Unfit soldiers shipped to Iraq, military admits

By David Goldstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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WASHINGTON — To meet the demand for troops in Iraq, the military has been deploying some National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers who aren't fit for combat.

More than a dozen members of the Guard and reserves said they were shipped off to battle with little attention paid to their medical histories.

Those histories included ailments such as asthma, diabetes, recent surgery and hearing loss. Once in Iraq, the soldiers faced severe conditions that aggravated their medical problems, and the medical care available to them was limited.

David Lloyd, 44, a mechanic with the Tennessee National Guard, died of a heart attack in Iraq last August. His wife, Pamela Lloyd, said her husband didn't know he had a problem, but his autopsy showed three blockages in his coronary arteries.

"He should have never been deployed," she said. "He was supposed to have been given a thorough physical. He had none. The only thing he had was the shots."

Michael Scott, an Iowa National Guardsman who had a herniated disk, said: "They funneled us through the medical part: boom, boom, boom. They let it be known they weren't real interested in hearing about stuff. 'No, you're fine right now.' "

A memo from the European Regional Medical Command in Germany, where many injured soldiers were sent, criticized the pre-deployment medical screening and said soldiers who were unfit for Iraq were being sent home. Deploying them was a risk to their health and an added cost for the military, it said.

The memo contained the concerns of Col. Holly Doyne, a physician based there at the time. Doyne has been deployed to Kuwait and couldn't be reached for this article. Another Army medical officer, who didn't want his name used, confirmed Doyne's memo was distributed to various stateside medical officials and commanders.

Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official, acknowledged some medically unqualified troops have been sent to Iraq but said "the percentages are extremely small." He said the Pentagon was taking steps to improve medical screening.
 
How many soldiers are unfit is unclear. Each soldier interviewed said he or she knew of others who — like themselves — were sent to Iraq despite health problems ranging from allergies requiring refrigerated medications to heart disease.

Several also said many soldiers weren't given physicals but were asked a few cursory questions about their health by the medical screeners.

All the soldiers interviewed said their units and the medical officers who screened them, either after they were activated or at their mobilization sites, were aware of their medical conditions.

The problem was worrisome enough to trigger concerns last April at the European Regional Medical Command.

Doyne's memo said pre-deployment screening was "clearing individuals for movement to the combat zone without knowledge of the medical system limitation in the combat theater. ... OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is NOT peacekeeping. It is combat. The medical support is austere."

It said the problem was a "KEY medical issue" and went on to say, "Frankly, we are burning out a lot of time and effort on shipping back folks who never should have come in the first place. Also runs a high risk of damaging folks."

The memo added: "Current practice of taking the theory of 'if they are on duty they are OK' is not working. Nor is the assumption that if they have been found fit for duty by a medical board in the past they are fit."

Kilpatrick, the Defense Department's deputy director of deployment health support, said the Pentagon was requiring more scrutiny of a soldier's medical background before he or she is shipped overseas.

"We just need to do a better job educating our medical providers — the people doing the pre-deployment screening — of the importance of making this on an individual basis," he said.

Of the 120,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq, about 40 percent, or nearly 50,000, are National Guard and reserves. Kilpatrick said that if even 1 percent were medically unfit, that was 500 soldiers who were likely to become patients at military hospitals.

Nearly every soldier interviewed for this article had to be medically evacuated out of Iraq because battlefield conditions exacerbated health problems.

"That's a tremendous medical logistical burden," Kilpatrick said.

Knight Ridder reported last March that the military wasn't medically screening troops before and after deployments, as required by law. Those screenings were supposed to include pre- and post-deployment blood tests.

Congress mandated the tests in 1997 to prevent a recurrence of Gulf War Syndrome, the mysterious malady that has affected some soldiers who fought in the Persian Gulf War.

In addition, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has found the military lax in keeping up with medical reporting. Guard and reserve troops are required to undergo medical examinations every five years, every two years for those older than 40. The GAO also is looking into the problem of National Guard and reserve troops being kept for long periods in "medical holds" while their conditions are evaluated.

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