04/22/10 – Joshua Kors – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And I'm happy to welcome back to the show Joshua Kors.
He's the author of a new article in the April 26th edition of The Nation magazine called Disposable Soldiers.
If you just go to antiwar.com right now, it's the top article in the front line section there next to the picture.
We've spoken with Joshua Kors on this same subject in the past and so has Charles Goyette in the archives there at Anti-War Radio, if you want to look that up.
Welcome back to the show, Joshua.
How are you?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here, and yet I hate your journalism.
I mean, it's really good stuff, but it's very disturbing.
So I guess, well, before we get into the specific story of Chuck Luther here, could you please tell us, I guess, you know, you must have looked this up in the textbooks or something.
What exactly is a personality disorder, if anything?
Personality disorder is a severe mental illness that strikes in childhood, and out of context, the military is using that to discharge wounded soldiers and deny them benefits.
Well, now, is this the kind of thing where, like, you know, Tony Soprano's mom, where she's just so narcissistic and self-referential and mean to everybody else and just kind of the center of the universe?
Is that the same thing we're talking about, or do you have an example that people could think of?
Yeah, the actual mental illness of personality disorder has a few branches, and one of them is narcissistic personality disorder.
You might imagine that Tony Soprano's mother would have a hard time being a functioning soldier in the military.
But in the last three years that I've been looking at this subject, I've looked at dozens and dozens of soldiers.
All of them passed through multiple screenings before going off to war, being wounded in combat, and coming back.
It's only then, after they're wounded, that these mental illnesses are discovered.
Well, now, let me play Pentagon's advocate here, if I can.
Sure.
Times are tough, unpopular, aggressive wars that nobody really wants to volunteer for, so we promise people citizenship if they'll come from third-world countries and join the Army.
They let in white supremacists and gang members and people just furloughed from prison and whoever they can to go there.
Maybe these guys really do have personality disorders, but the recruiters just kind of fudge the results on the way into the Army.
It's still true, though, when they're kicking them out.
That's a really interesting topic in itself.
A lot of the congressmen who've looked at this issue think there's a bit of fudging on both directions.
You have healthy soldiers coming in, being wounded, and then being discharged out the side door with this mental illness, personality disorder, when really what they have is broken bones, chunks of missing legs.
In Sergeant Chuck Luther's case, they said his blindness was caused by personality disorder.
With Specialist John Town, the soldier we spoke about last time, they said his deafness was caused by personality disorder.
And yet, on the other hand, they do have cases, so many people suspect, of the opposite, of soldiers that are coming and are facing mental problems.
And then the recruiters are saying, hey, just keep that on the down low.
We will usher you in anyway.
I don't have any investigation of that.
I certainly don't have any direct evidence that that is happening.
But one of the congressmen said that she has seen several cases of those coming to her office.
Well, and I don't mean to acquit the policy in question here.
It seems to me like if they do let in someone who is mentally ill, still, that's not an excuse.
They still owe what they owe, especially if we're talking about a mentally ill person being physically wounded in combat.
And to be perfectly clear, because I think I probably interrupted you and maybe talked over the real bottom line here, which you did mention once there, but I want to make sure everybody is on the same page and understands.
What we're talking about is people who, when their tours are over, when it's time for them to get out of the Army, the Army says, or if they're wounded and have to get out of the Army, they ought to be getting a Purple Heart and a parade or whatever, supposedly.
The Army says, oh, you have a personality disorder, and that means our contract is off.
We don't owe you college.
We don't owe you health care.
We don't owe you nothing.
Well, in fact, in Specialist John Town's case, after he was wounded by the rocket, they did give him a Purple Heart, and yet when it came time to discharge him, they said he wasn't wounded.
By the way, to go back to that earlier comment, it was Congressman Connie Brown, the Democrat from Florida, who said during the congressional hearing on these personality disorder discharges that her office had seen the cases you were discussing of people who were coming in, did have severe preexisting conditions, but the recruiters were saying, come in anyway.
