This
article is provided courtesy of Stars & Stripes,
which got its start as a newspaper for Union troops during the Civil War, and has been published continuously since 1942 in Europe and 1945 in the Pacific. Stripes reporters have been in the field with American soldiers, sailors and airmen in World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Bosnia and Kosovo, and are now on assignment in the Middle East.
Stars and Stripes has one of the widest distribution ranges of any newspaper in the world. Between the Pacific and European editions, Stars & Stripes services over 50 countries where there are bases, posts, service members, ships, or embassies.
By David Goldstein, Knight Ridder Newspapers Stars and Stripes European Edition
WASHINGTON — To meet the demand for troops in Iraq,
the military has been deploying some National Guard and Army Reserve
soldiers who aren't fit for combat.
More than a dozen members of the Guard and reserves told Knight Ridder
they were shipped off to battle with little attention paid to their
medical histories.
Those histories included ailments such as asthma, diabetes, recent
surgery and hearing loss. Once in Iraq, the soldiers faced severe
conditions that aggravated their medical problems, and the medical
care available to them was limited.
David Lloyd, a 44-year-old mechanic with the Tennessee National Guard,
died of a heart attack in Iraq last August. His wife, Pamela Lloyd,
said her husband didn't know he'd had a problem, but his autopsy showed
three blockages in his coronary arteries.
"He should have never been deployed," she said. "He was supposed to
have been given a thorough physical. He had none. The only thing he
had was the shots."
"They funneled us through the medical part: boom, boom, boom," said
Michael Scott, an Iowa National Guardsman who had a herniated disc.
"They let it be known they weren't real interested in hearing about
stuff. `No, you're fine right now.'"
A memo from the European Regional Medical Command in Germany, where
many injured soldiers were sent, criticized the pre-deployment medical
screening and said soldiers who were unfit for Iraq were having to
be sent home. Deploying them was a risk to their health and an added
cost for the military, it said.
The memo contained the concerns of Col. Holly Doyne, a physician based
there at the time. Doyne has been deployed to Kuwait and couldn't
be reached for this article. Another Army medical officer, who didn't
want his name used, confirmed that Doyne's memo was distributed to
various stateside medical officials and commanders.
Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official, acknowledged that
some medically unqualified troops have been sent to Iraq but said
"the percentages are extremely small." He said the Pentagon was taking
steps to improve medical screening.
How many soldiers are unfit is unclear. Each soldier who spoke with
Knight Ridder said he or she knew of others who — like themselves
— were sent to Iraq despite health problems ranging from allergies
requiring refrigerated medications to heart disease.
Several also said many soldiers weren't given physicals but only were
asked a few cursory questions about their health by the medical screeners.
Gerry Mosley, a retired first sergeant with a reserve unit from Mississippi,
said the practice of sending medically unqualified troops was widespread
in the Guard and reserves. "It wasn't about healthy troops," he said
in an interview. "It was about the number of troops."
"Soldiers with medical conditions that would be adversely affected
by deployment were `rubber-stamped' as fit for duty," Mosley says
in testimony prepared for a congressional hearing next week on military
health care. "Medical profiles were ignored."
All the soldiers interviewed by Knight Ridder said their units and
the medical officers who screened them, either after they were activated
or at their mobilization sites, were aware of their medical conditions.
The problem was worrisome enough to trigger concerns last April at
the European Regional Medical Command.
Doyne's memo said pre-deployment screening was "clearing individuals
for movement to the combat zone without knowledge of the medical system
limitation in the combat theater. ... OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom)
is NOT peacekeeping. It is combat. The medical support is austere."
It said the problem was a "KEY medical issue" and went on to say,
"Frankly, we are burning out a lot of time and effort on shipping
back folks who never should have come in the first place. Also runs
a high risk of damaging folks."
The memo added: "Current practice of taking the theory of `if they
are on duty they are OK' is not working. Nor is the assumption that
if they have been found fit for duty by a medical board in the past
they are fit."
Kilpatrick, the Defense Department's deputy director of deployment
health support, said the Pentagon was requiring more scrutiny of a
soldier's medical background before he or she is shipped overseas.
"We just need to do a better job educating our medical providers —
the people doing the pre-deployment screening — of the importance
of making this on an individual basis," he said.
Of the 120,000 or so troops in Iraq, about 40 percent, or nearly 50,000,
are National Guard and reserves. Kilpatrick said that if even 1 percent
were medically unfit, that was 500 soldiers who were likely to become
patients at military hospitals.
Nearly every one of the soldiers interviewed had to be medically evacuated
out of Iraq because battlefield conditions exacerbated their health
problems.
"That's a tremendous medical logistical burden," Kilpatrick said.
Sen. Christopher Bond, a Missouri Republican who co-chairs the Senate's
National Guard Caucus, said he "raised unshirted hell" with Army brass
when he learned that it had deployed medically unfit troops.
"There's no question that they screwed up badly," said Bond, who co-chairs
the caucus with Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont. "This should
have never happened."
The disclosure that the military has deployed medically unfit troops
adds to a larger pattern of problems plaguing its ability to monitor
its soldiers' health.
Knight Ridder reported last March that the military wasn't medically
screening troops both before and after deployments, as required by
law. Those screenings were supposed to include pre- and post-deployment
blood tests.
Congress mandated the tests in 1997 to prevent a recurrence of Gulf
War Syndrome, the mysterious malady that's affected some soldiers
who fought in the first Persian
Gulf War.
In addition, the General Accounting Office, the investigating arm
of Congress, has found that the military has been lax in keeping up
with its medical reporting. Guard and reserve troops are required
to undergo medical examinations every five years, and every two years
for those over 40.
The GAO also is looking into the problem of National Guard and reserve
troops being kept for long periods in "medical holds" at several bases
while their conditions are evaluated.
A high-ranking noncommissioned officer in the Army Reserve, who didn't
want his name used for fear of reprisals by his superiors, has been
assigned to the medical hold at Fort Knox, Ky., since last summer.
He had had surgery on his neck for a bulging disc two months before
his unit was activated earlier last year.
His doctors had told him to limit his activities for six months, and
not to lift anything heavier than 30 pounds. But the officer said
that after looking at his medical records and asking him to raise
his arms above his head, the medical screening officer at Fort Snelling,
Minn., where his unit reported in January 2003, told him, "You seem
to be good to go."
By last March, he was in Iraq carrying 75 pounds of equipment on his
back daily. Constantly in pain, he was taking heavy doses of ibuprofen
and acetaminophen.
By May, he'd been sent home and began an odyssey through military
hospitals, ending with a metal plate in his neck to replace the surgically
repaired disc that had fragmented during his deployment.
"It's a nightmare," the officer said. "I believe my neck would have
healed up if I had time. The pain was leaving, and now I'm stuck with
the pain again."
"They seem to want to think that we are malingerers," said Debra Rockwell,
41, an Illinois reservist with an engineering unit who has arthritis
in both hips and had to be sent back to the States. "Most of us would
like to stay in the Army and do our jobs. We're not doing this to
get out."
Scott, the Iowa National Guardsman, said his herniated disc was the
reason for his medical discharge from the military in 1995. He said
he never got it corrected, but the Army allowed him to re-enlist in
2001 so he could earn his 20-year retirement benefits. Then his unit
was called up for Iraq.
"I told them about my back," said Scott, a 43-year-old truck driver.
"I was told to let sleeping dogs lie." He said he didn't have his
medical paperwork, and "they didn't seem real interested. I was breathing.
I had a pulse. They needed bodies."
