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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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February 12th,
2009 - "You’re a Pussy And a Scared Little Kid” Feature article from Salon Magazine Summary
of the Fort Carson 2nd/4th Brigade Combat Team Killings |
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"You’re a Pussy And a Scared
Little Kid” John Needham returned from Iraq, suffering from combat stress. If he
had received proper care, would he be standing trial for murder? By Michael de Yoanna & Mark Benjamin Salon Magazine February 12, 2009 Fellow soldiers in Iraq
called John Wiley Needham "Needhammer" for his toughness. They also
saw him as somehow charmed, because the tall blond Army private from Southern
California always seemed to be just far enough away from danger. People died
next to Needham; Needham survived. But "Needhammer"
was not indestructible after all. He struggled with the aftereffects of the
explosions he'd dodged. He survived a suicide attempt while in Iraq, and,
after being shipped out of the country in 2007, was diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury. He took so many
prescription meds he could barely hold his head up. According to Needham's
father, Mike, the Army's response to the soldier's problems was punishment
rather than treatment. Last year, just weeks after
his discharge, he allegedly beat 19-year-old aspiring model Jacqwelyn
Villagomez to death in his California condo. A Salon investigation has
identified several trends involving Fort Carson soldiers who became
homicidal. There are failures by healthcare workers and commanders to provide
proper care to soldiers struggling with hidden wounds such as PTSD and brain
injuries. There is a tendency to overmedicate soldiers struggling with stress
or other injuries. Behind it all is an Army culture that punishes problematic
soldiers instead of aiding them. Needham is one of at least
13 current or former Fort Carson soldiers to serve in Iraq and then be
convicted, accused or linked to a murder in the past four years. Victims like
Villagomez who died at the hands of Fort Carson-based soldiers might be alive
today if the Army had played closer attention to their mental state,
providing necessary healthcare. In another story in the "Coming
Home" series that will be published tomorrow, Salon details the cases of
several soldiers involved in homicides whose preexisting problems raise the
question of whether they should ever have worn a uniform. The story of John
Needham, however, is the story of a young man who seemed stable and unscarred
until he had driven down too many bomb-laden roads in Iraq. In 2006, Needham was a
happy-go-lucky house-painter with a friendly smile, 6-foot-2 and a sturdy 210
pounds. The 23-year-old entered surfing competitions, played golf, wrote
songs on his guitar and dabbled in painting pictures. In his family, he was
the funny guy. "John was so full of life," says his father, Mike
Needham. He was also a patriot who,
like his dad before him, enlisted in the Army. In October 2006, not long
after basic training, John Needham was sent to Iraq. He was first attached to
1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, patrolling a sector in Baghdad rife with
insurgents. Needham saw some action, but
he seemed to be holding up. By January 2007, he even got to go home. The Army
was preparing for the troop surge and Needham was told that if he didn't take
leave, he might not get another chance. So he went back to San Clemente,
Calif., spending time with his family and riding the waves. In photos from his leave,
Needham is smiling. Yet when the camera wasn't aimed at him, his father says,
John was shaky. But it didn't appear to be a big deal. Just some jitters.
Needham seemed to be coping. Two weeks later, Needham
returned to Iraq and then in March or April was reassigned to the Fort
Carson-based 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry. With the 2-12, he patrolled
al-Dora, a Sunni neighborhood in southern Baghdad. It was a violent area. In
June, Needham and a group of soldiers stopped a car. Inside sat two suspected
insurgents. Needham approached with his rifle in the "low and
ready" position, aiming it at the face of one of the men, just in case.
Needham ordered one of the men to get out. As the man slid out, Needham
noticed he was holding a grenade. The pin had been pulled. "Grenade!" Needham
shouted. Then he pulled the trigger
of his rifle, hitting the insurgent several times in the chest and finally in
the head. As the man went down, the grenade rolled toward Needham, who was
running to his Humvee. "The explosion at such
a close range was incredible," Needham wrote to his father in an e-mail
following the incident. It briefly knocked him out. He would receive an Army
Commendation Medal for actions to save his comrades and a Purple Heart
because shrapnel entered his legs, too deep to be removed. He would also
begin to suffer from chronic back pain. While Needham patrolled
al-Dora with the 2-12, improvised-explosive devices were an ongoing threat.
He brought home photos from the spring and summer of 2007 that showed the
gore he saw with the 2-12. One picture showed a dead body, still dressed in
traditional Iraqi clothing, with a rotting skull for a head. Another picture
showed an Iraqi with the top part of his head blown off, covered in blood,
eyes open, his body placed in a black bag alongside his brains. Much later, after Needham
had left Iraq and was undergoing medical evaluation, one of his commanding
officers in Iraq would assure the evaluators that during his combat tour
Needham had seen the sorts of things that wound minds. Needham, wrote Capt.