We'll find a way to get you in because we have a shortage of soldiers.
In so many of the cases that I've looked at in these last three years, it's just the opposite.
These are soldiers who have been deemed healthy time and time again, have medical records to prove it.
In Sergeant Chuck Luther's case, the focus of this article that's coming out this weekend, he had gone through eight screenings, had served for a dozen years, and won dozens of medals for valor and for extraordinary performance on the battlefield, and yet after he was struck by mortar fire, he fell, he slammed his head against the concrete, and that led to severe traumatic brain injury, which left him with headaches so striking that he started to lose his sight.
The vision would shut off in one eye, and in the other, he said it felt like someone was stabbing him in the eye with a knife.
When he went into the aid station for help, first they told him that he was malingering, that he was faking his illnesses, and then they said, this blindness, these traumas, they're coming from personality disorder.
And of course, anyone who reads the story knows the horrific details of what happens next.
Well, go ahead and get into it.
We have the time.
Well, let me just say again real quick here, I'm talking with Joshua Kors, that's K-O-R-S.
DisposableSoldiers at TheNation.com is the article, and you can find the link in the Frontline section on AntiWar.com today.
So again, we're talking about this guy, Chuck Luther, specifically here.
Sounds like he was a career military officer, or was he an officer?
I forget.
Chuck Luther, he was a sergeant.
A sergeant, right.
But he was a career guy, right?
Absolutely.
He'd been serving for over a decade.
And then a mortar shell went off near him.
He had some kind of concussion or some sort of damage from the shockwave there, apparently.
And they said, nope, you've got a mental problem.
Then what?
Well, he said, that's ridiculous.
I don't have a problem with my personality.
And of course, that kind of personality problem couldn't cause blindness anyway.
So when he determined that he was not going to go along with this diagnosis, they did something quite severe.
They put him in a closet in the aid station and held him there at gunpoint under enforced sleep deprivation for over a month, keeping the lights on, blasting heavy metal music at him all through the night, sort of like the intro music to your show.
You could imagine trying to sleep with that with severe war wounds and the lights off while in a closet.
Actually, I could sleep to Master of Puppets.
It's anything that came the Black Album and after that would be torture for me, but I understand.
Yes, yes.
Well.
Pardon me for joking.
This is the most serious thing.
Again, just to be clear, they gave this career sergeant who was wounded in battle, they gave him the Guantanamo treatment.
Well, the way he did that.
I mean, they didn't shackle him, hang him from the ceiling, but keeping him awake with heavy metal music for not letting him sleep for more than a couple hours at a time, keeping him locked in solitary in a tiny little closet sized room or something.
He said it was the most trying situation of his life, and he described it as you did, that he came in for medical care, and it seemed a lot more like enhanced interrogation than the care he was expecting.
And, of course, after a month of that, he was willing to sign anything, and he did.
He signed papers saying that he had a pre-existing personality disorder.
They shipped him back to Fort Hood, and that's when he was informed of the repercussions of a personality disorder discharge.
No disability pay for the rest of your life, no long-term medical care, and because these soldiers who were discharged with this personality disorder don't complete their contract because they're too wounded, they have to give back a slice of their signing bonus so that on the day of their discharge, Luther and so many of these other soldiers are given a bill for several thousand dollars.
And that's what happened with him.
He was given a bill for $1,500 and said, That's it.
Your career is over.
Now, what kind of process is there for remedy here?
Because it sounds like, you know, all things being imaginary and fair, that he ought to be able to walk into a court and say, Your Honor, these guys had me sign this thing, but they kept from me the consequences of signing it.
It wasn't true anyway.
I was clearly under duress.
Null and void it.
Give me my benefits.
Well, there is a review board for the Army discharge, but it's very difficult.
And as I said, I've been through dozens of cases in my three and a half years investigating this story, and only once have I seen a soldier be able to reverse his discharge.
The happier news is that the VA does something quite extraordinary.
They give each soldier a unique and separate review of the cases.
