According to a new article in the Military Times, the Army is targeting for deployment the 7.2 percent of active-duty soldiers who have yet to serve in war zones.  Since the war in Afghanistan began six years ago, 59.4 percent (515,000 soldiers) of the Army has deployed at least once to regions under the Central Command.  The remaining 33.4 percent of soldiers are either non-deployable or about to leave for war.

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dick Cody told the Military Times among the 7.2 percent still without war deployments are soldiers in the health and training fields:

Everybody wants to go downrange and be part of this because they know the importance of this war...At the same time, there’s a demand to make sure we have the right noncommissioned officer leaders and officer leaders at our training bases that are training up these young men and women to go to these units.

Of the 7.2 percent of soldiers (37,000 of them) without combat deployments:

--27.2 percent work in health services.
--7.1 percent work in career management fields and operations support (i.e. systems engineering, information systems management, and telecommunications).
--4.1 percent work in logistics, transportation, and human resources.
--3.5 percent serve in combat units.

Last Thursday the Supreme Court of Canada rejected appeals of two U.S. Army deserters whose petitions for refugee status before Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board were denied in 2005.  Unless something happens in the political arena they'll likely be deported, and then face court martials for desertion.  Here's some interesting facts on Army desertions recently published by the AP/CBS News:

• --Desertion among Army soldiers has reached its highest rate since 1980.
• --There's been an 80 percent increase in Army desertions since the Iraq war began in 2003.
• --There's been a 42 percent increase in desertions since last year.
• --About nine in every 1000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007.
• --4,698 soldiers deserted this year, while 3,301 deserted last year.
• --Marine and Navy desertions declined over the last fiscal year.
• --About 20 soldiers have applied for refugee status in Canada.
• --It's estimated as many as 200 deserters are hiding in Canada waiting to see how Thursday's case played out.

In Thursday's case the two soldiers involved were Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, who both left the Army in 2004 after learning their units were headed to Iraq.  At the time, Hinzman told the Washington Post:

"Some people have put us as cowards, others have put us as victims...I would say neither is true. I chose to do this. I feel I exhausted all the options I had."

As expected this case is taking a heavy political tone.  Some Canadians argue the Supreme Courts decision is a form of cow-towing to the U.S. administration.  From an editorial in the Toronto Star:

If Canada's federal government had the inclination to face down Washington just a bit, both men – who almost certainly qualify for permanent resident status – would be welcomed, not as refugees but as landed immigrants. That's how Canada treated U.S. draft dodgers and deserters from the Vietnam War. And it worked out fine.

A Canadian minister of parliament had this to say about the soldiers' case:

The Supreme Court ruled...Canadians want a refugee system that helps true refugees.

According to the Washington Post, estimates of how many soldiers moved to Canada to avoid Vietnam service range from 30,000 to 90,000.

An occasional series highlighting some of the most thoughtful and informative combat reporting throughout America's history at war.

Today's Best in War Reporting comes from the legendary combat correspondent Ernie Pyle at the Italian front in WWII.  With a simplicity of words and observations, Pyle manages to knock you over as he writes of the moments surrounding a young company commander's death.  In his words you can almost hear his own exhaustion as he holds back tears.  It begins:

AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 - In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas...I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked. Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

The narrative continues as Pyle evokes an almost bizarre scene as Capt. Waskow's body is removed from the mule and placed with the other bodies of U.S. soldiers.  The empathy with which Pyle treats this moment is a grim foreshadowing of his own future in the war.  Like Capt. Waskow, Pyle was loved universally by the troops; and like Capt. Waskow, Pyle would not make it home from the war alive.  He was killed the following April by sniper fire on one of the Japanese islands. 

As Capt. Waskow's men begin to pay their last respects, Pyle manages to convey how even their short remarks are far more emotional than they might seem on the surface.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

"I sure am sorry, sir."

But, of course, the soldiers (and Pyle) must get ready to continue fighting the next day.

After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

Witnessing the moments he described Pyle showed that at a moment when his own emotions may have dominated his thoughts, his ability to step back, observe, and convey never left his writing.

On the morning of Jan. 16 last year, Acosta led soldiers on a 3-mile fitness run across Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. Suddenly, insurgents attacked the camp with mortars.
Acosta remembers that he stopped, turned to yell at his soldiers and then dived for cover.
"Bam! That was it," he recalls. "Lights out."
An explosion about 60 feet away sent a piece of shrapnel — perhaps three-quarters of an inch long — through his left eye. It struck his brain and came out his right eye.
"It was a perfect hit," Acosta says.

