've paid the price to survive war. No matter how much science or technology you have, those memories never leave you.'' Based out of Los Angeles, Meshad operates a hot line for war veterans. Until recently, the calls came from veterans of Vietnam and of Desert Storm, but in late fall the Iraq calls started to come -- not from soldiers but from their families. ''They're saying, 'Johnny came home, and he's angry; he wants a divorce,''' Meshad says. ''It's all the stuff I've heard from other wars.''

What might save some of today's soldiers is their awareness of the struggles of past veterans and of the resources available to them now. Not only are soldiers better educated and slightly older than their forebears in Vietnam; they are more likely to be married and have children -- meaning more people will be directly affected by their ability or inability to recover from war. On the day I met Debra Shrode, Robert's wife, at the hospital at Fort Campbell, she sat quietly holding his hand. There was an uneasy tenderness between the two, and Debra, who is tall and pretty, with wide down-turned eyes, seemed at first reluctant to speak. ''I told you she was shy,'' Robert said, grinning.

But she did speak. In a hill-country Kentucky drawl, Debra softly described getting the call last June from a commander, telling her that Robert had been hit by a grenade. She described the first time he was able to call her from the Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, about four days after the incident. (''He told me he was fine,'' she said. ''I lied through my teeth,'' Robert added.) And then she talked about his homecoming -- about meeting his medevac flight, ''scared to death,'' and first taking in the sight of his scar-ridden face, his weak body and missing arm. She remembered smiling as hard as she could at Robert before stepping out of his line of vision as the medics transferred him to a stretcher and letting herself weep.

At home, the awkwardness rarely seemed to lift. When Robert's nightmares drove him to sleep on the couch, Debra lay awake in the bedroom. ''I kept wondering, Is he sleeping down there because he rests better, or is it because he doesn't want to be beside me?'' she said. And while six months after Robert's return their relationship had stabilized somewhat, Debra was still adjusting to what the war has done to her husband. Even as she kept busy going to cosmetology school by day and selling lottery tickets in the evenings, she couldn't help feeling ''left out,'' since Robert seemed to prefer the company of Bricklin and other soldiers to her own. ''I know there's a lot of things he can't talk to me about, that he can talk to his friends about,'' she said, glancing at Robert, who was by now staring quietly at the floor. ''But I'm sitting there thinking, Why can't he talk to me?'' She added that she has become better at living with the distance between them. ''At first, I had thoughts of holding his hand, of wanting to be close with him,'' she said, a quiet resignation in her voice. ''But stuff like that's changed, too.''

For his part, Robert said that he couldn't get past the memories of Iraq, that his experience there felt unresolved. ''My body's here, but my mind is there,'' he said. Despite the injuries he had suffered, Shrode remained loyal to the war effort. ''We're doing good over there,'' he told me. ''People just don't see it.'' When it came to the future, he felt only confusion, saying, ''I'd like to live out West, but what kind of job could I do?'' He was interested in Wyoming, but remembered that cold weather makes his pain worse. ''One day I'm on the Internet searching for property there, and the next day I'm looking for a condo in Key West.'' He had thought about going to college to study forestry or real estate or to become a teacher, but his limitations always came rushing back. ''I type slow. I write slow. I can't carry heavy things. What am I going to do for work?''

Anticipating the challenges of receiving compensation and care from the V.A., he had recently joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He was also going to sign up with Disabled American Veterans and the American Legion, and just in case, he was going to hire a lawyer. When I asked what his image of a group like the V.F.W. was, Robert said, ''A bunch of old guys from Vietnam sitting around in field jackets, drinking and not talking about it.'' Did he sometimes worry that he, too, might end up as one of those guys? Robert paused for a long, sobering moment. ''Yeah,'' he said finally. ''I do.''


As Christmas approached, Caleb Nall's insomnia had not subsided. He announced to the group that his doctor had heard out all his complaints and then had the gall to suggest he add a warm bath to his routine. ''A warm bath -- c'mon!'' Nall said.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Gilbert had consulted his doctor about all the pain medication he was taking. Earlier in the fall, he had started shortening the time between his prescribed doses of Percocet until suddenly he was taking twice what he should. Gilbert, who is studying to apply for a physician's assistant degree and can be aptly professorial, cautioned everyone about Percocet. ''They say it's as addictive as heroin,'' he said. Having recently replaced Percocet with controlled-release OxyContin, Gilbert admitted to having a ''serious physical dependence'' on it, developing a crushing headache every time he tried to skip a dose. ''It gets to where you'll kill somebody because you need that fix,'' he joked.

''I'm strung out on Demerol all the time,'' Jenni McKinley piped up. ''I know it's time to take my meds when I start screaming at my kids for little things.''

She added, ''My doctors are talking about switching me to methadone.''

Gilbert laughed. ''Mine said the same thing.''

Whatever lay ahead for them couldn't be as bad, they figured, as what they went through the first few months following their return from war. Or at least they hoped as much. In an attempt to salve her conscience, McKinley had done some research on the marine who died next to her in Iraq, learning his name and the fact that he had left behind a young wife. She was contemplating calling his family, but eventually decided against it. Meanwhile, she had gained some strength and movement in her injured hand and was feeling better able to enjoy her children.

Robert Shrode, meanwhile, has a new prosthetic -- a high-tech beauty complete with realistic-looking fingers -and was out on the air strip on Feb. 1 when the men and women of his unit returned home. At Fort Campbell, the troop rotation is now fully under way, with planes landing almost daily at the base, each one carrying up to 200 soldiers fresh out of Iraq.

Shrode says that he has decided against having more of his arm amputated and is now embarking on the series of doctor's exams he needs in order to receive a medical discharge. His aim is to be out of the Army in April. He has also hit upon a new idea for his future: returning to Iraq as a security contractor for a private company. If it all works out, he could be back in the desert by next January -- his wife, he says, is against it.

Meanwhile, Brent Bricklin's four-year enlistment is up in June. He plans on marrying his girlfriend in Wisconsin, with Shrode as a groomsman, and then he wants to go to college to become a history teacher. Imagining this, he expressed the first bit of military pride I had heard from him. ''I can't wait for the day I say: 'O.K. class, close your books. Today we're going to do Operation Iraqi Freedom. This here is my Purple Heart; here's the Iraqi flag I got off a rooftop in Karbala; these are pictures from Mosul.' How cool will that be?'' But while the dream of this moment kept him going, it also -- he finally admitted -- prevented him from seeking psychological help for the grief and anger he felt in the wake of his time in Iraq. ''I can't have any of that on my record,'' Bricklin told me, as if there were absolutely no choice in the matter. ''I mean, who's going to hire a teacher who has flashbacks?''


At night, in the quiet of their rented farmhouse, Robert Shrode lets Debra pick the shrapnel out of his body. Over the last six months, she's tugged out 15 pieces as they have worked their way to the surface of his skin. She has picked them from his legs, from his neck, his face. Sometimes he will study them, these twisted aluminum chunks that have managed to escape while so many more will forever live inside him.

Barely out of her teenage years, Debra Shrode never pictured her life this way. Never imagined the Army would be calling her up and asking her to hand out advice as some kind of expert wife. Yet someone from the Army's Family Readiness Group wanted her to call another wife whose husband had come home injured. She sighs and dials the number. ''I don't know what I can say to make you feel better,'' she says into the phone. ''If he doesn't want to talk, don't take it to heart.''

She adds each new piece of shrapnel to the collection they keep stored in a Tupperware container. For a while, the container sat on their coffee table, but recently Robert moved it into a spare bedroom drawer.

If it seems as if he might be moving on, Debra has only to ask, What're you thinking about?

''Iraq,'' he'll say. And then the silence falls again.

Edited by author 02-03-2004 03:21 PM
Oldest Living Whiz Kid Tells All - Robert McNamara & Bush Parallels

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/arts/25R...=1&pagewanted=print=

Oldest Living Whiz Kid Tells All - Robert McNamara & Bush Parallels
FRANK RICH
January 25, 2004

There has been no more unlikely movie star this season than Robert McNamara, the only living character in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War." The 87-year-old Mr. McNamara ? who, as the Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter pointed out, is a dead ringer for Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" ? has been as surprised as anyone by his new-found audience. "I don't know a damn thing about films and TV," he said when we spoke last weekend. He can't remember the title of the one other movie he saw in the past decade and has "never seen a DVD." He hasn't watched any other film about Vietnam, period, having made a particular point of avoiding those by Oliver Stone.

As secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Mr. McNamara presided over the most disastrous foreign adventure in American history and refused to speak out against it even after his own private doubts helped fuel L.B.J.'s decision to fire him. Mr. McNamara still lives in Washington, minutes away from the memorial to the 58,000-plus American dead. Are strangers nice when they approach him to talk about the movie? I asked. Yes, he said, but he acknowledged that the sample may be skewed: "People who hate you don't come up to you on the street and say you're a son of a bitch."

Since its release, "The Fog of War" has generated plenty of debate on two fronts. Should Mr. McNamara, who freely admits to making errors about Vietnam but stops well short of outright contrition, rot in hell? The verdicts on his confessions in Mr. Morris's film range from mild praise (he's conceding fallibility, however belatedly) to utter rage (Roger Rosenblatt, on "The NewsHour," likened him to the self-justifying bureaucrats of Treblinka).

The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq.

Such analogies can be pushed only so far, however, and Mr. McNamara refuses to draw them publicly, despite repeated badgering by interviewers like me to do so. But if it is inexact, not to mention wildly premature, to declare that Iraq is Vietnam, it is not too soon to mine a related and pressing resonance of the McNamara story. When President-elect John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. McNamara to his cabinet, he was lionized as the very model, indeed the very shiny new model, of the modern star business executive: famously, the first non-Ford to be president of the Ford Motor Company, the most brilliant of the 10 so-called Whiz Kids whom Ford had recruited en masse from the Air Force brain trust of World War II, and the first M.B.A. from Harvard Business School to ascend so high in government.

As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty ? but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself."

"The Price of Loyalty," Ron Suskind's new best-selling exposé of the inner workings of the Bush White House, reads like an as-told-to book by its principal source, Mr. O'Neill, a C.E.O./cabinet officer fired by another Texan wartime president. It casts the former treasury secretary in the same role of protagonist that Mr. McNamara plays in "The Fog of War." When Mr. O'Neill was first appointed, he was hailed for his successful tenure at Alcoa, where, like Mr. McNamara at Ford, he was prized for his humanistic concern with safety as well as his can-do resuscitation of a sinking bottom line. The parallels end there. Whatever one thinks of Mr. O'Neill's White House tenure, he is of footnote stature in American history, if that. And unlike Mr. McNamara, a loyal courtier to presidents to the bitter end and beyond, Mr. O'Neill hardly waited a moment before trashing George W. Bush.

Consistent to a fault, Mr. McNamara doesn't approve of Mr. O'Neill's behavior. "I think it's terrible," he says. "It's wrong for a cabinet officer after he's out to blacken the reputation of the president." He finds it "particularly bad" that Mr. O'Neill has since retreated a bit from his criticisms: "If you're going to do it, don't shift!" But the former treasury secretary's cooperation with Mr. Suskind's book is useful in a way Mr. McNamara might have been had he spoken out when it could have made a difference. (Our involvement in Vietnam lasted another seven years after his seven years in office.) "The Price of Loyalty" is valuable not so much for its few specific headline revelations, or for its gratingly adoring portrait of the naïve and often hapless Mr. O'Neill, as for its atmospheric impressions of a White House where a C.E.O. mentality all too reminiscent of Mr. McNamara's shows signs of poisoning governance.

In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara's background was something of a novelty. The Bush administration boasts more C.E.O.'s in top jobs than any administration in history ? as well as the first president with his own Harvard M.B.A. These résumés were commended by the press when Mr. Bush took office, much as Mr. McNamara's had been 40 years earlier. But what Mr. O'Neill describes in Mr. Suskind's book is not the executive branch of a democratic government so much as an old-school dictatorial corporate monolith where any serious debate, whether about economic or foreign policy, is stifled from the top.

In "The Best and the Brightest," Mr. Halberstam summarizes how Mr. McNamara, his mind already made up on any subject, would run meetings at Ford (and later at the Pentagon): "Despite the appearance of give-and-take, the whole thing would become something of a sham, the classic Harvard Business School approach with loaded dice." The sentence could be grafted as is into Mr. O'Neill's descriptions of the Bush White House meetings in "The Price of Loyalty," where the McNamara-style C.E.O. enforcing his will and quashing debate often seems to be Mr. Cheney, freshly arrived from Halliburton. As Mr. McNamara's wielding of charts, statistics and unassailable rapid-fire logic mowed down internal dissent to Vietnam policy, so a similar intellectual arrogance at the very top of the Bush administration loads the dice for its rush into gaping budget deficits and ill-planned, excessively optimistic scenarios for post-Saddam Iraq.

I asked Mr. McNamara to identify any bad Ford habits that might have led him astray once in public service. He didn't concede much, noting only that he arrived in Washington having no sense of the role of the press in public life ("We had nothing like that in Detroit!") or the possibility that reporters might try (and succeed) in uncovering governmental activities that the administration wanted off the record. This corporate tic is duplicated exponentially in the Bush administration, which is shrouded in secrecy to the point where the public's right to know has been deftly supplanted by the small shareholder's right to receive an unfailingly upbeat annual report.

"The Fog of War" shows where this can lead. We see the vintage clips of Mr. McNamara promoting good news and suppressing the bad as the war turns sour ? a "credibility gap" echoed by this administration's "Mission Accomplished" happy talk after the fall of Saddam. We learn that there was no real White House debate of the domino theory, which as a premise for pre-emptive war in Vietnam was as intellectually suspect as the pre-emptive doctrine the Bush administration has applied selectively to justify its invasion of Iraq. "We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mind-set that led to that action," Mr. McNamara says in "The Fog of War" when he recalls how Vietnam spiraled after the Tonkin incident.

Errol Morris is not a historian or an ideologue but a profound student of the quirks of human nature. As he dramatizes Mr. McNamara's efforts to make sense of his own history, we see that it is the man's vanity, his narcissistic overestimation of his own "skill set" (to use current C.E.O. lingo), that leads him into a mental fog and his government into a quagmire. Such a classic tragic flaw is personal, not political, which is why "The Fog of War" is moving in the end. We see its protagonist inexorably heading toward disaster, in his case taking a country with him, and we are powerless to stop it.

At Ford, Mr. McNamara was eventually succeeded by Lee Iacocca, who more than anyone rehabilitated the image of the corporate star. It wasn't long after Mr. Bush and his C.E.O. team arrived in Washington that that image took its biggest hit in years, thanks to the new corporate whiz kids of the dot-com bubble, "The Smartest Guys in the Room," as the recent book by Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind calls Enron's executives. But the economy is up a bit now, and memories in this country are short. The new runaway hit of prime-time television is not "Arrested Development," the well-received sitcom about an incarcerated Enronesque C.E.O. and his family. It is instead "The Apprentice," in which Donald Trump, the first C.E.O. with his own reality show, is glorified for behaving in the imperial manner of Mr. McNamara in his heyday and Mr. Bush in "The Price of Loyalty": his executives speak only to second his motions.

It's all terribly entertaining, and at the very least, the star's hair deserves its own Golden Globe nomination. As a businessman serving his stockholders, Mr. Trump may even be as good as he thinks he is. But imagine him bringing the same management style into government at wartime, and you can picture his boardroom table of underlings nodding in agreement at the idea of donning a uniform for a premature victory jig on an aircraft carrier. That's why "The Apprentice" is, in its own farcical way, a valuable cautionary tale in its own right. Call it a "Fog of War" for dummies.

Kuwait to Hang Drug Smuggler

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&...107&d=16&m=1&y=2004

Kuwait to Hang Drug Smuggler
Deutsche Presse- Agentur
January 16, 2004
  
KUWAIT CITY, 16 January 2004 ? Kuwait will hang a convicted Pakistani drug dealer in public, a form of punishment not often carried out in the emirate, the Arab Times newspaper reported yesterday.

Fadhl Sherin Sharif will be hanged publicly at a police station in the capital, Kuwait City, under the supervision of Prosecutor General Judge Hamid Al-Othman at a date to be set soon, the paper said citing judicial sources.

Kuwait?s criminal court convicted Sharif of dealing in heroin and was sentenced to death. An appeals court upheld the verdict.

Art and Grace, When It's Time to Say Goodbye - GottaGo Now ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/30/health/3...nted=print&position=


Art and Grace, When It's Time to Say Goodbye - GottaGo Now ...
By JANE E. BRODY
December 30, 2003

The end of life has become an alien experience for those of us living in countries where most people spend their final days in institutional settings. As a result, conversing with people fast approaching the end of life is foreign for many people, who may be reluctant to visit dying friends or relatives because they do not know what to say or do.

