AMY GOODMAN: We’re on a 100-city Silenced Majority Election 2012 tour, and today we’re broadcasting from Colorado Springs, the second largest city in Colorado. In and around the city, you’ll find [five] major military installations: Fort Carson, Peterson Air Force Base, the United States Air Force Academy and Schriever Air Force Base, and the Cheyenne Mountain Air Station.

This weekend marks the 11th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The invasion began on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the September 11th attacks. The war has gone on for more than 4,000 days, making it the longest war in U.S. history. At least 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the war. The death toll in Afghanistan is unknown.

Today we’ll take a look at the invisible wounds of war here at home. Some 2.4 million soldiers have been through Iraq and Afghanistan, and the psychological toll of the wars is mounting. Last year, the Veterans Administration, or VA, treated almost 100,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for PTSD.

But many agree the numbers could be much higher, because not everyone who suffers seeks treatment. Here in Colorado Springs, the commanders at Fort Carson have come under scrutiny for its handling of mental health concerns, with a 2010 joint NPR-ProPublica investigation finding as many as 40 percent of Fort Carson soldiers had mild brain injuries missed by Army health screenings.

Meanwhile, in 2009, the Colorado Springs Gazette published a startling series called “Casualties of War.” It examined a part of war seldom discussed by the media or government officials: the difficulty of returning to civilian life after being trained to be a killer. The story focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson here in Colorado Springs, the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment. The battalion’s nickname is the “Lethal Warriors.” In Iraq, the unit fought in some of the war’s bloodiest battles.

For some of the unit’s soldiers, the killing did not end when they returned home. The Gazette reported, since 2006, 10 infantry soldiers have been arrested and accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter; others have committed other violent crimes. Some of the veterans have committed suicide. In a one-year period, from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008, the murder rate for members of the Army unit was 114 times the rate for Colorado Springs.

The series was written by investigative reporter Dave Philipps. He turned his reporting into the book, Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home. David Philipps joins us here in Colorado Springs.

Also with us in Colorado Springs is Georg-Andreas Pogany. He’s an independent veterans’ advocate and investigator. He’s a retired sergeant first class from the United States Army.

We are also joined by Graham Clumpner, Afghanistan war vet, Colorado regional organizer for IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against the War.

And we welcome you all to Democracy Now!

DAVID PHILIPPS: Thank you.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: And thanks so much both to Andrew and Graham for coming in from Denver. It’s snowing.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: It was snowing on the way down, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: The first snow of the season. Graham, you’re a veteran of the Afghanistan War. Tomorrow marks the 11th anniversary of this war. Your thoughts today?

GRAHAM CLUMPNER: Well, when we look back, you know, 11 years ago Sunday at 11:00 a.m. Central time, which is Colorado time, President Bush came on television and announced to the nation that we had begun bombing the people of Afghanistan. And 11 years later, we have a lineage that has extended longer than any other war, and we’re looking at a situation where we have so many millions of soldiers coming home to communities like Colorado Springs and not being able to separate the trauma that they experience in those combat zones and outside of those combat zones, just by nature of being in the military, because participating in this militaristic system, whether you deploy or don’t deploy, is a traumatic experience. And people bring those traumas back to our communities. And what we’re struggling with now is finding a way for these people—these soldiers, sailors, airmen, infantry, all of the members of the armed forces—to come come back and reintegrate into their communities.

AMY GOODMAN: You are organizing this weekend. You’re part of a group of soldiers and vets who have come together in Denver. Explain what’s happening.

GRAHAM CLUMPNER: In 2004, Iraq Veterans Against the War was founded by the first returning soldiers from the Iraq War. And since then, we have expanded to include any soldier or veteran who has served post-9/11 in the global war on terror. Our organization has been prioritizing Afghanistan veterans recently, not only because we have the most problems coming out of Afghanistan, out of the six countries that we’re currently bombing, but also because Afghanistan veterans can speak to a larger concern, which is, it’s very easy for the American people—and, in fact, some cases, the world—to lose sight of and stop paying attention to these conflicts. And as we sit here today, there are soldiers, and there are civilians sitting in firefights and sitting in situations where their lives are at risk, and we don’t take a lot of time to look at that, other than looking at the numbers on the front page of the newspaper that say four dead or seven dead. And it doesn’t mean anything to us.

