Race-car drivers get peek at Army life

Race-car drivers get peek at Army life
By Will Graves - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Mar 19, 2009 19:10:37 EDT

FORT KNOX, Ky. — You’d think since Tony Stewart doesn’t blink while going 180 mph at NASCAR tracks every weekend that he wouldn’t be impressed by a vehicle that tops out at 45 mph.

Then again, Stewart doesn’t drive an Army tank.

Stewart admits he got a little trigger happy while in a tank simulator during a visit Thursday to Fort Knox, firing shells at random targets in the western Kentucky base’s Close Combat Tactical Trainer Facility.

Stewart — who co-owns the No. 39 Sprint Cup car co-sponsored by the Army — and NHRA driver Tony Schumacher spent a few hours with soldiers, getting a taste of Army life that hardly resembled the battles Stewart would wage with green plastic Army men in his parent’s garden growing up.

The drivers took a glimpse at the cramped seat used by the tank drivers and marveled at how they can handle the massive machines without so much as a rearview mirror.
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Military veterans take horse farm tour

Military veterans take horse farm tour
By Jillian Ogawa
jogawa@herald-leader.com
PARIS — Willie T. Hunter had just returned home from Vietnam, where he had lost his hearing, permanently, in his left ear, and had narrowly escaped death after being hit by a rocket.


Wearing his U.S. Army uniform, he was pelted by a tomato and a lemon, Hunter recalled, while getting off a plane shortly after his arrival in the states.


"When we came back, we were called baby killers," Hunter said.


It's that experience that motivates Hunter, 64, of Louisville to help veterans who served in recent conflicts in the Middle East.


"I had a bad taste in my mouth for a long time," said Hunter, who served in the Army for 20 years. "I didn't want them to go through what I went through."


On Thursday, Hunter was among the veterans from past conflicts who gathered at Runnymede Farm, a Thoroughbred farm, with veterans currently in the Warrior Transition Battalion in Fort Knox, which helps injured soldiers make the return home or to their unit.


The Military Order of the Purple Heart, a charitable organization, and the Clay family, which owns the farm, invited the veterans on a private tour of the farm as a way to show appreciation for the sacrifices the soldiers made.
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http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/506509.html

After struggle, GI with TBI found fit for duty

After struggle, GI with TBI found fit for duty



By Joshua Coffman - The News-Enterprise via AP
Posted : Monday Jul 14, 2008 11:32:22 EDT



FORT KNOX, Ky. — Injured in Iraq nearly 14 months ago, Spc. Joshua Gracia’s military career has been a roller-coaster ride. Now he is ready to get back on track.

A step away from being medically discharged from the Army, he is preparing to return to duty as a combat engineer.

Gracia shipped out with the 19th Engineer Company from Fort Knox in August 2006 and worked alongside the 82nd Airborne Division building fortified patrol houses so infantry soldiers could leave their forward operating bases and communicate with Iraqis in neighborhoods.

While traveling in a piece of heavy construction equipment on May 30, 2007, a roadside bomb exploded directly beneath the 22-year-old from Archbold, Ohio. It marked the second IED attack Gracia had met with in a week and one of several explosions he endured during nearly 10 months in combat.

The blast disabled the 70,000-pound excavator and left him unconscious.

He was evacuated to a military hospital in Balad, Iraq, and, 10 hours after the explosion, his appendix ruptured. Gracia then was flown to a hospital in Germany where soon after he would be diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury.

He was left with memory loss and slurred speech.

The medical determination left Gracia, the first on his father’s side of the family to serve in the military, down and out as his fellow combat engineers continued their tour of duty.

Gracia will be assigned to the 911th Engineer Company, a unit activated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to perform rescue and recovery missions in stateside government buildings.

The unit does not deploy and a limitation on Gracia’s medical evaluation currently prohibits him from serving in overseas combat.

He is set to link up with his new unit in October, but Gracia wants that day to come sooner.

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Pvt. David Dietrich sent to Iraq no matter what and died there

‘He Should Never Have Gone to Iraq’
More borderline troops are being sent to the front, sometimes with tragic results.

By Dan Ephron NEWSWEEK
Jun 30, 2008 Issue

Pvt. David Dietrich had a history of cognitive problems. He struggled in boot camp at Fort Knox, Ky., striking at least one of his superiors as unfit for the military. Dietrich was so slow at processing new things, some fellow soldiers called him Forrest Gump.