There is no better time to learn than now, when more and more people are dying of protracted illnesses in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and, increasingly, at home with hospice care. While physicians may do an excellent job treating potentially curable illnesses, after modern medicine has no further treatment to offer, they often become tongue-tied and may even abandon their patients, leaving the task of emotional support to friends and family.

In his helpful book "I Don't Know What to Say: How to Help and Support Someone Who Is Dying" (Vintage, 1992), Dr. Robert Buckman, a medical oncologist at the University of Toronto, wrote, "One of the biggest problems faced by terminally ill patients is that people won't talk to them, and the feelings of isolation add a great deal to their burden." Talking and listening to a dying person can help relieve the patient's and the visitor's distress, fears and guilt.

Dr. Buckman, who practices at the Toronto-Sunnybrook Regional Cancer Center, reassures those who are concerned that talking about dying will create new fears and anxieties. "In fact," he says, "the opposite is true: not talking about a fear makes it bigger. Those patients with no one to talk to have a higher incidence of anxiety and depression. Bottled-up feelings may also cause shame. Many people are ashamed of their fears and anxieties."

Keep in mind, too, that dying is a lonely experience. Many people are more afraid of dying alone than they are of death itself. By knowing how to act and what to say when visiting a dying person, you can bring caring and comfort that eases the person's passage over this most momentous threshold.

Patients often take their cues from their visitors. If meaningful discourse is to occur, the visitor has to be a good listener. Take off the coat, try to relax, sit down at eye level with the patient, if possible, and as close as you would to a healthy friend. Remove obstacles that create distance or block eye contact. If touching and kissing were appropriate before the person became ill, they are fine now, too.

If you deliver a monologue about what you are doing or what is happening to mutual friends and relatives, you immediately convey the impression that you are not interested in the patient's concerns. Instead, focus on the patient. Try to determine whether the patient wants to talk and what about, perhaps by saying, "Do you feel like talking?"

You might ask, "How are you feeling today?" or, "What can I get you?" or, "Can I make you more comfortable?"

Offering Encouragement

Let the patient take the lead in talking about difficult topics and deep concerns, and encourage continued conversation by saying something like, "Yes, I understand," or, "Tell me more," or reflecting back to the patient what you heard.

If the patient starts talking about how bad things are or says he knows that he is dying, do not contradict him or change the subject. Instead, you might ask: "How can I help? Are there things you'd like to say or matters that worry you?"

Do not be afraid to say that you do not know what to say and do not become disturbed by lulls in the conversation. Often just being there and staying close says enough.

Avoid giving advice, unless it is asked for. Do not regale the patient with tales of patients you heard about who were saved by a particular doctor or took an alternative remedy and experienced a miraculous cure. If there really were miracles out there, they would be in use at every major medical center. And do not try to compare the patient's experience with that of anyone else.

If there were enjoyable experiences you once shared with the patient, you might reminisce about them, even if it makes you and the patient sad to realize they will never happen again. It is, after all, O.K. to cry when someone you love is dying.

It is also O.K. to laugh, if there are things that you both find amusing. Humor can lighten the patient's emotional and physical burden by putting things in perspective and raising the pain threshold.

Expect Fallout

Dr. Buckman points out that, like those in mourning, people who are dying are likely to pass back and forth through a series of emotional states, including denial, anger and acceptance. Although some patients ? often those who are deeply religious and believe in an afterlife ? readily accept the end of life with grace and equanimity, others may, as Dylan Thomas suggested, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Anger is often the hardest stage to deal with for those close to the patient, for anger is often misplaced. As Dr. Buckman put it, "When somebody in your family or circle is facing a serious illness and death, the anger that she feels might really be directed at the illness; it comes out directed at you because you are the only person around. If you are aware of the fact that the anger isn't meant for you personally, then you might be able to respond in a way different from the typical family-argument style."

If, for example, the patient says, "I feel dreadful, and you're no help," instead of rising to the bait with, "This is no picnic, you know," or even, "I'm doing my best," (which might prompt a reply, "Well, that's not good enough"), you could respond with, "How bad do you feel?" or, "What's bothering you the most?"

You, the future survivor, may also experience anger. You may be angry about the disruption in your life, the anticipated loss of your companion or support system or the seeming unjustness of the illness. In such cases, the patient may become the target of your anger. Because that is of no help to either of you, it is best to find a sympathetic soul who will talk things through with you. By recognizing the cause of your anger, you may be able to dissipate or at least redirect your angry feelings.

Some terminally ill patients remain in denial to their dying day. They may ask repeatedly, "I'm getting better, aren't I?" or "When can I get out of here?"

There is little to be gained by agreeing with such optimistic thoughts or directly refuting them. You might respond with a vague, "Let's hope so," or try gently to redirect the patient's thinking by asking, "What have the doctors told you?" or: "What if you don't get better? Should we make some plans just in case?"

Finally, you may be faced with a patient in despair who has lost all hope. Avoid making promises that cannot be kept, like, "Surely you'll feel better tomorrow." Instead, try to counter despair by reassuring the patients that everything possible will be done to assure their comfort, including relief of pain, and that no matter how bad things get, you will always be there.

Thurmond Family Struggles With Difficult Truth - Racist Senator banged His Maid and Had a Mixed Race Daughter

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/national...nted=print&position=

Thurmond Family Struggles With Difficult Truth - Racist Senator banged His Maid and Had a Mixed Race Daughter
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
December 20, 2003

COLUMBIA, S.C., Dec. 19 ? After Essie Mae Washington-Williams told the world this week that she was Strom Thurmond's mixed-race daughter, she walked away "completely free" of a burden she had borne privately for decades.

Now members of Mr. Thurmond's sprawling family, a well-connected dynasty in South Carolina, say they are the ones struggling.

The sudden, very public arrival of Ms. Washington-Williams to the family has stirred a mix of frustration, curiosity, discomfort and shame, several relatives of the late Mr. Thurmond said today, speaking about the news for the first time.

Mary T. Thompkins Freeman, a niece of the late senator, who died at 100 in June, said Ms. Washington-Williams's announcement "was like a blight on the family."

Like others, Ms. Freeman heard rumors for years that her uncle, a legendary politician in the South who rose to fame as a fiery segregationist, had fathered a child with a black maid. But she never had to confront the truth, not like this.

"I went to a church meeting the other day and all these people came up to me and you could tell they didn't know what to say," Ms. Freeman said. "For the first time in my life, I felt shame."

Ms. Freeman also said that had the secret daughter been white, "it would be a whole other situation," because public criticism would not have been as harsh.

"Strom rose to such stature, you just wonder how in the world this could have gone on," said Ms. Freeman, 64, a retired teacher in Lugoff, S.C. "My family always had help around the house. But it just seems Strom would have been above that."

James Bishop, a nephew, said the publicity had been "embarrassing and awkward." "The man's dead, and he can't speak for himself," said Mr. Bishop, 59, a horticulturist in Marietta, Ga. "I don't know why this lady is doing this."

Mr. Bishop's daughter, Robyn Bishop, 25, an interior designer in Washington, said the worst part was the jokes on late-night television. "It's been really hard this week," said Ms. Bishop, who once worked as a Senate page for Mr. Thurmond. "You have to turn on the TV and there are jokes about him and you're still grieving. I just hope this woman is coming out for the right reasons."

Ms. Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired teacher living in Los Angeles, said she finally broke her silence because she wanted her children to know the truth.

On Friday, when asked what she thought of relatives who were embarrassed by her, Ms. Washington-Williams said, "Well, that's just too bad. We'll pray for them."

Barry Bishop, 57, a plastic surgeon in Greenville, S.C., and the son of one of Strom Thurmond's twin sisters, said he was upset by the way the truth came out. "For something to be done so publicly and with all the media circus, well, we're just not comfortable dealing with things in that way," Dr. Bishop said. "There should have been a private conversation and a meeting."

Still, he praised the way Ms. Washington-Williams has handled herself, especially when asked about her father. Ms. Washington-Williams said he "was not a racist in his heart."

"She defended him and that gives us all a warm feeling," Dr. Bishop said.

Ellen Senter, a niece of Mr. Thurmond, also praised Ms. Washington-Williams' handling of her announcement after remaining silent for so long.