So, this weekend, we’re having Iraq Veterans Against the War’s first Afghanistan retreat. We’re bringing Afghanistan members from all over the country here to Colorado. We’re going to be meeting in Denver, and we’re going to be discussing what kind of things we’ve been successful at in the past and where we failed, and then where we need to go in the future, looking at organizing models that span the spectrum, from the Coalition of the Immokalee Workers to the civil rights campaigns in the '50s, ’60s and ’70s, to the environmental movement. And we're taking those lessons and moving forward as we look at a larger path of militarism, because this isn’t just about Afghanisan. It’s not just about Syria or Libya or Somalia or Iraq. We’re talking about Iran. We’re talking about the future. And we’re asking ourselves, how do we feel safer when we are involved in more bases in more countries than we’ve ever been in our history?

AMY GOODMAN: Dave Philipps, place us here today, here in Colorado Springs. For people around the country who don’t understand this city in the—at the foot of the Rockies, talk about its military significance for the country.

DAVID PHILIPPS: Well, in a lot of ways, Colorado Springs is an average town, in terms of demographics, in terms of crime rates—just about anything you could look at in the census. The big difference is, is that by far our largest industry, if you want to call it that, is the Department of Defense. How many—how many active-duty do we have here in Colorado Springs? Over 50,000, I believe. And so, that really is the lifeblood of our town.

AMY GOODMAN: This investigation that you did, the unit called Lethal Warriors, share with us what it is that you found as you worked for the Gazette, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, your investigation.

DAVID PHILIPPS: It started with us just seeing a lot of soldiers getting arrested for murder. And we didn’t know, until we really started digging, that it wasn’t the entire 30,000 soldiers at Fort Carson that were really responsible; it was just one group of 500 guys. At that point, we said, “My god, how can you have so much violence coming out of one small group? It must have to do with their collective story of their experience.” And so, we started tracing that story by going to the prison, talking to the guys who were in there, finding their friends, talking to them.

And what we found out, essentially, is that these guys had been in the very worst places in Iraq, had been through things that most people, even people who are familiar with the war, would find unspeakable. When they came back, they came back to a system that had been prepared for an Iraq war that the administration thought would last six months and was not prepared to really deal with any psychological casualties. And so, the Army that they had served, when they started showing these psychological wounds from war, a lot of times, instead of helping them, it punished them. It kicked them out. When that happens and these guys no longer have any help, a lot of times they just spiraled into a very dark place, and it ended in violence.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, here at Fort Carson, the murder rate, 114 times the murder rate in Colorado Springs, in civilian Colorado Springs?

DAVID PHILIPPS: Well, for that battalion that we looked at, which is amazing. Now, you have to remember that a combat battalion is almost all young men. But even when we correct for demographics, it’s something like 20 times as high. Twice as high would have been amazingly significant. This was off the charts.

The funny thing is, when we called Fort Carson to ask about this, a lot of times the official response was, “We don’t know what the problem is that you’re talking about. You know, it’s unfair for you to try and paint our brave war fighters as criminals.” There was a reluctancy to pick apart the problem and try and solve it.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk more about this, as we—after break. We’re joined by Dave Philipps, who wrote a remarkable book called Lethal Warrior[s]. We’re going to be speaking with Andrew Pogany, who is a veteran from Iraq, and Graham Clumpner with us, as well, a veteran of the Afghanistan War. They have gathered in Denver for this gathering, the first Afghanistan retreat of Iraq Veterans Against the War. We’ll continue this discussion, as we broadcast from the Tim Gill Center for Public Media in Colorado Springs. It was just inaugurated last week. It is an honor to be here with the first broadcast, not to mention the first global broadcast, in the center’s history. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from the Tim Gill Center for Public Media here in Colorado Springs. In Colorado, it is snowing for the first time. We’re in the foot of the Rockies, and we’re in one of the most heavily militarized areas of this country, an area of bases, military bases for the Army, for the Air Force.

