Redeployed wounded, the part of the surge no one talks about

CHUCK CLAMON With a mix of medication prescribed after suffering head and spine injuries in Iraq, the sergeant first class says, I feel helpless. I could care less about actually leaving the house now. (Post Andy Cross )

DENNY NELSON The 19-year Army veteran and Bronze Star recipient was sent to Kuwait while he was still using crutches. (Post Andy Cross )

AMY DUERKSEN The 19-year-old s family calls her suicide in Iraq friendly fire - because they failed to take care of a fellow soldier. Her diary talks of her rape at a training session before being deployed.

The battle within
Soldiers who struggle with pained bodies or troubled minds still get deployed, sometimes on crutches or antidepressants, by an Army pressed to fill the ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Erin Emery and David Olinger
The Denver Post

In the weeks before Christmas last year, a brigade of battle-bruised soldiers left Colorado's Fort Carson for its third round of war in Iraq.

Sgt. Colin Barton was getting Botox shots in his forehead to kill the relentless pain from a brain injury. Army doctors said he should not wear a helmet — a safety requirement for the flight to Iraq. The Army sent him anyway.

Sgt. Joshua Rackley, recovering from his eighth knee surgery, was classified as permanently injured. The Army sent him anyway.

Master Sgt. Denny Nelson and Sgt. Joseph Smith didn't have time to recover from predeployment surgeries. Nelson hobbled with crutches; Smith wore a post-surgical boot. Sgt. Tim Graham brought a sleep-apnea machine. Sgt. 1st Class Walter Overton had a shoulder injury and couldn't lift his gear. Spec. Joseph Leon was popping morphine pills to dull the nerve damage to his groin.

The Army sent them too.

Five years into the war in Iraq and six years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Army is sending soldiers with physical and mental injuries back to war, at times overruling physicians' classifications of soldiers as "nondeployable."

Facing demands unprecedented in the history of the all-volunteer force, the Army has deployed soldiers with slings and crutches and some who need machines to help keep them alive through the night. Thousands are taking pain, sleep or antidepressant medication, with sometimes deadly consequences.

The pressure to send marginal soldiers grew with the "surge" of troops to Iraq in January 2007, an effort that Army leaders say has succeeded in stabilizing the nation's government and reducing sectarian violence.

Yet from the onset of the Iraq war, deployment pressures have been evident. An Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis shows that 43,000 service members — two-thirds of them in the Army or Army Reserve — were classified as nondeployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed.

Through May, about 206,000 soldiers, plus about 63,000 in the Army National Guard and Reserve, had gone to Iraq or Afghanistan at least twice, Army data show.

TRAVIS VIRGADAMO The night he was given back his gun in Iraq, he killed himself, his grandmother said. The teen was on Prozac when he was deployed and had been previously been on suicide watch, she said.

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