http://www.msnbc.com/news/994733.asp?0sl=-41
Misdiagnosed Green Beret demoted
Soldier nearly court-martialed before rare brain illness revealed
ASSOCIATED PRESS
KARNACK, Texas, Nov. 24 — By the time he shipped out for the war in
Iraq in January, Special Forces Sgt. James Alford was a wreck of a
soldier. For five months, he had been doing odd things. He disappeared
from Fort Campbell, Ky., for several days last year. He lost equipment
and lied to superiors. In December, he was demoted from staff sergeant
to sergeant.
IN THE KUWAITI desert, he came apart. The hotshot Green Beret who a year
earlier ran circles around his team members and earned a Bronze Star in
Afghanistan was ordered to carry a notepad to remember orders. By March,
he was being cited for dereliction of duty, larceny and lying to
superiors. He couldn’t even keep up with his gas mask.
Finally, in April, his commanders had had enough. They ordered
him to return to Fort Campbell to be court-martialed and kicked out of
the Special Forces.
“Your conduct is inconsistent with the integrity and
professionalism required by a Special Forces soldier,” Lt. Col.
Christopher E. Conner of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group
Headquarters in Kuwait, wrote April 10.
CONFUSED AND DISGRACED
Confused and disgraced, the soldier moved back into his off-base
home where he ate canned meat and anchovies, unaware of the day, the
month or the year.
Sensing something was wrong, a neighbor called Alford’s parents.
They drove 600 miles from East Texas to find a son who’d lost 30 pounds
and could no longer drink from a glass, use a telephone, button his
shirt or say Amber, the name of his soldier wife who was still stationed
in the Middle East.
They rushed him to an emergency room. A month and several hospitals
later, Alford’s family learned he was dying of a disease eating away his
brain. He had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an extremely rare and fatal
degenerative brain disorder akin to mad cow disease that causes rapid,
progressive dementia.
Now, as the 25-year-old soldier wastes away in his boyhood home,
his parents and his wife are struggling to understand how the military
could have misdiagnosed Alford’s erratic, forgetful behavior as nothing
more than the symptoms of a sloppy, incompetent soldier.
“He had to hold his hands to keep them from shaking, but they saw
nothing wrong with my child,” his mother Gail Alford, a nine-year Army
veteran, said recently from her home in a rural community near Marshall,
Texas.
Alford’s parents say Special Forces staff told them that a doctor
in Kuwait found nothing wrong with him and that a psychiatrist there had
said Alford was “faking it.”
FAMILY WANTS FORMAL APOLOGY
Army officials have acknowledged that the 5th Special Forces
Group erred and, more than eight months after Alford’s demotion, they
reinstated his staff sergeant rank.
But the dying soldier’s family wants more. They want a public
apology for the ridicule and disgrace that they say filled Alford’s
final days of service.
“They called him stupid, told him he was lazy, he was a liar,
that he wasn’t any good, that he was a faker,” his mother said,
recalling what little her son could tell her about his time in Kuwait.
“I want them shamed the way they shamed my son.”
And they want his pay restored and his medical benefits maintained. The
Army declared Alford medically incompetent, placed him on retirement
status and froze his pay earlier this month until his parents can prove
in court they are his legal guardians. His mother said she was given
power of attorney long ago.
Alford’s father, retired Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Alford, who
served 34 years, said Army doctors have been caring and professional,
and commanders stationed his son’s wife, Army Spc. Amber Alford, in
Texas near her husband.
He mainly faults the Special Forces.
“I think they did everything they could to break him, mentally
and physically,” he said.
A Special Forces spokesman did not respond to phone messages and
an e-mail request for an interview with The Associated Press.
In a July 30 letter responding to an inquiry by U.S. Rep. Max
Sandlin of Texas, Army Lt. Col. Johan C. Haraldsen wrote that the
Special Forces group to which Alford belonged expressed “its deepest
concerns” to the soldier and his family.
“All actions taken ... involving Sergeant Alford were appropriate
based on the best information available at that time,” Haraldsen wrote.
