More Military Madness...

via Holden at First Draft.

He lost his arm serving his country in Iraq.

Now this wounded soldier is being discharged from his company in Fort Hood, Texas, without enough gas money to get home. In fact, the Army says 27-year-old Spc. Robert Loria owes it close to $2,000, and confiscated his last paycheck.

How could that happen, you ask?

A Separation Pay Worksheet given to Loria showed the numbers: $2,408.33 for 10 months of family separation pay that the Army erroneously paid Loria after he'd returned stateside, as a patient at Walter Reed; $2,204.25 that Loria received for travel expenses from Fort Hood back to Walter Reed for a follow-up visit, after the travel paperwork submitted by Loria never reached the correct desk. And $310 for missing items on his returned equipment inventory list.

"There was stuff lost in transportation, others damaged in the accident," Loria said of the day he lost his hand. "When it went up the chain of command, the military denied
coverage."

Including taxes, the amount Loria owed totaled $6,255.50. The last line on the worksheet subtracted that total from his final Army payout and found $1,768.81 "due us."

Yep, virtually every penny was directly related to treatment for Loria's injury, or to the IED incident that caused the injury. Back in my day, it was common scuttlebutt that if you got hurt, they could hang you up for 'damaging government property.'

We thought it was a sick joke. Rummy's DoD has made it a sicker reality.

Some comments at First Draft indicate that the Army is backing off now that the spotlight is on them, but these stories are far too common, and we're left wondering how many similar cases don't get the scrutiny of the press that seems required for reasonable treatment.

It shouldn't take a reporter or a blogger to make these things right, but there doesn't seem to be a goddam soul in the chain of command with the sense to say "This is just wrong."

And yes, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush are in the chain of command.