Weight of War: Gear that
protects troops also injures them
By Hal Bernton
2/12/2011
Military studies acknowledge that combat
soldiers are carrying too much weight — often more than 100 pounds. These loads
have contributed to soaring numbers of injuries, and higher costs in disability
payments.
His body hurt the most when his squad came
under attack and he tried to run or dive on the ground. His neck and shoulders
would burn as if on fire.
Since returning to Western Washington 2 1/2
years ago, Chroniger has been diagnosed with bone spurs in the vertebrae of his
neck caused by a degenerative arthritic condition. Sometimes, the pain is
intense, and he dreads getting out of bed in the morning.
"This is ridiculous," Chroniger
said. "I'm only 25 years old. Arthritis is supposed to happen when you get
old. What's it going to be like when I'm 50 or 60?"
Chroniger's injury is a symptom of the
overloaded U.S. combat forces that have served in the long wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
In 2001, an Army Science Board study, noting
that weight carried by soldiers could decrease mobility and increase fatigue
and injury, recommended no soldier carry more than 50 pounds for any length of
time. The Army chief of staff hoped to approach that goal by 2010.
But the loads combat soldiers typically carry
remain far above that goal.
That weight has helped fuel an avalanche of
musculoskeletal injuries that are eroding the combat-readiness of the military.
Long after the fighting ends, injuries such as Chroniger's will remain a
painful and expensive legacy of these wars.
•
Nearly one-third of all medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004
through 2007 resulted from musculoskeletal, connective-tissue or spinal
injuries, according to a study led by a Johns Hopkins University researcher.
That was more than double the number of evacuations from combat injures.
•
The heavy loads contribute to rising numbers of Afghanistan and Iraq war
veterans retiring with degenerative arthritis, cervical strains and other
musculoskeletal injuries. Disability benefits paid for these injuries by the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) exceed $500 million annually, according to
estimates done by The Seattle Times. That figure is expected to grow as tens of
thousands of new veterans apply to the VA for compensation.
Weighing the gear
In 2003, Col. Charles Dean, a
military-equipment expert, formed a seven-man team to conduct a detailed study
of weight worn in the combat zones of eastern Afghanistan. "What we were
proposing was highly irregular, and my chain of command had to pass this all
the way to the generals to get approval," Dean said.
Dean, who is now retired, wanted his team to
share an infantry soldiers' life, packing the same loads and facing the same
dangers.
In Afghanistan, the team joined soldiers of
the 82nd Airborne Division. Their missions typically began with a helicopter
ride, followed by multiday foot patrols. Before each mission, team members
pulled out a digital scale and weighed weapons, ammunition, night-vision
goggles, sleeping bags, eating utensils and every other item carried by
soldiers, down to ID cards.
The team stayed in Afghanistan for three months,
collecting data from more than 750 soldiers with a range of different jobs.
Dean said many soldiers had no idea how much
weight they were carrying.
"They were very interested in helping
out," Dean said. "If anybody could help ease the burden to them, that
was great news."
When soldiers headed out on extended foot
patrols, their average load ranged from 87 pounds to 127 pounds. When they came
under attack and dropped their rucksacks, most of their fighting loads still
exceeded 60 pounds.
In his final report, Dean sounded an alarm.
"If an aggressive ... weight-loss
program is not undertaken by the Army," Dean wrote in his report,
"the soldier's combat load will continue to increase and his physical
performance will continue to be even more severely degraded."
Back in the United States, Dean said
"jaws dropped," when he disclosed his findings to Army leaders.
The Army launched new programs to develop
lighter gear. But at the same time the Army was looking at ways to lighten the
load, it also focused on trying to reduce casualties by beefing up body armor
and other measures.
It's unclear if any headway was made in
reducing the overall weight during the next six years. A 2009 study by a team
of Army advisers indicated some soldier loads had increased by 25 percent or
more compared with 2003.
The Army isn't alone in its struggle.
A 2007 study by a Navy research-advisory
committee found Marines typically have loads from 97 to 135 pounds. The
committee, citing information from the VA, stated that an increasing number of
disabilities due to lower-back problems were a "direct result" of
carrying excessive loads for long periods.
"Many of these injuries reflect troops
carrying far more weight than what medical experts say is reasonable,"
said Norman Polmar, a Naval analyst and historian who served on the committee.