Jim Keirsey in a March 2008 e-mail, "encounter[ed] and witness[ed]
situations that may contribute to" PTSD. "Every soldier in the unit
saw civilians injured by road side bombs, dead bodies from civilians killed
from sectarian strife, and most significantly, every soldier patrolled daily
under the threat of injury or death" from an improvised-explosive
device. While still in Iraq, Needham
sought help. He wrote to his father that he saw a doctor and was given a
small handful of Zoloft pills, which treat depression and anxiety, and Ambien
for sleeplessness. It didn't seem to work. "I'm stressed out to the
point of completely losing it," Needham later wrote in an e-mail to his
father. "The squad leader brushed me off and said suck it up." Needham began to
self-medicate with large amounts of alcohol. In a MySpace blog post in
August of 2007, Needham was showing the strains of war. The post, typos
included, reads: "I'm falling apart by the seams it seems the days here
bleed into each other I have to find the will to live man I miss my brothers.
These walls are caving in my despair wraps me in its web, I feel I'm sinking
in, throw me a lifesaver throw me a life worth living. I'm apart of death I
am death this is hard to admit but this shits getting old. I fall asleep and
pray I die before I wake. The heat is unbearable I wish this experience to
wash from me to melt away with the quickness it came, I yearn for the pacific
to cool me to refresh every positive ion in me. I want it so bad I would
trade a thousand waking moments to be there with you to just be near. The
sreets here fill with filth and the stray dogs resemble the locals with their
torn pride beaten and batter haggard life that falls into this abyss please
tell me you miss me let me know you realized I was gone but not forgotten.
With every wish and prayer and every meditation I get closer to home i close
my eyes" And on Sept. 18, 2007, he
finally fell apart. As he and a comrade drowned their troubles in booze,
Needham pulled out a gun and pointed it at his own head. The friend jumped at
Needham. "Blam!" The bullet
hit the wall. It was a suicide attempt,
Needham's medical records say. A crowd gathered. Needham got into a fight.
Things got confusing. Needham seemed to need
intervention more than ever now. But he was not sent for a psychiatric consultation.
Instead, he was punished - confined. "They keep me locked up in this
room and if I need food or water I have to have two guards with me," he
wrote to his father after 18 days. John Needham was told that
he could face charges and possible time in military prison for illegal
discharge of a weapon. It was then that Mike
Needham realized that getting help for his son was going to be a struggle.
"There were a number of things that prevented John from getting care,
starting after his suicide attempt in Iraq." Mike Needham reached Lt.
Col. Stephen Michael, the 2-12’s top commander, via phone in Iraq.
"After he tried to kill himself, they said he was a criminal. I couldn't
believe it. I called his commander to try to say that John might be suffering
from combat stress. I offered him literature. [Lt. Col. Michael] told me John
deserved to be in military prison. When I argued, he said, 'Fuck off,' and
hung up the phone." Needham's father then
reached out to Fort Carson's inspector general, a neutral arbiter of
disputes. John finally got medical intervention. He was shipped to Landstuhl
Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, where he was diagnosed with PTSD,
and then to the Washington, D.C., area, where he received care at Walter Reed
Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Depression was added to his list of ills. "I don't know what
would have happened to him if I hadn't intervened," Mike Needham said.
"They made me fight them just so that he could receive help. This is so
backwards, I thought. He was entitled to decent care for everything he had
already done for his country." From Maryland, Needham was
sent to Colorado. Salon was at Denver International Airport when Needham
arrived in the middle of November 2007. There, Needham was greeted by Fort
Carson commanders. Waiting in the wings was Georg-Andreas Pogany, then an
investigator for the advocacy organization Veterans for America. At Mike
Needham's behest, Pogany became an advocate for the Needham family, advising
John Needham of his right to receive mental healthcare. It was a tense time.
