Trained to Harm: How the Military Abuses Its Own

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

By JoAnn Wypijewski, The Washington Spectator. Posted May 10, 2007.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/51658/

--SNIP--
"LIKE BEING INCARCERATED" -- Basic training is one of those regimens of cruelty that people have come to accept as normal. The Army has officially eliminated some of its most abusive practices, along with its theory of "breaking them down to build them up," the classic humiliation of recruits by a drill sergeant, designed to make them into soldiers capable of acting as a unit, following orders and killing. This reshaping remains essential; it is simply meant to be accomplished with more respect now. In all events, weakness is to be despised, which means that the 15 to 37 percent of men and the 38 to 67 percent of women who sustain at least one injury due to the rigors of basic training at Fort Sill, Fort Knox, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood or Fort Benning are in trouble.

A year ago I visited Fort Sill, Okla., where the son of a friend had suffered stress fractures during basic training and was then in the post's physical training and rehabilitation program. PTRP is where the Army, desperate for bodies in a time of war, puts broken enlistees whom it is committed neither to curing nor to releasing, nor even to respecting as soldiers and human beings. Basic training takes nine weeks; PTRP can warehouse soldiers for months, in anticipation of the time they manage to recuperate, pass the grueling PT (physical training) test and go on to battle-readiness; or fail the test, try again, stumble through the bureaucratic labyrinth until the point at which they are chaptered out or medically discharged. As trainees, all have yet to be granted "permanent party" status in the Army. In the military hierarchy, this makes them lower life forms, which is how they were being treated at Fort Sill.

It was Family Weekend when I visited, and the PTRP command was on its toes because for weeks my friend, Pat deVarennes, had been writing a blog exposing the routine abuses of injured soldiers there. As a result of her persistence, the Army had initiated an investigation into the actions of a drill sergeant who had kicked a soldier in his bad knee, sending him to the floor screaming, and who had punished and terrorized the soldiers in numerous other ways. That weekend these men, on crutches and painkillers, wearing casts or moving gingerly, were not being called "fakers," "lady men," "shitsacks," "malingerers"-- the names that, at other times, were regularly hurled at them. The command met with parents and wives and told them their loved ones would be getting individualized medical attention, something many had not had for months, and reassured them that the soldiers' well-being was their chief concern.

A week later, on March 19, 2006, one of those soldiers, Pfc. Matthew Scarano, 21, was found dead in his bunk. He had been in the program for more than a year with a shoulder injury and excruciating pain. It was unlikely he would ever be fit for battle, but he could not get out. Shortly before he died, he wrote to deVarennes: "I liken being here to being incarcerated. And it often helped during the bleaker points in PTRP history to think of it as such: I'm far from being any kind of expert on the subject, but perhaps it was a psychological self-defense mechanism to try to perceive what was going on as being punitive in nature."...

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

1. Dupe--- Mods, please delete Thanks, and sorry about that.