"Essie Mae Washington-Williams's humble spirit and kind nature has made it easier for us to bear this news," said Ms. Senter, 58, a teacher in Columbia. "But it was hard when I first heard it because it was surprising to me that my uncle had any sort of illegitimate child, black or white."

The Thurmond family, a network across South Carolina of well-placed lawyers, doctors and public officials, say the announcement will not taint the image of their beloved patriarch. And several family members acknowledged that how they deal with the news will affect not only Mr. Thurmond's legacy, but also the political prospects of his descendants, several family members said.

"The Thurmonds are the closest thing we got to royalty," said Lee Bandy, a longtime columnist for The State newspaper.

The stakes seem highest for Mr. Thurmond's eldest son and namesake, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., 31, the United States attorney for South Carolina who is thought to aspire to higher office.

On Monday, two days after the news broke about Ms. Washington-Williams, Mr. Thurmond issued a statement for the family acknowledging her "claim to her heritage" and indicating he would like to meet her.

Ms. Washington-Williams said she had met with some members of the family this week, but she declined to say who because they asked her not to disclose their identities.

Mr. Thurmond Jr. did not return calls. Some people have praised his quick response; others say he had no choice.

"It's what they had to do," said Congressman James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina. "She had DNA proof. Even so, I applaud them. But mostly I applaud their attorney. The statement he put together was a work of artful vagueness."

The Thurmonds' lawyer, J. Mark Taylor of Columbia, did not return several phone calls.

Ms. Freeman said she had talked to family members who said the younger Mr. Thurmond and Mr. Taylor had "worked very carefully on that statement, thinking of the road ahead."

Mr. Thurmond Jr., known as Lil' Strom and Stromboli, has a reputation as a dogged worker determined to prove himself as his own man. He once took a summer job at an ecology laboratory cleaning out duck cages. But in 2001, he was appointed to the post of United States attorney despite complaints of nepotism and the fact that he had only three years of legal experience.

This week, family members said he had stepped up to be the voice of the Thurmond family because he was the namesake and the eldest of the children Mr. Thurmond raised, not including Ms. Washington-Williams. The senator married twice, both times to beauty queens, and fathered four children when he was in his 60's and 70's.

Political observers say that for the Thurmond family, this moment, however painful, has turned into an opportunity. "I think Strom Jr. has scored points, especially in the black community, because he's not sweeping this family issue under the carpet," said Donald P. Aiesi, a professor of political science at Furman University in Greenville.

"He's well positioned now to do whatever he wants," Professor Aiesi said. "And most people knew about Strom's other daughter anyway."

For decades, rumors swirled in South Carolina that Mr. Thurmond, who had once declared that "all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes," had fathered a mixed-race child with a teenage black maid when he was 22.

Ms. Freeman said she was not sure if she was ready to meet Ms. Washington-Williams, who has said she wants to connect with as many members of the family as possible.

"If I do, I'm not going to go with open arms," Ms. Freeman said. "It's too much to accept right now."

But, she added, "there's no doubt about the family resemblance."

Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/national...nted=print&position=

Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories
By JOHN KIFNER
December 28, 2003

Quang Ngai and Quang Nam are provinces in central Vietnam, between the mountains and the sea. Ken Kerney, William Doyle and Rion Causey tell horrific stories about what they saw and did there as soldiers in 1967.

That spring and fall, American troops conducted operations there to engage the enemy and drive peasants out of villages and into heavily guarded "strategic hamlets." The goal was to deny the Viet Cong support, shelter and food.

The fighting was intense and the results, the former soldiers say, were especially brutal. Villages were bombed, burned and destroyed. As the ground troops swept through, in many cases they gunned down men, women and children, sometimes mutilating bodies ? cutting off ears to wear on necklaces.

They threw hand grenades into dugout shelters, often killing entire families.

"Can you imagine Dodge City without a sheriff?" Mr. Kerney asked. "It's just nuts. You never had a safe zone. It's shoot too quick or get shot. You're scared all the time, you're humping all the time. You're scared. These things happen."

Mr. Doyle said he lost count of the people he killed: "You had to have a strong will to survive. I wanted to live at all costs. That was my primary thing, and I developed it to an instinct."

The two are among a handful of soldiers at the heart of a series of investigative articles by The Toledo Blade that has once again raised questions about the conduct of American troops in Vietnam.

The report, published in October and titled "Rogue G.I.'s Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands," said that in 1967, an elite unit, a reconnaissance platoon in the 101st Airborne Division, went on a rampage that the newspaper described as "the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War."

"For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians ? in some cases torturing and mutilating them ? in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public," the newspaper said, at other points describing the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians.

"Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers," The Blade said. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed ? their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings."

In 1971, the newspaper said, the Army began a criminal investigation that lasted four and a half years. Ultimately, the investigators forwarded conclusions that 18 men might face charges, but no courts-martial were brought.

In recent telephone interviews with The New York Times, three of the former soldiers quoted by The Blade confirmed that the articles had accurately described their unit's actions.

But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a "rogue" unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.

"The story that I'm not sure is getting out," said Mr. Causey, then a medic with the unit, "is that while they're saying this was a ruthless band ravaging the countryside, we were under orders to do it."

Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops.

The tactics ? particularly in "free-fire zones," where anyone was regarded as fair game ? arose from the frustrating nature of the guerrilla war and, above all, from the military's reliance on the body count as a measure of success and a reason officers were promoted, according to many accounts.

Nicholas Turse, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been studying government archives and said they were filled with accounts of similar atrocities.

"I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported," Mr. Turse said by telephone. "I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn't stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That's the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds."

Yet there were few prosecutions.

Besides the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968, only 36 cases involving possible war crimes from Vietnam went to Army court-martial proceedings, with 20 convictions, according to the Army judge advocate general's office.

Lt. Col. Kevin Curry, an Army spokesman, said the Army had compared the Blade articles with the written record of the earlier investigation and did not intend to reopen the case.

"Absent any new or compelling evidence, there are no plans to reopen the case," Colonel Curry said. "The case is more than 30 years old. Criminal Investigation Command has conducted a lengthy investigation when the allegations surfaced four years after they reportedly occurred."

Guenter Lewy, who cited the Army figures in his 1978 book, "America in Vietnam," wrote that if a soldier killed a civilian, the incident was unlikely to be reported as a war crime: "It was far more likely that the platoon leader, under pressure for body count and not anxious to demonstrate the absence of good fire discipline in his unit, would report the incident as `1 VC suspect shot while evading.' "

Mr. Causey, now a nuclear engineer in California, said: "It wasn't like it was hidden. This was open and public behavior. A lot of guys in the 101st were cutting ears. It was a unique time period."

Mr. Kerney, now a firefighter in California, agreed that the responsibility went higher.

"I'm talking about the guys with the eagles," he said, referring to the rank insignia of a full colonel. "It was always about the body count. They were saying, `You guys have the green light to do what's right.' "

While Mr. Causey and Mr. Kerney became deeply troubled after they returned from Vietnam, Mr. Doyle, a sergeant who was a section leader in the unit, seemed unrepentant in a long, profanity-laced telephone conversation.

"I've seen atrocities in Vietnam that make Tiger Force look like Sunday school," said Mr. Doyle, who joined the Army at 17 when a judge gave him, a young street gang leader, a chance to escape punishment.

"If you're walking down a jungle trail, those that hesitate die," said Mr. Doyle, who lives in Missouri. "Everybody I killed, I killed to survive. They make Tiger Force out to be an atrocity. Well, that's almost a compliment. Because nobody will understand the evil I've seen."

The American public was shocked in November 1969 when the reporter Seymour M. Hersh broke the news of the My Lai massacre. Years later, it was revealed that a Navy Seal team led by Bob Kerrey, who would go on to become a United States senator and is now president of New School University in New York, had killed 21 women, children and old men during a raid on the village Thanh Phong in 1969.

"My Lai was a shock to everyone except people in Vietnam," recalled Kevin Buckley, who covered the war for Newsweek from 1968 to 1972 and reported on an operation called Speedy Express, in which nearly 11,000 were killed but only 748 weapons were recovered.

At his court-martial in the My Lai massacre, Lt. William L. Calley Jr., the only person convicted in the case, said: "I felt then ? and I still do ? that I acted as directed, I carried out my orders, and I did not feel wrong in doing so." He was paroled in 1975 after serving three and a half years under house arrest.

In spring 1971, embittered veterans demonstrated against the war in Washington, many throwing away their medals.

One of their leaders, John Kerry, then a recently discharged Navy officer, now a senator and presidential candidate, delivered an impassioned speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971.