"You just... suck it up"
For foot soldiers, muscle and bone injuries
always have been an occupational hazard. But piling too much weight on soldiers
for prolonged periods can intensify the injury cycle, aggravating old muscle
tears or cervical strains, and triggering new ones that never heal.
Noncommissioned officers — seasoned leaders
who often have shouldered loads through three or four tours in a combat zone —
may be hard-hit by these injuries. But many of these leaders feel burdened by
responsibility and are unwilling to cede their place in a war zone to less
experienced soldiers who may have fewer injuries.
"I had a choice. But I couldn't leave my
squad behind just before they were being deployed," said Staff Sgt. James
Knower, a wiry, 155-pound soldier from Joint Base Lewis-McChord who served in
Afghanistan for a year despite injuries to his arm and rotator cuff.
Carrying loads in Afghanistan, Knower's
injuries worsened. On patrols through the Arghandab Valley in southern
Afghanistan, his right arm often went numb.
"Basically, it comes down to: If you
want to do your job — and you take pride in what you do — you've just got to
suck it up," said Knower, 29.
A rail-thin staff sergeant in the same
platoon, 130-pound Kenneth Rickman, patrolled with armor and gear that
typically weighed between 80 and 90 pounds.
Earlier in his Army career, Rickman suffered
a pinched nerve while carrying his gear in Iraq and then a cracked vertebra in
his spine while back in the United States. While in Afghanistan, he fell off a
roof with all his gear on and injured his shoulder.
As the months wore on, Rickman described the
pain as a kind of bone-on-bone grinding. So he gradually began to shed some of
his gear. He ditched some of his extra batteries, three of his seven ammo
magazines and switched to a lighter rifle.
Finally, he headed back to Washington state
several weeks early on a flight filled with other injured soldiers. There, he
underwent a spinal-fusion operation and the removal of a ruptured disc.
"I told them I had had enough. I was
done," said the 35-year-old Rickman.
"Primary-care providers ... have had
very limited tools in their toolbox. It's medications for the most part, and
maybe physical therapy, but very little to offer in addition to that,"
said Col. Diane Flynn, chief of the department of pain management at Madigan
Army Medical Center.
Through the war years, the use of these drugs
has escalated. A 2010 Army report found 14 percent of soldiers had
prescriptions for opiates. The Army also is concerned the availability of pain
drugs through medics widens the potential for abuse.
A 26-year-old Army veteran who lives in
Seattle said a medic provided him with Vicodin, Dilaudid and morphine to help
him through a series of deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of the worst pain
came in 2003 on duty in the steep terrain of eastern Afghanistan as he labored
up hills with his body armor, pack and a bulky automatic weapon that sometimes
pushed his total load to more than 100 pounds.
"My lower back would just start aching
from running up the hills. It would just break me," said the veteran who
requested anonymity.
For some soldiers suffering from
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental wounds, the combination
of chronic pain and opiates to treat their physical injuries can help push them
deeper into despair.
Orrin Gorman McClellan, a veteran of the war
in eastern Afghanistan, returned to his family home in Whidbey Island with
severe PTSD. He took an opiate he obtained online, but it failed to relieve his
muscle and back pain. In May 2009, he committed suicide at the age of 25.
McClellan's mother believes the physical pain
contributed to his suicide.
"One of the things that he was angry
about was that he always hurt. He never really got a break," Judith Gorman
said.
Since his return from Iraq, Chroniger also
has struggled with PTSD, which helped him gain an early discharge from the Army
that goes into effect this week. But most days, Chroniger said his neck injury
causes him the biggest problems.
He has been prescribed an opiate, Percocet,
which he can take up to three times a day. Yet it often fails to quell the
pain.
"The neck hurts so bad, sometimes you
can't concentrate on anything other that," Chroniger said.
The Army has created teams of physical
therapists and other specialists to serve with infantry brigades in combat
areas, and it stepped up screening for serious injuries at clinics. But some
soldiers complain these injuries still may be discounted by physician
assistants, who often act as gatekeepers to more extensive workups by doctors
at military hospitals.
While training for his 2009 deployment to
Afghanistan with the 5th Stryker Brigade, an Army sergeant complained of a sore
back. A physician assistant at Madigan Army Medical Center dismissed the
complaint as muscle pain.
