A Morally Bankrupt Military : Spc. Alexis Hutchinson and Pvt. Paul Rich

Army Spc. Alexis Hutchinson. Below, Alexis with son Kamani Hutchinson. Photos from Oakland Tribune.

U.S. Army:
Infant to protective services,
mom to Afghanistan

By Dahr Jamail / November 16, 2009

See ‘Morally bankrupt military: When soldiers and their families become expendable,’ by Dahr Jamail, Below.

VENTURA, California — U.S. Army Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a single mother, is being threatened with a military court-martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan, despite having been told she would be granted extra time to find someone to care for her 11-month-old son while she is overseas.

Hutchinson, of Oakland, California, is currently being confined at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Georgia, after being arrested. Her son was placed into a county foster care system.

Hutchinson has been threatened with a court martial if she does not agree to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, Nov. 15. She has been attempting to find someone to take care of her child, Kamani, while she is deployed overseas, but to no avail.

According to the family care plan of the U.S. Army, Hutchinson was allowed to fly to California and leave her son with her mother, Angelique Hughes of Oakland.

However, after a week of caring for the child, Hughes realised she was unable to care for Kamani along with her other duties of caring for a daughter with special needs, her ailing mother, and an ailing sister.

In late October, Angelique Hughes told Hutchinson and her commander that she would be unable to care for Kamani after all. The Army then gave Hutchinson an extension of time to allow her to find someone else to care for Kamani. Meanwhile, Hughes brought Kamani back to Georgia to be with his mother.

However, only a few days before Hutchinson’s original deployment date, she was told by the Army she would not get the time extension after all, and would have to deploy, despite not having found anyone to care for her child.

Faced with this choice, Hutchinson chose not to show up for her plane to Afghanistan. The military arrested her and placed her child in the county foster care system.

Currently, Hutchinson is scheduled to fly to Afghanistan on Sunday for a special court martial, where she then faces up to one year in jail.

Hutchinson’s civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, told IPS, “The core issue is that they are asking her to make an inhumane choice. She did not have a complete family care plan, meaning she did not find someone to provide long-term care for her child. She’s required to have a complete family care plan, and was told she’d have an extension, but then they changed it on her.”

Asked why she believes the military revoked Hutchinson’s extension, Sussman responded, “I think they didn’t believe her that she was unable to find someone to care for her infant. They think she’s just trying to get out of her deployment. But she’s just trying to find someone she can trust to take care of her baby.”

Hutchinson’s mother has flown to Georgia to retrieve the baby, but is overwhelmed and does not feel able to provide long-term care for the child.

According to Sussman, the soldier needs more time to find someone to care for her infant, but does not as yet have friends or family able to do so.

Sussman says Hutchinson told her, “It is outrageous that they would deploy a single mother without a complete and current family care plan. I would like to find someone I trust who can take care of my son, but I cannot force my family to do this. They are dealing with their own health issues.”

Sussman told IPS that the Army’s JAG attorney, Captain Ed Whitford, “told me they thought her chain of command thought she was trying to get out of her deployment by using her child as an excuse.” ‘

Major Gallagher, of Hutchinson’s unit, also told Sussman that he did not believe it was a real family crisis, and that Hutchinson’s “mother should have been able to take care of the baby”.

In addition, according to Sussman, a First Sergeant Gephart “told me he thought she [Hutchinson] was pulling her family care plan stuff to get out of her deployment”.

“To me it sounds completely bogus,” Sussman told IPS, “I think what they are actually going to do is have her spend her year deployment in Afghanistan, then court martial her back here upon her return. This would do irreparable harm to her child. I think they are doing this to punish her, because they think she is lying.”

Sussman explained that she believes the best possible outcome is for the Army to either give Hutchinson the extension they had said she would receive so that she can find someone to care for her infant, or barring this, to simply discharge her so she can take care of her child.

Nevertheless, Hutchinson is simply asking for the time extension to complete her family care plan, and not to be discharged.

“I’m outraged by this,” Sussman told IPS, “I’ve never gone to the media with a military client, but this situation is just completely over the top.”

Source / IPS

Fort Bragg, N.C. The flowers are a nice touch. Photo by Gerry Broome / AP.

Morally bankrupt military:
When soldiers and their families become expendable

By Dahr Jamail / November 11, 2009

The military operates through indoctrination. Soldiers are programmed to develop a mindset that resists any acknowledgment of injury and sickness, be it physical or psychological. As a consequence, tens of thousands of soldiers continue to serve, even being deployed to combat zones like Iraq and/or Afghanistan, despite persistent injuries. According to military records, over 43,000 troops classified as “nondeployable for medical reasons” have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan nevertheless.