American troops in Vietnam, he said, had "raped, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Mr. Kerry's account came from his own experience, as well as from a three-day conference of the fledgling Vietnam Veterans Against the War. At the conference, he said, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

A transcript of that meeting makes for hair-raising reading. The returned troops told of the slaughter of civilians; "reconnaissance by fire," or soldiers shooting blindly; "harassment and interdiction fire," with artillery being used to shell villages; captives thrown from helicopters; severed ears drying in the sun or being swapped for beers; and "Zippo inspections" of cigarette lighters in preparation for burning villages.

There is no shortage of literature on atrocities in Vietnam. Books include Jonathan Schell's "The Military Half," which recounts the campaign in 1967 in which Tiger Force took part; Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War," a bitter memoir of his experience as a young Marine officer that is now required reading in a military history course at West Point; and Michael Herr's "Dispatches," which captured the madness from a "grunt's" point of view.

David H. Hackworth, a retired colonel and much-decorated veteran of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam who later became a journalist and author, said that he created the Tiger Force unit in 1965 to fight guerrillas using guerrilla tactics. Mr. Hackworth was not in command of the unit during the period covered by the Blade articles because he had rotated out of Vietnam.

"Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go," Mr. Hackworth said in a recent telephone interview. "It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted."

Tapes Show Abuse of 9/11 Detainees - Justice Department Examines Videos Prison Officials Said Were Destroyed

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...18?language=printer

Tapes Show Abuse of 9/11 Detainees - Justice Department Examines Videos Prison Officials Said Were Destroyed
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 19, 2003

Hundreds of videotapes that federal prison officials had claimed were destroyed show that foreign nationals held at a New York detention facility after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were victims of physical and verbal abuse by guards, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday.

An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers, and used excessive strip searches and restraints to punish those in confinement.

The report concluded that as many as 20 guards were involved in the abuse, which included slamming prisoners against walls and painfully twisting their arms and hands. Fine recommended discipline for 10 employees and counseling for two others who remain employed by the federal prison system. He also said the government should notify the employers of four former guards about their conduct.

"Some officers slammed and bounced detainees against the wall, twisted their arms and hands in painful ways, stepped on their leg restraint chains and punished them by keeping them restrained for long periods of time," the report said. "We determined that the way these MDC staff members handled some detainees was, in many respects, unprofessional, inappropriate and in violation of BOP policy."

One focus of the report was an American flag T-shirt that hung from a wall at the MDC with the slogan, "These colors don't run." Four corrections employees told investigators that the shirt, which hung in a prisoner receiving area for months, was covered with bloodstains, including some that appeared to have come from detainees being slammed into the wall.

A report issued by Fine in June found "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" at the Brooklyn detention facility's Special Housing Unit, where 84 of the men picked up after the Sept. 11 attacks were held. But investigators said then that firm conclusions on abuse were impossible in many cases because of the lack of videotapes, which prison administrators said at the time had been destroyed.

Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said yesterday that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and in the department's Civil Rights Division were reviewing the report to determine whether criminal charges were warranted. The Justice Department had previously declined to pursue any prosecutions in the cases.

"We agree with the inspector general that even the intense emotional atmosphere surrounding the attacks, particularly in New York City, where smoke was still rising from the rubble of Ground Zero, is no excuse for abhorrent behavior by Bureau of Prisons personnel," Corallo said in a statement. "It is unfortunate that the alleged misconduct of a few employees detracts from the fine work done by the correctional personnel at MDC and around the nation, who conducted themselves professionally and appropriately."

Bureau of Prisons officials declined to comment, referring all questions to the Justice Department.

Barbara J. Olshansky, deputy legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based civil liberties group that is suing the federal government on behalf of detainees, said the report "is astounding confirmation of what we've alleged all along. This goes into exactly what kind of physical and verbal abuse there was and what the contradictions of the government's position has been. . . . It's clear that there was no provocation at any point, and clear that there was no justification for excessive force at any point."

A federal dragnet after the Sept. 11 attacks resulted in the detention of more than 1,200 foreign nationals, including 762 people who were the focus of Fine's original probe. Most were of Arab or South Asian descent and were held on immigration violations under a directive from Attorney General John D. Ashcroft while authorities attempted to determine whether they were connected to the attack or to terrorist groups. None was ever charged with terrorism-related crimes, however.

Many of the incidents of abuse were confirmed when investigators viewed more than 300 videotapes recorded from October to November 2001 that showed detainees being moved around the facility and within their cells, investigators said. Corrections officers who had been interviewed earlier had denied that many of the incidents occurred. MDC Warden Michael Zenk and other officials repeatedly told Fine's investigators that the videotapes had been destroyed as part of a recycling policy, the report said.

The tapes eventually located in August had not been included on inventory sheets provided by the prison and were held in a storage room that also had not been disclosed to investigators, the report said. Many tapes from the period are still missing, and there are unexplained gaps the ones that were found, the report shows.

Many detainees also told investigators that, in the month before the installation of the camera system in October 2001, jail conditions and abuse had been much worse, the report noted. The cameras were installed in part to protect jail officers from unwarranted allegations, Fine said.

"If the camera wasn't on, I would have bashed your face," one detainee was allegedly told by a guard. "The camera is your best friend."

Fine said in an interview that the prison system's failure to turn over all the videotapes "significantly delayed and hindered our investigation," but "we did not find sufficient evidence to prove it was an effort to cover anything up."

He said he remained concerned about allegations of abuse in the weeks before the installation of a video system. "If these incidents are an indication of what was done in front of the camera, what may have occurred without them?" Fine asked. "It's cause for significant concern."

The public version of the report released yesterday does not name individual corrections officers or detainees, but it does describe in detail an unspecified number of violent incidents captured on film or witnessed by guards and law enforcement officials. Several lieutenants and officers interviewed by investigators indicated that they had seen incidents of abuse. One lieutenant told another that "slamming detainees against the wall was all part of being in jail and not to worry about it," the report said.

Another MDC officer said in an affidavit that "there were some lieutenants . . . who would [rein] in an officer for bouncing a detainee against the wall, but there were probably other lieutenants who would let it slide."

During two incidents captured on videotape, the report said, "we observed officers escort detainees down a hall at a brisk pace and ram them into a wall without slowing down before impact." In the numerous "slamming" incidents recorded on tape, the report said, there was no evidence that the detainees had provoked or attacked the guards.

On more than 40 occasions, the report found, MDC staff members recorded detainees' visits with their attorneys using video cameras set up on tripods outside visiting rooms. The tapes routinely captured "significant portions" of conversations between the detainees and legal counsel. In some cases, detainees were instructed not to speak in Arabic or to speak in English because they were being taped.

Such taping is a violation of federal regulations, Fine's investigation found. Prisons rules permit videotaping, but not audiotaping, of attorney visits.

Zenk, the prison warden, told investigators that the cameras were moved farther from the visiting room after an attorney complained in November 2001. But the report says that "as late as February 2002, conversations between detainees and their attorneys are still audible on many of the tapes."

Although the taping "potentially stifled detainees' open and free communications with legal counsel," the report noted that some of the recordings include allegations of physical and verbal abuse that were consistent with the allegations being probed.

The report found two incidents in which inmates were locked in restraints for more than seven hours despite no signs of resistance.

Cheney in region for a day of small-game hunting

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03343/249105.stm

Cheney in region for a day of small-game hunting
By Rebekah Scott, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rebekah Scott can be reached at rscott@post-gazette.com or 724-836-2655.
December 09, 2003

One of Washington's big guns came to Westmoreland County yesterday for a day's shooting at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township.

For the second time in two years, Vice President Dick Cheney arrived at daybreak at Arnold Palmer Airport in Latrobe. Air traffic was halted briefly at about 7 a.m. as Air Force Two landed and Cheney's security detail loaded him and his favorite shotgun into a Humvee and drove up U.S. Route 30 to the exclusive country club.

"All I'm allowed to say is there's a big military plane on the ramp, and it's not the first time I've seen it there," said airport manager Gabe Monzo.

Cheney shot more than 70 ringneck pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks. The birds were plucked and vacuum-packed in time for Cheney's afternoon flight to Washington, D.C.

John Smith, law enforcement supervisor for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, said he was alerted to Cheney's day-trip. Rolling Rock has a game-raising program worthy of a second-in-command, he said, and unlicensed bird hunting is legal this time of year for guests at private clubs.