Alford himself may have tried to conceal his symptoms, said Dr.
Steve J. Williams, a clinical fellow in the Division of Infectious
Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
“He was capable of masking the symptoms because he was
resourceful and he was a smart guy,” said Williams, who diagnosed Alford
with CJD. “I’d ask him what floor he was on and I could catch him
looking outside and counting the number of windows.”
CLASSIC FORM OF CJD?
Doctors believe he has the classic form of the disease, which
develops spontaneously. It affects just one in 100 million people under
30, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Col. David Dooley, an infectious disease doctor at Brooke Army
Medical Center in San Antonio, said Special Forces staff shouldn’t take
the blame for missing Alford’s illness. A delayed diagnosis is “typical
and classic;” the average lag time for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is five
to seven months, he said.
“If I’m going to hold anything against them, they might have come
around a little faster when a medical problem was recognized,” Dooley
said. “The Special Forces group was fairly inert to the face of data
that we medics were showing them.”
Alford’s parents believe he has the “variant” form of CJD, caused
by eating brains or nervous system tissue from an infected cow. They
worry he may have got it from eating sheep brains locals served to
soldiers as an honor in Oman two years ago.
But there is no evidence people can get the disease from sheep.
Doctors also note Alford didn’t have the outbursts of anger and
depression usually associated with the variant form of the disease, and
his illness has progressed at the faster rate resembling the classic
form.
AWARDED THE BRONZE STAR
Alford was the youngest man in 5th Group and his wife says some
of his team members resented his promotion. At least one team member
said Alford seemed a bit immature and made a few bad decisions when he
first joined, but he earned decorations, military records show.
He was awarded the Bronze Star in May 2002 for “gallant conduct”
in leading reconnaissance patrols in Kandahar and helping capture
suspected Iranian terrorists.
Staff Sgt. Miguel Fabbiani, a friend of Alford’s and a member of
the same team based at Fort Campbell, said Alford’s symptoms escalated
during wartime when he was working with a new group that didn’t know him
as well. And people remembered past youthful errors.
Alford’s parents said they didn’t see him enough to detect a
problem. His wife was stationed near him for a while in Kuwait, but she
chalked up his odd behavior to stress.
Alford’s father said the actions of his son’s superiors broke the
spirit of a young man who had wanted to become a soldier since he was 4.
He now lies in pastel sheets next to a wall painting of John
Wayne. Wearing a Houston Texans T-shirt that hangs like a hospital gown,
he stares absently into a TV that glows 24 hours, his hands gripping
stuffed animals to keep them from clenching shut.
“He knows his name, sometimes,” says his wife, a tiny woman in
sneakers who helps tend to her husband as she ponders a life alone.
“Sometimes I’ll go up to him, wink at him and make kissy faces and he
laughs.”
‘HE WILL LOSE EVERYTHING’
Her eyes well up as she remembers the handsome, arrogant boy she
met as a teenager at a barrel racing contest in Texas.
As his brain deteriorates, his organs will fail.
“He will go blind, he will go deaf, he will lose everything,” his
father says.
He stopped walking more than a month ago, mumbles when he tries
to speak, is fed intravenously and takes medicine for insomnia, pain and
tremors. Doctors have told the family he probably won’t live to see
Christmas.
The Army told the family the issues over Alford’s pay could be
resolved within weeks, but the family is skeptical. They aren’t sure how
they will pay his bills and maintain his 24-hour care without his
salary.
“It’s very sad when the people who are putting their life on the
line for this country should be treated like this,” Alford’s father
said. “This has been a bureaucratic nightmare. We’ve got enough to deal
with on a daily basis, caring after our son and dealing with our pain
and weariness and our suffering to have to fight the U.S. Army.”
They fought for four months before his rank was reinstated in
September.
John Alford knew his son might not live long enough to get the
good news, so he had already told him a “white lie” that he had been
vindicated.
“It was very important to him because he kept saying, ’I didn’t
do anything wrong, Daddy.”’
© 2003 Associated Press.
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
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