During the Glass trial, 23 Marines from Platoon 2167 testified that he hit, punched and kicked them for minor infractions on dozens of occasions.  They also said he forced recruits to drink multiple canteens of water after eating. When some of the recruits threw up, Glass forced them to roll around in the vomit.

A conviction of this scope is rare. In the last three years, the recruit depot, which has nearly 500 drill instructors, has seen 44 drill instructors charged with misconduct toward recruits. Of those 44, only two before Glass went to court-martial; others were punished or admonished through an administrative process.

The U.S. soldiers fought alongside their Iraqi counterparts for more than 12 hours, killing hundreds of enemy, members of a cult known as Soldiers of Heaven, whose plan was the takeover of Najaf and its holy shrine.

The Special Forces soldiers also risked their lives when they went to the aid of two American Apache attack helicopter pilots who died when their aircraft was shot down by the enemy.

A new study appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports the number of Iraq soldiers seeking mental health treatment tripled from the moment they returned home to six months afterwards. The study, conducted among 88,235 soldiers, showed 4.4 percent of soldiers immediately sought treatment, while 11.7 percent did within six months after leaving Iraq.

Researchers attribute the initial low number to the euphoria--a honeymoon period--of coming home, and not thinking too much about the war they'd just experienced. Then as time goes on the troubles begin to sink in.  As the Army Times reports:

"When you come back ... you’re feeling great,” said Brig. Gen. Stephen Jones, the U.S. Army Medical Command’s assistant surgeon general. “You’re almost euphoric. And you don’t have any problems in the world. You’re just glad to be home. And then over the next three to four weeks, you get home, you re-establish the relationships with your family, and the normal stress that everybody feels when they return home starts to surface.”

Of particular note: 20 percent of active-Army soldiers sought or were referred for mental health care, as opposed to 40 percent of reservists and National Guard. Are soldiers among the latter more susceptible to having mental health issues? It's possible. The study also cited reservists moving on in civilian life without a strong military support community, as reasons for the high percentage.

Still, the Army reports some different reasoning for why the reservist numbers are much higher:

...Army officials believe much of that rise stems from the perception that their healthcare coverage will expire sooner than that of active-duty soldiers. So, even though reservists' medical coverage continues after their return, they are more likely to report problems during the second assessment, Army officials speculate.

The Washington Post highlighted the issue of substance abuse taken up by the JAMA study:

Another troubling finding is that while soldiers frequently reported abusing alcohol -- nearly 12 percent of active-duty soldiers and 15 percent of reservists -- less than 1 percent in each category was referred for substance-abuse treatment. One reason may be that such treatment is not confidential and triggers the involvement of commanders, the study says.

Here's a recent CBS News interview with a veterans activist taking a look at the state of mental health issues in the military:

One day after Michael DeVlieger was released from an Army hospital in Kentucky for acute stress disorder, he got the redeployment order. Now he's on the front lines.

"The closer that it got, he kept saying 'Mom I'm going to die, I'm not coming back this time. I'm feeling it, I'm dreaming it. I'm not coming back,'" said Sue DeVlieger, his mother.

Critics say there's a contradiction between military policy and its practices. The official policy of the Department of Defense states that soldiers with serious psychiatric problems could only be sent back to the war zone if they were stable for at least three months.

But the national guard told Team 5 its policy "is based on the severity of their PTSD diagnosis...that may limit their ability to deploy."

The Army says it's "individualized" and that they "do not want to stigmatize the soldiers by saying they cannot deploy with their unit because they have symptoms."

Besides bringing antibiotics and painkillers, military personnel nationwide are heading back to Iraq with a cache of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. The psychotropic drugs are a bow to a little-discussed truth fraught with implications: Mentally ill service members are being returned to combat.

The redeployments are legal, and the service members are often eager to go. But veterans groups, lawmakers and mental-health professionals fear that the practice lacks adequate civilian oversight. They also worry that such redeployments are becoming more frequent as multiple combat tours become the norm and traumatized service members are retained out of loyalty or wartime pressures to maintain troop numbers.

During this past weekend we saw Veterans Day parades around the country marked by a number of incidents that underscore the deep divisions within the veterans community.  In Boston 18 members of the anti-war veterans group, Veterans for Peace, were arrested as they sought inclusion in the city's Veterans Day parade.

From the Boston Globe:

Some protesters wore gags, which they later said symbolized the fact that, while they were permitted to march in the parade, they were prevented from carrying signs opposing the war in Iraq...When Boston police asked the demonstrators to move from the front of the podium so that the Veterans Day services could continue, they refused. As the Boston Firemen's Band played The Marine Hymn, several protesters were placed in plastic handcuffs and led away.

