Unbelievable

by hilzoy

Before this administration took office, I would have thought that the one thing I could count on Republicans to do right was to take care of the basic needs of our men and women in uniform. "Help is on the way", Bush said. I suppose I should have remembered that he came from the same party that told us (falsely) that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'", and taken it as a threat. Leaving aside the little matter of sending them off to fight a needless war without bothering to take care of such minor details as planning for the occupation, we've seen the guard and reserves stretched to the breaking point, stop-loss orders, Humvees with inadequate protection, and soldiers buying their own body armor. So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this:

"His hand had been blown off in Iraq, his body pierced by shrapnel. He could not walk. Robert Loria was flown home for a long recovery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he tried to bear up against intense physical pain and reimagine his life's possibilities. The last thing on his mind, he said, was whether the Army had correctly adjusted his pay rate -- downgrading it because he was out of the war zone -- or whether his combat gear had been accounted for properly: his Kevlar helmet, his suspenders, his rucksack.

But nine months after Loria was wounded, the Army garnished his wages and then, as he prepared to leave the service, hit him with a $6,200 debt. That was just before last Christmas, and several lawmakers scrambled to help. This spring, a collection agency started calling. He owed another $646 for military housing.

"I was shocked," recalled Loria, now 28 and medically retired from the Army. "After everything that went on, they still had the nerve to ask me for money."

Although Loria's problems may be striking on their own, the Army has recently identified 331 other soldiers who have been hit with military debt after being wounded at war. The new analysis comes as the United States has more wounded troops than at any time since the Vietnam War, with thousands suffering serious injury in Iraq or Afghanistan. (...)

At the root of the problem is an outdated Defense Department computer system, which does not automatically link pay and personnel records. This creates numerous pay errors -- and overpayments become debts, said Gregory D. Kutz, the GAO's managing director for forensic audits and special investigations. "They've been trying to modernize it since the mid-1990s," he said. "They have been unsuccessful."

No one can say how many troops have pay problems across the military, Kutz said, but the GAO has found that, in certain Army National Guard and Reserve units, more than 90 percent of soldiers have had at least one overpayment or underpayment during deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. Steps have since been taken to improve the system, but the problem will not be eliminated, Kutz said, until the larger computer system is reengineered.

Typically, troops get a boost in pay while in combat. When they come home, the system can take extra weeks to catch up with the change, and some people are overpaid. For wounded troops -- still adjusting to their injuries and changed futures -- a debt notice can be another bitter discovery. (...)

Tyson Johnson, 24, of Prichard, Ala., was stunned after being struck by a mortar round in Iraq to find a bill waiting for him when he came home from the hospital. It was for $2,700, the bonus he had been given when he enlisted. "I definitely felt betrayed, because I went over there and almost lost my life," said Johnson, a corporal when he was injured. His debt was resolved after his story made news. "I really didn't need more stress."

Sgt. Gary Dowd, 28, was caught in an ambush 30 miles north of Tikrit, Iraq, in 2003 and suffered multiple injuries, losing his left hand and forearm. After 13 months of treatment, he retired from the Army early this year. Shortly afterward, he received a letter at his home in Tampa asking him to repay $600 for a survivor-benefit insurance plan he had opted out of when he signed his deployment papers. There was no number on the bill to call -- no way to protest. "I was pretty irked that they thought I owed them something," he said. "I feel like I've given them enough.""

Amazing. Somehow or other, in the rush to pass tax cuts for the rich, the Congress might have found time to try to force action on this. Or perhaps the President could have taken time out of his busy schedule of scripted meetings pushing his doomed Social Security plan to groups of pre-screened supporters, interspersed with weeks of brush-cutting, or even taken the time he would normally have spent on one mountain bike ride, to call someone into his office and make it clear that it was just not acceptable to send creditors after wounded soldiers on the grounds that they had lost a limb before serving the full term specified in their signing bonus.

But, as our President said: "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life." More important, apparently, than making sure that the men and women who were wounded in his war can recover without the army siccing collection agencies on them.

