The Fort Carson Murder Spree
Soldiers returning from Iraq have been charged in at least 11 murders at America's third-largest Army base. Did the military's own negligence contribute to the slayings?
L. CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Posted Nov 06, 2009 9:58 AM
It was just after closing time on Saturday night when the four soldiers staggered out of the Rum Bay nightclub ("Southern Colorado's largest supply of rum!"), piled into a gray Audi A4 and lit a blunt. Since they had returned from fighting in Iraq, where they had seen some of the bloodiest action of the war, nights like this had become common. There are more than 50 bars in downtown Colorado Springs, and on some nights thousands of people, many of them troops from nearby Fort Carson, pour out onto the streets after last call, looking for trouble. Rum Bay was one of the worst dives in town: Infamous for brawls involving drunken soldiers, locals called it "Fight Club." That night, the bar offered a special dispensed by shooter girls in denim cutoffs, who carried trays filled with test tubes of vodka mixed with apple schnapps. "We drank an ungodly amount," one of the men, Kenneth Eastridge, later recalled. "Like, hundreds of shots."
Eastridge and the others were members of the same Army unit, and they had all served together in Baghdad during the most volatile phase of the war. A 24-year-old specialist known as a "crazy bastard with no remorse," Eastridge had been court-martialed for stockpiling 463 pills of Valium in his barracks. Two of his buddies from Charlie Company carried equally sketchy reputations: Bruce Bastien, a 21-year-old medic who had been arrested for beating his wife while on leave, and Louis Bressler, a 24-year-old private who "started acting like King Kong," in the words of a fellow soldier, after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Tucked beneath the driver's seat of the Audi was a .38 revolver registered to Bressler's wife.
read more here
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30794989/the_fort_carson_murder_spree/
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Monday, November 9, 2009
Did the military's own negligence contribute to the slayings?
While I don't think it was all the fault of the military, it is easy to say that what they did not do added to all of this. Just think about knowing repeat deployments incresed the risk of PTSD but no one seemed to be bothered by this fact at all even though this report came from the Army. Think of the lack of programs proven to work instead of as one provider told me, "better than nothing" when it came to addressing the never ending stress on these men and women. Then remember how they saw over 22,000 needing mental health care, asking for it, but being kicked out of the military with dishonorable discharges, leaving them unable to get any help at all or any benefits. If you think that did not make things worse for the attitude of the troops, you may be of like mind with military leaders and part of the problem as well.
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