His squad leader, Pfc. Matthew Berg, says Dietrich couldn't hit targets on the rifle range and had trouble retaining information. "He was very strong physically, but mentally he wasn't really all there," Berg says. Recruited as a cavalry scout, one of the toughest specialties in the Army, Dietrich seemed to lack the essential skills for the job: concentration, decisiveness and the ability to move around without being noticed. He was sent for psychological evaluations at least twice, yet somehow Dietrich advanced—from Fort Knox to Germany and on to Iraq in November 2006. Eight weeks later, at 21, Dietrich was killed by a sniper while conducting reconnaissance from an abandoned building in Ramadi.

What was a guy like Dietrich doing in the military? At a time when an overstretched Army is sending into combat thousands of soldiers who once would have been considered mentally or physically unfit for duty, his story illuminates the complexities and human cost of the war—and shows how hard it is to find the line between tragic circumstances and military misconduct.

Dietrich's problems did not surface on enlistment tests. In Iraq, it's unclear whether his cognitive issues had something to do with his death. Yet his superiors had serious misgivings about the troubled soldier. One of them says he worried that Dietrich would pose a danger to himself and others if he was sent to Iraq and pushed to have him processed out of the military—only to be rebuffed by higher-ups. In conversations with NEWSWEEK, he asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing his Army career. Berg, the squad leader, says he is speaking publicly because he feels partially responsible for Dietrich's death. "The Army was under a lot of pressure to graduate scouts at the time, and even now … no matter how competent or incompetent," Berg says.
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/142640
linked from ICasualties.org

Sgt. Dies in July 07, DOD reports death in May of 08?

DoD Identifies Army Casualty


The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.



Sgt. Jerry L. DeLoach, 45, of Jackson, Ga., died July 7, 2007, at Fort Knox, Ky. He had been medically evacuated from theater, and died of a non-combat related injury. He was assigned to the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Knox.

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11895

linked from ICasualties.org

How many more did they forget to report?

Non-combat death at Fort Knox

Knox soldier dies by apparent gunshot wound

The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Apr 24, 2008 9:31:12 EDT

FORT KNOX, Ky. — The Army is investigating a Fort Knox soldier’s death Wednesday afternoon from an apparent gunshot wound. He was an Army specialist in the 16th Cavalry Regiment, which includes the Army’s Armor School, officials said.

The soldier’s name has not been released pending notification of family. A Defense Department policy prohibits releasing names until 24 hours after next of kin is informed.

A Fort Knox spokesman declined to say whether the death was a result of a training accident. Officials say the soldier received care from an on-site medic and then was flown to University Hospital in Louisville.
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/04/ap_knoxdeath_042408/

States Step Up with War Vet Aid

States Step Up with War Vet Aid
Mclatchy -Tribune News Service March 17, 2008
FORT KNOX, Ky. - In the complicated world of military and veterans' benefits, in which returning warriors face a bewildering array of complicated and sometimes conflicting directions, Wally Kotarski is a middleman.

One morning last week, with a fresh coating of snow covering the U.S. Army base in Fort Knox, Kotarski met with a soldier recently back from Iraq. The soldier had such a debilitating case of post-traumatic stress disorder that his squad leader was ushering him around.

Kotarski explained the range of services and benefits that the soldier could - and should - receive once he's discharged from the Army. He tracked down the address of a Vet Center, operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, in the soldier's neighborhood in Brooklyn. When the soldier goes home, one of Kotarski's colleagues will make sure that somebody in New York gets the veteran to the center.

Kotarski, who served in the Army for 20 years, works for the Kentucky Department of Veterans Affairs, participating in a new program that's designed to ensure that soldiers don't fall through the cracks.

As troops stream home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the VA and military systems restructure their benefits and services, states increasingly are stepping in to help service members navigate the process and get on with their lives five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Citizen soldiers from various states' National Guard and Army Reserve units make up a substantial portion of Iraq forces, and soldiers are doing repeat deployments. Many come back with deep psychological problems on top of their physical wounds.

States, as well as nonprofit organizations such as the American Legion, have long played a role in helping veterans. Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started, however, some states have boosted their efforts, worried that the federal government is overwhelmed or otherwise unable to tend to returning soldiers quickly enough.