So even though these soldiers are told you can't get benefits, you can't get disability pay, some of them fight and go into the VA and say, I want a separate review.
And then in cases like Luther's and a few unique others, they get the review.
The VA doctors back here in the States say, this is absurd.
You don't have a personality disorder.
And with Luther, they determined him to be severely disabled, 90% disabled.
They went ahead and started to give him benefits anyway.
So think of the dichotomy, Scott.
You have an Army that's saying the soldier isn't wounded at all and is severely mentally ill.
You have a VA now who's saying some of these soldiers aren't mentally ill in the slightest, but are severely wounded from combat.
Well, and, you know, after what they put this guy through, it's amazing he's not crazy now.
Well, I think he is now actually dealing with some post-traumatic stress disorders.
I think of myself, certainly, if I were in that situation, I might have come out with shell shock, too.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Joshua Kors.
We're in the United States of America.
And tell me, Joshua, when you wrote your first article about Specialist Town and how he was denied his benefits, what happened to your telephone?
Just started ringing off the hook?
It sure did.
With each of the parts of this series, first the John Town story, and part two of the series I interviewed military doctors who talked about the pressure on them to purposely misdiagnose wounded soldiers.
One of the doctors told me a story of a soldier who came in with a chunk missing from his leg.
They pressured him to diagnose that as personality disorder.
And no doubt in the wake of that article, I got yet another flood of phone calls.
It's really important for your listeners to know this is not just one or two cases gone awry.
Since 2001, 22,600 soldiers have been discharged with personality disorder at a savings to the military of roughly over $12 billion.
Well, and you know, that brings up an important point.
It's something I'm kind of torn about.
On one hand, well, at least close to a majority or right around a majority of the American people bought into this Iraq war, and certainly after it started, it was 75% said you're supposed to shut up and support the troops and send them out on their missions, and that's somehow supporting them and whatever.
So it seems fair is fair.
The government owes these guys the health care that they were promised in a way.
On the other hand, I kind of don't like the idea of there being a bunch of benefits to joining the military.
It should just be another job.
It shouldn't be the most exalted position in our society, and you shouldn't be able to put your whole family on the dole and go to college for free and all these things.
Why do we have a million-man army?
Because of at least the promises of all these benefits in the first place.
Well, to back up a moment, I think everybody, regardless of their political views or how they felt about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, want to see the best for these soldiers.
These are guys that are not taking free money from society.
These are soldiers that are taking on a very serious duty to protect this country, one that's dangerous.
But wouldn't you agree, honestly, that on September 11th, two-thirds or better of the military were guys who were in for a few years to try to get enough money to go to college?
They didn't want to go be in Imperial Army at all.
It's a jobs program for the South.
I don't think that's true at all.
In Sergeant Luther's case, he was really trying to follow a family tradition.
His grandparents had been honored soldiers in World War II, and he really wanted to follow in their bootsteps.
Don't get me wrong, Joshua.
I'm not saying these particular guys ought to be abandoned or whatever, but I'm just saying at the same time, having the whole society demand that the government devote all these resources to all the soldiers, it kind of makes it, especially in bad economic times, it becomes like a good job opportunity.
People are weighing, well, I can't get a job repairing air conditioners, and I can't get a job doing this or that.
I guess I've got to join up the Army.
Somebody's got to feed these kids.
And it becomes, you talk about the bonuses that they cheat these guys out of.
Some of those bonuses are pretty huge.
And for a working class, not very educated guy, this is one of the best ways to go in terms of money and benefits in this society.
I'm just trying to say there's kind of a problem there, I think.
I really don't think that squares with the figures.
It's interesting you raise this issue because I do ask all the soldiers that I interview, what got them into the Army in the first place?
And you get such a wide range of answers, from soldiers that are following a family tradition to soldiers that felt like the Afghanistan War was the best thing for this country and really wanted to help the country stay safe, to other folks who really didn't see another career for them.
But I think if a soldier, if an American, is just looking to make money, I don't think anybody's turning towards the military.
And those that do are really in desperate straits to begin with.