Shortly before his deployment, the sergeant,
who requested not to be named in this story, paid out of his own pocket for an
MRI that indicated a herniated disc. He opted to deploy and then seek treatment
upon his return to Washington state in summer 2010.
The sergeant said medical staff are
rightfully on the lookout for "sick-call warriors" who constantly
complain of problems when there is nothing wrong. But, he said, "the
problem is, now they treat most everyone like they are faking it."
Medical officials say attitudes are changing.
"The faster you can address some of
those issues at the clinic level, the less likely the soldier is to need
hospital-level care ... in the theater (or need) to be evacuated," said
Col. Stephen Bolt, Madigan Army Medical Center's chief of the department of
anesthesia and operative services.
The Army also is trying to reduce the use of
opiates for pain. An Army report recommended the increased use of alternatives,
including chiropractic care, massage, meditation and acupuncture.
At Madigan, Shashi Kumar, a doctor trained in
acupuncture, says these treatments have helped many patients substantially
reduce pain and narcotics use.
"This has been more than what I hoped
for," Kumar said. "The pain-management outcome is fantastic."
Chroniger is one of her patients. During his
first treatment, she gently inserted the metal needles about a quarter-inch
deep into his neck and shoulder muscles. Then she hooked the needles up to a
machine that generated a small electrical current and bathed her patient in the
warm glow of an infrared lamp.
After some 15 minutes, she took out the
needles and helped the patient back to his feet.
Chroniger said he felt better, not so
tight, and will undergo three more sessions. But at Madigan and elsewhere, the
Army has few staff trained to offer these therapies, and military insurance
does not pay for most of these alternative services from civilian providers.
"That's really one of the things that's
holding us back," said Flynn, the Madigan doctor who directs the pain
center. "We have such limited access to other than what we call
traditional medicine."
The Army also has sought to prevent such
injuries by improving the conditioning of soldiers.
While training, soldiers may exercise or run
with full body armor and other gear. But even the most physically fit platoon
member will be prone to injuries when carrying 100 pounds of gear through a
year of combat.
So, the Army continues to pursue an elusive
goal: Lightening the load.
THE GENERAL'S DRUG PROBLEM
His story is a warning about
use of painkillers
By Gregg Zoroya,
USA TODAY / TAMPA
Jan. 2011
Standing before a packed hall of 700 military
doctors and medics here, the deputy commander of the nation's elite special
operations forces warned about an epidemic of chronic pain sweeping through the
U.S. military after a decade of continuous war.
Be careful about handing out narcotic pain
relievers, Lt. Gen. David Fridovich told the audience last month. "What we
don't want is that next generation of veterans coming out with some bad
habits."
What
Fridovich didn't say was that he was talking as much about himself as anyone.
For nearly five years, the Green Beret
general quietly has been hooked on narcotics he has taken for chronic pain — a
reflection of an addiction problem that is spreading across the military.
Hospitalizations and diagnoses for substance abuse doubled among members of
U.S. forces in recent years. This week, nurses and case managers at Army
wounded care units reported that one in three of their patients are addicted or
dependent on drugs.
In going public about his drug dependency
during interviews with USA TODAY, Fridovich, 59, echoes the findings of an Army
surgeon general task force last year that said doctors too often rely on
handing out addictive narcotics to quell pain.
An internal Army investigation report
released Tuesday revealed that 25% to 35% of about 10,000 soldiers assigned to
special units for the wounded, ill or injured are addicted to or dependent on
drugs, according to their nurses and case managers. Doctors in those care units
told investigators they need training in other ways to manage pain besides only
using narcotics.
"I was amazed at how easy it was for me
or almost anybody to have access and to get medication, without really an
owner's manual," says Fridovich, deputy commander of the nation's roughly
60,000 Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALS and secretive Delta Force teams.
For such a high-ranking military officer,
publicly acknowledging drug dependency was unprecedented.
Retired Army major general Paul Eaton, a
former commander in Iraq, says Fridovich has now joined a small cadre of senior
military leaders willing to discuss publicly personal struggles, such as living
with post-traumatic stress disorder. Such admissions are difficult professional
decisions, Eaton says.
"Nobody wants to show weaknesses. You
want to be perceived as perfection," he says. "But sometimes moral
courage kicks in where moral courage is demanded."
