Salazar, Allard defend care at Fort Carson

The Pueblo Chieftain

PETER ROPER

May 02, 2007

How Fort Carson deals with soldiers suffering from post-combat stress has spilled back into the Senate this week where nine senators, led by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., have asked for a General Accountability Office investigation into allegations that soldiers at the Mountain Post are not getting adequate treatment or are being punished for problems associated with post-traumatic stress.

On the other side, Colorado Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard sent their own letter to the GAO on Tuesday, praising Fort Carson for its research on severe brain injuries and asked that any GAO investigation look at problems Armywide, not just at the Mountain Post.

“Focusing the investigation solely on a single installation, such as Fort Carson, may result in the faulty perception that these challenges are confined to one installation,” Salazar, a Democrat, and Allard, a Republican, said in their letter Tuesday. The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress and does research and investigations on a bipartisan basis for lawmakers.

Veterans for America, a veterans group that has been interviewing soldiers at Fort Carson and reporting to various Senate offices, said they were not claiming that Fort Carson was the worst case of the Army failing to provide adequate care.

“No one can say that until they do a comparison,” said Jason Forrester, a spokesman for the group. “We are saying there are some alarming reports coming out of Fort Carson about how soldiers are being treated, or being poorly treated, before being sent back to Iraq.”

Scott Robinson, an investigator for the organization, said the group has been working with a caseload of between 30 and 40 Fort Carson soldiers on a continuing basis over the past 18 months.

Fort Carson’s mental health system has been under scrutiny since last autumn, when there were news reports about soldiers complaining about a lack of mental health treatment. In 2005, Army doctors at Walter Reed Medical Center shocked Congress when they reported that 30 percent of all returning Iraq veterans were seeking post-combat mental health care - more than the Army expected and signaling a surge in the future caseload for the Veterans Administration.

Congress reacted by authorizing a special task force to look at mental health treatment in all branches of the military and that group was scheduled to report back to lawmakers this month. However, Army Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, who was then the Army’s surgeon general, was part of that task force leadership. Kiley was fired from his senior Army position in February for failing to fix the housing and treatment problems discovered at Walter Reed earlier this year. His dismissal has delayed the task force’s final report.

Neither Salazar nor Allard signed onto the Obama letter. A spokesman for Allard said the senior senator has not received any complaints from Fort Carson soldiers about their mental health treatment.

A spokesman for Salazar said that office is working on several cases on behalf of soldiers. “Sen. Salazar was an early supporter of looking at the adequacy of the Defense Department’s mental health programs,” his spokesman said Tuesday.

When Kiley visited Fort Carson last January, Army officials made a point of saying most soldiers diagnosed with post-combat stress are treated and stay in service, and are even returned to combat. Last year, Army doctors at Fort Carson diagnosed 590 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder - with 120 referred to medical boards to determine if they should be discharged.

Earlier this spring, Army doctors invited reporters to Fort Carson to showcase the research they are doing in treating severe brain injuries, a common wound from roadside bombs in Iraq.

But Obama’s new letter to the GAO said there are continuing problems at Fort Carson.

“There are allegations of commanders at Fort Carson, Colorado, denying soldiers access to mental health care and instead ordering them deployed to Iraq,” the letter said. “We have also heard of cases in which service members with PTSD are diagnosed as having ‘personality disorders’ that the Army considers to be ‘pre-existing,’ thus depriving otherwise eligible combat veterans of disability benefits and much-needed mental healthcare.”

Staffers from the Senate Armed Services Committee are scheduled to visit Fort Carson on May 14-15 along with staff from various Senate offices, including Obama’s. This marks the third review of mental health services at Fort Carson in the past year.

 

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