Army Refuses to Pay Deployed Soldiers Leads To Suicide

Posted by: Kevin Lake Posted date: August 16, 2013 In: News

Army refuses to pay deployed soldiers, leads to suicide.

 Though the novel “Off Switch” is a work of fiction, it is based on fact; events that author and Iraq War Veteran Kevin E Lake and his battle buddies from his former Washington Army National Guard unit faced while on deployment in Iraq, and issues some of them, as well as other soldiers from various units- Guard, Reserves and active Army- have faced since returning.
To give an idea of some of the issues that deployed troops face, other than simply being shot at and mortared and hit by roadside bombs, we’ve taken the author’s afterward from Lake’s novel “Off Switch” and copied it here, as written, to give you an idea of what soldiers face in theater, and often times more heart breaking, what they face when they come home. You can get “Off Switch” on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Off-Switch-ebook/dp/B009Q3MSK2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350804270&sr=8-1&keywords=off+switch+kevin+lake
*From Lake’s “Off Switch”
I am now, and forever will be pro-soldier. My time spent in the military gives me some of the fondest memories of my life.
Yet also some of the most disturbing.
I want to point out some of the ‘unbelievable’ accounts in this novel that are based on real events.
During my first four months in Iraq I did NOT receive pay, and my National Guard leadership, through my chain of command, did nothing. My platoon leader, a certain lieutenant, would NOT allow me to simply go to the finance office and inquire about my pay problem.
When I pleaded with this lieutenant to allow me to do so, as my three children back in the states were going without their needs being met because I was not paying my child support as a result of not receiving my bi-weekly paycheck while I was deployed to a warzone, he told me, “Lake, you don’t know how good you and your kids have it. You need to look at these kids in Iraq and realize how lucky you and your kids are.” And then he told me that if I were to go to the finance office I would be reprimanded, placed on extra duty, and would ‘fill every sandbag he could find in Mosul.’
Only when I was on my way to complain to the Inspector General, again, four months after not having been paid, was I finally escorted to the finance office by my First Sergeant. We were able to get my pay problem resolved that day. My First Sergeant told me he would have done so sooner, but the lieutenant had been telling him that my problem was already fixed and not to worry about it.
And I know my First Sergeant was telling the truth.
But the damage had been done. My ex-wife had made arrangements to move my three children to England, against my knowledge, during this period, and I didn’t have a legal leg to stand on since I had not been supporting my family.
While I was later hospitalized (for 6 months!) upon return from my deployment, she did in fact move my children to England. I went to J.A.G. seeking legal help, and they told me they wouldn’t help me because the Army couldn’t appear to look anti-family in the eyes of the media and the public by getting involved in such family sensitive cases.
I have seen my children three times in the three years since.
*
Members of my unit and I were denied permission, by our National Guard leadership, to receive medical attention for injuries we sustained while we were in Iraq. We were threatened with reprimands, article 15’s and loss of rank and pay, for ‘malingering’ (faking injury or illness) by our leadership.
One of my battle buddies broke one of his fingers while playing basketball during one of our forced P.T. sessions between missions. When he finally sought medical treatment in spite of the threats from our leadership, he was taken off of mission for a couple of weeks so his finger could heal, understandably and only because of doctor’s orders, but then assigned extra duty by our leadership as punishment for seeking medical attention.
We really were forced by our National Guard leadership to take mandatory P.T. tests while we were in theater. I had never scored below the perfect 300 mark in my career, but I was forced to take these tests as well while many of those among our senior leadership, N.C.O.s who held squad leader and platoon sergeant positions, and who hadn’t passed a P.T. test in years (‘pencil whipping’ the results from their National Guard Unit offices before turning the results in to National Guard Headquarters) did not.
On one such exam, after an extended convoy security mission, something in my groin region snapped, and hurt like hell while I was doing sit-ups.
And then I was forced to run two miles, for time.
I walked and worked and continued to go on missions hunched over and in pain for the remainder of the deployment, because I was denied permission by my National Guard leadership to seek medical treatment for my injury. With less than two weeks to go in theater, and only after our unit had been replaced on missions by the new incoming unit, I finally sought medical treatment, against the permission of my leadership, and was misdiagnosed with a hernia.