We continue our conversation with Dave Philipps, investigative reporter and author. In 2009. he wrote the award-winning two-part series called “Casualties of War” for the Colorado Springs Gazette. Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home is his new book, which shows how a wave of violence swept across Colorado Springs when the 506th Infantry Regiment, known as the Band of Brothers, returned home from their first tour in Iraq.

The Band of Brothers had been deployed to the most violent places in Iraq, and some of the soldiers continued suffering from what they had seen and done in combat, even after leaving the battlefield. Without much time to recover, they were sent back to the front lines. After their second tour of duty, the battalion was renamed the Lethal Warriors, since the soldiers once again brought the violence home.

Also joined by Andrew Pogany, who is a veteran of the Iraq War, and by Graham Clumpner, who served in Afghanistan and now part of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who has organized with a number of others an Afghanistan retreat, the first of its kind for Iraq Weterans Against the War. They’re gathering in Denver.

Andrew Pogany, you served in Iraq when?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: I was in Iraq in 2003.

AMY GOODMAN: In 2003. This was the first year of the U.S. invasion.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: You are now a counselor, a psychologist, working—

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: No, no, I’m not a counselor; I am a—I’m veterans’ advocate. I’ve worked as a veterans’ advocate on the national level since my retirement from the Army in 2007. And that work has been combined with investigative work, which is what is part of my training as a professional. So, that’s what I am.

AMY GOODMAN: And what are—

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: I have a colleague—my colleague who I do this work with, he is a counselor.

AMY GOODMAN: What are you finding?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: We’re finding that the system is very ill-equipped and that the system is also not adapting, and the system is not changing.

One of the things I want to add upfront is that we don’t have a political position on this. We don’t approach any of these issues from the position of whether, you know, the conflict is correct or we should be there or should not be there. Our only concern is that there is an epidemic that is brewing, and it manifests itself mainly in suicides, as well as other social problems, and there are some root causes that need to be addressed. And that’s what we—that’s what we advocate on. Those are the types of cases that we investigate. And we try to bring them to the attention of senior leaders to bring about some change.

We fully acknowledge that, you know, sometimes—you know, and people disagree with our position on this. Sometimes war is important. Sometimes war is necessary. We take a historical look at this. There are democracies, there are nations, there are individuals, who owe their very existence to the fact that it’s being done. But as a nation, we must ask ourselves the question, what is the cost of doing this business? And if we don’t have an honest and open dialogue with the nation and its citizens about what this cost is, then we’re failing. And that cost is not just bombs and bullets. The cost is the psychological cost, the scars, the psychological injuries borne by those who survive war, come home, and then have to reintegrate back into normal life.

So, part of the work that we do also is to not just help individuals, you know, avoid the path to suicide or the path to homelessness or the path to being shoved off into some fringe group of society labeled the mentally ill. Part of our work is to make sure to give those who have honorably served this nation in war an opportunity to come home and to reintegrate and to be able to fully participate in normal life.

AMY GOODMAN: Do think that the mental health services here in Colorado Springs at Fort Carson are working?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: They are working, to an extent. They are very—there are some very innovative things that have happened at Fort Carson. It’s been a hard road, but Fort Carson has also—as part of the growth and the painful growth that they had to go through, they have had some very, you know, great experiences, and they’ve had some very innovative leaders and thinkers at Fort Carson to bring about some change.

One of the things that we see as the ongoing problem is that there are players in the system that, for whatever reason they’re doing what they’re doing, they are not doing the right thing. And what we’re referring to by saying this is that we encounter case after case after case where it’s an over—it’s painfully obvious that there is malfeasance involved. And that starts with misdiagnosing—purposely misdiagnosing—individuals and players within the system purposely.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean? Why purposely?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Well, we have individuals that have the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, and then, when it comes to adjudicating that case, whether from an administrative standpoint or from a medical standpoint, specifically when it comes to affording the individual an opportunity to exit the military, those diagnoses are being changed. They’re being changed to diagnoses that don’t carry disability ratings, don’t carry benefits. And when you change someone’s diagnosis, not only is it unethical and immoral, but you’re preventing them from receiving the proper and appropriate care.

