The Broken Soldier

Got an email from MI Guard folks today.  $1,000 check from the Family Relief Fund was mailed, according to the person writing the email, four days ago.  We can certainly use the money.  Not that we’re poor.  Far from it.  My wife makes twice the mean national annual salary.  But my Guard enlistment has been very costly to us, and hasn’t paid out as we thought it would.  In fact, though I haven’t done the actual calculation, I’m betting my wife and I have actually paid more for my Guard membership than we’ve made.

Sarah and I entered into certain financial obligations on the reasonable assumption of two incomes.  Hers, which we already knew would stay the same or increase, and mine.  My income would have been cadet pay and allowances for 9 weeks, roughly $8k total after tax, a $10k bonus for completing OCS, and then 2nd LT pay and allowances for at least 4 months to a year and half, depending on what officer job I took/was assigned, roughly $15k-$70k after tax.  Then, more than likely, I would have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan on an 18 month deployment.  Several of those months would have been spent spinning up at Fort Dix, during which time my income would be taxed.  Boots on sand, and no taxes.  There’s a possibility I may have been promoted during that 18 months, but if not, which actually simplifies the calculation, I’d have had a net income of approximately $85k.

If I didn’t deploy, I’d have entered the job market a triple bachelors holding U of M grad, continued pursuing professional education, or perhaps both.  In any event, my student debt, which is substantial, could have been paid or would have remained deferred.

This assistance, though late (we were told this check would be sent several weeks ago), is appreciated, but it really isn’t enough.  As well, it will likely go to paying for prescriptions, and there’s a strong chance, if past experience is a predictor of future outcomes, TriCare will not reimburse these costs.  What’s $1,000?  Especially in light of the information provided above.

I thank God everyday that my wife has a wonderful talent.  Without it, and the salary it commands, we’d be in far worse shape.  But we shouldn’t have to be where we are now, barely getting by.  We should be well off, and we could be well off if the government actually took care of those of us injured on active duty as was promised when I enlisted.  But nothing has happened as was explained to us.  Bad info.  Bad consequences.

You know, it’s funny how something so simple, so straightforward, so reasonable can be the source of so much conflict.  I have asked those appointed over me for clear, correct, complete information.  Moreover, I’ve asked that this information be delivered in a timely fashion so as my wife and I can make the best short term and long term decisions possible.  Somehow, still, even after explaining myself and offering a few examples of the consequences receiving bad info have created for my wife and I, this is the cause of back and forth.  Or more appropriately, as I am no longer participating in the discussion, “back.”

For example, when I enlisted in May 2006 I was told to ‘hold tight,’ to ‘not be too entangled in work or school,’ as I’d be ‘heading to OCS during the next cycle, and then to OBC for between 4 months to over a year depending upon branch.’  After that, I’d ‘likely be deployed.’  I did as I was told.  I held tight.  I didn’t become entangled in a job or grad/professional school.  As a result, my wife and I ate up our savings, and in fact, we used a $14,000 CD in my name, which was to be used for our retirement fund, to offset the relative discomfort of one income.  After a year of waiting for my unit to get me a full clothing issue and a full TA50 (equipment issue), I broke down, after begging the unit to help resolve the situation to no avail, and began occasional work as a freelance writer to supplement our income while also staying true to the instruction to avoid entanglements.  When I dared suggest to my unit and to Officer Accessions that given what had transpired (and more importantly what hadn’t and the effect that had) we needed to discuss bonuses offered for completing OCS and volunteering for certain combat arms branches - for the purpose of replacing the retirement money we spent waiting for the Guard to do what it was supposed to do - I was dressed down and informed that I needed ‘to adjust my attitude.’

There are at least ten more examples of bad info that have cost my wife and I.  All of them costly either short term, long term, or both.  The effects range from the annoying, as being told my presence and my purchasing clothing to attend AT was mandatory (and that I’d be reimbursed for that expense) when that wasn’t the case, to the truly harmful, as in my wife and I turning down gainful job offers because we don’t know what’s going to happen next with my training, my medical care, and now my retention status.  What’s most bizarre about this is that I should have to argue the merits of getting the flow of info right.  Whatever.  I pray every night that I won’t have to deal with this much longer.