"We don't think that the VA is going to come through for our veterans in a timely fashion, and these are problems we see now," said Linda Schwartz, who heads the state veterans department in Connecticut. "If the VA catches up with us, good. If not, we have to take care of our people."

Around the country, state veterans departments spend more than $4 billion a year on benefits and services, according to Leslie Beavers, the head of Kentucky's program and a former president of a national association of state VA directors.

Each state has its own programs. Some run nursing homes for older vets and provide cemetery space in case there are no nearby federal VA cemeteries. Many provide assistance to veterans in applying for federal VA disability benefits.

In recent years, state programs have increased those efforts, both in money spent and in hands-on services. In Kentucky, Beavers said his state program had grown to $44 million a year, up from $17 million in 1998.

In Washington state, director John Lee said his two-year budget had jumped to $111 million, from $70 million at the start of the Iraq war. In Massachusetts, the budget has nearly doubled in the past five years, to a proposed $50 million for the next fiscal year.

The combined spending by state programs is dwarfed by the federal VA budget, which also is expanding rapidly and is proposed to top $90 billion next fiscal year for health-care and disability benefits, among other functions.

The state efforts, however, are driven by the belief that some veterans still slip through the cracks, and the fact that navigating the federal VA is daunting for the average person.

"We have a great VA system, but it's also time-consuming and incredibly complicated," Lee said. "We need somebody to be an advocate for the veteran."
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http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,164093,00.html

Army probe finds failures in care at Fort Knox unit

LEFT BEHIND: Melissa Cassidy (left) and her mother-in-law, Kay McMullen, want changes in how wounded soldiers are cared for so Sgt. Gerald Cassidy's death while in the Army's care will not be in vain. Abbey, 5, and Isaac, 3, also survive their father, who was 31.

SPECIAL REPORT
A soldier's death, a family's fight
Army probe finds failures in care at Fort Knox unit
By Maureen Groppe
Star Washington Bureau
FORT KNOX, KY. -- When Sgt. Gerald Cassidy died alone from a prescription drug overdose at the Army's Warrior Transition Unit here, at a facility set up expressly to help wounded soldiers, he had more than 600 prescription pills in his room.

His body was found Sept. 21 in a chair in his room, after he had missed required morning and afternoon check-in for three days.

A sergeant was supposed to have taken attendance and tracked down anyone not present.

Instead, the sergeant ignored Cassidy's absence the first afternoon, missed the next daily check-in with car trouble and the following day marked Cassidy present even though he wasn't.

Cassidy was found dead more than eight hours after his wife, Melissa, began calling Fort Knox in an escalating panic on Sept. 21.

Finally, after she called at 6 p.m. and told a sergeant that she was getting ready to drive down from Westfield to look for her husband herself, the sergeant checked Cassidy's room.

Two hours later, Melissa was told over the telephone that her husband had been found dead in his small room. Four hours after that, about midnight, an Army chaplain arrived at Melissa's home.

The Army pronounced Cassidy's death an accidental overdose. The 31-year-old soldier took too many prescription drugs that, in combination, suppressed his respiratory system. In his system were methadone, the antidepressant citalopram, multiple opiates, a tranquilizer and a hypertension drug.

These and other details about how Cassidy lived his last few days and how he died were revealed recently by his wife and mother in an interview with The Indianapolis Star.

Cassidy's family also provided to The Star key documents from the Army's investigation of his death that had not previously been released and shared some notes Cassidy wrote at Fort Knox about his anxiety over loud noises and lack of sleep and his concern for the impact of his illness on his family.

The family says it is speaking out in hopes that greater public awareness will help other soldiers get better treatment.

The family found an ally in Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, who is calling for numerous changes in the way the military handles mental health services for wounded soldiers.

"The pain is never going to go away," said Cassidy's mother, Kay McMullen, Carmel. "You've got to do something then to change the outcome for other people."
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Brig. Gen. Mike Tucker A Man On A Mission To Heal

“What’s their job? To heal,” Tucker said. “If they’re not healing, they’re not doing their job.”

General: Army still facing Warrior Transition Unit challenges
Tucker lauds progress but says more ‘hard thinking’ necessary
By John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Monday, February 25, 2008

BAUMHOLDER, Germany — Nearly a year ago, Col. Robert P. White was catching up on old times with his old boss, Brig. Gen. Mike Tucker, when the phone rang.