Fridovich agreed in recent weeks to talk
openly about his reliance on drugs as part of what he says is a personal
commitment to push the Army into better addressing pain management and drug
addiction.
"Here's my story," he says. "I
feel like there is some real value — maybe cathartic, don't know — but really,
more than anything else, how can you help people?"
His own experiences are his bona fides on the
issue, Fridovich says, and others agree.
"This is huge for Fridovich to be
willing to talk about this as a three-star general," says Gen. Peter
Chiarelli, Army four-star vice chief of staff. "We're finally coming clean
and admitting at all levels this is an issue."
Fridovich says narcotics altered his
personality, darkened his mood and management style and strained his 35-year
marriage.
When Fridovich finally went through treatment
and detoxification to reduce his drug reliance in 2008 — he still relies on
weaker doses of narcotics to combat pain — his wife, Kathy, hid or destroyed
more potent pain pills so he could not use them.
"I was fighting the pain. And I was
fighting the injury. And I was fighting the narcotics," he says. "We
have an obligation to the soldiers to look them in the eye and say, 'I know
what you're going through. You don't want to be like this for the rest of your
life. You don't have to be.' "
Pentagon statistics show the number of
pain-relief prescriptions given to troops, including narcotics, growing 86%
from 2001 to 2009, when 3.7 million doses were handed out. That dipped last
year to 3.5 million prescriptions, the data reveal, but is still more than any
year prior to 2009.
From 2005 to 2009, the number of troops
diagnosed each year with substance abuse disorders jumped 50% to nearly 40,000,
the Pentagon says. And substance abuse hospitalizations increased from 100
troops per month in 2003 to more than 250 per month in 2009.
"The abuse is getting higher and higher
and more and more," Fridovich says, "and that leads to a very dark,
deadly, dangerous place."
Narcotics entered Fridovich's life in May 2006,
after he severely injured his back exercising between trips to war zones. At
the time he was a two-star general in command of all special operations forces
— Green Berets, Navy Seals and Army Rangers — operating in the Pacific.
Fresh from a trip to Iraq and slated to go to
the Philippines, he was in a Marine base gymnasium on Oahu leg-pressing 400
pounds when lower vertebrae shattered. Doctors later said his back was brittle
from decades of soldiering and scores of parachute drops.
He said he felt a twinge at the time and
worked through it, continuing a regimen of weight-lifting, handball and
racquetball for several days.
But by Memorial Day, he awoke barely able to
stand. "All I could do was just lie in bed and writhe," Fridovich
recalls, describing pain radiating from his lower back down his left leg.
"It felt like someone had taken a
baseball bat from here to here," Fridovich says, gesturing from waste to
kneecap.
In the emergency room at Tripler Army Medical
Center in Honolulu, X-rays showed shattered bones and pinched nerves. Motrin
and morphine were the first medications, followed by fistfuls of fast-acting
roxicet and longer-lasting Oxycontin, both listed by the federal government as
highly addictive with significant potential for abuse.
Doctors wanted him to wait on surgery to
gauge progress. "That was a little bit more than wishful thinking,"
Fridovich says now.
Eager to quell pain and resume command,
Fridovich during one 24-hour period swallowed five dozen Oxycontin pills. His
calculus was simple, he says: If the drugs were for pain relief, more drugs
must equal more relief.
But the price was a disturbing fogginess of
mind and dark, frightening thoughts. Fridovich recalls contemplating, almost
irrationally, whether he should simply have his stricken left leg amputated and
be done with it.
He says he pulled out the written warnings
about narcotics and realized he was in treacherous territory. "That scared
the hell out of me, (the) anxiety, depression, real bad thoughts," he
recalls. "I got scared so bad that I stopped."
Fridovich says he immediately cut his
consumption of pills drastically — but not entirely. Instead, Fridovich fell
into a lifestyle he now concedes was a mistake — ingesting two to four pain
pills daily, even as he continued commanding troops and moving up through the
ranks.
The demands of his job, the need to travel by
plane and helicopter around the globe and stay functional, meant that the
roxicet and Oxycontin pills would be part of his daily diet.
"Somebody should have challenged
me," he says. "I should have challenged myself and said, "Wow,
I'm on this stuff way too long. What's the deal?' "
His wife, Kathy, the college sweetheart he
married on the eve of joining the Army in 1976 — the couple have one child, a
daughter — found herself in a dilemma. She could see her husband was in chronic
pain, but she hated the medication.