This is not a money-making scheme by any chance.
I think those people you'd find on Wall Street or in business, other places where the money flows a lot more freely.
Well, I don't want to reduce it all the way down to money only, but if you ask the guys at Fort Hood, what you'll hear over and over again is, it's just a job.
It's just my job.
If you say, hey, thanks for your service, what you're doing over there, they go, it's just a job, man.
But anyway, it's kind of beside the point.
I agree with you on how unfair this is, obviously, to these guys who are promised that they're going to be taken care of, that they're not going to be put in harm's way, except in the most necessary circumstance, when our government decides that they have no other choice but to use combat soldiers and risk their lives on these missions and what have you, that if somebody blows up a mortar near them and they have brain damage that causes it to feel like a knife being stuck in their eyeball, they're owed.
Somebody's got to be taking care of them.
Well, and think about the money issue, too.
Since you raised it, could you imagine coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, not only with the war injuries taken back from combat, but also with a sheet of paper that says you're mentally ill, when really you're nothing of the sort?
Could you imagine going into someone's office and asking for a job with a piece of paper like that?
This job economy, it's really a promise of joblessness, and one of the doctors I spoke to really pointed that out as well.
He had interviewed and treated Sergeant Luther when he came back to Texas.
He said that, first of all, not only was he not suffering from a personality disorder, but that an intern wouldn't have made that obvious of a mistake, but also that he'd seen a dozen cases coming from Fort Hood with this exact same diagnosis, and none of them actually had personality disorder.
He said it may seem like a small financial issue, but for so many of these soldiers, it's the scarlet letter that's put on their chest that they just can't wipe off.
And now that they go to try to provide for their family, it makes it nearly impossible.
Well, you know, what's bothersome to me, too, is that these officers who are doing these diagnoses, they're doctors, right?
And, I mean, what kind of sick incentive structure do they have where deliberately misdiagnosing their patients, especially in a way that leaves them helpless, if they know good and well is going to leave their patients helpless, how is it that that's a benefit to them rather than a demerit somehow?
Well, there are a few answers to that.
First, it's worth noting the Fares Doctrine, which comes out of a 1950 Supreme Court case, Fares v.
U.S., which provides a bubble in which Army doctors cannot be sued for malpractice by their soldiers, regardless of how egregious their mistakes are.
So there's that.
But also, these are doctors who are facing pressure to do this, and their careers are on the line.
We've seen two instances of this rising to the surface, not just from the doctors I've interviewed, and also the doctors who were mentioned by Congressman Bob Filner, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
During hearings, he talked about speaking with doctors who told him the same story, the pressure on them to purposely misdiagnose.
At a VA in Texas, we saw a memo from Dr. Perez, who led a group of doctors at her VA, and it arose in the course of a lawsuit where several documents that weren't supposed to see air were released to the public.
And it told the other doctors, hey, look, we know that a lot of these soldiers are injured, but we simply don't have the money to provide them benefits.
So diagnose a preexisting condition, like an adjustment disorder or a personality disorder, and that'll get them out the side door without benefits.
Well, you know, it seems like I'm not a veteran.
Have you ever been in the Army?
No.
Yeah, well, me neither.
But from what I understand about this, it seems like because the profession is actually waging mass violence, that officers and soldiers alike, at least the way it's portrayed, they are inculcated on the subject of honor.
And this is in order to control how the military deals out its lethal force when it comes to the enemy or innocent bystanders near enemies, and also how they treat each other, too, because it's not a business where if one Army doctor is doing a bad job that people can go to the competition or something like that.
So the whole brotherhood honor thing becomes like the overriding or maybe the only, like the last resort motivation for people to do right, even in the very worst of circumstances.
This is where doctors are supposed, Army officer doctors, are supposed to be so brainwashed with how important honor is that they would rather die than screw over a soldier like this.
Well, I don't know if I'd use the word brainwashed, but I certainly think that...
Well, I meant it in a positive way there, you know, like it's supposed to be that important.