Scott Wakefield, a dog handler at the club, said about 500 farm-raised pheasants were released from nets for the morning hunt. The 10-man hunting party that included Cheney shot 417 pheasants. The vice president was set to hunt ducks in the afternoon.

Cheney followed a similar hunting schedule in November 2002, when he last visited the Ligonier Township landmark.

Cheney's Washington staff would not confirm his whereabouts yesterday, saying: "Today is his day off and he can spend it where he likes." Spokesman Kevin Kellems said Cheney is expected back in Washington today for a full day's work.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is a quick flight from Washington, D.C., a good alternative to Cheney's favorite South Dakota hunting ground.

Court Grants Prisoners Access to Lawyers - Court Rules U.S. Military Can't Indefinitely Hold Prisoners Without Access to Lawyers, Courts

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20031218_2320.html

Court Grants Prisoners Access to Lawyers - Court Rules U.S. Military Can't Indefinitely Hold Prisoners Without Access to Lawyers, Courts
Associated Press Writer Larry Neumeister contributed from New York.
December 18, 2003

In twin setbacks for the Bush administration's war on terror, federal appeals courts on opposite coasts ruled Thursday that the U.S. military cannot indefinitely hold prisoners without access to lawyers or the American courts.

One ruling favored the 660 "enemy combatants" being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The other involved Jose Padilla, an American who was seized in Chicago in an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" and was declared as an enemy combatant.

In Padilla's case, the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the former gang member released from military custody within 30 days and, if the government chooses, tried in civilian courts. The White House said the government would appeal and seek a stay of the decision.

In the other case, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base should have access to lawyers and the American court system. It was the first such ruling by a federal appeals court anywhere in the country.

"Even in times of national emergency indeed, particularly in such times it is the obligation of the judicial branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the executive branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike," Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in ruling in favor of a Libyan captured in Afghanistan and held in Cuba.

The two rulings highlighted the tensions between national security and civil rights since Sept. 11.

An order by President Bush in November 2001 allows captives to be detained as "enemy combatants" if they are members of al-Qaida, engaged in or aided terrorism, or harbored terrorists. The designation may also be applied if it is "the interest of the United States" to hold an individual during hostilities.

The Justice Department this week said such a classification allows detainees to be held without access to lawyers until U.S. authorities are satisfied they have disclosed everything they know about terrorist operations.

But the New York court ruled 2-1 that Padilla's detention as an enemy combatant was not authorized by Congress and that the Bush administration could not designate him as an enemy combatant without such approval.

Padilla, a convert to Islam, was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare Airport as he returned from Pakistan. Within days, he was moved to the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The government said he had proposed the bomb plot to Abu Zubaydah, then al-Qaida's top terrorism coordinator.

In ordering his release from military custody, the court said the government was free to transfer Padilla to civilian authorities who can bring criminal charges. Padilla could also be held as a material witness in connection with grand jury proceedings, the court said.

"As this court sits only a short distance from where the World Trade Center stood, we are as keenly aware as anyone of the threat al-Qaida poses to our country and of the responsibilities the president and law enforcement officials bear for protecting the nation," Circuit Judge Rosemary S. Pooler wrote.

"But presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum, and this case involves not whether those responsibilities should be aggressively pursued, but whether the president is obligated, in the circumstances presented here, to share them with Congress."

In a dissent, Circuit Judge Richard C. Wesley said that as commander in chief, the president "has the inherent authority to thwart acts of belligerency at home or abroad that would do harm to United States citizens."

Chris Dunn, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the ruling historic. "It's a repudiation of the Bush administration's attempt to close the federal courts to those accused of terrorism," he said.

The White House said the ruling was inconsistent with the president's constitutional authority as well as with other court rulings.

"The president's most solemn obligation is protecting the American people," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "We believe the 2nd Circuit ruling is troubling and flawed."

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, did not immediately return a call for comment. Newman has battled in court to be able to meet with Padilla; she has not done so since he was designated an enemy combatant the month after his arrest.

Thursday's 2-1 decision out of San Francisco was the first federal appeals court ruling to rebuke the Bush administration's position on the Guantanamo detainees, who have been without charges, some for nearly two years.

The administration maintains that because the 660 men confined there were picked up overseas on suspicion of terrorism and are being held on foreign land, they may be detained indefinitely without charges or trial.

But Reinhardt ruled: "We cannot simply accept the government's position that the executive branch possesses the unchecked authority to imprison indefinitely any persons, foreign citizens included, on territory under the sole jurisdiction and control of the United States, without permitting such prisoners recourse of any kind to any judicial forum, or even access to counsel, regardless of the length or manner of their confinement."

The Supreme Court last month agreed to decide whether the Guantanamo detainees, who were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, should have access to the courts. The justices agreed to hear that case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the prisoners had no right to access to the American legal system.

Reinhardt, who signed the 9th Circuit opinion last year that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional when recited in public schools, stayed enforcement of the Guantanamo decision pending the outcome of the case already before the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced Thursday that it has appointed a military defense lawyer for a terrorism suspect held at Guantanamo. Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen becomes the second Guantanamo prisoner to be given a lawyer. Australian David Hicks got a lawyer earlier this month and recently met with an Australian legal adviser.

Both Hamdan and Hicks are among six Guantanamo prisoners designated by the president as candidates for trials by special military tribunals. Neither Hamdan, Hicks nor the others detained in Cuba have been charged.

Padilla is accused of plotting to detonate a "dirty bomb," which uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials.

Besides Padilla, only two other known people who are being detained in the United States have been designated as enemy combatants since the 2001 terrorist attacks: Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar accused of being an al-Qaida sleeper agent, and Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana native captured during the fighting in Afghanistan.

Call to Attention - US Fatalities View - Row After Row, Photos of the Fallen Turn Loss Into Something Personal

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...5072-2003Dec27.html

Call to Attention - US Fatalities View - Row After Row, Photos of the Fallen Turn Loss Into Something Personal
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 28, 2003

Americans are supposed to be squeamish about death, unwilling to face it squarely in their own lives, and resistant to the age-old rituals that remind us of its inevitability and omnipresence. Dying well, for the tidy-minded, means dying peacefully in one's sleep, at a ripe age, without sickness, and with ample provision made for burial. Open caskets are a bit controversial and wearing black is optional; confinement during mourning is virtually nonexistent, and expensive ceremonies of any sort are becoming old-fashioned. For many the rituals of death are simply vulgar. We want our lives turned off like a light.

Yet rituals and remembrance keep coming back at us, newly reconstituted and atavistic at the same time. The odd habit of bringing teddy bears to the site of an accident or the gates of a palace enjoys a vogue, though we rarely see those same bears a week later, after rain and grime have turned them from toy to trash. The candlelight vigil still has currency, from time to time, depending on the weather. And new forms of remembrance, such as the AIDS quilt, break out when needed (although it was eventually overwhelmed by its own scale). All of these recall, if not some actual ritual, a remembrance of ritual, such as the bringing of sacrificial animals to the altar, the lighting of pyres or church candles and the weaving of a funeral shroud.

Newspapers have chosen something between the high school yearbook, the database and the graveyard as a motif for memorializing this war. Periodically, because death in Iraq is no longer really news but must be noted in some form, we collect images of the dead and lay them out in orderly lines, thumbnail "faces of the fallen" above the barest epitaphs, noting the name, the age and perhaps the means of their extinguishing. The Washington Post does so once again today, on Pages A18 and A19, and has kept the list up to date on its Web site (which is searchable).

It seems a studiously neutral way to present the American war dead. Fundamental to the political debate about war is whether too many have died to justify the cause, or not so many as to panic the public or unsettle the resolve for war. So the newspaper graveyard gives a dry, statistical sense of the dead, with apparently little interpretation. We can see that there were good days and bad days, and some very, very bad weeks in November. And that the dead include mostly men, but a few women too, and people of all ages and races.

But despite the neutrality of the presentation, dissonance creeps in. Some of these images are the standard military head shot, flag in the background, hat or cap pulled down tight above the eyes, the mouth set in a rictus of stern determination. But there are more casual images as well, graduation shots, tuxedo-clad young men perhaps en route to the prom, and sunny snapshots. One man is in a woolen cap and coat, dressed for L.L. Bean weather, not the desert; others mug for the camera, setting their faces in stark contrast to the more posed shots that surround them. There is a mix of self-consciousness and blankness, real smiles and forced ones, eyes that glint and eyes that say just take the damn picture.

