PTSD and Gambling: New Combat Vets Plagued by Troubling Addiction

Gambling: New Combat Vets Plagued by Troubling Addiction
By John H. Tucker
Thursday, May 3 2012


In 2007, having served with distinction during two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, U.S. Air Force firefighter John Brownfield Jr. took a job as a correctional officer at the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colo., 40 miles south of Colorado Springs. Ten months later, prison officials caught the former senior airman smuggling tobacco to at least seven inmates at the facility and accepting at least $3,500 in payoffs. The U.S. attorney for the District of Colorado charged the 22-year-old combat veteran with bribery by a public official. Brownfield pleaded guilty.

Two years later, Sgt. Dreux Perkins returned home from a combat stint in Baghdad — his second overseas tour of duty with the U.S. Army — received his honorable discharge and went to work as a correctional officer at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Greenville, Ill., 50 miles east of St. Louis on Interstate 70. In May 2011 the Federal Bureau of Investigation confronted Perkins with evidence that he'd accepted at least $2,600 in payoffs for smuggling cigarettes into the prison. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois indicted the 23-year-old decorated war veteran for bribery by a federal official, two counts of wire fraud and two counts of making a false statement to a federal law officer. Perkins pleaded guilty.
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