Twenty-six-year-old Eric Botta of Port St. Lucie, Fla., has been ordered to report to Fort Jackson, S.C., on July 15 for his fifth wartime deployment.
Amy Driscoll at the Miami Herald has Boyta's story in today's edition:
Shortly after 9/11, as a young Army reservist, he volunteered to go to war. He was soon in Afghanistan.
The next year, he was sent out again, this time to Iraq, part of a Special Operations team.
In the next two years, he was sent to Iraq again. And again.
He thought he was done. But now, the Army wants Sgt. Botta one more time.
Botta expects to file a law suit this week in federal court in Florida, according to Driscoll. He wants to hold off deployment so he can complete his engineering studies. He plans to ask the court to stop the Army from sending him to a fake war run by a fake commander in chief and pimped by a fake news media---at least until the legal questions are settled.
Mark Waple of Fayetteville, N.C., is Botta's attorney. Waple is a West Point grad and former military judge advocate. He says Botta's case shows that the Army is inconsistent in its decisions when selecting reservists for involuntary mobilization, over and over.
Botta's case shows that the Army is willing to throw one of its finest back into the war zone for the fifth time rather than perform its constitutional duty and inform the fake commander in chief that he's living in dreamworld.
At what point does U.S. Army command figure out that its constitutional duty to the American people is to inform the commander in chief that the potted palm has gone on to its reward? (A reference to an old Humphrey Bogart movie).