So, if you have someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder, and then they’re fraudulently diagnosed as having an adjustment disorder, it’s—you know, to us, that’s—you know, it’s a very, very serious problem, because, for one, you’re denying them the proper and appropriate care that they need. Number two is, you’re causing what is commonly referred to as “betrayal trauma.” Betrayal trauma is the social component of PTSD. You have an individual who has served, has an experience in combat, they come home with a combat-related injury, an visible injury, and now you’re telling them that they’re just somehow mentally ill. And it’s wrong on every single level, not to mention that from the clinical standpoint, if you look at the DSM4, which is the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual that is the book to help facilitate mental health diagnoses, it clearly states that, for example, if an individual has an Axis I diagnosis such as PTSD, then giving the diagnosis of adjustment disorder is inappropriate.

And we’ve tracked this pattern for years now. In the beginning, it was diagnosing individuals with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries as having personality disorders. Then the next thing was the adjustment disorder. Then it was anxiety disorder NOS. The new trend that we see now is, all of a sudden individuals have somatoform disorder. I mean, it—

AMY GOODMAN: Somatoform?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Somatoform disorder, which is absurd. It is really, really absurd. So, recently, for example, there was a scandal at Joint Base Lewis-McChord where it was uncovered—

AMY GOODMAN: In Washington state.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: In Washington state, that providers were changing individuals’ diagnoses and denying the diagnosis of PTSD. When that came into the news cycle, I received calls, and I was asked the question, “What do you think about this?” And I said that this is—while this is tragic, this is not newsworthy. Why? Because this has been going on for years.

I was involved in an investigation in Fort Carson in 2008, where we identified a provider who admitted that they were purposely misdiagnosing so they don’t have to pay benefits. So this is an ongoing problem, and it is one of the root causes that ultimately leads people to commit suicide.

So, this notion that, you know, that Johnny comes home and somehow committed suicide because he couldn’t balance his checkbook or he had relationship problems, that is only one aspect. And that might be the trigger that caused him to commit suicide, but nobody looks at the path to suicide. Suicide is not something that happens, you know, at the drop of a dime. People don’t wake up in the morning and say to themselves, “What am I going to do today? Commit suicide? Well, that sounds like a good idea.” No, people get on a path, a path that continuously deteriorates their mental state. And at some point in time, they are so compromised that, because of the emotional pain, possible physical pain, that they’re suffering, they see no other way out than to take their own lives.

AMY GOODMAN: There was a suicide just at the beginning of the year.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened here in Fort Carson?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Well, there was an individual who took his own life by crashing his vehicle into a light pole, tree, fence kind of combination. And then, as a result of the vehicle accident, he ended up passing away. And it was a suicide. The individual posted on Facebook he was going to do that.

And the reason that particular case is very relevant to us right now, because we have a case right now which is the—this one actually takes the cake, as far as we’re concerned. On the eve and on the heal of the Army’s national suicide prevention stand down in response to the rising numbers of what we call or consider catastrophic amounts of suicide and an epidemic that is equivalent to a public health crisis, we get a case where an individual who has attempted to kill himself—

AMY GOODMAN: This was this past May.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: This past May. An individual who attempted to kill himself in the same manner, by crashing his vehicle into an object, now that individual is being recommended and considered for an administrative separation from the military without benefits as a result of misconduct. When we reviewed the file, the misconduct that they’re referring to is the actual suicide attempt.

So, we’re stunned. We’re baffled that leaders would say that, you know, we’re trying to prevent suicides, we’re trying to work on the issue of stigma and address stigma, and then, behind closed doors, we have these types of cases. Now, is this—is this prevalent across the board? Probably not. But there is a certain percentage that this is happening to, and there’s a certain percentage—when you look at numbers across the board, it’s always kind of like the same percentage.

