COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: AWOL
Army Is Cracking Down on Deserters
PAUL von ZIELBAUER, NewYork Times
April 9, 2007
Army
prosecutions of desertion and other unauthorized absences have risen
sharply in the last four years, resulting in thousands more negative
discharges and prison time for both junior soldiers and combat-tested
veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army records show.
The increased prosecutions are meant to serve as a deterrent to a
growing number of soldiers who are ambivalent about heading — or
heading back — to Iraq and may be looking for a way out, several
Army lawyers said in interviews. Using courts-martial for these
violations, which before 2002 were treated mostly as unpunished
nuisances, is a sign that active-duty forces are being stretched to
their limits, military lawyers and mental health experts said.
“They are scraping to get people to go back, and people are worn
out,” said Dr. Thomas Grieger, a senior Navy psychiatrist. Though
there are no current studies to show how combat stress affects
desertion rates, Dr. Grieger cited several examples of soldiers
absconding or refusing to return to Iraq because of psychiatric reasons
brought on by wartime deployments.
At an Army base in Alaska last year, for example, “there was one
guy who literally chopped off his trigger finger with an axe to prevent
his deployment,” Dr. Grieger said in an interview.
The Army prosecuted desertion far less often in the late 1990s, when
desertions were more frequent, than it does now, when there are
comparatively fewer.
From 2002 through 2006, the average annual rate of Army prosecutions of
desertion tripled compared with the five-year period from 1997 to 2001,
to roughly 6 percent of deserters, from 2 percent, Army data shows.
Between these two five-year spans — one prewar and one during
wartime — prosecutions for similar crimes, like absence without
leave or failing to appear for unit missions, have more than doubled,
to an average of 390 per year from an average of 180 per year, Army
data shows.
In total, the Army since 2002 has court-martialed twice as many
soldiers for desertion and other unauthorized absences as it did on
average each year between 1997 and 2001. Deserters are soldiers who
leave a post or fail to show up for an assignment with the intent to
stay away. Soldiers considered absent without leave, or AWOL, which
presumes they plan to return, are classified as deserters and dropped
from a unit’s rolls after 30 days.
Most soldiers who return from unauthorized absences are punished and discharged. Few return to regular duty.
Officers said the crackdown reflected an awareness by top Army and
Defense Department officials that desertions, which occurred among more
than 1 percent of the active-duty force in 2000 for the first time
since the post-Vietnam era, were in a sustained upswing again after
ebbing in 2003, the first year of the Iraq war.
At the same time, the increase highlights a cycle long known to Army
researchers: as the demand for soldiers increases during a war,
desertions rise and the Army tends to lower enlistment standards,
recruiting more people with questionable backgrounds who are far more
likely to become deserters.
In the 2006 fiscal year, 3,196 soldiers deserted, the Army said, a
figure that has been climbing since the 2004 fiscal year, when 2,357
soldiers absconded. In the first quarter of the current fiscal year,
which began Oct. 1, 871 soldiers deserted, a rate that, if it stays on
pace, would produce 3,484 desertions for the fiscal year, an 8 percent
increase over 2006.
The Army said the desertion rate was within historical norms, and that
the surge in prosecutions, which are at the discretion of unit
commanders, was not a surprise given the impact that absent soldiers
can have during wartime.
“The nation is at war, and the Army treats the offense of
desertion more seriously,” Maj. Anne D. Edgecomb, an Army
spokeswoman, said. “The Army’s leadership will take
whatever measures they believe are appropriate if they see a continued
upward trend in desertion, in order to maintain the health of the
force.”
Army studies and interviews also suggest a link between the rising rate
of desertions and the expanding use of moral waivers to recruit people
with poor academic records and low-level criminal convictions. At least
1 in 10 deserters surveyed after returning to the Army from 2002 to
mid-2004 required a waiver to enter the service, a report by the Army
Research Institute found.
“We’re enlisting more dropouts, people with more law
violations, lower test scores, more moral issues,” said a senior
noncommissioned officer involved in Army personnel and recruiting.
