The Nation: Disposable Soldiers

The mortar shell that wrecked Chuck Luther’s life exploded at the base of the guard tower. Luther heard the brief whistling, followed by a flash of fire, a plume of smoke and a deafening bang that shook the tower and threw him to the floor. The Army sergeant’s head slammed against the concrete …

“I remember laying there in a daze, looking around, trying to figure out where I was at,” he says. “I was nauseous. My teeth hurt. My shoulder hurt. And my right ear was killing me.”  The sergeant was seven months into his deployment at Camp Taji, in the volatile Sunni Triangle, twenty miles north of Baghdad. …

Then came the headaches. “They’d start with a speckling in the corner of my vision, then grow worse and worse until finally the right eye would just shut down and go blank,” he says. “The left one felt like someone was stabbing me over and over in the eye.”

Doctors at Camp Taji’s aid station told Luther he was faking his symptoms. When he insisted he wasn’t, they presented a new diagnosis for his blindness: personality disorder [PD]. …

PD is a severe mental illness that emerges during childhood and is listed in military regulations as a pre-existing condition, not a result of combat. Thus those who are discharged with PD are denied a lifetime of disability benefits, which the military is required to provide to soldiers wounded during service. Soldiers discharged with PD are also denied long-term medical care. …

According to figures from the Pentagon and a Harvard University study, the military is saving billions by discharging soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan with personality disorder.

Full Article: http://www.thenation.com/article/disposable-soldiers