AMY GOODMAN: So this—this young man who attempted to kill himself, now the Army’s response is to sever him from the military without benefits.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: You, yourself, Andrew Pogany, you served in Iraq. Your were then court-martialed?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: I was not. I was brought up on some charges, on some fabricated charges by my command. I was wrongfully—my command wrongfully attempted to prosecute me for something that they alleged happened, but it didn’t happen. And ultimately, the case was very quickly dismissed, so it never got to the point where it entered a courtroom.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you learn from this, and what year was it?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: This was also in 2003, started in 2003. The case was closed in 2004. What I learned from that is, is that—I mean, I learned various things from that. One, to stand up and fight for myself. And I also learned that there is certain things within a system that may or may not work to an individual’s benefit, and that, you know, when the system closes in and has an agenda, you know, it can become very difficult for an individual to survive that. Myself, I was close to not surviving what was happening to me. But luckily, I had a support system that I was able to rely on to make sure that I did come out on the other end.

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew, the case, even though it was thrown out, it is extremely important, I think. I mean, you were the first American soldier since the Vietnam War to be charged with what they call “cowardice.”

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: For what? Explain actually what took place in your first nights in Iraq.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: I had a psychological breakdown, which was induced by toxic levels of an anti-malaria drug that we were administered. So, the toxic levels of the drug caused practically a malfunction in the brain, and it caused me to have both auditory and visual hallucinations. And it caused me to not be able to function. And when I approached my command and requested and sought medical help, they didn’t see it that way, initially.

AMY GOODMAN: You also saw an Iraqi killed.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Yes, there was an individual who had been—

AMY GOODMAN: What happened to him?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: He was shot by the main gun of a Bradley. I didn’t witness the actual shooting. I saw the aftermath.

AMY GOODMAN: Which was?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Which was an individual hit by the main gun of a Bradley fighting vehicle.

AMY GOODMAN: Which means he was—

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: He was very much disintegrated. It was a very grotesque view, but not anything that—you know, it wasn’t something that was that bizarre or grotesque. I had seen similar things previously in my life. So, in response to me seeking medical help, my command, in their infinite wisdom, they sought to court-martial me. Later on—

AMY GOODMAN: Cowardice is a charge punishable by death?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Correct. So that, you know, was a sobering reality to me.

AMY GOODMAN: But what does cowardice mean?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: It just means cowardly conduct before the enemy, which didn’t even apply in my case.

AMY GOODMAN: Which came from you appealing to your superiors, to your commanding officer?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: And asking—and asking for medical help. And then, within two weeks of the charge being brought, the charge was actually dismissed. And then it was replaced with another charge that was called “willful dereliction of duty,” which subsequently, about 30 days after that, was also dismissed. And then the case just lingered for about nine months. And then the case was ultimately closed, and the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, which I was a member of, they admitted that, you know, the anti-malaria drugs that they have given me had contributed to the—to what happened.

And I wasn’t the only one. By the time I was done, we found out that within the special operations community, there were at a minimum 12 individuals who had pretty much the same types of reactions and side effects from this particular drug. This drug is known to the medical community to cause problems; it’s a black label drug. And today, out of those 10 or 12 individuals that have been identified, myself and another guy actually are the only ones that are still alive. Everybody else has committed suicide.

DAVID PHILIPPS: Jesus.

AMY GOODMAN: Everyone else has committed suicide.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: How many?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: It was about 10, 10 individuals.

AMY GOODMAN: Out of how many?

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Out of the 12 that we, in our investigation, have, you know, connected to having severe side effects of this drug.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait. I think a lot of people right now who are listening, who are watching, who will read this, will be shaking their heads. Say again.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Within the special operations community where I worked, we—in the course of several years, we identified roughly 12 individuals—I think it’s 12 or 14 individuals, I’d have to go back and look at the numbers—that have had documented severe side effects from the anti-malaria drug called Lariam, that we were given. Out of those individuals, at a minimum 10 have committed suicide as a result of side effects.

AMY GOODMAN: Graham Clumpner, Afghan War vet.