"I don't like the drugs," says
Kathy Fridovich. "I knew he was taking a lot. I read all the little fine
print. Drugs are scary."
She became her husband's conscience, urging
him to find a way off the drugs.
For a time in Hawaii, Fridovich sought out
acupuncture and managed to reduce his intake of narcotics.
He received his third star in July 2007, and
an assignment as director of the Center for Special Operations. He and Kathy
moved to Tampa, where Special Operations Command headquarters are located and
the acupuncture treatment ended. Special Operations troops have played a
central role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since 9/11 and the pressure on
Fridovich to remain fully functional meant that the pain had to be kept in
check. The easiest way was the pills, he says.
"Starting a new job and wanting to do
well, he just worked as hard as he could, and they helped him get through,"
Kathy Fridovich says. "(But) I kind of wondered about the quality of what
he was doing."
"I did, too," echoes Fridovich.
The drugs were altering his personality.
Fridovich found himself becoming cross with colleagues and less tolerant of new
ideas. "I found myself being, in some ways, very isolated, very
combative," he says. "It's not what I wanted to be known for. I
wanted to build teams. I wanted to bring people together."
Doctors at Walter Reed Army Center in
Washington, D.C., finally decided to operate on Fridovich's back in January
2008. The surgery removed shattered bone and fused vertebrae. It would provide
some long-term relief, but for a while the pain intensified.
Oxycontin and roxicet no longer were enough.
He was given morphine.
Within a few weeks back in Tampa, doctors
finally advised the three-star general that he had a long-standing dependency
on narcotics. He needed some way of managing his pain without relying only on
drugs.
At the time, Special Operations doctors were
facing the same issues with soldiers suffering chronic pain, dependency or
addiction. They found the Andrews Institute for Orthopedics and Sports
Medicine, a Pensacola-based center that provides an array of services including
surgery, rehabilitation and pain management.
Fridovich would be the test subject.
For four weeks, doctors, therapists and rehab
specialists worked with Fridovich through physical training, psychological
counseling and nutrition to train his body in more natural ways to deal with
pain. They also put him through detoxification.
He was placed on a weaker narcotic,
buprenorphrine, less amenable to abuse.
Detoxification left Fridovich physically and
emotionally wrung out, he says, suffering the shakes, sweats, aches and nausea.
"It's the most sickening feeling that racks your entire body," he
says.
Fridovich — who was named deputy commander of
Special Operations Forces in May 2010 — says the therapy, detox and reduction
in narcotics cleared his head, eased his temperament and brightened his outlook
on life. "I should probably take an ad out in a national newspaper
apologizing for everything I've said or done, because I'm a different
person," he says with a grin.
He hopes one day to leave narcotics behind
entirely.
When the Army's surgeon general office
developed a plan last year to institute service-wide some of the same holistic
methods that helped Fridovich, the general was part of the campaign.
"I want to be involved," Fridovich
says. "I want to listen to where this is going and see if my playing a
part would lend any sense of urgency or importance — get it moving in a way
that we start getting things done."
He says Army medicine must be better prepared
to treat pain with aggressive monitoring of medication, drug education,
acupuncture, nutrition and proper exercise. "We ask great things of
(soldiers). Don't we owe them great things as well?" Fridovich says.
"It's about the human expense."
Marine Captain Matthew Kutilek believes some
of the problem was exacerbated by the reaction to IED (improvised explosive
device) explosions in Iraq. The Pentagon — under pressure from families and Congress
— reacted by beefing up body armor.
Kutilek: "Maybe in the political eye it
looked like we were protecting people by making them wear more body armor. But
in reality it hindered the way we fought, and most of all it reduced our
maneuverability in combat."
Service members deployed in Iraq and
Afghanistan routinely carry loads from 60 to more than 100 pounds.
KUOW's Patricia Murphy teamed up with The
Seattle Times to explore the weight of war.
This is a YouTube video of a firefight in
Afghanistan. US troops are under attack. They can be seen sprinting from their
armored vehicles in full combat load to engage the enemy. It's an intense and
physical firefight.
Marine Captain Matthew Kutilek has deployed
twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. He says this kind of dismounted battle
where troops are on foot is common in Afghanistan's rugged terrain.
