"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." Sgt. Chuck Luther remembered the immediate aftermath of the mortar explosion at the base of the guard tower he was stationed in, in Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, Iraq. The guard tower shook, he had been knocked to the ground and his nose was leaking clear fluid.
The shoulder pain never stopped, the hearing in his right ear was gone from the moment of impact. Instead his right ear buzzed, and continues buzzing, with the constant hum of tinnitus.
Then he began to get 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."
Instead of treating Sgt. Luther's injuries, the doctors at Camp Taji told him that he was faking his medical problems and diagnosed him with a "personality disorder." This inspite of the fact that the personality disorder that they said Sgt. Luther had was a dignosis that comes in childhood, the Sgt. was 36 years old, and had passed eight psychological evaluations.
But how, you ask, was he tortured? When Sgt. Luther tried to get the Army doctors to understand the severe pain he was in he told them that his pain was so severe at times that he wished he was dead, so they confined him to an eight foot by six foot isolation chamber for over a month, while depriving him of sleep many nights on end. They kept the lights on 24 hours a day, and many nights they blasted heavy metal music, including Megadeath, Saliva, and Disturbed, into his cell. Sleep deprivation, especially of this duration, is torture. As Sgt. Luther says "Now suddenly I'm not a soldier. I'm a prisoner, by my own people. I felt like a caged animal in that room. That's when I started to lose it."
After being treat like an animal, and being tortured for over a month, being denied treatment for his injuries, and being subjected to relentless pressure to sign papers admitting that he had a personality disorder, Sgt. Luther snapped, and in an altercation bit one of his guards and spit in the face of the aid station chaplain. He was then sedated and taken back to his isolation chamber.
What did they think was going to happen when they tortured the man?
Sgt. Luther signed the papers admitting to having a personality disorder. He was discharged. As a result of signing the papers, he is inelligible for any Army medical benefits, his ongoing injuries will not be treated, and he owes the Army $1,500 back from his re-enlistment bonus. Sgt. Luther had been in the Army since 1988.
This man's case is but one of many. All of the quotations from Sgt. Luther are from an article in "The Nation" by Joshua Kors. There is much more information in the article. Here is the link:
http://www.thenation.com/...
Please, we need to stand up for these men and women. Write to the President. Write to, fax, phone or visit your senators. Write to,fax, phone, or visit your congressional representative.
The people who did this need to be held to account.
With gratitude,
Standing for justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
Some of you have asked about the motivation for what they did to Sgt. Luther. To clarify: They were intimidating him into signing the papers acknowleging he had a personality disorder. As the article in The Nation states:
For three years The Nation has been reporting on military doctors' fraudulent use of personality disorder to discharge wounded soldiers [see Kors, "How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits," April 9, 2007]. 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. And they have to give back a slice of their re-enlistment bonus. That amount is often larger than the soldier's final paycheck. As a result, on the day of their discharge, many injured vets learn that they owe the Army several thousand dollars.
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.
If you would like to assist Sgt. Luther and other service members like him, his web site is:
http://www.disposablewarriors.com/...
With gratitude,
For Dan,
Heather