The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma, coupled with ongoing harassment about his being a Muslim. This, along with other factors, contributed towards Hasan falling into a desperation so deep he was willing to slaughter fellow soldiers, and is indicative of fissures running deep into the crumbling edifice upon which the US military stands.

The case of Pvt. Timothy Rich also demonstrates the disastrous implications of the apathetic attitude of the military toward its own. Not dissimilar from Major Hasan, who clearly would have benefited from treatment for the secondary trauma he was experiencing from his work with psychologically wounded veterans, one of the main factors that forced Private Rich to go absent without leave (AWOL) was the failure of the military to treat his mental issues.

Rich told Truthout, “In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn’t have mental issues because we were too ‘high speed.’ So I was afraid to go because I didn’t want to be labeled as a weak soldier.”

What followed was more harrowing.

The other problems arose when I brought my girlfriend down to marry her. My unit believed her to be a problem starter so I was ordered not to marry her, taken to a small finance company by an NCO and forced to draw a loan in order to buy her a plane ticket to return home. They escorted her to the airport and through security to ensure that she left. Once the NCO left she turned around and hitchhiked back to Fort Bragg.

Before the unit could discover us, we went to the courthouse and got married. We were then summoned by my Commander, Captain Jones, to his office and reprimanded. He called me a dumb ass soldier and a shit bag for marrying her and told my wife that she was a fool to marry someone as stupid as me. Members of my unit started referring to me as Pvt. Bitch instead of Pvt. Rich. The entire episode caused a lot of strain in our relationship. Unable to cope with all this, I bought two plane tickets and went AWOL with my wife.

Rich was later apprehended when a federal warrant was issued against him. After 11 days in a country jail, he was transported back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On August 17, 2008, he was wrongly assigned to Echo Platoon that was part of the 82nd Airborne, whereas his unit was part of the 18th Airborne.

Rich recollects, “I was confused when they assigned me to the 82nd. I was dismissed as a liar when I brought this up with my NCO Sgt Joseph Fulgence and my commander, Captain Thaxton. I ended up spending a year at Echo before being informed that I was never supposed to have been in the 82nd.”

At Fort Bragg, he was permitted to seek mental health treatment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychosis, insomnia and a mood disorder. This, however, did not stop his commander from harassing him. His permanent profile from the doctor restricted him from being on duty before 0800 (8 a.m.) hours, but his commander, Sergeant Fulgence, dismissed the profile as merely a guideline and not a mandatory directive.

The soldier was accused of using mental health as a pretext to avoid duty. So, Rich was up every morning for first formation at 0545 (5:45 a.m.). It wasn’t until he refused to take his medication because it made him groggy in the morning that his doctor called his commander and settled the matter. By then, Rich had already been forced to violate his profile for six months.

During this period, his mental health deteriorated rapidly. The combined effect of heavy medication and restrictions on his home visits resulted in his experiencing blackouts that led him to take destructive actions in the barracks. When he was discovered talking about killing the chain of command, he was put on a 24-hour suicide watch that seemed to have served little purpose, because on August 17 he was able to elude his guards and make his way to the roof of his barracks.

“I climbed onto the roof of the building and sat up there thinking about my family and my situation and decided to go ahead and end my suffering by taking a nose dive off the building,” Rich explained to Truthout.

His body plummeted through the air, bounced off a tree, and he landed on his back with a cracked spine. The military gave him a back brace, psychotropic drugs and a renewed 24-hour suicide watch, measures as effective in alleviating his pain as his failed suicide attempt.

When Truthout contacted him just days after his failed suicide attempt, a fatigued Rich detailed his hellish year-long plight of awaiting a discharge that never came.

I want to leave here very bad. For four months they have been telling me that I’ll get out next week. It got to the point that the NCOs would tell me just to calm me down that I’d be going home the next day. They went as far as to call my wife and requesting her to lie that she was coming to get me the next day. I eventually stopped believing them. I didn’t see an end to it, so I figured I’d try and end it myself.

The noncommissioned officers in his barracks thought it was hilarious that Rich had jumped, and he was offered money for an encore that could be videotaped.

At the time he was in a “holdover” unit, comprised mostly of AWOL soldiers who had turned themselves in or had been arrested. Others in his unit had untreated mental health problems like him or were suffering from severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from deployments in Iraq and or Afghanistan.

According to Rich, every soldier in his platoon was subjected to abusive treatment of some kind or the other. “It even got to the point when our 1st Sergeant Cisneros told us that if it were up to him we all would all be taken out back and shot, and that we needed to pray to our gods because we were going to pay (for our actions).”