Kutilek: "When we walked into Laki last
January 4, we had never been there before, we carried everything on our back,
we had vehicles behind us but we carried everything on our back to be
sustainable. And I carried, we carried, every Marine carried roughly 110 to 125
pounds minimum, and some guys carried more, and we walked 13 kilometers under
the cover of darkness."
Studies have recommended that troops carry no
more than a third of their bodyweight in gear. Yet despite some effort by the
military, truly effective light–weight body armor has yet to be developed.
There are some options.
Kutileck: "We had the opportunity to
wear the SAPI [small arms protection inserts] plate carrier which is lighter —
it's much more mobile, you have much more range of motion in your arms and your
shoulders. It's still heavy but it's not as heavy as the other gear. To me,
mobility trumps massive, cumbersome, heavy protective equipment every
day."
But some troops don't have the same access to
lighter equipment.
There's anecdotal evidence that some military
personnel are turning to illegal steroids to help shoulder the combined load of
body armor and gear. In 2008 soldiers confessed to using steroids during an
investigation at Joint Base Lewis–McChord.
One soldier said he almost fell out of
formation during a road march through the woods. His weapon was taken. He said
he turned to steroids because wanted to make sure it didn't happen while he was
deployed.
Kutilek says the key to maintaining physical
health while on duty is staying fit, staying hydrated and stretching.
Kutilek: "Believe it or not the human
body gets used to wearing 65 to 70 pounds of gear. It doesn't like it, but it
gets used to it."
Bottom line, Kutilek says Marines will do all
they can to go out on patrol and not let their buddy down.
Kutilek: "They don't want to be
perceived as weak and making up an injury or being a malingerer."
After each patrol Kutilek says it was not
uncommon for Marines to visit the corpsman for some type of medication or
Tylenol for pain.
Kutilek: "I think every Marine, every
infantry Marine experiences a lot of discomfort, a lot of initial superficial
pain, when they're in Afghanistan carrying this load. Absolutely. Does that
equate to other injuries when you get back? I think it does in certain
instances."
Relieving pain in the field has proven tricky
for the military. According to the Department of Defense many of its deployed
troops are now regularly abusing prescription drugs. Pain killers like Vicodin
and Percocet.
In fact prescription abuse in the military
tripled between 2002 and 2008.
Army Specialist Joseph Chroniger says he was
in great shape when he deployed to Iraq in 2007. Today he's facing chronic pain
that on the worst days immobilizes him.
Chroniger: "Well I have a degenerative
neck disease, they call it DDD [degenerative disc disease], and it started
pretty much after we got home. My neck started cracking and popping all the
time."
Degenerative disc disease is an arthritic
condition that's usually associated with aging. Chroniger is 25.
While in Iraq Chroniger says like most people
in his unit, he spent his downtime lifting weights. He was a private when he
deployed and that meant carrying even more than the usual gear load.
Chroniger: "Privates get stocked with
all the extra stuff so I had, you know, radio with a battery in it and that
adds some weight, then all the extra antennas. Squad leader captains, all their
extra land warrior batteries. All of my magazines, grenades, your NODs [night
observation device] — you know, your night vision — you got your helmet with
all its little racks that you put on, like the rhino mount and everything, then
you've got your boots plus just your regular gear."
Sometimes his missions required him to stand
in full gear for hours which bothered his neck.
Chroniger: "My neck burned. It was like
a deep burn too, like to your bone. It hurt so bad. But you get used to it
eventually, but then it causes problems."
Chroniger is still in the military but is in
the process of being retired for medical reasons.
The Army has made an effort to embed physical
therapists within some units, but for the most part access to this type of care
is still limited to combat support hospitals.
Muscle strain is usually a short term
condition that has always been prevalent among soldiers. But after a decade of
war in Afghanistan the numbers of acute injuries that have progressed to the
level of chronic pain has grown significantly.
Part of the problem may lie within the very
thing that makes a good warrior: mission–focused toughness and determination.
Chroniger: "In the infantry world the
way it goes is, it's almost frowned upon to complain about an injury."
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University
found that between 2002 and 2007, 31 percent of all medical evacuations from
Iraq and Afghanistan were due to muscular, skeletal or spinal injuries.
More than double the number of medical
evacuations due to combat injures.