GRAHAM CLUMPNER: I think this is a larger—you know, his story is a microcosm of a larger problem. And that is the fact that the women and men who join the United States military are referred to as GIs. GI means government issue, and that means that, just like your helmet and your rifle, you are a piece of equipment.

And so, the way that the military looks at it, from a healthcare perspective, as you’re an active-duty soldier or military member, is that if you’re broken, you can’t give them what they need from you. So the military’s healthcare is essentially trying to keep that piece of equipment working another six months—duct-tape it, if you will. And then they toss you aside, especially now, because what we’re going through is a downturn in the number of total contractors and active-duty personnel in the military, so we’re looking at a situation where people are being pushed out—minor drug offenses, marijuana. You know, you can go down to a dispensary here in Colorado Springs, right down the street, and purchase marijuana as a civilian. But if you’re a soldier that gets caught with some marijuana on you, they will push you out of the military and ruin the rest of your life.

So, on a personal level, as I served in the military, there was numerous examples of, you know, family problems being not an issue to anybody in your chain of command—personal relationships with a spouse, you know, car trouble, the simplest things that you would think a community, that we talk about when, you know, we say “Band of Brothers.” And it’s not just a band of brothers, it’s a band of sisters and brothers now. And we are looking at a world where we’re asking these people to go sacrifice and come home and shut up and not talk about it, and just go stay in their rooms, and once in awhile we’ll put a little bumper sticker on our car, we’ll have a little yellow ribbon. But that’s the extent of the conversation that we want to have.

So, we heard earlier about this feeling of betrayal. And it’s really important to talk about trauma in terms of betrayal. Now, you can have an IED go off or a rocket attack, and you can have 40 people in a platoon there, and maybe only five of them are the ones whose brains don’t heal from that. Thirty days later, the other 35 may be relatively fine. But we can’t exactly figure it out, but we do see a parallel between people trusting—trusting their command, trusting their president, trusting the American people to make a proper choice about where and when we use these tools of war. And let’s be completely transparent. If you serve in the United States military, your first, last and only job is to take the life—or as we call it in the military, close with and kill the enemy. If you are in the military, you are serving that purpose.

And I think we are missing a larger conversation here, because look at who’s on this panel. We have three white men who have had experience, on some level, in a relatively white community here in Colorado Springs. And the violence that we are participating in, whether actively or passively, is not being done to people—it’s being done to people of color from other nations. And we are in a situation where we never talk about those people. I mean, I can come home and go to the VA, OK? I can remove myself from the source of my trauma. People in Afghanistan and Iraq and all of these other countries where we’re dropping drone—or having drone strikes, they cannot remove themselves from the source of their trauma. They do not have a Veterans Administration. In a lot of cases, they don’t have access to basic healthcare. And we lose sight of having that conversation every time we sit down and talk about this. So I think it’s very important that we acknowledge that this is larger than just an American problem.

GEORG-ANDREAS POGANY: Amy, I wanted to add—I want to add something to what he just talked about, specifically when it comes to the conduct of soldiers when they come home. There is a percentage of soldiers who engage in various activities that the military labels as misconduct, such as alcohol-related offenses, drinking, substance abuse, drug-related offenses. Those are misconduct in the military. So, the process of helping those who come home and need help and need appropriate care should not be confused with diminishing or degrading a system of accountability within the military. The military heavily depends on what is commonly referred to as the good order and discipline of the military. And all of us in my field where I work, we acknowledge that.

The problem that we encounter is that you have an individual who, for example, as a result of not being able to receive the proper and appropriate treatment or individually tailored treatment that they need, they resort to things like self-medicating. The science has proven, research has proven, that this is a fact. Alcohol abuse or substance abuse, depression, those are the most concomitant diagnoses with PTSD. What we are faced with is we’re faced with an archaic military justice system that has not adapted, even though their own research, their own military law reviews show that PTSD and substance-abuse-related misconduct are closely related, that there’s a nexus, that one comes from the other.