I learned the other day that I’m not on ADME orders, and the decision to place me on ADME orders hasn’t been made.  This, of course, conflicts with what we’ve been told, what the forms I signed led us to believe, and places us in a difficult spot financially.  As my wife and I were planning, and had reason to plan, on active duty pay and allowances.  When my wife and I again pleaded with those ‘in the know’ to a) get us correct information and b) get that information to us quickly, somehow confusing this as an argument, those ‘in the know’ responded with ‘you haven’t requested all of the months of Incap Pay for which you’re eligible.’  God damn it, am I going to have to do another didactic series on fallacy theory?

So again, the Army and the MI ARNG put us in it, try to blame us for it, and basically deny any and all responsibility for the bed we’re lying in.  We were left with a parting suggestion, paraphrased, “If you need clarification or information, call us.”  As though the statements, ‘You’re being placed on active duty orders, sign these forms before your surgery, and you’ll begin collecting active duty pay’ are unclear.  They’re not unclear, they just happen to be wrong.  And those who made these mistakes go home to paid bills, no collection calls, able to answer the phone, no threats of being taken to court, not so much as a slap on the wrist, and my wife and I continue to deal with these things and other problems we didn’t create but for which we’re held responsible.

The smallest things set me off.  Well, small depending on one’s perspective.  Rather than air the long and embarrassing list of things that make me cry, reasoning the implication I cry a lot is embarrassing enough, I’ll stick to what set me off today.  The lyric title of this post.

“With every mistake, we must surely be learning.”  Jesus, what sad, thanatotic irony.  Rather than waste time with the rolling-boulders-uphill exercise of organizing and coherently expressing my thoughts on our individual and collective failings while super dooper doped up, suffice it to say, trite as it is, we are our own and each others worst enemies.  Doomed to climb on each others backs in greed and lust and unworthily arrogant intransigence.

There are things we all know to be wrong.  Most things in fact - 90% or more of human action.  Though leave it to “professional ethicists” to fuck that fecund 10% up by attending to a rodent’s right to informed consent, it’s no wonder morality and ethics are confusing jokes to most people.  Yet, for a variety of reasons, we continue to consciously choose the wrong.  Whether brazenly doing the wrong action, by confusing what the right or wrong actions are in a given instance, or by not caring one way or the other - until what’s wrong impacts us personally, we pave the road to hell with those under our heels and or removed from our sight.  Hoping our turn will never come, or that our turn is of sufficient distance that it doesn’t merit our immediate attention.

I’ve done my best to appeal to what’s clearly moral from rules based system.  When that didn’t work, I tried appealing to first-person ethics.  So far, nothing has worked.  Or, it hasn’t worked as well as one might expect given the ‘support the troops’ fervor sticking to every person in the free world’s bumper.  I realize now that very few possess the strength of their supposed convictions, or beat the conviction drum with ulterior motives.  While that is sad commentary about people in general, the problem still exists, and needs correction.  Who among you will stand for what you claim you believe?

… is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we’d probably go to war.”

Etiquette.  I used to think it was something most people just understood.  I was mistaken.  Below is my simple and straightforward contribution to fixing the problem.

You don’t rub poop on your face, or those of your fellow queuees, in the breakfast buffet line at the local Bob Evans.  You don’t laugh out loud and point when you see a man in public wearing a fashionable pink shirt with the collar cocked up.  And you don’t send files in unusable formats, especially when those files contain documents necessary for initiating important processes.  Like those involved in getting injured soldiers on orders for example.

But time and time again, even after alerting the people involved, that my wife and I are a) Mac users, and b) don’t have Office, we still receive important, time sensitive documents in MDI or XFDL or password protected or whatever formats.  Without the necessary software, we can’t touch said documents, and there’s nothing we can do, short of purchasing said, often obsolete software, to fix the problem on our end.  I ask each time it happens, please send files to us in a usable format, and somehow I’m the asshole.  One barbarian had the audacity to suggest Sarah and I purchase the full MS Office Suite so as to make things easier.  Translation, Sarah and I are to drop $X on software we a) don’t like, b) don’t have the money for even if we did like it, and c) to spare the farouche genius making the suggestion the laborious task of pressing CNTRL S and choosing to save the file in PDF or Tiff or the like.