Tim’s wife Megan had to bear his never-ending ordeal in equal measure. She witnessed the military’s callousness up close. She informed Truthout,

Since February of this year, Tim’s unit had been telling him he would be out in two weeks. After two weeks when he asked, they would repeat the same thing. At times he would get excited and start packing his belongings and I would try to figure out how to get him home to Ohio. He would call me crying in relief because he thought we were going to be together again real soon. The military forced me to lie to him too. When he realized they did not mean to release him he grew very destructive during his black out spells. Eventually he simply gave up on coming home.

Megan first realized there was a problem with the way the military was treating her husband when she noticed him doing and saying things that were out of character for him, like apologizing for not being a good husband and father and being openly suicidal. He had also begun to self-medicate with alcohol, an increasing trend among soldiers not receiving adequate mental-health treatment from the military.

She revealed to Truthout,

He had quit for the girls and me but it seems like he could not handle the stress and needed an escape. This caused a huge problem between us and we began to argue about it. He became severely depressed, pulled away from me, and started to do things he normally doesn’t do, such as giving away his money and belongings, and telling the recipients that he wouldn’t need those things in hell.

She sensed that her husband would be in trouble if he were to stand up for himself, so she began to advocate on his behalf. Her attempts to do so met with fresh abuse from his commanders. The chain of command banned her from the company barracks and had her escorted off post. The couple was commandeered into Sergeant Fulgence’s office where they were chastised. The sergeant referred to Megan as “a bad mother” and “a bitch.” When Megan attempted to leave the office in protest, the sergeant ordered her to stay and listen to what he had to say.

This was followed by an encounter with the commander of the platoon, Commander Thaxton. The commander in this case ordered Tim to shut up, and threatened him with confinement. He demanded that Megan explain what kind of mother would bring her child to a new location without a place to live. She tried telling him that the AER loan was for her to come to Fort Bragg since they had lost their house after Tim’s arrest and loss of job.

Although the paperwork for the loan clearly stated that it was for her travel, food and lodging at Fort Bragg, the commander insisted it was for an apartment. When Tim intervened to say that the $785 would not be sufficient to pay rent and bills, especially since he wasn’t being paid his wages and his wife couldn’t work because of the baby, and according to Tim, both Sergeant Fulgence and Captain Thaxton “had a nice laugh over that” and dismissed the duo, referring to them as “juvenile dumb-asses.”

After Tim returned from being AWOL and was brought up on charges, he went through 706 (a psychology board) that declared him mentally incompetent at the time of his being AWOL. It took a painfully long amount of time for the charges to be dismissed without prejudice. The soldier believes that his superiors deliberately refused to do the requisite paperwork for his clearance and subsequent resumption of his pay.

He told Truthout,

Every time I came on base I got arrested even though I was on active duty again. Then my wife and I got an AER loan for her to come down to Fort Bragg. When she got there and my pay continued to be withheld, the AER money ran out and my wife and child had to sleep in the van we owned. When my unit found out they called the Military Police and ordered me to give custody of my daughter to my father.

When Tim refused to do that, they punished him by confining him to the barracks and barring his wife from entering the base. To add insult, the chain of command took away his van keys and said that neither he nor Megan was allowed use it.

The nightmare ended when the military finally released Pvt. Timothy Rich, and by default, Megan. He was discharged and “allowed” to enter the ranks of US citizens searching for jobs and health care. Their traumatic journey to that starting point is what distinguishes them from their civilian counterparts.

Rich’s advice to anyone thinking of joining the military today: “Don’t join. Everything they advertise and tell you about how it’s a family friendly army is a lie.”

Sgt. Heath Carter suffered a similar fate at the hands of an indifferent military command. Upon return from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered that his daughter Sierra was living in an unsafe environment in Arkansas under the care of his first wife, who had full custody of the child. Heath and his new wife, Teresa, started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of Sierra, who also suffered from a life-threatening medical condition.

Precisely during this time, the military chose to keep changing Carter’s duty station from Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then to Fort Stewart, Georgia. Not only did these constant transfers make it difficult for Carter to see his daughter, they also reduced his chances of gaining custody of Sierra. Convinced that this was a matter of life and death for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours from his first wife’s home in Arkansas.

His appeals to the military command, the legal department, chaplain and even to his congressman failed, and the military insisted that he remain at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Having run out of all available avenues, in May 2007 he went AWOL from Fort Stewart and headed home to Arkansas where he fought for and won custody of Sierra, and was able to literally save her life by obtaining needed medical care for her.