And what we’re addressing is—we’re not asking the military to not have people held accountable for misconduct. If you need to go ahead and punish someone because they illegally or in violation of regulation used illegal substances, go ahead and punish them. Punish them within the system. But that doesn’t mean that you have to go to the extent of imposing administrative sanctions that have an impact on the rest of their life, such as taking away all their benefits and then putting that person without a safety net out into the community, where they then become a problem in my community. And all they do is they end up draining the resources of my community. And whether—and that can be within the criminal justice system, homelessness, domestic violence, child abuse, and the list goes on and on and on.

So, there needs to be—you know, when it comes to addressing the issue of stigma, there needs to be really a revamping of how the system administers punishment for misconduct and then, subsequently, administrative action in order to eliminate those individuals from service. And we feel it is morally and ethically wrong to deprive those who have honorably served this nation in war of the benefits that they have earned, that they have—that, you know, this country has legislated that they should be getting.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, but we’re going to come back to this discussion. Our guest, Dave Philipps, author of Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers [Came] Home. And I want to talk more about this. You’re just returning to revisit some of the stories of the people you covered in this remarkable both series, first for the Gazette here in Colorado Springs and now as a book. Andrew Pogany with us, an Iraq War vet, now [an advocate] for soldiers returning home. And Graham Clumpner, with Iraq Veterans Against the War, he’s drove in from Denver for—because this weekend, starting today, is the first Afghanistan retreat—he is an Afghan War vet—for—that Iraq Veterans Against the War are putting on, a gathering nationally. This is Democracy Now! We’re broadcasting from Colorado Springs on our 100-city tour. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are on the road in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This is the site of military bases all gathered here in Colorado, Air Force and Army. We are joined by three men. Dave Philipps is the author of Lethal Warriors, which we’re going to talk more about in a minute. Andrew Pogany served in Iraq. Graham Clumpner served in Afghanistan. This is the eve of the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

We’re broadcasting from the Tim Gill Center for Public Media, which just opened, was inaugurated last Friday. And we’re honored to be the first broadcast out of this center, teaching people in the community about civic engagement, citizen journalism. And it’s wonderful to be here before a group of people from Colorado Springs. This weekend, we’ll be traveling the Western Slope of Colorado. You can check our website at tour.democracynow.org.

We are here with Dave Philipps. Dave, if you can talk about Lethal Warriors, expand on what you said at the beginning, because when you describe these soldiers coming home, going back to war, coming home, going back to war, coming home — Lethal Warriors — what happened on the base? Give us an example.

DAVID PHILIPPS: First, let me say that when we talk about soldiers, the guys that I wrote about, guys that ended up getting arrested for prison, are really young guys. We think—tend to think of soldiers as, you know, grown-up adults. These guys were 21, 22. Sometimes they weren’t even old enough to buy a beer. In Iraq, they essentially were given the mission of finding the enemy, but there was no enemy for them to find. There was no uniformed enemy. There was only IEDs that kept blowing up their friends and often blowing them up. That was a very hard thing for anyone to deal with, let alone someone that young.

So when they came home, the Army had a plan to make sure that everybody got screened to make sure they had no mental wounds from this war. And it essentially was that they were all marched into a room and given a multiple-choice piece of paper to fill out that said, “Did you see dead bodies? Did you kill anybody? Are you having trouble sleeping? Are you having trouble with substance abuse?” — things that would screen for symptoms of disaster down the road. And these guys all lied, or at least almost all of them did. And they lied because they had been taught in the culture of the infantry that they were tough, they could handle it. And not only that, but if they couldn’t handle it, they were somehow a defect that had no business being part of the Army. And so they lied and figured out they could handle it on their own.

Now, to be fair, some of them did, and some of them had help from friends. But some of them didn’t. And they started doing things that, in retrospect, are obscenely dangerous. Young men who had been taught how to use weapons, literally expertly, were carrying a loaded fire weapon—firearm all the time around Colorado Springs. They were drinking a lot. They were doing a lot of drugs. And they had had this—we all have this inhibition to killing people—it’s just part of our human nature—that had sort of eroded in them. When you mix together the alcohol, the weapons and this ability to kill that I think most of us can’t even fathom, it was very easy to all of the sudden have bodies. I mean, people were killed for no reason. One man shot another guy for throwing up in the back of his car. Another man just drove around—he would get drunk and drive around with an AK-47 and just shoot people he didn’t even know.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to read: in 2009 — in 2006, “21-year-old Anthony Marquez killed a small-time drug dealer by shooting him repeatedly with a stun gun and then shot him in the heart.