I had my staples removed Friday.  Feels like getting stung by a bee, thirty two times.  The PA gave me some info and instructions.  The surgeon worked on multiple levels, not just L5-S1.  The 8-10 inch incision made sense after that.  Still not sure what he did in there, but it hurts like hell.

The instructions I received during this last visit are a lot different from those I got when I was discharged from the hospital.  At first I was to stay off my feet - avoid sitting, standing, walking, etc., for more than 10 minutes at a time - for about 4-6 weeks.  As of yesterday, I basically have the same instructions, it’s just that they’ve been extending for at least another 6 weeks.  Cool as medical folk try to be, you can tell when things haven’t gone as well as they expected.  I figured 4-6 weeks after surgery I’d be starting physical therapy.  Now it’s looking more like 2-3 months post op before PT, depending on how I’m doing then.

I’m on a truck load of medication.  I’m taking more, in fact, in one sitting than I’m supposed to - not exceeding the daily allowable dosage, but taking 2/3rds of the maximum allowable in one sitting.  It’s the only thing that works, and even then relief is temporary.  The remaing 1/3rd I take at night before bed, typically giving me a couple hours of decent sleep.  Then I wake up, roll around in bed for several hours, and get up and go outside to smoke djarums.  It’s very peaceful at 2 a.m.  I watch TV until Sarah gets up.  I’ve committed most of the regularly cycled info-mercials to memory.  More useless info, like my college degrees, but much less expensive.

You know something?  I hate being right.  I said this would happen.  One can’t have compression of this sort for this long and recover.  This first surgery, which would have likely been the only surgery necessary had the Guard and Army moved quickly on this, has cost TriCare $25k.  Physical therapy, which will be prescribed if the docs think it will work, will be 3 times a week for 4-16 weeks at $150 a pop.  The various devices the physiatrist will prescribe run from $50 to close to a thousand.  Fusion, which is the next step, will cost about $30k, at least, depending on how many levels are fused.  These costs, as I’ve spoken to before, don’t include the costs the VA will incur paying my disability compensation and future medical care, and this doesn’t include the costs of treating illnesses, like major clinical depression with anxiety, secondary to this injury.  Why was this a good approach?  An approach that assures everyone involved loses.

There’s this group that asked me to join it a while back.  They found my site, and thought I could be of use to them.  I get news letters from them every now and again.  They’re holding some sort of summit or something, and they’re looking to form “sub-committees” to generate discussion topics.

Truth in recruiting is one of their favorites.  To my chagrin, they tend to focus on recruiter fibs that if an enlistee is dumb enough to believe he or she should be hammer-of-truth punished for their stupidity.  “If you enlist in branch X, under MOS/AFSC/etc. Y you can’t be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.”  Again, if you believe that, you deserve a date with the hammer.  I mean shit, when I went through basic, even the folks who barely eked out the minimum ASVAB to enlist were capable of cleverer lies.  Take this idiot named Land as an example.  Bare with me.  “Yo, my job’s like a combination of a brain surgeon, a general, a jet pilot, and like Rambo.  But yo, if you see me at my duty base, and I’m like pickin’ up doodoo, it’s cuz I ain’t reached my 5 level yet.”  So okay, I’m exaggerating, but barely.

I’m wondering, especially after asking me to participate, why they don’t speak to more believable lies.  Such as those about how well reserve component members are taken care of when injured in the line of duty.  “Yeah man, you get hurt, you get medical and pay and allowances.”  As though these things are automatic.  Yeah.  Had I known the truth, the realities of the risk I was assenting to, I would not have enlisted.  Why this group has chosen to focus on extremes rather than on substantive matters I can’t say.

I’ve included a pic of my lower back with this post.  My friends and neighbors were eager to see it.  I tell them I elected to have my butt crack lengthened by 8 to 10 inches instead of back repair.  Chicks in New York are paying top dollar for that sort of thing, and I got it for free.

Dark as this time has been, there are, on occasion, reasons to believe what’s broken can be fixed.  “Reasons” for want of a better word.  People didn’t fit the sentence scheme.