However, on January 25 of this year, Carter was arrested at his home by the military police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges for the past eight months. Being a sergeant, he is in a regular unit and not in a holdover, but that does not help his cause. Initially, his commander told him it would take a month and a half for him to be sent home. Several months later, it was decided he would receive a court-martial.

Carter feels frustrated,

Now I have to wait for the court martial. It’s taken this long for them to decide. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I’ll have a trial, they say it is only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they are lying. They have messed with my pay. They’re trying to push me to do something wrong.

His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on the wars. He admits that, although his original reason for going AWOL was personal and he had otherwise been proud of his missions, he sees things in Iraq differently today. “I don’t think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil.”

Yet, both Private Rich and Sergeant Carter were offered deployments to Afghanistan amid their struggles. It is soldiers like these that the military will use to fill the ranks of the next “surge” of troops into Afghanistan, which at the time of this writing, appears to be as many as 34,000 troops.

The stage is set for more tragic incidents like the recent massacre at Fort Hood.

[Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years. This report was originally published by Truthout.]

Source / Dahr Jamail’s Mideast Dispatches

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15 Responses to A Morally Bankrupt Military : Spc. Alexis Hutchinson and Pvt. Paul Rich

  1. elbon55 says:

    Question #1 To Dahr-why didn’t you contact the child’s father or his relatives? He’s as much to blame for this as the army or the mother.
    #2 If the army tried to deploy her and someone said they would put her child in the custody of family services, the army is way wrong.
    #3 If she can’t do her duty in the army then she should get an honorable discharge and be returned to civilian life.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Honorable?? Are you serious??? She is not fulfilling her duty as a soldier!! I am a single mother and got deployed to afghanistan for 12 months…flat out..i did my duty…she should not receive special treatment..if they are gonna kick her out they need to do it the right way and give her a dishonorable discharge…

  3. masterspork says:

    Before this one gets blown out of proportion it has to be asked that did she try to have a family care Plan? Did she get a divorce recently? Also one thing that you cannot assume is that the person that you put down for your care plan will be able to do it. There are so many questions that needed to be answered here.

    I mean if you are a single parent this is a mandatory thing. Because even if we take deployments out of the picture there are days where you are gone 12+ hours. Or what happens if something happens to you (overseas or not), who is going to care for the child then?

    But becuase it is dealing with a Deployment to Iraq/Afghanistan people are quick to write up how the military is so evil and wrong for wanting her to do her job. If she cannot do here job as a single Mother then she needs to get put out. But it may not be the result that you will like.

    We got a brief on this before this story even went public about making sure that you have a WORKING family care plan. Because once it is time to go is the wrong place to try to fix it.

  4. masterspork says:

    Ok now on to the second story. I have to ask about how much is real and want is not.

    At Fort Bragg, he was permitted to seek mental health treatment and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, psychosis, insomnia and a mood disorder. This, however, did not stop his commander from harassing him. His permanent profile from the doctor restricted him from being on duty before 0800 (8 a.m.) hours, but his commander, Sergeant Fulgence, dismissed the profile as merely a guideline and not a mandatory directive.

    Ok on this one, I have had someone I know have a similar case where they where told that he had to do the same thing as above. Except that this was challenged by his and my wife after it went on for a week. The spouses have a right to ask to see the commander with the open door policy. So once that was done the problem was fixed. I want to know why did it take him that long for him to contact his doctor to have this fixed.

    Rich told Truthout, “In my unit, to go to sick call for mental health was looked down upon. Our acting 1st Sergeant believed that we shouldn’t have mental issues because we were too ‘high speed.’ So I was afraid to go because I didn’t want to be labeled as a weak soldier.”

    What can I say, there are good NCOs and bad ones. In my unit there was not issue of sending people to mental heath. In fact we had one of the higher percentage per unit that had people using. It can be taken two ways but they where getting seen. Just like outside the Military you will have people that do their job well and those that no not. It is not just a military problem.

    “The recent atrocity at Fort Hood is an example of this. Maj. Nidal Hasan had worked as a counselor at Walter Reed, hearing countless stories of bloodshed, horror and death from dismembered veterans from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While he had not yet served in Iraq or Afghanistan, the major was overloaded with secondary trauma,”

    Give me a break, your telling me that he went off because of a secondary accounts? Pennies to Dollars this was not about PTSD.

    http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=15574

    Would write more but I am pressed for time.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Thank you for this article. There are great NCO's in the Army but for the most part I have seen plenty of stories like this at my last duty station. NCO's picking on their soldiers', calling them punks for wanting to go to sick call and get taken care of. I ended up in a care accident 3 weeks before deployment. My car was almost totalled and I was injured. My NCO didn't want me to

  6. masterspork says:

    Not sure if you will read this but here is some thoughts and advice.

