Associated Press

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Some Fort Carson, Colo.-based soldiers have had trouble adjusting to life back in the United States, saying they refused to seek help, or were belittled or punished for seeking help. Others say they were ignored by their commanders, or coped through drug and alcohol abuse before they allegedly committed crimes, The Gazette of Colorado Springs said.

The Gazette based its report on months of interviews with soldiers and their families, medical and military records, court documents and photographs.

Several soldiers said unit discipline deteriorated while in Iraq.

“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” said Daniel Freeman. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley,” an armored fighting vehicle.

With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions “and just light the whole area up,” said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. “If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ‘em.”

Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.

“You didn’t get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong,” he said

Soldiers interviewed by The Gazette cited lengthy deployments, being sent back into battle after surviving war injuries that would have been fatal in previous conflicts, and engaging in some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq. The soldiers describing those experiences were part of the 3,500-soldier unit now called the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team.

Since 2005, some brigade soldiers also have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.

The unit was deployed for a year to Iraq’s Sunni Triangle in September 2004. Sixty-four unit soldiers were killed and more than 400 wounded – about double the average for Army brigades in Iraq, according to Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit served a bloody 15-month mission in Baghdad. It’s currently deployed to the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan.

Marquez was the first in his brigade to kill someone after an Iraq tour. In 2006, he used a stun gun to shock a drug dealer in Widefield, Colo., in a dispute over a marijuana sale, then shot and killed him.

Marquez’s mother, Teresa Hernandez, warned Marquez’s sergeant at Fort Carson her son was showing signs of violent behavior, abusing alcohol and pain pills and carrying a gun. “I told them he was a walking time bomb,” she said.

Hernandez said the sergeant later taunted Marquez about her phone call.

“If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot,” Marquez told The Gazette in the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is serving a 30-year prison term. “But after Iraq, it was just natural.”

The Army trains soldiers to be that way, said Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist serving 10 years for accessory to murder.

“The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody,” he said. “And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off.”

Both soldiers were wounded, sent back into action and saw friends and officers killed in their first deployment. On numerous occasions, explosions shredded the bodies of civilians, others were slain in sectarian violence – and the unit had to bag the bodies.

“Guys with drill bits in their eyes,” Eastridge said. “Guys with nails in their heads.”

Last week, the Army released a study of soldiers at Fort Carson that found that the trauma of fierce combat and soldier refusals or obstacles to seeking mental health care may have helped drive some to violence at home. It said more study is needed.

While most unit soldiers coped post-deployment, a handful went on to kill back home in Colorado.

Many returning soldiers did seek counseling.

“We’re used to seeing people who are depressed and want to hurt themselves. We’re trained to deal with that,” said Davida Hoffman, director of the privately operated First Choice Counseling Center in Colorado Springs. “But these soldiers were depressed and saying, ‘I’ve got this anger, I want to hurt somebody.’ We weren’t accustomed to that.”

At Fort Carson, Eastridge and other soldiers said they lied during an army screening about their deployment that was designed to detect potential behavioral problems.

Sergeants sometimes refused to let soldiers get PTSD help or taunted them, said Andrew Pogany, a former Fort Carson special forces sergeant who investigates complaints for the advocacy group Veterans for America.

Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General’s Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason.

Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man’s body to his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims’ brains.

The Army’s criminal investigation division interviewed unit soldiers and said it couldn’t substantiate the allegations.

The Army has declared soldiers’ mental health a top priority.

“When we see a problem, we try to identify it and really learn what we can do about it. That is what we are trying to do here,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, Fort Carson’s commander. “There is a culture and a stigma that needs to change.”

Fort Carson officers are trained to help troops showing stress signs, and the base has doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors. Soldiers seeing an Army doctor for any reason undergo a mental health evaluation.

by Michael M. Dunn, HumanEvents.com

When it comes to defense planning, this much is constant: It is not possible to predict the future. That’s why we should prepare for a wide range of threats. That, in fact, is the key lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan. The nation over the past few decades largely ignored investing in irregular warfare capabilities because leaders thought we would never engage in it after Vietnam. They were wrong and the country paid for this mistake with tremendous sacrifice.

Failure to acquire the full “moderate-risk” military requirement of 243 F-22s repeats this mistake, just at the other end of the spectrum.

Critics decry the F-22 as a “Cold War weapon,” representing unnecessary overkill for today’s threats. What these detractors fail to realize is that the air dominance we currently enjoy over Iraq and Afghanistan will not always be as easily attained and maintained elsewhere. The rapid proliferation of advanced surface-to-air missiles and other anti-access technology is limiting when and where the vast majority of Air Force aircraft can operate. During last year’s conflict in Georgia, the F-22 was the only fighter aircraft in the Department of Defense inventory that could have penetrated the defended airspace and had a chance of surviving. Considering that air dominance is the precondition for any successful US combat operation, this is a serious problem.

Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who was the Air Force chief of staff during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and who credited air power with winning the war, was the first four-star officer to endorse the one-term senator in his presidential campaign. Now he’s criticizing the president on a key defense decision.

by Rowan Scarborough

The most senior retired military officer to back President Obama’s run for the White House says the president is making a “real mistake” in terminating F-22 production.

Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who was the Air Force chief of staff during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and who credited air power with winning the war, was the first four-star officer to endorse the one-term senator in his presidential campaign. McPeak traveled with Obama to bolster the candidate’s commander-in-chief credentials, much to the chagrin of the general’s fighter pilot colleagues.

But now McPeak is breaking with Obama on the president’s most contentious defense budget decision: ending production of the Air Force’s top-line fighter at 187 aircraft.