Like many in his situation Army Specialist
Joseph Chroniger has applied to receive disability for his injury. The Veterans
Affairs says musculoskeletal injuries account for many of the disability claims
for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chronic low back and neck
pain and degenerative arthritis of the spine are the most common.
It's an expensive problem. Currently these
types of injuries are costing taxpayers more than $500 million a year. That
figure could potentially climb into the billions as ten of thousands new
veterans receive disability for musculoskeletal injuries.
Seattle Times reporter Justin Mayo and Seattle Times researchers David Turim and Gene Balk contributed to this story. KUOW reporter Patricia Murphy also contributed.
A Reservist in a New War,
Against Foreclosure
Thursday, 27 Jan 2011
By: Diana B. Henriques
The New York Times
While Sgt. James B. Hurley was away at war,
he lost a heartbreaking battle at home.
In violation of a law intended to protect
active military personnel from creditors, agents of Deutsche Bank foreclosed on
his small Michigan house, forcing Sergeant Hurley’s wife, Brandie, and her two
young children to move out and find shelter elsewhere.
When the sergeant returned in December 2005,
he drove past the densely wooded riverfront property outside Hartford, Mich.
The peaceful little home was still there — winter birds still darted over the
gazebo he had built near the water’s edge — but it almost certainly would never
be his again. Less than two months before his return from the war, the bank’s
agents sold the property to a buyer in Chicago for $76,000.
Since then, Sergeant Hurley has been on an
odyssey through the legal system, with little hope of a happy ending — indeed,
the foreclosure that cost him his home may also cost him his marriage. “Brandie
took this very badly,” said Sergeant Hurley, 45, a plainspoken man who was
disabled in Iraq and is now unemployed. “We’re trying to piece it together.”
In March 2009, a federal judge ruled that the
bank’s foreclosure in 2004 violated federal law but the battle did not end
there for Sergeant Hurley.
Typically, banks respond quickly to public
reports of errors affecting military families. But today, more than six years
after the illegal foreclosure, Deutsche Bank Trust Company and its primary
co-defendant, a Morgan Stanley subsidiary called Saxon Mortgage Services, are
still in court disputing whether Sergeant Hurley is owed significant damages.
Exhibits show that at least 100 other military mortgages are being serviced for
Deutsche Bank, but it is not clear whether other service members have been affected
by the policy that resulted in the Hurley foreclosure.
A spokesman for Deutsche Bank declined to
comment, noting that Saxon had handled the litigation on its behalf. A
spokesman for Morgan Stanley, which bought Saxon in 2006, said that Saxon had
revised its policy to ensure that it complied with the law and was willing to
make “reasonable accommodations” to settle disputes, “especially for our
servicemen and women.” But the Hurley litigation has continued, he said,
because of a “fundamental disagreement between the parties over damages.”
In court papers, lawyers for Saxon and the
bank assert the sergeant is entitled to recover no more than the fair market
value of his lost home. His lawyers argue that the defendants should pay much
more than that — including an award of punitive damages to deter big lenders
from future violations of the law. The law is called the Servicemembers Civil
Relief Act, and it protects service members on active duty from many of the
legal consequences of their forced absence.
Even though some of the nation’s military
families have been sending their breadwinners into war zones for almost a
decade, some of the nation’s biggest lenders are still fumbling one of the
basic elements of this law — its foreclosure protections.
Under the law, only a judge can authorize a
foreclosure on a protected service member’s home, even in states where court
orders are not required for civilian foreclosures, and the judge can act only
after a hearing where the military homeowner is represented. The law also caps
a protected service member’s mortgage rate at 6 percent.
By 2005, violations of the civil relief act
were being reported all across the country, some involving prominent banks like
Wells Fargo and Citigroup. Publicity about the violations spared some military
families from foreclosure, prompted both banks to promise better compliance and
put lenders on notice that service members were entitled to special relief.
But the message apparently did not get
through. By 2006, a Marine captain in South Carolina was doing battle with
JPMorgan Chase to get the mortgage interest rate reductions the act requires.
Chase eventually reviewed its policies and, earlier this month, acknowledged it
had overcharged thousands of military families on their mortgages and
improperly foreclosed on 14 of them. After a public apology, Chase began
mailing out about $2 million in refunds and working to reverse the
foreclosures.