Comments

[Jackmormon]

I spent the better part of a year listening obsessively to the ARF Radio Network in Germany. The sense I got from listening in was that there was a central authority who would take care of you, but that there were any number of omnimously invoked (yet vague) pitfalls that the less virtuous might fall into. Of course the AFN shows that talked about money were those associated with the demon NPR, which got minimal and marginalized airtime compared to Rush, Dr. Laura, and very anodyne central military news productions.

[Nicanor]

Comical. Sad and comical. Wait until we see all these fellows on the street with their 'wounded in iraq, please give money' scrawled in magic marker on a card board sign. Unfortunately for them the marker is not really all that magical, and we only give in bursts. 'Ah,' they perhaps may think, 'If only I was wounded in a natural disaster.'

-Nicanor

[Jesurgislac]

They're only trying to move the US back into the 19th century, one step at a time. "And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!" Rudyard Kipling

[Tim]

Well, now we know what an invasion run by Al Capone would look like.

[Tim]

Well, now we know what an invasion run by Al Capone would look like.

[Tim]

Well, now we know what an invasion run by Al Capone would look like.

[Tim]

Wow, I only hit post once.

[Tim]

Wow, I only hit post once.

[CaseyL]

(No, Tim; now we know what a country run by Al Capone would look like.)

The difference between the Borgias and the Bushes is that the Borgias left a legacy of great art, architecture and literature.

[dutchmarbel]

You missed the bit last year where the soldiers landed in hospital and their fellow-soldiers were trying to get clothes and such for them.

The military gives them a $250 voucher to buy clothing and toiletries at the BX, but many are not ambulatory, and those who are have to wait for a bus to get down to the BX on Ramstein 7 miles away. The BX runs out of the clothing and it takes weeks for more to come in. Those who can go to the BX still need something to wear to get there!

The cadets are collecting new clothing and toiletries to that they can take to the wounded at LRMC. Below is a list of items the wounded need. It is cold here in Germany and warm items are needed.

I seem to recall that the wounded soldiers actually had to pay for their hospital meals too.

[Ugh]

It's all part of the bankruptcy bill hilzoy, didn't ya know?

Can't have those free loaders running up all sorts of debt and then try and get out of it by having one or more limbs blown off, nossiree, that's an abuse of Chapter 7 (or whatever). If we allowed that, soon everyone with credit card debt, even if only a few hundred dollars, will start amputatin' limbs left and right to take advantage of the loophole, and pretty soon half the country will be debt (and limb) free. After all, it's an easy choice between lopping off your left hand (especially if you're right handed) and paying off your credit card bill.

Plus think of all the future ADA plaintiffs that would result if we didn't come down hard on these guys.

Sending debt collecters after maimed soldiers: good for America.

[Sofocleto]

July 7, London Bombing - a coincidence?

Many strange facts from highly credible sources are coming in regarding the recent London bombings. The most astonishing is the following conversation which took place the afternoon of the London bombing on BBC radio. The BBC host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, which bills itself as a 'crisis management' advice company. Peter Power was a former Scotland Yard official.

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this, and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning. We planned this for a company, and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met. And so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one, and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking.

Mr. Power repeats these statements on ITN television. The two-minute video clip is available HERE.

"CRISIS PLANNING: When there is an emergency like the London bombings, the public instinctively turns to professionals for help. We speak to two experts who are in Toronto today for the World Conference on Disaster Management. Adrian Gordon is the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness, and Peter Power is Managing Director of a London-based consulting firm that specializes in crisis management, Visor Consultants - which on the morning of July 7 was co-incidentally running a security exercise for a private firm, simulating multiple bomb explosions in the London Underground, at the same stations that were subsequently attacked in real life."

[Barry]

A year or so ago Molly Ivins commented that, back in 1980, she figured there'd at least be one good thing from Reagan winning the presidency - he'd fix the deficit. She figured that Republicans were businessmen, and understood accounting, and bottom lines, and such.