Yeah, and to understand what it means to be a soldier means, you know, protecting and serving with honor, and I think that's part of the pain so many of these soldiers discharge with personality disorder as part of this fraudulent situation.
That's how they feel.
They thought that they had acted with honor and served with honor and that they should be treated with honor, and so many feel that when they get this wrongful diagnosis, that's not the treatment they're getting.
They're providing honored service, but not being treated in equal measure.
Has there been any real reaction in the halls of power to your work here?
Absolutely.
Barack Obama put forward a bill to halt these personality disorder discharges, and there was a matching bill in the House, but neither bill went forward.
I think a lot of the veterans groups were very disappointed with President Obama because during his presidential run, and now from the White House, he hasn't spoken about the personality disorder scandal or his efforts to stop it, and so without larger public understanding of this issue and without, you know, really a sense of what's going on, so many of the others on Capitol Hill thought that eliminating this discharge would just open the floodgates to benefits, and so Obama and his co-author, Senator Kit Bond, a Republican from Missouri, were forced to water down the bill, and the watered-down version of the bill was signed by President Bush as part of a spending bill.
The watered-down version required the Pentagon simply to study the issue, not to stop it, and that study was completed five months later.
It landed on Obama's desk, and as you might guess, the Pentagon concluded that no soldiers had been wrongly diagnosed, and none had been wrongly discharged.
Didn't you say earlier that they only saved $12 billion doing this?
22,600 people have been probably wrongly discharged under this loophole, and they've only saved $12 billion?
I mean, that's chump change, right?
You'd think in a larger viewpoint it would be seen as chump change, but I think having looked at this for so many years, I think it's part of the culture as well.
The VA manual caught some sunlight during that lawsuit I was speaking about earlier.
This was a group of veterans who were suing the VA for care that didn't meet the standard of a soldier, and as part of that lawsuit, several documents came into play.
One of them was the VA manual that trained doctors on how to treat soldiers, and that manual explicitly told the doctors if soldiers come in complaining of severe wounds, particularly the invisible wounds like traumatic brain injury and shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, don't believe them because those ailments are relatively easy to fake.
And when you have a situation like that where the soldier has to prove that he's telling the truth, it creates a situation where personality disorder discharges come into play.
And, Scott, I think you have to think of another factor too, and that's the public relations aspect.
If we took all of these soldiers who were being wounded in action and put them on the rolls of the wounded, the opposition to these wars would increase dramatically.
At least it seems that way to many who've looked at this issue.
You'd see a huge spike.
Right now we're seeing a relatively low number of wounded because so many of those who are wounded are kept off the books through techniques like personality disorder discharges.
And even with these techniques, you still have the RAND Corporation saying that 500,000 soldiers are looking at traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
And that's a large number already before we even factor in those who are being slipped out the side door.
It's an incredible number.
Half a million.
Well, how many people have been wounded?
Because, you know, I'm looking at the casualties in a rat page at antiwar.com, and pardon me, I guess maybe this question would be better directed toward Margaret, but we have, in terms of wounded, this kind of wide gap between estimated, over 100,000, and the official number, which is some small tens of thousands of American soldiers wounded.
What accounts for the disparity?
Do you have any idea what the real numbers are?
It's in the low thousands.
The low thousands of wounded?
Of wounded and dead, yeah.
It's interesting how the RAND Corporation's take on this is so much grander.
And I should mention the RAND Corporation, which originally grew out of the Pentagon, is a non-profit organization set up to study military issues.
I think so many of these invisible wounds, as they call them, with traumatic brain injury, with post-traumatic stress disorder, they crop up later, and they're relatively easy to ignore or misdiagnose right off the bat.
I think, as many of the veterans' leaders had said to me, in the coming years, as some of these soldiers come home and try to make a new life for themselves, we're going to see a massive wave of soldiers coming in with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder illnesses.
Well, pardon me, I'm kind of confused, and I'm sure it's my fault.
I'm not very good at answering these things in the form of a question sometimes.