If every photograph on the page were a standard issue military portrait, it would yield a simple, pleasing, visual consistency; and it would add up to the visual representation of a meaningless statistic. So, intended or not, in this strange assemblage of formal and informal pictures, there is also a tension fundamental to war and loss: Military pictures generally show soldiers with their individuality annihilated, while snapshots capture people with their personalities intact. In war soldiers die, which is to be expected; but soldiers are also people, and when people die it is excruciating. No matter how tiny the image, no matter how thoroughly everything else has been cropped out of the shots, it is surprising how consistently people emerge from these pictures. In these galleries of faces, which it would be easier for all of us to think of as just soldiers, individuality asserts itself.

In a little book about photography called "Camera Lucida," the French critic and author Roland Barthes wrestled with the mystery of why some photographs haunt us and others feel like just so much visual noise. He argued that the vast majority of photographs are functional, belong to basic genera, fill a simple purpose, say something obvious and reveal only broad social meanings: people laughing, soldiers marching, children playing. This "duh" quality of the photograph he called the "studium." But some photographs do the obvious and something more. They prick us. They have what Barthes called a "punctum" that pierces.

Barthes went looking for the punctum in the photographs that moved him. In the case of one image, a handsome young man sitting with his back against a dark wall, his hands manacled together, the punctum was this: "He is dead, and he is going to die." The photograph, taken in 1865, was of a would-be political assassin, facing imminent execution. Barthes stares into the man's eyes and can't get over the uncanny sense that he seems vibrantly alive, but is, through the paradox of photographic time, dead, and "going to die."

That paradox has fascinated people since the beginning of photography, which has maintained an intimate alliance with death throughout its history. In the mid-19th century, when photography was becoming more widely available to middle-class people, it wasn't uncommon to photograph one's dead children, tiny corpses, preserved for the memory in their coffins, and in their Sunday best.

The association continues: In W.G. Sebald's 2001 novel, "Austerlitz," a man slows down an old movie from a Nazi concentration camp until it is a succession of blurry, grainy stills; he thinks he sees an image of his dead mother emerging from a bare quarter section of the frame. We have been querying photographs of the dead since the inception of photography. It's frustrating, fruitless and impossible not to do.

Everything conspires against finding any punctum in photographs like the ones in today's images of the fallen. They are too small. Almost everything personal, but for a smile or the tilt of the head, has been edited out. They're sometimes grainy and, reproduced on newsprint, the images are often thin. They are, in many cases, what Barthes would call pure studium: functional military shots meant to say one thing only, that so and so was a soldier of a certain rank at a certain time. The remarkable thing is that we keep looking for these images to prick us and, despite their formality, their orderliness and the pure statistical neutrality of their layout, they still do.

Barthes was worried that photography would be "tamed," that it would lapse into a dull artiness, or the emptiness of the workaday imagery of magazines and newspapers.

He wanted photographs to continue to pierce, to drive him a bit mad with their frustrating sense of reality being present and elusive at the same time. He needn't have worried. With photography serving its old partner, death, no matter how negligible the images, they still have a sting, especially when the dead are young and need not have died. The thing that is in danger of being tamed isn't photography, it's our reaction to it.

Army Stops Many Soldiers From Quitting

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...st/a36979_2003dec28

US Army Stops Many Soldiers From Quitting
By Lee Hockstader, Washington Post Staff Writer
Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.
December 29, 2003

• Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Eagle, an expert on enemy targeting, served 20 years in the military -- 10 years of active duty in the Air Force, another 10 in the West Virginia National Guard. Then he decided enough was enough. He owned a promising new aircraft-maintenance business, and it needed his attention. His retirement date was set for last February.
• Staff Sgt. Justin Fontaine, a generator mechanic, enrolled in the Massachusetts National Guard out of high school and served nearly nine years. In preparation for his exit date last March, he turned in his field gear -- his rucksack and web belt, his uniforms and canteen.
• Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, an interrogator in an intelligence unit, joined the Army Reserve in 1991, extended his enlistment in 1999 and then re-upped for three years in 2000. Costas, a U.S. Border Patrol officer in Texas, was due to retire from the reserves in last May.
• According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are currently serving in Iraq (news - web sites), and Eagle has just been deployed. On their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now listed sometime after 2030 -- the payroll computer's way of saying, "Who knows?"
  

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.

To the Pentagon, stop-loss orders are a finger in the dike -- a tool to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Through a series of stop-loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.

By prohibiting soldiers and officers from leaving the service at retirement or the expiration of their contracts, military leaders have breached the Army's manpower limit of 480,000 troops, a ceiling set by Congress. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites) last month, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed that the number of active-duty soldiers has crept over the congressionally authorized maximum by 20,000 and now registered 500,000 as a result of stop-loss orders. Several lawmakers questioned the legality of exceeding the limit by so much.

"Our goal is, we want to have units that are stabilized all the way down from the lowest squad up through the headquarters elements," said Brig. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, director of enlisted personnel management in the Army's Human Resources Command. "Stop-loss allows us to do that. When a unit deploys, it deploys, trains and does its missions with the same soldiers."

In a recent profile of an Army infantry battalion deployed in Kuwait and on its way to Iraq, the commander, Lt. Col. Karl Reed, told the Army Times he could have lost a quarter of his unit in the coming year had it not been for the stop-loss order. "And that means a new 25 percent," Reed told the Army Times. "I would have had to train them and prepare them to go on the line. Given where we are, it will be a 24-hour combat operation; therefore it's very difficult to bring new folks in and integrate them."

To many of the soldiers whose retirements and departures are on ice, however, stop-loss is an inconvenience, a hardship and, in some cases, a personal disaster. Some are resigned to fulfilling what they consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded draft.

"I'm furious. I'm aggravated. I feel violated. I feel used," said Eagle, 42, the targeting officer, who has just shipped to Iraq with his field artillery unit for what is likely to be a yearlong tour of duty. He had voluntarily postponed his retirement at his commander's request early this year and then suddenly found himself stuck in the service under a stop-loss order this fall. Eagle said he fears his fledgling business in West Virginia may not survive his lengthy absence. His unexpected extension in the Army will slash his annual income by about $45,000, he said. And some members of his family, including his recently widowed sister, whose three teenage sons are close to Eagle, are bitterly opposed to his leaving.

"An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is allowed to violate the contract; I am not," said Costas, 42, who signed an e-mail from Iraq this month "Chained in Iraq," an allusion to the fact that he and his fellow reservists remained in Baghdad after the active-duty unit into which they were transferred last spring went home. He has now been told that he will be home late next June, more than a year after his contractual departure date. "Unfair. I would not say it's a draft per se, but it's clearly a breach of contract. I will not reenlist."

Other soldiers retained by the Army under stop-loss are more resigned than irate, but no less demoralized by what some have come to regard as their involuntary servitude.

"Unfortunately, I signed the dotted line saying I'm going to serve my country," said Fontaine, 27, the mechanic, who said he spent "20 or 30 days" fruitlessly researching legal ways that he could quit the Army when his contractual departure date came up in February. "All I can do is suck it up and take it till I can get out."

The military's interest in halting the depletion of its ranks predates the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. American GIs in World War II were under orders to serve until the fighting was finished, plus six months.

Congress approved the authority for what became known as stop-loss orders after the Vietnam War, responding to concerns that the military had been hamstrung by the out-rotations of seasoned combat soldiers in Indochina. But the authority was not used until the buildup to the Persian Gulf War (news - web sites) in 1990 when Richard B. Cheney, then the secretary of defense, allowed the military services to bar most retirements and prolong enlistments indefinitely.

A flurry of stop-loss orders was issued after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, intensifying as the nation prepared for war in Iraq early this year. Some of the orders have applied to soldiers, sailors and airmen in specific skill categories -- military police, for example, and ordnance control specialists, have been in particular demand in Iraq.

Other edicts have been more sweeping, such as the Army's most recent stop-loss order, issued Nov. 13, covering thousands of active-duty soldiers whose units are scheduled for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming months. Because the stop-loss order begins 90 days before deployment and lasts for 90 days after a return home, those troops will be prohibited from retiring or leaving the Army at the expiration of their contracts until the spring of 2005, at the earliest.

The proliferation of stop-loss orders has bred confusion and resentment even as it has helped preserve what the military calls "unit cohesion." In the past two years, the Army alone has announced 11 stop-loss orders -- an average of one every nine or 10 weeks.