When we returned to the states, I was stationed at the Warriors in Transition Battalion (WTB- medical holdover unit for wounded soldiers) at Fort Lewis, just south of Seattle, Washington, where it was found that I had actually disconnected my epididymis. In laymen’s terms, the tube that connects to the testicle and carries seminal fluid to the outside world had been torn off of my right testicle. I apologize to those of you with weak stomachs, but that is what happened and there is no simpler way to state it.
I spent the next six months in the hospital having surgery and being treated for a severe infection caused by seminal fluid having drained into my inguinal canal and spoiling. This is what caused the swelling and the pain in my groin region that gave all appearances of a hernia. All of this could have been treated in Iraq, in a matter of days, had I been allowed to seek medical treatment. I would not have suffered so much for so long and lost another six months of my life to the Army.
Also, I would have avoided the worst, which was yet to come.
While I was on medical holdover, I got addicted to pain killers. Namely, Vicodin, but also whatever my battle buddies stationed at the WTB were willing to trade for my Vicodin. Narcotics were handed out to us like candy, and though I needed them dreadfully at first, due to the level of intensity to which the pain from my injury had progressed since I was denied medical attention by my leadership while in Iraq, there came a point where I no longer needed it, and I begged the doctors to quit prescribing it to me, as I’ve known my entire life that I have an addictive personality, and at times I have struggled with addiction. The idea of returning to active addiction and not being able to shake it again was scaring the hell out of me. They’d tell me ‘not to be a tough guy’ and give me a bottle of forty for the week, and I ate every damn last one of them, except for the ones I exchanged with other soldiers for other drugs.
I spent the next two years struggling with addiction.
*
Suicide was quite an issue at the WTB, but while I was there, there was only one.
I spent Christmas Day of 2010 with a soldier who would soon commit suicide. Though I’d been at the WTB for several months by then, and had seen this soldier around, I had never really spoken to him. He had been at the WTB for some time, nearly two years if memory serves me correctly, and had no expected date for when he was to leave.
One of his legs had been crushed during a recent deployment and it wavered back and forth between paralysis and recovery, as he explained it to me, but it seemed to be spending longer periods of time in a state of paralyses and less time among the living appendages of his body. He shared with me that he had been begging the Army to amputate his leg and allow him to learn to live with a prosthetic, and allow him to also get out of the WTB and get on with his life.
But they wouldn’t.
A weak or so later, when we had our first formation after the New Year’s break, this soldier was a no-show. The leadership went searching for him and found him sometime later in his room, dead from an overdose of his prescription medications. He had apparently been there, in his private room, for days, and no one had even checked on him.
On the day of the memorial service, I commented to one of our N.C.O.’s in charge at the WTB that it didn’t seem real to me that I had eaten Christmas dinner with someone who was now dead because of suicide. I was wishing I could have seen a sign, that there was something I could have said or done. Then the N.C.O. said to me, “It’s about time he killed himself. We’ve been telling him to just kill himself for a while now.”
As you can imagine, I was shocked. I asked this N.C.O. what they meant and they told me that they used to have this soldier in their platoon and had requested he be transferred because he was always ‘crying about killing himself,’ and that this N.C.O. and others were ‘sick of hearing it, and had been telling him to just do it and get it over with.’
He finally did.
*
My driver’s license really had expired while I was in Iraq and when I attempted to renew them in West Virginia, my home state and to where I had relocated not long after being released from the hospital. I was unable to do so.
It turned out that there was a hold on my license because I had allowed my auto insurance to expire while I was in Iraq. But it was on a truck that I had relieved myself of during the deployment. I did not own it anymore when the insurance lapsed.
The D.M.V. told me that my DD-214 would NOT work for proof of my deployment, and that I needed to get the C.O. of my National Guard unit to send them a certified letter stating that I had been with them in Iraq during the disputed dates, or otherwise pay a nearly $600 fine for not having insurance.
I contacted my old National Guard unit in regard to this matter, and a week later they got back in touch with me and told me that they needed a certified letter from the D.M.V. requesting a certified letter from them.
Seriously!
I’ve since relocated to the Philippine Islands, a nation of which I am not a citizen, and have never fought in a war to defend (though my forefathers have liberated them twice in the last 120 years, first from Spain in the Spanish American War and then from Japan in WWII), and I have had no problems buying a motorcycle here, getting it registered, insured, and licensed and driving at will. Yet when I left America to come here, two years after having returned from deployment to Iraq, I still had not been granted a driver’s license to drive on the roads of the nation of which I had been sent to Iraq to defend. I was still waiting on certified letters from two different government agencies who were busy passing the buck back and forth.
