Green Berets Mistreated at Fort Carson

Fort Carson Gets a Black Eye for Its Treatment of These Green Berets
US Navy SEAL Today
By Joel Warner
Sep. 24 2014

Sergeant First Class Emil Wojcik wasn't the same after a rollover car crash at Fort Carson in March 2013 broke one of his cervical vertebrae. That, combined with the various times he'd been knocked unconscious during rough parachute landings, seemed to knock something permanently askew in his mind. He lost hearing in his right ear and begun stuttering when he spoke. Sleep became a problem. He'd sit upright in bed in the middle of the night and yell, "Stand up straight, the general is here!" -- as if he were back on one of his secret missions. Or he'd sleepwalk, sometimes tumbling down the stairs of his Colorado Springs home. He started taking Ambien to help him sleep, but that plus the Oxycodone he was on for ongoing neck pain left him in a medicated stupor.

It didn't help that Wojcik, who was born in Warsaw but had immigrated to Michigan when he was seven, had a lot on his mind. In 2012, his first marriage had ended in an ugly divorce and custody battle that resulted in his two children living 4,500 miles away, with their mother in her native Ireland. His second wife, Amber, had stage IV bone cancer that had spread to her lungs and lymph nodes, and the two were caught in exhausting cycles of chemotherapy treatments and remission. On top of that, a good friend of Wojcik's, a Special Forces team sergeant at Fort Carson, had taken his pistol and killed himself while parked on the side of Interstate 25 in December 2011. "Nobody asked too many questions about it," says Wojcik of the incident -- but it stuck with him.

For Wojcik, everything came to a head one evening in July 2013.

But Wojcik didn't feel supported by his superiors, even as his medical condition deteriorated. By December 2013, his neck pain and sleeping problems had become serious enough that his battalion's physician referred him to the Army's Medical Evaluation Board, the first step toward being medically retired from the Army. But then in January, when he was called into his battalion commander's office -- "It was the first time I'd ever met the man," he says -- Wojcik learned that he could be leaving Special Forces for other reasons. Wojcik's medical-evaluation process had been halted, his commander told him; he was now looking at an other-than-honorable discharge from the Army because of his behavior, which would leave him with few benefits.
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