But Nash points out that a discharge offers one thing to commanders that the medical-retirement process does not: a "way faster" means of getting rid of a troublesome soldier. "Somebody can be out on the street in a week instead of nine months," he says. And as Siegel's experience shows, soldiers are continuing to be discharged even with diagnoses of PTSD in hand.
"I know there's been a lot of progress [in recognizing that combat veterans need help]," says Reynolds, the Fort Lewis sergeant. "But down at the unit level, where the soldiers are," it's as though these troubled soldiers "are being swept under the rug."
Jordan Hollender
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The new mental-health screening "doesn't necessarily mean anything," says Vokey. "It doesn't mean the discharge proceeding stops, or they treat you any differently." Adding to his skepticism is his past experience. Marines would come into his office with "these horrific stories," he says. One had a best friend killed before his eyes, another's hand couldn't stop shaking as he talked to attorneys. About a third to a half of the Marines facing discharges had PTSD or some other mental disorder, he estimates.
Those diagnoses and experiences were "pretty much ignored," Vokey says. He would hear arguments from commanders such as "I know PTSD is a problem, but this guy did something wrong." And those were the leaders who believed in PTSD. "Many people, including senior leaders, did not," Vokey says.
Petty Officer Jermie Arnold says he ran up against the nonbelieving kind. As in the Siegel case, Arnold—an Oregon native, 10-year veteran of the Navy, and recipient of a Navy/Marine Corps Achievement Medal—is currently facing a discharge from the military on a drug charge. He's now at the Naval Station San Diego awaiting a hearing.
In early 2003, Arnold and fellow sailors were at Camp Patriot in Kuwait, where, he says, Saddam Hussein would aim missiles. At that time, nobody knew if Iraq had chemical weapons or not. And so sirens would go off warning troops to don their protective masks and suits. At 12:07 one morning, the alarm went off, and Arnold couldn't find his mask. "I'm running everywhere looking for it," he recalls. "Somebody had grabbed mine." And then Arnold could see the sky light up right above him.
Still without his mask, he remembers thinking "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to sit here and die."
He didn't. As he leaned backwards onto somebody else's cot and prepared for the worst, he bumped into a mask, perhaps belonging to the person who took his. He grabbed it and ran to a bunker, where he says he spent the next six hours sweating in 120-degree heat, locked in a suit that made it feel even hotter.
He was safe. But he says that since then, flashbacks of frantically looking for his mask have caused him to wake up in a cold sweat.
Upon his return in the spring of 2003, he started drinking. Each day, he says, "basically I was drinking an entire bottle of Black Velvet. It made the day go better."
One night, after being transferred to the Naval Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, he went to a college party off base and encountered a guy shooting a cap gun. "I was freaking out," he recalls. He left the party and went to a nearby grocery, where he grabbed some shelves leaning against a wall, intending to use them on the guy with the cap gun.
When a police officer on patrol spotted him, Arnold dropped the shelves and started running, according to both his account and Kingsville police records. The reporting officer filed charges of burglary (for stealing the shelves) and evading arrest. (They were eventually dropped for lack of evidence.)
Because of the incident, Arnold says he was called before a disciplinary review board. Arnold says he told the boardmembers that he suspected he had PTSD. It didn't go well, he claims. "They were laughing and joking, telling me I didn't have PTSD, saying I was just trying to get off the charges."
The regional Navy office that covers Kingsville said they could not disclose information about Arnold's disciplinary proceedings for privacy reasons.
His father, Tom Arnold, a former Border Patrol mechanic who lives in the Portland suburbs, wrote every member of Congress he thought could help. One, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, launched an inquiry with the Navy, according to Tom Towslee, a spokesperson for the Senator. Towslee says the Navy reported back that Arnold had gotten medical treatment.
Not so, according to Arnold. But the Navy did transfer him for a time to a laid-back job at the Escondido Ranch, used by the Navy for bombing practice as well as for recreation for its sailors.
Still, Arnold continued to have problems as he was deployed twice more. Shortly before his third tour, he says he walked into his chief's office and broke down crying. The chief sent him to a Navy counseling center, where he was diagnosed with PTSD, according to Arnold. But soon he was deployed again on the USS Pearl Harbor. After an R&R stop in Thailand, he tested positive for cocaine.
"I think I'll lose all my benefits," he now worries as he awaits his discharge hearing.
The military "should have something to help him," bemoans his father. "They created this problem, then they just want to kick him out."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