“In August 2007, 24-year-old Louis Bressler robbed and shot a soldier he picked up on a street in Colorado Springs.

“In [December] 2007, three soldiers from the unit,” from Lethal Warriors, “—Louis Bressler, Bruce Bastien and Kenneth Eastridge—left the bullet-riddled body of a soldier from their unit on a Colorado Springs street. Two months earlier the same group intentionally drove into a woman walking to work. One of the soldiers then repeatedly stabbed her.

“In May and June 2008, police say Rudolfo Torres-Gandarilla and Jomar Falu-Vives drove around with an assault rifle, randomly shooting people.

“In [September] 2008, police say John Needham beat a former girlfriend to death.

“Josh Butler was sent to prison for beating his pregnant wife. Months later his child was born with severe birth defects and died. Butler blames himself [in part] for the the child’s death.”

These are horrifying stories.

DAVID PHILIPPS: Yeah, and to a certain extent, what’s interesting is that this was going on very much under the radar for Colorado Springs. These guys all tend to hang out in their own circles. They come back from war together. They do everything together. And so, it is possible to live even in a city as military as Colorado Springs and feel very removed by the war—from the war. It was only when we started digging that we uncovered how some of these horrific, senseless acts were really all connected to sort of a larger toxin that these guys had brought home.

AMY GOODMAN: Graham Clumpner, the end of—as we wrap up now, talk about more what you’re doing this weekend.

GRAHAM CLUMPNER: So, Iraq Veterans Against the War has been using an organizing model since a little bit after President Obama was elected. As we’ve seen on the left in this country, it’s been difficult to have an antiwar voice. You know, on the one hand, some people don’t want to push too hard, and on the other hand, they think like it’s falling on deaf ears.

Iraq Veterans Against the War is trying to make some decisions for the long term, because as we look at the Pentagon, they make a 20-to-30-year plan. They talk about climate change. They acknowledge it exists. They’re willing to talk about all of the possible future threats. And in the antiwar movement and in a lot of these healthcare movements, we’re reactionary; we don’t plan ahead. And so, this weekend is the beginning of starting to look forward and say, what’s the next war? We’re not just going to be focused on bringing the war in Afghanistan to an end, bringing all of our soldiers home, and reparations for the Afghan people, as well as full healthcare for our own returning veterans. That is—that is part of what we’re doing. But we’re taking this as a larger conversation, because as we see the news on Syria and Turkey this week, or we look at Iran and the differences with, you know, the European powers and the United States, we are looking at a world that is not going to stop being militarized any time soon.

AMY GOODMAN: Where are people meeting in Denver?

GRAHAM CLUMPNER: We’re going to be meeting at 27 Social Center. It’s going to be right next to the football stadium. And we’ve got about 20 participants at this point. And it’s going to be, for a lot of these veterans, the first time that they get to talk with each other and share their stories.

And on Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m., which will mark the 11th anniversary of the beginning of the Afghanistan War, we are going to be spending some time for our own memorial. It’s going to be the first memorial that we have, because every time we’ve had to go to these public memorials and stand there and hear all of these lies and hear these things that, you know, are just so broad, that don’t deal with the real loss, we’re going to be sharing those stories with each other for the first time.

AMY GOODMAN: Graham Clumpner, Andrew Pogany, and thank you so much to Dave Philipps. That ends our broadcast here in Colorado Springs at the Tim Gill Center for Public Media, part of Rocky Mountain PBS. This weekend, we’ll be in Salida on Saturday; Carbondale, Paonia, Crested Butte, Telluride and Durango through Sunday. Check out details at our website tour.democracynow.org. Then Moab, Utah, and then we’ll be going to Arizona and then to New Mexico and then to California, Washington state and Oregon.