Locked Away Army struggles with wounded soldiers

Locked Away Army struggles with wounded soldiers
By Dave Philipps
The Gazette

Sgt. Paul Sasse arrived at Fort Carson in February in a uniform glistening with decorations from three combat tours: five medals for heroism, four for excellence, three for good conduct and one for nearly getting killed in Iraq. The 32-year-old Special Forces soldier also wore shackles. He was facing court-martial for assaulting his wife and two military police officers. Sasse had been sitting in solitary confinement at the El Paso County jail for months without military charge and had been brought to the Colorado Springs Army post to be arraigned. "I just need someone to help me," he said, reaching with bound hands to show a Gazette reporter his medical files.

Sasse was hit by a roadside bomb in 2007 in Iraq and diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. He kept soldiering through another tour even though he struggled with shattered memory and concentration, depression, nightmares and rage.

In 2012, the Army diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Doctors gave him a mix of contraindicated drugs that made him manic. A few weeks later, he slammed his wife's head against their Jeep until she was covered in blood then turned on the military police who tried to stop him. He had been scheduled to go into a special unit for wounded soldiers. Instead, the Army put him in jail.

In the El Paso County jail, Sasse picked up three more assault charges for assaulting guards. He ended up in solitary. He sat there for almost nine months, growing a long, bushy beard and developing, an Army doctor wrote in January, "severe psychiatric disease."

"Given his condition, his confinement is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment," Fort Carson's top defense attorney said in a letter to Fort Carson's commander in September, asking the general to send Sasse to a psychiatric hospital.

Still, the Army left him in solitary.

His family pleaded to the commander and their hometown senator to intervene to no avail.

If convicted and thrown out of the Army, Sasse had a plan: go to the Capitol in Washington, D.C., lay his thick stack of medical records on the steps then set himself on fire.

"It's the only way I can get anyone to listen," he said as deputies took him away.
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Left Behind No break for the wounded

Other than honorable way to treat combat wounded, Army kicks them out

Fort Carson Wounded Transitioned to Betrayed

Left Behind No break for the wounded
The Gazette
By Dave Philipps
May 13, 2013

Jerrald Jensen holds a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at his outpost in Afghanistan in 2009. He deployed to Afghanistan after being Injured in Iraq.

A roadside bomb hit Sgt. Jerrald Jensen's Humvee in Iraq, punching through heavy armor and shooting a chunk of hot metal into his head at several times the speed of sound, shattering his face and putting him in a coma. "I wasn't supposed to live," the veteran lisped with half a tongue through numb lips.

"No one knows why I did. It's shocking." Even more shocking is what Jensen did next. After 16 surgeries, the sergeant volunteered to go back to combat in one of the most savage corners of Afghanistan, where he was injured again. Perhaps most shocking, though, is what happened when he got home.

Jensen returned to recover in a battalion at Fort Carson designed to care for wounded soldiers called the Warrior Transition Unit. In the WTU, the soldier with a heroic record said he encountered a hostile environment where commanders, some of whom had never deployed, harassed and punished the wounded for the slightest misstep while making them wait many weeks for critical medical care and sometimes canceling care altogether.

In 2011, a year after joining the WTU, just days after coming out of a surgery, Jensen tested positive for the drug amphetamine. The then-41-year-old asked to be retested, suggesting his many Army prescriptions might be to blame. His commander refused and instead gave Jensen the maximum punishment, cutting his rank to private, docking his pay and canceling surgery to fix his face so he could spend weeks mopping floors, picking weeds and scrubbing toilets.

Then, Jensen said, WTU leaders said he should be discharged for misconduct — the equivalent of getting fired — with an other-than-honorable rating that could bar him from medical benefits for life.

"To call guys who sacrificed so much dishonorable and kick them out with nothing?" said Jensen, who is now out of the Army, living in a small apartment with blankets covering the windows because his injuries make him sensitive to light. "Christ sake, man, it is a disgrace." read more here
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Other than honorable way to treat combat wounded, Army kicks them out

Missing war records make it harder to prove claims

Congressmen to Hagel: Where are the missing war records?
By Peter Sleeth
Special to ProPublica
Published: May 20, 2013

The top Republican and Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs are demanding more information from defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about lost Army field records from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year.

In November, ProPublica and the Seattle Times reported that they were among numerous Army units that had lost or failed to keep battlefield records as required, making it harder for some veterans to obtain benefits and for historians to recount what actually happened.

"Operational records can be used to track the history of our nation's military, plan for future operations and support innovative medical research,'' Miller and Michaud wrote to Hagel.
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Students trapped after tornado hits two schools near Oklahoma City

UPDATE NBC
'Confirmed casualties' at Oklahoma school flattened by tornado, fire chief says
UPDATE KROR.COM 4 NEWS said they are now in search and recovery at the school.

About 2 dozen children are believed to remain in the rubble of Plaza Towers Elementary School.

Reporters have also been talking about average people showing up to do whatever they can to help.
Live coverage on NBC
'Major damage' as huge tornado rips through neighborhoods south of Oklahoma City
By Erin McClam
Staff Writer
NBC News

A monster two-mile-wide tornado ripped through southern Oklahoma City and the suburb of Moore on Monday afternoon, leaving homes and schools in ruins and fires burning out of control.

There was no immediate word on casualties, but aerial footage showed major destruction: flattened homes, cars flipped over and crushed, residents milling around in shock or combing through debris.

At one wrecked school, search crews were trying to account for students in kindergarten through third grade, NBC station KFOR reported.

“I lost everything,” a shirtless man told a reporter as he walked in a daze through the ruins of a horse farm that was obliterated. “We might have one horse left out of all of them.”

Two elementary schools — Briarwood Elementary in Oklahoma City and Plaza Towers Elementary in Moore — were heavily damaged, KFOR reported.

A teacher told a KFOR reporter that she lay on top of six kids in a bathroom as the tornado touched down to protect them.
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Iraq Veteran missing in Gainesville

Iraq veteran Larry Vantassel still missing in Gainesville
WUFT.com
Forrest Smith
May 20th, 2013
Gainesville Police Department
Larry Vantassell, 52
Gainesville police say they still haven’t been able to find 51-year-old Laurence Vantassell.

Police have considered him missing and endangered since Saturday, when he apparently called his out-of-state parents and indicated he was thinking of killing himself. Vantassell is a combat veteran from Iraq, and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and other undisclosed injuries.

GPD spokesman Ben Tobias told WUFT Monday morning that a friend of VanTassell’s said he might have checked into a rehab facility, which the friend said he has been known to do.
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