Doc Grue is one such person.  A man at my unit, Glen to protect his anonymity, is another.  Good people, the kind of people that used to come to mind when thinking of the category ’service members.’  He’s been very helpful and very positive since he’s become involved.  I recall meeting him as he was helping the front spin up for their first deployment.  My recruiter, who also deployed with my unit, said something about him being a jerk.  That doesn’t surprise me.  My recruiter, I’ll call him SGT Bilko to protect his anonymity, hates rules and people who play them.  Glen struck me as an ‘old school’ NCO: Tough, but not be an asshole.  His concern is getting the job done.  And part of the job of an NCO is taking care of soldiers.  He asked me if I wanted to come along.  I said I did, but I wasn’t sure I was allowed.  I wish I had been.  I feel a lot would be different now had I been under the tutelage of people who actually knew what they’re doing.

Glen is leaving for another deployment.  He just got back less than a year ago.  We talked about it briefly.  He volunteered to go again.  He doesn’t know where he’s going, what he’ll be doing exactly, but he volunteered anyway.  His reasoning: His kids are grown, he isn’t married, and if someone doesn’t volunteer, command will choose someone.  Possibly someone with kids and a family.  I’m sure he could have found a way to get out of it if he wanted to.  He’s a bright guy, and has been a soldier for a long time.  Long enough to know how to work the system.  But he chose to go, at least in part, to keep someone else from having to.  We sure could use more like him.  If only strength of character could be taught.  Remember him in your nightly prayers.  I know my wife and I surely will.

I got up at 3 p.m. today.  If Sarah hadn’t come up to thank me for the posters I ordered for her still unfinished office, I’d still be sleeping, or trying to in a semiconscious not-quite-sleep but not-quite-awake state.  It’s been this way for the past several days.  I just stay in bed.

Nothing is really helping with the pain.  I still have the neuropathic pain I had before the surgery.  And now I have post-op pain too.  Still nothing from the Army about treating my depression - which I’m sure is part of the problem, not causally, but in how I’m handling it.

I keep hearing ‘hang in there.’  Why?  To what end?  What the fuck do YOU know about it?  Have you ever been where I am?  Small measures, less than bandaids for a sucking chest wound, are having little positive effect.  Serving only to postpone the inevitable ruin.  Ruin I didn’t create, but ruin my wife and I will be responsible for for the rest of our lives. I’ve been destroyed for doing what’s right.  Doing what’s good.  And those responsible do everything they can to justify doing as little as possible to help.  How could I not be depressed?  Or as an Army doc put it ‘dealing with an Adjustment Disorder’ - cuz AD, unlike depression, is non-compensable.

I’m pretty jacked up.  After 16 months of this, jacked up isn’t a new state of being.  But with ADME orders, and what they mean, there’s resolution of part of that feeling: Ambivalence.  With all the shit the Army and the Guard have pulled, part of me still wanted to be part of these organizations.  I was willing to fight to stay in, even if that meant I couldn’t commission.  But no longer.

By regulation, the Army must make a retention decision within 90 days of initiating ADME orders.  Though my orders haven’t popped, they’re going to be dated 3 June 2008.  Unless they - the docs responsible for my medical board and the people at my state,  play fast and loose with retention standards and loose with the language of my contract, I really can’t be kept.  By med board or by failure to train me - resulting in a breech of contract (unless I consent to being trained in something else, which I will not do) and “discharge without board or further action (the language of my contract),” the end is the same.  I have several injuries/illnesses secondary to the initial injury, itself ratable between 10-100%, that rate around 60% each, and there’s no way the Guard can meet its contractual obligations to me.  If I had reason to believe I’d be treated fairly, I would elect to stay, but past experience gives me no reason to expect that will happen.

While my career ending this way, really before it began, is discouraging to say the least, it’s also something of a relief.  The military, or at least the Army, isn’t the military I left ten years ago.  It’s not the military my family members served in.  And while there has been some effort to remedy the problems that brought me here, it’s too little too late.  The damage is done.  The ambivalence I once felt is gone.  Gone because I know retention the right way is no longer an option.