For armed forces in a war zone, a foreclosure
back home is both a family crisis and a potentially deadly distraction from the
military mission, military consumer advocates say.
“It can be devastating,” said Holly Petraeus,
the wife of Gen. David Petraeus and the leader of a team that is creating an
office to serve military families within a new Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau.
“It is a terrible situation for the family at
home and for the service member abroad, who feels helpless,” Mrs. Petraeus
said. “I would hope that the recent problems will be a wake-up call for all
banks to review their policies and be sure they comply with the act.”
Chase’s response, however belated, is in
sharp contrast to the approach taken by Deutsche Bank and Saxon in the Hurley
case.
Sergeant Hurley bought the land in 1994 and
“was developing this property into something special,” he said in a court
affidavit. He put a double-wide manufactured home on the site and added a deck,
hunting blinds, floating docks and storage buildings.
According to his lawyers, his financial
troubles began in the summer of 2004, when his National Guard unit sent him to
California to be trained to work as a power-generator mechanic in Iraq.
Veterans of that duty advised him to buy certain tools not readily available in
the war zone, he said in his affidavit. With that expense and his reduced
income, he said, he fell behind on his mortgage — a difficulty many part-time
soldiers faced when reserve and National Guard units were mobilized.
Believing he was protected by the civil
relief act — as, indeed, he was, as of Sept. 11, 2004 — his family repeatedly
informed Saxon that Sergeant Hurley had been sent to Iraq. But Saxon refused to
grant relief without copies of his individual military orders, which he did not
yet have.
Although Saxon’s demand would have been
legitimate if Sergeant Hurley had been seeking a lower interest rate, the law
did not require him to provide those orders to invoke his foreclosure
protections.
Nevertheless, Saxon referred the case to its
law firm, Orlans Associates in Troy, Mich., which completed the foreclosure
without the court hearing required by law. The law firm filed an affidavit with
the local sheriff saying there was no evidence Sergeant Hurley was on military
duty. At a sheriff’s sale in October 2004, the bank bought the property for
$70,000, less than the $100,000 the sergeant owed on the mortgage.
Orlans acknowledged in a court filing that
one of its lawyers learned in April 2005 that Sergeant Hurley had been on
active duty since the previous October. Nevertheless, neither Saxon nor the law
firm backtracked to ensure the foreclosure had been legal or took steps to
prevent the seized property from being sold, according to the court record.
Lawyers for Orlans Associates did not respond to a request for comment.
When Sergeant Hurley sued in May 2007, the
defendants initially argued that he was not allowed to file a private lawsuit
to enforce his rights under the civil relief act. Federal District Judge Gordon
J. Quist agreed and threw the case out in the fall of 2008.
That drew a fierce reaction from Col. John S.
Odom, Jr., a retired Air Force lawyer in Shreveport, La., who is working with
Sergeant Hurley’s local lawyer, Matthew R. Cooper, of Paw Paw, Mich.
Colonel Odom, recognized by Congress and the
courts as an expert on the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, knew Judge Quist
had missed a decision that overturned the one he had cited in his ruling. In
December 2008, Colonel Odom appealed the ruling.
In March 2009, Judge Quist reversed himself,
reinstated the Hurley case, ruled that the foreclosure had violated the civil
relief act and found that punitive damages would be permitted, if warranted.
Despite that legal setback, the defendants
soldiered on. As the court docket grew, they argued against allowing Sergeant
Hurley to seek compensatory or punitive damages in the case. Judge Quist ruled
last month that punitive damages were not warranted — a ruling Colonel Odom has
said he has challenged in court and, if necessary, will appeal.
“Nothing says you screwed up as clearly as a
big punitive damages award,” he said. “They are a deterrence that warns others
not to do the same thing.”
When the trial on damages begins in early
March, Sergeant Hurley will have been fighting for almost four years over the
illegal foreclosure, a fight he could not have waged without a legal team that
will probably only be paid if the court orders the defendants to cover the
legal bills.
Regardless of the trial outcome, Sergeant
Hurley’s dream home is likely to remain as far beyond his reach as it was when he
was in Iraq. Its new owner has refused to entertain any offers for it and
recently bought an adjoining lot.
Sergeant Hurley said he still loved the
wooded refuge he drives past almost every day. “I was hoping I could get the
property back,” he said. “But they tell me there’s just no way.”