This is the kind of story that always outrages people on both sides of the political spectrum, and rightly so. No matter how one feels about the war, no one wants to see a warrior punished for serving his country. Being asked to pay for the loss of body armor that failed to protect him from a crippling wound only adds insult to injury. The prominence this story is likely to achieve is even more unfortunate given the recent leak by the New York Times of an internal study detailing body armor vulnerabilities. The Marine Corps had asked the Times not to publish the study due to concerns it would enable enemy snipers to target our soldiers more effectively. Unsurprisingly, the Times showed their concerns for the troops by publishing a detailed diagram showing the enemy exactly where to aim.
The story quickly became a political hot potato. Ignoring the military's legitimate concerns that more body armor would weigh soldiers down or cause them to become overheated, opponents of the war lambasted the administration for not providing equipment a large part of the military had stated it did not want:
Several lawmakers ---- including U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York ---- have called on Congress to reassess the Defense Department's standards for body armor.
One of the difficulties for troops in the field is balancing the amount of weight they are carrying with their need to be mobile, Landis said.
"We are working with anywhere from 100 pounds of standard combat assault load, to up to 120 pounds, and the last thing you want to do is add additional weight," he said.
"You can totally encircle a Marine in steel and he is going to be less susceptible to hostile fire but he also will much less mobile," Hunter said. "You have to balance the amount of armor these folks can carry with their need to be able to move around."
The military initially didn't want the extra body armor, but the Marine Corps decided it did because of the greater protection it provides.
But the Times has a history of dishonest reporting on this issue. Recently, the Army proactively took steps to improve the reliability of its Interceptor body armor before a threat emerged. Here's how the Times reported the story:
"For the second time since the Iraq war began, the Pentagon is struggling to replace body armor that is failing to protect American troops from the most lethal attacks of insurgents.
"The ceramic plates in vests worn by most personnel cannot withstand certain munitions the insurgents use. But more than a year after military officials initiated an effort to replace the armor with thicker, more resistant plates, tens of thousands of soldiers are still without the stronger protection because of a string of delays in the Pentagon's procurement system."
There's just one problem: the reporter had been told the insurgents weren't using those "certain munitions" yet. He knew this, and yet he twisted the facts to make the Army look bad. Sadly, dishonest reporting puts the military on the defensive and makes them less willing to be open with the media. It also makes military readers like me far more skeptical of stories like Lieutenant Rebrook's. So I did some checking.
It seems that the Army did indeed give Lt. Rebrook a medical discharge after he was wounded in Iraq, and they did charge him $700 for his lost body armor. But the story gets worse, to hear him tell it:
Rebrook was standing in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle when the roadside bomb exploded Jan. 11, 2005. The explosion fractured his arm and severed an artery. A Black Hawk helicopter airlifted him to a combat support hospital in Baghdad.
He was later flown to a hospital in Germany for surgery, then on to Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington, D.C., for more surgeries. Doctors operated on his arm seven times in all.
But Rebrook’s right arm never recovered completely. He still has range of motion problems. He still has pain when he turns over to sleep at night.
Even with the injury, Rebrook said he didn’t want to leave the Army. He said the “medical separation” discharge was the Army’s decision, not his.
So after eight months at Fort Hood, he gathered up his gear and started the “long process” to leave the Army for good.
Things went smoothly until officers asked him for his “OTV,” his “outer tactical vest,” or body armor, which was missing. A battalion supply officer had failed to document the loss of the vest in Iraq.
“They said that I owed them $700,” Rebrook said. “It was like ‘thank you for your service, now here’s the bill for $700.’ I had to pay for it if I wanted to get on with my life.”
In the past, the Army allowed to soldiers to write memos, explaining the loss and destruction of gear, Rebrook said.
But a new policy required a “report of survey” from the field that documented the loss. Rebrook said he knows other soldiers who also have been forced to pay for equipment destroyed in battle.
Now no one who has ever had to deal with military disbursing will be much surprised at the Byzantine nature of military accounting. On our first PCS move, my 2nd Lieutenant husband, I, and our baby were greeted at our new duty station with a paycheck of exactly $100. With this, we were expected to put down first and last month's rent on a new apartment and commence moving in. The explanation from disbursing?
After refusing the only married couple at TBS base housing, the base housing office at our last duty station had decided that we had, after all, lived on base for the entire time my husband had been in Basic School. This came as a complete surprise to us, since we had been crammed into a tiny one-bedroom apartment off-base. This was all we could find since Housing wouldn't let us sign a lease until they refused us on-base quarters. Our son had slept in the Master bedroom closet for months. Rather than check their records, the disbursing office simply decided to "take back" thousands of dollars in housing allowances for quarters we never lived in.