    Ok with the car crash I would want more information on the extent of the crash and injuries. Because totaled only tells me that it the cost to fix it is more then the car is worth. Also same goes with the injuries.
    As a medic I would want to know more detailed explanation of what happened. Also did you go

  7. mystictravel says:

    I understand that Kamani’s father is not absentee by choice. I encourage him to come forward and fight for custody rights to his son… I at one time supported Alexis but after interaction with her friends, family can no longer do so.

  8. masterspork says:

    What exactly happend with them?

  9. Anonymous says:

    I tried to join the Army after my divorce – at the age of 32 because I wanted to learn how to fly a helicopter. I was willing to train and serve. I was laughed at and was told I was too old AND because I had a small child, the Army wouldn’t take me because they said “who is going to take care of your baby?”!! I told them I had a huge family and child care was not a problem. I was denied!! So, when has our government gotten so strict that they cannot make concessions for a single mom! Why isn’t Spc. Alexis Hutchinson given another assignment where her child will be taken care of during the day? This is a blatant disgrace and I want to know when the h-ll the rules changed? Do I have a case to sue???

  10. Anonymous says:

    To the most recent poster: No you absolutely do not have a case to sue, the army has clear regulations and cut-offs for service, including age- you can’t sue them for adhering to these standards. While the rudeness is uncalled for it is also not really something you can sue over. You can however report the issue to their superiors, considering public face of the recruiting position, it is an issue commanders will want to address.

    I would also take some time to consider your reasoning for joining the Army, if you just want to learn to fly helicopters, there’s many other avenues that require less than six+ years of obligated service, and pose less chances of hardships.

    To the poster with a car crash, it seems like the civilian doctor was more or less agreeing with the military doctors, saying that while yes you had injuries if the army doctors had no issue with you deploying than he didn’t either. If he actually believe that you should be non-deployable, even if he is not a military doctor, that opens a lot of doors for you- especially if you were referred by tri-care. Even if you got the appointment without your health care provider, a doctor saying you have substantial injuries should not be dismissed, if it is being completely disregarded you have members in every command, as well as IGs that you can take your issues to- I’ve seen far too many people completely ignore programs and persons that are available to them, and attempt to go it alone with their problems which rarely ends in success.

    Also I would echo masterspork and ask what the issue with storing the vehicle was- even if its repairs were completed after you left it appeared your boyfriend was in the area, why could he not pick up the vehicle and take it to storage, if the storage was on a base facility, why not ask a non-deployed friend to act as his sponsor to get him and the vehicle onto the base to store it at a later time? My experience has been with the Marines, so there may be slight differences in our deployment experiences, but similar issues like this, while a nuisance, were handled relatively easily.

  11. Anonymous says:

    I am having difficulty finding any other sources on the portion of the story on Pvt Rich other than carbon copies what is written about him here, posted on other sites. Does anyone know why his name changes from Paul Rich to Timothy Rich from the title of the article to the end?

    Initially I was hoping to see some form of retribution against his commanders who appeared to have gone against military doctors instructions and issued unlawful orders among other infractions, which would be punishable under the UCMJ.

    However, after noticing the change in name and the inability to find anything related on any of the names from an original source I began to think the article on Paul Rich is more fabrication and anything else- and is merely tacked on to the tail end of the article on Miss Hutchinson by the author for a desired effect.

  12. Anonymous says:

    Apologies, I did not notice it was a separate blog entry, so the author obviously didn’t “tack on” anything for to accent the latest entries desired effect.

    However I would like to see if anyone has other information on Pvt. Rich if its available.

  13. Linda says:

    Hutchinson is a single mother no divorce she was young when she joined the army and ended up pregnant she tried to work it out with the father who did not care for her nor the baby she did have a family care plan but like someone else said they are not always able to care for your child/ren as for Hutchinson her mother was her FCP who always takes care of others in the household and having an infant as well was a big load on her soldiers i’m not taking no sides i kno Hutchinson very well as i am an army wife. She has been trying to get her FCP straightened out long before i know its hard as a single mother but she can’t do her duty or chose to stay in their is conseqences.

  14. Anonymous says:

    Update: she has been discharged; no court-martial is coming.

    Common sense and family values 1, P.C. military bureacracy 0.

    Now maybe the army can actually go after real bad guys. God bless Ms. Hutchinson and her baby!

  15. Masterspork says:

    No, no one wins in this. See got discharged with what I expect a bad conduct discharge that will follow her through out her life. Also she will not have any veteran or military benefits.

    The people who she was suppose to deploy with will now have to work hard because they are down one less person.

    Also this is a slap in the face to the single parents that have deployed by

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