In Denver an 11th-hour agreement last Friday ended up allowing anti-war veterans to march in the city's parade after being told a month ago they were banned.

Members of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War marched at the end of Saturday's parade Nov. 10 holding signs protesting the war and President Bush. Some people along the parade route turned their backs on those veterans while others applauded.

When one a sign belonging to one of the protesters fell on the ground, Florence Sebern stood on it and refused to move in a protest of her own.
"Today is a day of patriotism, not politicism. Period. End of statement," she said.

Air Force veteran Jim Hill said the groups should be allowed to march in the parade.
"They put in their time, they lost their buddies too, their friends," he said.

A writer for the Long Beach Press-Telegram received some critical messages after he defended veterans wishing to protest in that area's  parade.  Unlike in Denver, no agreement was reached and protesters were absent from the event.  One message read:

"If anti-war vets want to march to get their message out, all they simply have to do is file with the city and have a march. They don't approach it that way because they know no one would show up. Instead, they target a long-time tradition of honoring our fallen heroes and attempt to hijack the event for themselves with a captive audience."

In the Santa Barbara Independent, anti-war Vietnam veterans stated their own reasons for condoning protests at these types of parades:

We will be joining with like-minded citizens to petition our representatives for legislation that will meet the just needs of veterans. We will be striving to end our government’s pursuit of senseless military adventures.

Often the military is portrayed as being of a single mindset.  These events show views among the ranks are as diverse as those of the general American public.

Though we talk a lot about the term "PTSD," rarely is it personified in the way it is in this incredible series of audio slide shows in the Los Angeles Times focusing on Marine James Blaker Miller.  Miller's face became an iconic image of the Iraq war when he was photographed during the battle of Fallujah, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.  Since then, he's struggled deeply with what he experienced during that time, contemplating suicide and going through a divorce.

In a highly personal and moving article the photographer, Luis Sinco, recently wrote of his own efforts to help Miller.  I urge you to take the time to watch the slide shows and read Sinco's words.

Photo: Seth Wenig/AP

He was killed on Aug. 16, 2006-shot by a sniper near Fallujah as he went to rescue a wounded Marine, Lance Corporal Glover, who also died that day. Their funerals both took place in New York City within the same week.

I often wish that every American could attend at least one funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are one of only a few occasions when military and civilian rituals can come together as one. They are the proud and largely unknown moments of American history. Since 9/11, they’ve taken place more than 4,000 times.

A few weeks ago Soldier's Home blogged about a VA hospital in Illinois where an abnormal number of patients recently died.  Partly at issue was the performance of Dr. Jose Veizaga-Mendez, a physician with a suspect history of practicing medicine.  Now authorities in Massachusetts, where the doctor once worked, have barred him from ever practicing in the state again.  From the Associated Press:

The resignation also requires Veizaga-Mendez to resign any other state medical licenses he may hold, as well as to withdraw any pending license applications.

Veizaga-Mendez was under investigation in Massachusetts on allegations of substandard care made against him in 2004 and 2005. He was being investigated for botching seven cases, two of which ended in deaths, before he relocated to Illinois in 2006.

The board had issued formal allegations that Veizaga-Mendez provided substandard care to several patients. The case was slated to be heard by an administrative magistrate when Veizaga-Mendez opted to resign instead.

The matter is now closed, the board said.

Frederick Johnson, 37, an Army reservist, slept in abandoned houses shortly after returning to Chester, Pa., from a year in Iraq, where he experienced daily mortar attacks and saw mangled bodies of soldiers and children. He started using crack cocaine and drinking, burning through $6,000 in savings.

“I cut myself off from my family and went from being a pleasant guy to wanting to rip your head off if you looked at me wrong,” Mr. Johnson said.

On the street for a year, he finally checked in at a V.A. clinic in Maryland and has struggled with PTSD, depression, and drug and alcohol abuse. The V.A. has provided temporary housing as he starts a new job.

After being discharged from the military, Jason Kelley, 23, of Tomahawk, Wis., who served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard, took a bus to Los Angeles looking for better job prospects and a new life.

Kelley said he couldn't find a job because he didn't have an apartment, and he couldn't get an apartment because he didn't have a job. He stayed in a $300-a-week motel until his money ran out, then moved into a shelter run by the group U.S. VETS in Inglewood, Calif. He's since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.

"The only training I have is infantry training and there's not really a need for that in the civilian world," Kelley said in a phone interview. He has enrolled in college and hopes to move out of the shelter soon.

Dressed in the Army uniform he wore in the Persian Gulf War, John Vitale draws stares at food kitchens as he waits for a free meal.