“I think it’s a real mistake,” McPeak told FOXNews.com. “The airplane is a game-changer and people seem to forget that we haven’t had any of our soldiers or Marines killed by enemy air since 1951 or something like that. It’s been half a century or more since any enemy aircraft has killed one of guys. So we’ve gotten use to this idea that we never have to breathe hostile air.”

McPeak’s comments come as Obama is in the throes of a major battle with Democrats and Republicans who have voted in committee to fund seven more F-22s.

Obama sent a letter to Congress Monday with a blunt warning.

“I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress,” Obama wrote. “To continue to procure additional F-22s would be to waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with the weapons that they actually do need.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ramped up the pressure Thursday, attacking Congress for trying to keep the $65 billion program alive.

“If we can’t get this right, what on earth can we get right?” Gates said.

But McPeak said the F-22 has the capability to deter attacks.

“We do not want to field an Armed Forces that can be defeated by someone simply by topping our capability,” he said. “The F-22 is at the top end. We have to procure enough of them for our ability to put a lid on, to dictate the ceiling of any conflict.”

The radar-evading fighter/bomber’s role is to control the skies in a future war against a major foe. McPeak and F-22 backers in Congress say 187 planes are simply not enough to do that job given the fact that some will be needed to train pilots and others will be in regular depot maintenance. That may leave only about 100 planes available for a war.

The Air Force had at one time wanted over 700 F-22s, but eventually lowered the figure to 381, then acceded to the 187 number.

“We certainly need some figure well above 200,” said McPeak. “That worries me because I think it is pennywise and pound foolish to expose us in a way this much smaller number does … That’s taking too much high-end risk.”

Gates defends the termination by saying more money needs to be spent on current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also is increasing production of the multi-service single-engine F-35, a slower aircraft carrying fewer munitions, to augment the F-22. Both planes are to replace the Air Force’s aging fleets of F-15 and F-16 fighters.

Obama and Gates are upping the pressure as pro-F-22 forces seem to be gaining steam in Congress.

Obama has two Senate heavyweights on his side — Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Arizona Sen. John McCain, the panel’s top Republican.

Yet Levin and McCain were unable to defeat an amendment in committee offered by Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., to add seven planes. They will try to kill that provision next week.

In another act of defiance toward the White House on the F-22, Rep. John Murtha’s panel added a down payment in the fiscal 2010 defense bill for 12 more jets.

“I think the F-35 is going to be a good airplane, when we get it,” McPeak said. “It’s just not going to be surprisingly good” like its successor, the F-16. He said the F-35 has been “compromised” in an effort to build versions for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

McPeak also said he opposes Gate’s decision to retire 200 tactical aircraft, mostly F-16s, over the next year.

“Certainly driven by cost, not driven by the fact that we don’t have lots of work for these guys to do,” he said.

Still, McPeak said he has no second thoughts about backing Obama.

“Barack Obama is doing a tremendous job,” he said. “I think he’s a great president, and has a shot at being put up on Mount Rushmore. … My bitch is with Secretary Gates who I do not think has shown a lot of judgment here on these calls regarding the Air Force budget. … His principal advantage is he is not (former Defense Secretary) Don Rumsfeld. And that virtue can only be played out so long.”

by Chalmers Johnson, NYT

The U.S. “Empire of Bases” — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive.

As a start, on May 27, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed — only $4 million less, before cost overruns, than the Vatican City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad.

Whatever the costs turn out to be, they will not be included in the already bloated U.S. military budget, even though none of these structures is designed to be a true embassy — a place, that is, where local people come for visas and American officials represent the commercial and diplomatic interests of their country.

Instead these so-called embassies are actually walled compounds, akin to medieval fortresses, where American spies, soldiers, intelligence officials and diplomats try to keep an eye on hostile populations in a region at war. One can predict with certainty that they will house a large contingent of Marines and include roof-top helicopter pads for quick getaways.

While it may be comforting for State Department employees working in dangerous places to know that they have some physical protection, it must also be obvious to them, as well as the people in the countries where they serve, that they will now be visibly part of an in-your-face American imperial presence.

We Americans shouldn’t be surprised when militants attacking the U.S. find one of our base-like embassies, however heavily guarded, an easier target than a large military base.

And what is being done about those military bases anyway — now close to 800 of them dotted across the globe in other people’s countries? Even as Congress and the Obama administration wrangle over the cost of bank bailouts, a new health plan, pollution controls and other much needed domestic expenditures, no one suggests that closing some of these unpopular, expensive imperial enclaves might be a good way to save some money.

Instead, they are evidently about to become even more expensive. On June 23, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic that back in February 2009 announced it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan war), has been persuaded to let us stay.

But here’s the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners.

I suspect this development will not go unnoticed in other countries where Americans are also unpopular occupiers. For example, the Ecuadorians have told us to leave Manta Air Base by November. They could probably use a spot more money.

And what about the Japanese who for more than 57 years have been paying big bucks to host American bases on their soil? Recently, they reached a deal with Washington to move some American Marines from bases on Okinawa to the U.S. territory of Guam. In the process, however, they were forced to shell out not only for the cost of the Marines’ removal, but also to build new facilities on Guam for their arrival.

Is it possible that they will now take a cue from the government of Kyrgyzstan and just tell the Americans to get out and pay for it themselves? Or might they at least stop funding the same American military personnel who make life miserable for whoever lives near the 38 U.S. bases on Okinawa.

In fact, I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: Cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country.

This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they’re cashing in quietly in order not to tank the dollar while they’re still holding onto such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: Whether we’re being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.

Count on this: Future generations of Americans traveling abroad decades from now won’t find the landscape dotted with near-billion-dollar “embassies.”