Wounded soldiers paying debt to Pentagon in accounting errors!

You have the right to remain oblivious if that gets you through your day with your own troubles. Lord knows I have my own but there is no way in hell I will return to the days when these men and women were not worth the time to care. How about you? How can we ever look any of them in the eye and say we support them when we allow all of this to go on?

Special Report: How the Pentagon's payroll quagmire traps America's soldiers
By Scot J. Paltrow and Kelly Carr
EL PASO, Texas
Tue Jul 9, 2013

(Reuters) - As Christmas 2011 approached, U.S. Army medic Shawn Aiken was once again locked in desperate battle with a formidable foe. Not insurgents in Iraq, or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan - enemies he had already encountered with distinguished bravery.

This time, he was up against the U.S. Defense Department.

The mistakes in soldiers' pay may seem small - $1,000 here, a few hundred there. But for an Army private first class making a base annual salary of about $23,000, or a wounded veteran on disability, they can be devastating. Former soldiers have had their civilian wages and their Veterans Administration benefits garnished. They have been pursued by private collection agencies and forced to pay tax penalties. In other cases, too, deserters have continued to be paid for months, and sometimes years, after disappearing.

Aiken, then 30 years old, was in his second month of physical and psychological reconstruction at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, after two tours of combat duty had left him shattered. His war-related afflictions included traumatic brain injury, severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), abnormal eye movements due to nerve damage, chronic pain, and a hip injury.

But the problem that loomed largest that holiday season was different. Aiken had no money. The Defense Department was withholding big chunks of his pay. It had started that October, when he received $2,337.56, instead of his normal monthly take-home pay of about $3,300. He quickly raised the issue with staff. It only got worse. For all of December, his pay came to $117.99.

All Aiken knew was that the Defense Department was taking back money it claimed he owed. Beyond that, "they couldn't even tell me what the debts were from," he says.
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linked from Huffington Post