He earned 18 medals, ribbons and awards in Iraq, and was honorably discharged. He wants strangers to know he’s a veteran. He says he doesn’t drink or use illegal drugs. He calls everyone “sir” or “ma’am.”

But something about him isn’t right.

His eyes dart, scanning for an unknown assailant. His hands shake. His moods swing wildly. He can’t hold a job. For the last two years, Vitale, 40, has traveled in and out of homelessness.

The Concord Monitor provides a brief look at veterans in U.S. politics throughout the years.  Some facts they've compiled:

--Since the draft ended in 1973, U.S. citizens serving in the military fell to 1% of the population.
--31 of the 42 presidents were veterans.
--The 2008 election could mark the first time since World War II that a veteran isn't on the final ballot (if McCain doesn't make it).
--In the generation from 1870 to World War I, it really did matter if a campaigning candidate had fought in the Civil War.

The article goes on to look at whether military experience really does impact how a political leader conducts a war.  There was James Madison (civilian) who was in charge during the War of 1812 when the White House burned:

"It was really an active question about whether civilian presidents were capable of leading America in wars and managing the military in wars...[Madison] failing badly - that set a poor first example."

But, then there was Lincoln (civilian):

"Abraham Lincoln, he had been in the Black Hawk War for a couple of months and he had been a critic," Birkner said. "And yet he proved to be an adept commander-in-chief, a very patient and effective leader on the military side."

Eisenhower (veteran):

"The typical voter seeing America stuck in the morass of Korea, they thought, 'If this guy could do D-Day, he can do Korea,' " said Birkner. "And he did. He didn't deliver a victory, but he delivered peace with honor."

And then there's this view:

Today's post is the last in a three-part series of interviews with filmmaker Ken Burns.  His 15-hour documentary, "The War," looked at life on the battlefield and homefront during WWII. Excerpts: 

S.H.: What was it like living with the images of war for six years during the making of the film?

BURNS: It was very very tough. I mean we like to say, and it’s a dishonor to anyone within the sound of my voice who’s actually experienced combat, to say we used to have kind of our own minor versions of PTSD because we had to look at horrible footage. We looked at thousands of hours of footage to get our 15 hours of film. We looked at tens of thousands of still photographs, some of the most gruesome carnage.  And while our film is difficult to watch, and shows in an unmitigated, unmediated fashion the horror of war, nonetheless it isn’t the worst we’ve seen.  

We didn’t want to gratuitously shock anybody. There are difficult images, but we left the most difficult images of children, of women, of soldiers deeply maimed, guts spilling out on the battlefield, of the worst kind of depravity that takes place in war, out of our film. But we ourselves had to find out what it was like. And we’d often, many of us, recount the stories of in the editing process, the long solitary editing process, of going home at night and dreaming--finding ourselves not just filmmakers in the editing room trying to solve the problems of the Battle of Peleliu, for example, or the Battle of the Bulge, but finding ourselves in that battle.  [We were] realizing, ‘wait a second, we’re filmmakers without guns--why are we here?’ And waking up in cold sweats with nightmares, coming in hollow-eyed with sleep and finding out the editor, or producer across the table had felt the same thing, or something similar in a different battle.

It was very difficult, but what kept us going, and I don’t mean to play up any real difficulties--we had the luxury of being at home, none of us were called up to do the actual fighting that takes place--is that we were compelled along, carried along, buoyed by the stories that we had collected.  [From] the 40-odd people that we’d gotten to know intimately, people we’d said in our early boiler plate language paid lip service to the notion that these people would be like family members, somebody you might have had Thanksgiving with. By the end I can tell you that they do feel like family members. We lost Earl Burke. We lost Ray Leopold in the last few months.  And we all felt a great deal of sadness as if someone really close to us had died. With Ray Leopold, from Waterbury, I actually broke down and cried, as if it had been my own grandfather.

[Part 1] [Part 2]

A veteran’s hopes for the next secretary. 

When he reviewed Iraq military memoirs on NPR recently, Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks pointed out an instance of incredible combat leadership. During one scene described in a Marine officer’s book, he was checking his platoon’s perimeter fighting holes at night in Afghanistan when he came upon Marine Gen. James Mattis also checking on the men. As commander of all Marines in Afghanistan, Mattis soundly proved the extent of his compassion for the average grunt.

General Mattis is the type of leader one hopes for in a combat zone, but that doesn’t mean you stop needing noble leaders when you come home.

One day it would be nice for the VA secretary to live as consciously in the mind of a veteran, as his/her division commander once did. You may never have met him, or know too much about him, or even know what it is he exactly does, but you know he’s out there leading you. No vets I talked to ever knew the former VA secretary’s name.