Often in the past year, the Army has allowed active-duty soldiers to retire and depart but not Guard and reserve troops, many of whom have chafed at the disparity in policies. Some Guard troops and reservists complain their release dates have been extended several times and they no longer know when they will be allowed to leave.

"We don't ever trust anything we're told," said Chris Walsh of Southington, Conn., whose wife, Jessica, an eighth-grade English teacher, is a military police officer in a National Guard unit in Baghdad. She may end up serving nearly two years beyond her original exit date of July 2002, Chris Walsh said. "We've been disappointed too many times."

For many soldiers who had planned on leaving the military, the sudden change of plans has been jarring.

Jim Montgomery's story is typical. Montgomery, an air-conditioning repairman in western Massachusetts, did a three-year hitch in the Army in the '90s and then signed up for a five-year stint in the National Guard. His exit date was July 31, 2003, after which he planned to devote himself to getting his electrician's license -- and to the baby he and his wife, Donna, expected in November, their first.

"I felt like I'd honored my contract," said Montgomery, 35, a beefy, affable man who holds the rank of specialist E4 in the Guard. "The military had given me some good things -- friendships and the opportunity to take some college courses -- and that's where I wanted to leave it."

The Army had other plans. In March, Montgomery's maintenance unit was sent for training to Fort Drum, N.Y. In April it deployed to Kuwait, and since May it has been stationed in southern Iraq. With each move, it became clearer to Montgomery that his July exit date from the Guard would not materialize. The latest he has heard is that the unit may be coming home in April, but even that is uncertain, he said.

Last month Montgomery rushed home on a medical emergency when Donna had complications in childbirth. She and the baby are fine now, but Montgomery is frustrated by his cloudy future.

"Some guys who are Vietnam vets are with us," he said in an interview at his home in Holland, Mass., shortly before he was to return to his unit in Iraq. "They said even in Vietnam, as difficult as it was there, you knew from the time you hit the ground to the time you returned it was one year -- whereas with this it's really up in the air."

Some military officials have acknowledged that stop-loss is a necessary evil. When the Air Force announced it was imposing a stop-loss rule last spring, an official news bulletin from Air Force Print News noted: "Both the secretary [James G. Roche] and the chief of staff [Gen. John P. Jumper] are acutely aware that the Air Force is an all-volunteer force and that this action, while essential to meeting the service's worldwide obligations, is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of voluntary service."

More frequently, the military response to griping about stop-loss is bluntly unsympathetic. "We're all soldiers. We go where were told," said Maj. Steve Stover, an Army spokesman. "Fair has nothing to do with it."

New Willie Nelson Song Condemns War in Iraq

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...=/nm/iraq_nelson_dc


New Willie Nelson Song Condemns War in Iraq
December 31, 2003

Country music icon Willie Nelson has written a Christmas song with an edge -- a protest against the war in Iraq that he hopes will stir passions in those who hear it.

Nelson, 70, told Reuters on Wednesday he wrote "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth" after watching the news on Christmas Day and will play it in Austin, Texas on Saturday at a concert to benefit Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

His rare foray into protest music -- he said it was only the second such song he had written, after the Vietnam-era "Jimmy's Road" -- follows recent political controversies stirred by the Dixie Chicks and Steve Earle.

The Dixie Chicks, one of the biggest acts in country music, had their music boycotted by some country stations after lead singer Natalie Mains said at a concert in London just before the invasion of Iraq that she was embarrassed to be from the same state as President Bush.

Last year Steve Earle sparked the ire of conservatives with his song "John Walker's Blues" about the young American who converted to Islam was captured while fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Nelson said his new song criticized the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and those who thought it unpatriotic to speak out against the war.

The song opens with the line "How much oil is one human life worth?" and swings into the chorus: "Hell they won't lie to me/ Not on my own damn TV/ But how much is a liar's word worth/ And whatever happened to peace on earth?"

"I hope that there is some controversy," said the country singer, who has five nominations in the upcoming Grammy Awards. "If you write something like this and nobody says anything, then you probably haven't struck a nerve.

"I got it out of my system. I was able to say what I was thinking," Nelson said.

David Swanson, a spokesman for the Kucinich campaign, said the candidate was a Willie Nelson fan and the song resonated with themes raised by Kucinich on the stump.

"This is a patriotic song," Swanson said.

Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March saying that Saddam Hussein threatened U.S. security by possessing weapons of mass destruction, but no such weapons were found.

Rehnquist Nails Congress on Judge Limits

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid...entencing&printer=1

Rehnquist Nails Congress on Judge Limits
By JENNIFER C. KERR, Associated Press Writer
January 01, 2003

WASHINGTON - Congress should have sought the judiciary's advice before limiting the ability of judges to impose lighter sentences than specified in federal guidelines, the nation's top judge says. "During the last year, it seems that the traditional interchange between the Congress and the Judiciary broke down when Congress enacted what is known as the Protect Act, making some rather dramatic changes to the laws governing the federal sentencing process," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote Thursday in his annual report on the state of the judiciary.

Prior to the new law, prosecutors had long complained that judges had too much leeway in imposing sentences. Supporters of the measure argue that it was needed to ensure fair and equal sentencing justice throughout the judiciary. House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said too often judges were handing down sentences less than those specified in federal guidelines.

The Judicial Conference of the United States ? a 27-judge body that sets policy for federal trial judges, appeals judges and others ? voted in September to support overturning the law.

The changes that Rehnquist objects to were tucked into an anti-crime bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in April. It targeted child kidnappers, molesters and pornographers and included a national Amber Alert network. But it also included a provision sponsored by Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., and supported by Attorney General John Ashcroft, that reduced federal judges' discretion in sentencing criminals, and required reports to Congress on any judge who departs from sentencing guidelines. Collecting this information on judges, Rehnquist said, is "troubling." He said cataloguing such data "could appear to be an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges in the performance of their judicial duties." Other critics say it could lead to a "black list" of judges deemed soft on crime.

In the report, the chief judge lectured Congress on the importance of a strong working relationship between the judicial and legislative branches, and he cited historical examples in which the two arms of government consulted on drafting laws. He complained that the measure changing judges' sentencing authority was enacted "without any consideration of the views of the judiciary." He added, "It surely improves the legislative process at least to ask the judiciary its views on such a significant piece of legislation." If they did their own for getting the War in iraq, why would they be different when the turn on their own.

Mary Cheh, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, said Rehnquist has a legitimate complaint. Congress adopted "rules and procedures that really are quite unacceptable as far as the judges go because it so restricts their discretion and so straightjackets the process that it really has caused a lot of consternation," she said. The new law means "the sentencing process is even more removed from the judge ... and placed more heavily in the hands of prosecutors."

"The Feeney amendment seeks to correct these sentencing disparities so that one person doesn't receive a sentence three times as long as another person committing the same crime," Sensenbrenner said in a statement responding to Rehnquist's report. Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and other Democrats have introduced legislation that would nullify the Feeney amendment. Calls to Feeney's offices in Washington and Florida were not returned Wednesday.

Judge rules US troops were 'guinea pigs' for anthrax jabs

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/23/1071941731382.html

Judge rules US troops were 'guinea pigs' for anthrax jabs
By Esther Schrader
December 24, 2003

The Pentagon has suspended compulsory vaccination of US troops against anthrax after a federal court judge ordered the military to stop treating its personnel like "guinea pigs".

US District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the mandatory inoculations, administered to more than 900,000 troops, violated a law passed in 1998 prohibiting the use of experimental drugs on troops.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, which represented the military in the case, said the Pentagon would instruct medical personnel at US military facilities around the world to temporarily halt the vaccinations while it reviews the ruling.

Earlier this year 52 Australian troops were flown home from the Persian Gulf after they refused to have the vaccine because they were concerned about possible side-effects. This was despite the vaccination being voluntary for Australian forces.

Lawyers representing US soldiers say the shots have sickened hundreds and caused a handful of deaths.

In his 33-page judgement, Judge Sullivan ruled that the anthrax vaccinations vio-lated a law passed by Congress in the wake of concern that similar inoculations may have led to illness among veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.

Australia's Opposition defence spokesman, Chris Evans, said yesterday the Defence Force should review its policy in light of the US judgement.

Defence Minister Robert Hill and the Defence Department would not comment.

Australian Defence Association executive director Neil James said the vaccine was "a reasonably dangerous injection". But he said the issue was almost irrelevant with Saddam Hussein's capture. "The most likely user of anthrax... was the regime of Saddam Hussein. That regime no longer exists, so the threat's gone," Mr James said.