Bad Paper Discharges New Video

His Purple Heart 'Didn't Mean S***'
Huffington Post
Jordan Melograna
Content Director, Brave New Films
Posted: 05/21/2014

How often have we heard of employees being injured on the job and their bosses trying to squirm out of paying for benefits? We've seen it with coal miners and NFL players, but what if the job was defending our country, and the boss was the U.S. military?

That's what happened to Marine Corps veteran Josh Christmon, the subject of Brave New Films' newest video, "Bad Paper":

Josh earned a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq, where a close encounter with a roadside explosion nearly killed him. He suffered back problems and leg injuries, but maybe worse than all that were the nightmares, the depression, and the disconnection from his family -- classic signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Josh's bad dreams followed him back home. Alcohol seemed as good a way to forget as any, so one night he went out for drinks. He was also offered a joint. Josh took two puffs. A week later he failed a random drug test at work. Days after that he was less than honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, losing all his veterans benefits, including his medical care.

This kind of zero-tolerance policy has invaded every corner of American society. We see it in our schools, where kids are arrested for behavior that used to send them to the principal's office.

We see it in our harsh response to our nation's broken immigration system, labeling those who seek jobs and opportunities as hardened criminals. The worst of all zero-tolerance policies, our nation's long-running "war on drugs," hasn't made a dent in our drug-addiction rates but has sent our incarceration rates soaring past every other nation on Earth.

We're so interested in the most severe penalties that we are blind to context. In this case, zero tolerance threw away a brave Marine. As Josh puts it in the video, his Purple Heart "didn't mean shit."
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The number of U.S. soldiers forced out of the Army because of crimes or misconduct has soared in the past several years as the military emerges from more than 10 years of war that put a greater focus on battle competence than on character.

Data obtained by The Associated Press show that the number of officers who left the Army due to misconduct more than tripled in the past three years. The number of enlisted soldiers forced out for drugs, alcohol, crimes and other misconduct shot up from about 5,600 in 2007, as the Iraq war peaked, to more than 11,000 last year.