But you said 22,600 of these guys have already been screwed out of their benefits by this loophole.
And then my question was, what are the total numbers of wounded from the war, do you think?
And then you said low thousands.
And 22,000 screwed by the loophole is already higher than low thousands.
Oh, well, I was simply talking about the Pentagon's figures, of what they're publicly releasing as wounded.
Right.
I mean, even now, with those low numbers, we're seeing almost 70,000 claims pending, of soldiers coming back wounded and seeking disability benefit.
That's probably a much better way to measure how many really wounded soldiers there are.
And those are 70,000 soldiers who are waiting in line in the midst of 440,000 who have filed for benefits.
So that may be a more accurate way to look at how many are wounded.
All right.
Well, I sure hope I see you all over TV next week or two talking about this.
Got any invites for the cable news shows yet?
I'm working on it.
This is really important stuff.
I mean, it's just, it seems like the kind of thing where, you know, Anderson Cooper or whoever could kind of hang their hat on it and see it as a benefit to themselves if they wanted to make a big deal out of it, something like that.
And I sure hope so.
Well, if people go to my website, joshuacores.com, they can see a Nightline piece that Bob Woodruff and I collaborated on, part of a series about the lives of wounded soldiers that won the Peabody Award.
So it's gotten out in bits and pieces.
But this most recent case about Sergeant Chuck Luther is just hitting the media.
And we'll see how far it spreads.
Hopefully your listeners can go to my site, can go to The Nation, and go to Huffington Post where I have a post about it.
There's even a new Facebook page of readers who are simply outraged as to what's happening here.
And that Facebook page, started by a former National Guardsman, is called Stop Personality Disorder Discharges for Our Wounded Soldiers.
Oh, right on.
Well, if I can find that thing, I'll join up today.
And again, everybody, the article is called Disposable Soldiers.
It's at the nation.com website right now.
And if you just go to AntiWar.com and look in the Frontline section right next to the picture on the front page there, you'll see it at the very top, Disposable Soldiers.
And I really strongly urge you guys to actually read this article, not just hear what he says in this interview.
After all, an interview can only be so good with me on one side of it.
So go and read this.
It's astounding and very important journalism.
It needs to be spread around and well understood.
So do that.
Thank you very much, Joshua, for your time on the show today.
While you're there, Scott, I have those figures that you've been asking about.
Oh, sure.
If you'd like them.
Yeah, go ahead.
In both wars, the death count is 5,376.
And the wounded in action, officially, is 36,000.
Plus 47,000 that were evacuated for medical-type issues.
We're looking at a total of 90,000 soldiers.
And as I said before, RAND and other corporations that have studied this think the actual number, including traumatic brain injury, is a lot larger than that.
Yeah.
Well, and they say, of course, that now more veterans of these wars have killed themselves than died in action.
That's another part of it, too.
The divorce rate is also pretty severe.
Soldiers coming back really face a second war.
And that's something that's also just becoming part of the public consciousness as well.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny.
It seems like mostly it's the anti-war people.
I think of you and Dar Jamal and Aaron Glantz.
Where are the pro-war mongers rallying around the veterans who are getting, you know, screwed out of their benefits and mistreated by the Pentagon?
Oh, well, certainly I wouldn't want to be lumped in with anti-war protesters.
I make a meticulous effort to be completely neutral in my reporting.
The Nation's been great in allowing me to publish my investigations, but I think that's one thing that your listeners will find.
If they go to The Nation, if they go to joshuacores.com, they're not going to find opinion from me.
Right on.
Well, fair enough.
And sorry for assuming too much there.
No, no, that's fine.
But I have to say, in addition to my keeping that, you know, mainstream neutral stance, I also have great respect for Aaron Glantz and the other reporters you mentioned.
They're doing a fantastic job at covering other aspects of the story.
Yeah, indeed they are.
All right.
Well, again, thank you very much, Joshua, and I hope we can do it again on occasion of your next piece along these lines.
Scott, I really appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
This is Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas, and we'll be right back after this.