Needham's father remembers calling Col. Kelly A. Wolgast, the nurse who
commands Evans hospital at Fort Carson. He wanted to know why his son was on
12 medications. He was worried about the charges his son faced, although they
never came to fruition. He just wanted assurances that his son would get the
best care available. "She just said that
care at Evans was fine when I was telling her what happened to my son,"
Mike Needham said. "It was like she wasn't listening." While at Fort Carson,
Needham, advised by Pogany, kept notes about his treatment. On Nov. 16, 2007,
Needham, still wondering if he'd face charges stemming from his suicide
attempt in Iraq, wrote in black pen that he felt drowsy and laid his head on
a desk. According to Needham's notes, a staff sergeant found him there and
yelled, "This is no time to sleep." The sergeant then threatened
Needham, saying "I will break your fucking face." Needham told the
sergeant to go ahead. The sergeant closed in, inches from Needham's face, and
"called me a pussy and a scared little kid," Needham wrote. Weeks later, during a visit
with his family in California, Needham reinjured his back. He was brought to
Naval Medical Center in San Diego, and then received an official transfer
from Fort Carson to the medical center. Once with the Army’s warrior
transition unit at the medical center, Needham had trouble meeting the Army's
standards. Needham was charged with "patterns of misconduct" for
failing to appear in formation, insubordination to superiors, and other
problems. To Mike Needham, it seemed like the Army, which had acknowledged
that John had PTSD, was now punishing his son for displaying the symptoms. Nonetheless, on July 14,
2008, Needham received an honorable discharge. Then the real headache
began. The Army's disability ratings system, which assigns percentages to
gauge a soldier's level of disability on a scale of zero to 100 percent, gave
Needham a 20 percent rating for his back and just 10 percent for his PTSD,
according to his medical records. By law, Needham should have
received 50 percentage points for PTSD alone. The difference in scores is an
important detail, one that might have saved Villagomez. If Needham had
received a total score of 50 on the disability scale -- which a PTSD
diagnosis by itself should've guaranteed -- he could have received
personalized support for his day-to-day issues, whether psychological,
physical, financial or career. He also would be guaranteed lifetime military
health benefits. With 10 points for PTSD and only 30 overall, he didn’t get
the one-on-one attention he needed to transition back to civilian life. At one point he freaked out,
"naked, whimpering," his father says. "But we couldn't get him
everything he needed psychiatrically." Less than two months after
his discharge, on Sept. 1, 2008, Needham clashed with Villagomez in his San Clemente
condo, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office. It began
when Villagomez physically fought with another woman in the residence.
Needham broke up the fight, calling 911 to report it. The woman left, but
Villagomez stayed with Needham. When officers arrived,
Needham allegedly attacked them at his door while nude and drunk. Officers
subdued the 25-year-old with a Taser. They discovered Villagomez
unconscious, severely beaten and barely breathing. Rescuers rushed her to the
hospital, but they were too late. "We believe what
happened was he had a flashback and lost control," Needham's father
says. "Something triggered it, as if he felt he was back in Iraq and
being attacked." Needham isn't the only
soldier to be discharged with a PTSD rating lower than the 50 points that the
law requires for full benefits, according to a class-action lawsuit by the
National Veterans Legal Services Program. The independent nonprofit, which
fights to see that the nation's 25 million military personnel and veterans
receive benefits to which they are entitled, alleges that
"thousands" of Iraq war veterans with PTSD are currently being
denied care through Veterans Affairs because they were discharged with
illegal PTSD ratings. The Army recently acknowledged the law in an Oct. 14,
2008, Defense Department directive, ordering that soldiers discharged with
PTSD receive the proper rating. Bart Stichman, a
co-executive director for NVLSP, wasn't surprised to hear about problems at
Fort Carson, saying his office is aware of them. "Untreated
post-traumatic stress disorder is bound to create bad behavior,"
Stichman said. "Often what happens is if soldiers can't find help, they
medicate themselves with alcohol or drugs and it leads to problems." Col. Wolgast of Evans
hospital declined to comment on Needham's case - or any others - citing
medical privacy laws. Maj. Gen. Mark Graham assembled a task force late last
year to explore an unspecified number of cases, many of which have shocked
Colorado Springs. The task force is delving into all the aspects of the
soldier's histories - "not just healthcare," said Wolgast, who is
also a member. "There is no evidence
that we find that anything is a trend right now for those soldiers," she
added. Asked whether it is
appropriate for commanders to downplay or ignore the possible hidden wounds
of war, such as PTSD, Wolgast said no, and doesn't see it as a problem among
Fort Carson's troops. "I don't think anyone is out to maliciously go
after a soldier. I don't believe that at all." She added, however, that if
allegations that soldiers with mental injuries were mistreated by commanders
proved true, the Army would then "clearly help that young leader
understand a better way of going about taking care of that soldier." While Wolgast declines to
link soldier healthcare and violent crimes to PTSD, Sheilagh McAteer, a
Colorado public defender and a member of a federal Health and Human Services
task force exploring ways to divert combat veterans who resort to crime, sees
compelling links. McAteer says soldiers
returning home after traumatic war experiences are struggling with violence.
Some are winding up in prison and Army officials need to wake up and
recognize the problem, she adds. So far, though, the Army is
"refusing to take responsibility," McAteer says. "That's a
problem." John Needham is now sitting
in the Orange County Jail, awaiting trial for murder. He has pleaded not
guilty. Bail has been set at $1 million. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for
next month. Salon's attempts to reach Needham in jail were unsuccessful. External link: http://www.salon.com/news/special/coming_home/2009/02/12/coming_home_three/index.html |