White was in a pre-command course at Fort Knox, Ky., where Tucker was serving as deputy commanding general.

“I’m sitting there having a beer with him and he gets a call. He walks out of the room and comes back in and his face, his jaw just dropped,” White told a group of 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division commanders.

On the phone was the chief staff of the Army, who had a special assignment, one that would place Tucker in the eye of the storm. Revelations about shoddy outpatient care at Walter Reed Medical Center had just burst into the national consciousness. Tucker’s task was to make things right.

Tucker, now the Army’s assistant surgeon general for warrior care and transition, was in Baumholder last week to talk with commanders about the progress made so far and the challenges ahead.

“We have transformed the way we care for warriors in our Army and we will never go back to the way it was,” Tucker said during the presentation Thursday.
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=52803

Fort Knox:"We're soldiers caring for our own"

"We're soldiers caring for our own," said Lt. Col. Gary Travis, the unit commander at Fort Knox.

Fort Knox improves treatments
BOOSTS DISCHARGE PREPARATION, AID FOR WOUNDED
By Bruce Schreiner
ASSOCIATED PRESS

FORT KNOX --Staff Sgt. Gerald Gonzalez has seen plenty of changes in a special unit for wounded soldiers since arriving at Fort Knox last summer with injuries from a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Barracks at the Army post in Central Kentucky are being renovated for soldiers placed in the "warrior transition unit." Staffing has been beefed up to help soldiers heal. And an assistance center geared toward the wounded troops and their families has opened.

"It's a lot better now," said Gonzalez, who suffers from a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder since being wounded last May while helping escort a military convoy.

Still, he said, Army efforts to specially tend to the wounded soldiers remain "a work in progress."
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http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/327283.html

Death of Sgt. Gerald Cassidy caused changes at Fort Knox

Fort Knox touts improvements at unit for wounded warriors
By BRUCE SCHREINER, Associated Press Writer

Story Created: Feb 21, 2008 at 6:30 PM EST



FORT KNOX, Ky. (AP) — Staff Sgt. Gerald Gonzalez has seen plenty of changes in a special unit for wounded soldiers since arriving at Fort Knox last summer with wounds from a roadside bomb in Iraq.


Barracks at the Army post in central Kentucky are being renovated for soldiers placed in the "warrior transition unit." Staffing has been beefed up. An assistance center geared toward the wounded troops and their families has opened.

"It's a lot better now," said Gonzalez, who suffers from a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder since being wounded last May while helping escort a military convoy. "Overall, the way that we receive care has gotten better."

Still, he said, Army efforts to specially tend to the wounded soldiers remain "a work in progress."

The Army initiative has come under scrutiny following the death of Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, a member of the Indiana National Guard. Cassidy, who was in a transition unit, was found dead in his room at Fort Knox on Sept. 21, about 15 months after he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
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http://www.wsbt.com/news/indiana/15853057.html

Death at the Army's Hands

Just as the Pentagon failed to anticipate the duration and cost of the Iraq war, it has been woefully unprepared for the waves of wounded who return home needing care. Earnest, hardworking medical personnel haven't been able to handle the deluge. At Fort Knox, Cassidy and more than 200 other soldiers were placed in a newly created Warrior Transition Unit (WTU). The Army is spending $500 million this year on such units, in which troops operate as a military detachment and continue to be paid. After a 2007 Washington Post series focused attention on poor conditions at the service's flagship Walter Reed hospital in Washington, the Army created the units to streamline the care of Army outpatients. There are currently 8,300 soldiers in 35 WTUS. One in 5 suffers from TBI, PTSD or both.

Why do they keep saying this? How many times does it have to be pointed out to reporters by other reporters that the administration not only knew this was going to be a "quagmire" as Cheney put it and become what Stormin Norman warned would be "like a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit" when they cared about the loss of life? They knew this would produce years upon years and a multitude of wounded but they didn't care!

Just for a second here, set aside your position on Iraq. This has nothing to do with being for it or against it. This has to do with the troops who were sent there.

