Army misreads Green Beret's disease (Charges filed for brain disease) [View All]

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001798856_soldier23.html

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"Your conduct is inconsistent with the integrity and professionalism required by a Special Forces soldier," Lt. Col. Christopher Conner wrote April 10.

Confused and disgraced, the soldier moved back into his off-base home where he ate canned meat and anchovies, unaware of the day, the month or the year.

Sensing something was wrong, a neighbor called Alford's parents. They drove 600 miles from East Texas to find a son who'd lost 30 pounds and could no longer drink from a glass, use a telephone, button his shirt or say Amber, the name of his soldier wife who was still stationed in the Middle East.

A month and several hospitals later, Alford's family learned he was dying of a disease eating away his brain. He had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an extremely rare and fatal degenerative brain disorder akin to "mad-cow" disease that causes rapid, progressive dementia.

Now, as the 25-year-old soldier wastes away in his boyhood home, his parents and his wife are struggling to understand how the military could have misdiagnosed Alford's erratic, forgetful behavior as nothing more than the symptoms of a sloppy, incompetent soldier.

"He had to hold his hands to keep them from shaking, but they saw nothing wrong with my child," his mother, Gail Alford, a nine-year Army veteran, said recently from her home in a rural community near Marshall, Texas.

Alford's parents say the Special Forces staff told them that a doctor in Kuwait found nothing wrong with him and that a psychiatrist there had said Alford was "faking it."
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