“We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to
get people to join.” (Army officials agreed to discuss the issue
on the condition that they not be quoted by name.)
The officer said the Army National Guard last week authorized 34 states
and Guam to enlist the lowest-ranking group of eligible recruits, those
who scored between 16 and 30 on the armed services aptitude test.
Federal law bars recruits who scored lower than 16 from enlisting.
Desertions, while a chronic problem for the Army, are nowhere near as
common as they were at the height of the Vietnam War. From 1968 to
1971, for instance, about 5 percent of enlisted men deserted.
But the rate of desertion today, after four years of fighting two
ground wars, is “being taken much more seriously because we were
losing so many soldiers out of the Army that there was a recognized
need to attack the problem from a different way,” said an Army
criminal defense lawyer.
In interviews, the lawyer and two other Army lawyers each traced the
spike in prosecutions to a policy change at the beginning of 2002 that
required commanders to welcome back soldiers who deserted or went AWOL.
Before that, most deserters, who are often young, undistinguished
soldiers who have fallen out of favor with their sergeants, were given
administrative separations and sent home with other-than-honorabl e
discharges.
The new policy, ordered by the secretary of the army, effectively
eliminated the incentive among squad sergeants to urge returning AWOL
soldiers to stay away for at least 30 days, when they would be
classified as deserters under the old rules and dropped from the roll.
But some unit commanders, wary of scrutiny from their superiors, go out
of their way to improperly keep deserted soldiers on their rosters, and
on the Army’s payroll, two officers said in interviews. To
counter that, the Army adopted a new policy in January 2005 requiring
commanders to formally report absent soldiers within 48 hours.
Such problems are costly. From October 2000 to February 2002, the Army
improperly paid more than $6.6 million to 7,544 soldiers who had
deserted or were otherwise absent, according to a July 2006 report by
the Government Accountability Office.
Most deserters list dissatisfaction with Army life or family problems
as primary reasons for their absence, and most go AWOL in the United
States. But since 2003, 109 soldiers have been convicted of going AWOL
or deserting war zones in Iraq or Afghanistan, usually during their
scheduled two-week leaves in the United States, Army officials said.
With the Iraq war in its fifth year, a new subset of deserter is
emerging, military doctors and lawyers said: accomplished soldiers who
abscond reluctantly, as a result of severe emotional trauma from their
battle experiences.
James, a 26-year-old paratrooper twice deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan, went AWOL in July after being reassigned to Fort Bliss,
Tex., an Army post in the mountainous high-desert region near El Paso.
“The places I was in in Iraq and Afghanistan look exactly like
Fort Bliss,” said James, who agreed to talk about his case on the
condition that his last name not be printed. “It starts messing
with your head — ‘I’m really back there.’
”
In December, he and another deserter, Ronnie, 28, who also asked that
his last name not be used, tried to surrender to the authorities at
Fort Bliss. A staff sergeant told them not to bother, James said.
James and Ronnie, who both have five years of service, suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder and abuse alcohol to self-medicate, said
Dr. David M. Walker, a former Air Force psychiatrist who has examined
both men.
With help from lawyers, James and Ronnie returned to Fort Bliss on
Tuesday. They were charged with desertion and face courts-martial and
possibly a few months in a military brig.
“If I could stay in the military, get help, that’s what I
want,” said Ronnie, who completed an 18-month combat tour in
Kirkuk, Iraq, with the 25th Infantry Division in 2004.
The Army said combat-related stress had not caused many soldiers to desert.
Major Edgecomb, the spokeswoman, said more than 80 percent of the past
year’s deserters had been soldiers for less than three years, and
could not have been deployed more than once.
Morten G. Ender, a sociologist at the United States Military Academy at
West Point, said soldiers’ decisions to go AWOL or desert might
come in response to a family crisis — a threat by a spouse to
leave if they deploy again, for instance, or a child-custody battle.
“It’s not just that they don’t want to be in a war
zone anymore,” Dr. Ender said. “We saw that a lot during
Vietnam, and we see that a lot in the military now.”
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