Go back and read history, read the speeches, listen to rebroadcasts of speeches they did at the DAV, the VFW and the American Legion conventions. Listen to the words of warnings and consequences they were so concerned about following the Gulf War that they decided to not remove Saddam. Take those words and then compare them to what Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney said about how fast this would be over. They may have told us that, but they didn't believe that. They proved it when they were defending the decision to not take over Iraq after they removed Saddam's forces from Kuwait.

They knew this would happen but did nothing to prepare for it. They knew how many years it would go on at the same time Rumsfeld was saying "It may take six days. It may take six weeks. I doubt six months." because he was involved in the Gulf War and so was Cheney and so was Powell.

This is what is so infuriating about all of this. They knew and did nothing to prepare. As a matter of fact the VA budget was cut in 2005. There are still less doctors and nurses in the VA than there were in the 90's. Nicholson sent back money that he did not spend at the same time there were soldiers coming back with PTSD and committing suicide because they couldn't get in to see a psychiatrist. So please tell me how dare they still use the no one knew copout on this?

Death at the Army's Hands
Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008 By MARK THOMPSON

Iraqi insurgents wounded Gerald Cassidy in the deafening blast of a roadside bomb just outside Baghdad on Aug. 28, 2006. But it took more than a year for him to die from neglect by the Army that had sent him off to war. When Cassidy returned to the U.S. last April, the Army shipped him to a hospital in Fort Knox, Ky., to get treatment for the excruciating headaches that had accompanied him home. For five months, he made the rounds of Army medical personnel, who couldn't cure a pain that grew steadily worse. Unable to make room for him in a pain-management clinic, the Army increasingly plied him with drugs to dull the torment.

At summer's end, the headaches had grown so intense that Cassidy pleaded once more for help, and his doctor prescribed methadone, a powerful narcotic. The next day, calls to Cassidy's cell phone from his wife Melissa went unanswered. After two more days without word from her husband, she frantically called the Army and urged that someone check on him. Nine hours later, two soldiers finally unlocked the door to his room. They found Cassidy slumped in his chair, dead, his laptop and cold takeout chicken wings on his desk.

The "manner of death" was summed up at the end of the 12-page autopsy: "Accident." But when he died, Cassidy had the contents of a locked medicine cabinet coursing through his body, powerful narcotics and other drugs like citalopram, hydromorphine, morphine and oxycodone, as well as methadone. The drugs--both the levels that Cassidy took and "their combined, synergistic actions," in the medical examiner's words--killed him.

Horrifyingly, it appears that Cassidy lived for up to two days after falling into a stupor. Forgotten and alone, he sat in his room until he died. "My God, he was there for three days, and no one even found him. That's a huge scandal," says Dr. William Kearney, Cassidy's Army psychiatrist. Regulations that require a soldier to show up for formation three times a day or be tracked down were widely ignored, say soldiers who stayed at Fort Knox. "You could easily linger for two days in a coma," Kearney says, "and if anybody had opened his door, they would have found him unconscious and they would have called 911."

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1713485,00.html

Mom says "The Army killed him with incompetent care"

Dead soldier's doctor is fired
Psychiatrist treated veteran at Fort Knox

By Laura Ungar
lungar@courier-journal.com

The Courier-Journal



A psychiatrist who treated Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, the wounded Iraq veteran from Indiana found dead in his Fort Knox barracks, has been "relieved of his duties," a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh said yesterday.

Bayh press secretary Jonathan Swain identified the psychiatrist as Dr. William Kearney.


The civilian doctor, contracted by the Army, is the fourth person to face job action in connection with the Sept. 21 death. Three soldiers in Cassidy's chain of command have already lost their posts.

Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, has linked the Westfield man's death to inadequate staffing and problems with care at the Fort Knox Warrior Transition Unit, which opened in June and is devoted to healing the wounds of war.

"The fact that (Kearney) has been relieved of his duties confirms the validity of the questions Sen. Bayh and the family have been asking," Swain said.

Although the Army is still investigating the death and its cause, preliminary reports show that the brain-injured National Guardsman may have been unconscious for days and dead for hours before someone checked on him.

Cassidy left a wife, a 5-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son.

"This was a beautiful young man who did nothing wrong," said Cassidy's mother, Kay McMullen of Carmel, Ind.

She declined to comment specifically on the psychiatrist, but said: "The Army killed him with incompetent care."
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It's about time this was brought out and people are held accountable for what they fail to do. This has happened too many times and very few have been held responsible for any of it.