Where the hell is Harry Truman when you need him?
*
I still reside in the Philippines and am happy to report, that as of the writing of this book, I have beaten addiction again, or rather, have been given a daily reprieve from the terrifying grasps of addiction.
For today.
And those daily reprieves have been stacking up. It has been nearly a year (*almost two years as of the date of this media article being published) since I have eaten any of the ‘skittles’ given me by the Army hospital at Ft. Lewis, or any of the seven, that is correct, seven different prescription medications given me by the VA hospital in Beckley, WV.
I did suffer from chronic pain while in the U.S. as a result of injuries I sustained while in Iraq (that damn body armor) and the colder temperatures, but the tropical environment of the Philippines allows me to live relatively pain free without the use of drugs that put me in more of a hell than any physical pain I’ve ever experienced; drugs that hijack my mind and make it impossible for me to think straight, or in any way be a productive member of any society.
All that the drugs seemed to enable me to do was take more drugs. I certainly was not able to write while on them, let alone live life the way it is meant to be lived, the way I am living it today.
*
At this point in time, the largest battle the U.S. military faces is not on some far away battlefield in the Middle East, but within its own ranks. Broken and disturbed soldiers, who are angry, depressed, and confused, are killing themselves in historical record numbers.
For the first time in world history, more soldiers from a certain war or wars, (the wars in the Middle East) have died from suicide than have died on the battlefield.
And the National Guard and Army Reserve suicide numbers are not even being included among the Army suicide rate numbers being given to the public!
Smarter men and women than me are addressing the issue, and for the sake of my brothers and sisters in arms, I hope they figure it out. I might offer a few simple suggestions, but as I was never anything more than a lower enlisted man (E-4 specialist) who never knew my place (according to my former National Guard leadership who didn’t feel I was worthy of receiving pay to care for my family, or receive medical care when I was seriously and painfully injured), my views may not carry much weight, or even be very good, but here they are:
1- When the war is over, go home. By the time my unit deployed to Iraq, we were simply occupying a defeated nation and everyone on both sides knew it. So many vets have deployed, many of them repeatedly, merely to spend a year of their lives escorting and protecting civilian contractors who are piling up profits selling the U.S. Army and foreign governments anything from concrete to soda-pops, while their personal lives are falling to pieces back home.
Yes, we enlisted. We volunteered. But it was to fight a threat against America, and to defend others in foreign lands who do not possess the ability to defend themselves, not to watch publicly traded companies increase quarterly profits consistently to please shareholders, or to suffer at the hands of abusive, toxic leadership who develop prison mentalities, perhaps out of sheer boredom as much as anything else.
2- Perhaps the men and women who have fought overseas should be allowed to seek medical and mental healthcare treatment in the private sector, beginning immediately upon returning from deployment, and then bill the Veterans Affairs Administration who seems, at times, too busy with red tape and protocol to provide timely care themselves.
Delay, deny and hope that I die?
If the private sector is good enough for the public, then why isn’t it good enough for the troops? Especially when the military and government sides seems to have been able to do all they can in special cases (“…we’ve all been telling him to just kill himself,” the N.C.O. said as we headed to the memorial service).
Less than one half of one percent of the American people ever serves in the U.S. armed forces. Less than half of those ever deploy, even during a time of war. These men and women deserve the best upon returning home, if they are fortunate enough to do so.
3- And finally, it has been noted that substance abuse is the second most common risk factor for suicide after major depression and bipolar disorder, and many people who suffer from P.T.S.D. also suffer from depression. So, add to a veteran’s depression drug addiction, via the small, private pharmacies the VA is handing out to most veterans suffering from P.T.S.D., and especially those who suffer from any physical pain, and it is pretty easy to see, as I hope I have made painstakingly clear in this novel, that you end up with veterans now suffering from depression and drug addiction.
This adds up to suicide waiting to happen.
I’m not a doctor or a social worker, so I am not technically qualified to give advice in this regard, but after my own experiences I am certainly free to give my own opinion.
Not to mention, I spent a year in hell earning that right and giving everyone else the right to do the same.
*Kevin E Lake is an Iraq War Veteran and an author. His book “Off Switch” was written to raise awareness of the suicide epidemic among our veterans in the U.S. and it is available on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Off-Switch-ebook/dp/B009Q3MSK2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350804270&sr=8-1&keywords=off+switch+kevin+lake

http://freepatriot.org/2013/08/16/ar...ds-to-suicide/