So I am not at all surprised that this sort of thing might happen. Accounting snafus and silly rules are not at all uncommon in the military. They happen, people complain, and eventually in the fullness of time, they are fixed. What does disturb me about this story are two things. The first is this allegation:
Rebrook said he tried to get a battalion commander to sign a waiver on the battle armor, but the officer declined. Rebrook was told he’d have to supply statements from witnesses to verify the body armor was taken from him and burned.
“There’s a complete lack of empathy from senior officers who don’t know what it’s like to be a combat soldier on the ground,” Rebrook said. “There’s a whole lot of people who don’t want to help you. They’re more concerned with process than product.”
My first comment is this: whose battalion commander? Presumably not Lt. Rebrook's. But if this is true, the commander in question needs to be taken aside and counseled - this should not have gotten past him.
The second thing that doesn't sit right with me is this:
Rebrook, 25, scrounged up the cash from his Army buddies and returned home to Charleston last Friday.
This will undoubtedly make several people angry, but put aside your emotions for just a second and recognize that I am not saying what happened to this man was right.
Lt. Rebrook is a First Lieutenant who graduated with honors from West Point. So he is presumably a very intelligent young man. I am therefore somewhat surprised that he would air his disbursing difficulties in the media rather than writing someone farther up the chain of command and working through channels. Perhaps, in all fairness, he has already done this and received no response. But if so, he does not say so. I find it surprising that an officer who graduated at the top of his West Point class would, rather than pursuing a minor (and $700 is small potatoes to an officer) pay dispute through official channels, instead opt to air it in the media. He is, of course, free to do so, but surely he realizes how this story will be politicized and the damage it will do to the Army. Could he not, as a courtesy, let the senior chain of command know before going public with his complaint? I hope I am wrong and he did this. It is what my husband would have done, and what I would expect any officer to do.
Secondly, he has more than four years in, which means he makes $3165 a month. There is no mention of a wife or children, so like most 1st. Lts., he is single. He has been on convalescence at Fort Hood for eight months. So my question is this: why did he have to "scrounge up $700 from his Army buddies" to pay for his body armor?
Unless there is something very odd going on here (for instance, he is supporting his elderly parents, in which case they are dependents for pay purposes on his LES and he gets extra pay, which I very much doubt) a single First Lieutenant should not have to borrow $700 from anyone. When my husband was a First Lieutenant, we had two small children and I could put my hands on that amount easily. It was in my savings account. In fact, in the $100 pay due story I referenced earlier, that's exactly how we dealt with the situation. Our little family of three with another child on the way, fresh out of Basic School and still paying for uniform loans, making less than Lt. Rebrook, dipped into savings to pay far more than $700. We did not have to "scrounge money from our Marine buddies". So perhaps you can understand my confusion.
This is entirely a separate issue from whether the regulation is right: it clearly is not. And it appears that more than $5700 in donations have been collected from the liberal AmericaBlog and the citizens of West Virginia, all of which Lt. Rebrook is donating to charity. His state Senators have asked the Army to look into the matter:
Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, attended the hearing.
“That is a very unusual story,” Schoomaker responded. “I have no idea why we would ever do something like that. We have issued body armor, the very best that exists in the world. Every soldier has it.
“We certainly have procedures that account for battle loss, and I just find it a highly unusual story. But we’ll certainly follow up and correct it if there’s any truth to it.”
“First Cavalry Division leadership is going to do everything to ensure this issue is brought to a conclusion that is both in line with procedures that apply to all its soldiers and in the best interest of our veterans who have served so proudly and honorably in Iraq,” Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, the division's spokesman at Fort Hood, told the Killeen Daily Herald for today’s edition.
Bleichwehl said soldiers are not held financially responsible for any equipment lost, damaged or destroyed in combat.
Having watched my husband investigate scores of these types of matters over the years, I've seen that there is almost always more to them then is apparent at first. Often they are the result of lower-level bungling or misinterpretation of regulations. These things are unfortunate, and I am glad this happened to an officer so the problem, if it is an institution-wide one, could be brought into the open.
But as usual, the press and the public need to be patient and wait for the investigation to be completed. Clearly something has gone wrong, but turning one incident into a metaphor for everything that is wrong with the war and/or the military is both irresponsible and premature. The Army is an enormous organization and foul-ups can and do happen. When they do, they should be corrected. But most importantly, before judging, we should know all the facts.
Let the investigation play out, and then decide.
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