By Alice Salles
Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon hired Bell Pottinger, a London-based PR agency. The PR firm was tasked with promoting what the Pentagon called “democratic elections” in Iraq, ultimately earning over a hundred million dollars yearly. Part of the firm’s job included producing “fake al Qaeda propaganda films,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently reported.
Despite the PR operation’s hefty price tag, the Pentagon seemed to have no issue allocating taxpayer resources to have these videos produced. But over ten years after the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon is now concerned about its past appropriations — at least part of them, anyway.
Ten years after promising $15,000 bonuses to soldiers willing to re-enlist in 2006 and 2007, the Pentagon is now forcing California veterans to pay back the bonuses.
The Los Angeles Times reports, “officials signed up soldiers in assembly-line fashion” in 2006 and 2007, outlining the “generous terms available for six-year reenlistments” to those willing to sacrifice their safety, leaving their homes, once again, to fight abroad in exchange for a large bonus. Now, the Pentagon wants their money back.
To Get Soldiers to Re-enlist, the National Guard Lied
In 2008, the movie Stop-Loss highlighted a reality few members of the public were informed about.
With the growing involvement of U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers who had already served in Iraq and Afghanistan for several tours were being asked to reenlist. Sometimes, these soldiers’ term duties were extended forcefully via the government’s controversial stop-loss policy, which allows the government to extend the period a soldier must spend on active duty involuntarily.
In California, the state’s National Guard began promising thousands of soldiers that they would receive $15,000 bonuses for going back to war.
Now, nearly 10,000 soldiers who took the National Guard’s promise at face value are being ordered to pay back the bonuses plus interest. In some cases, their wages are being garnished to fund the payments.
This issue was first brought up when veterans “whose only mistake was to accept bonuses offered when the Pentagon needed to fill the ranks” were the target of an investigation launched in 2010.
After receiving reports of improper payments, a federal probe found “thousands of bonuses and student loan payments were given to California Guard soldiers who did not qualify for them, or were approved despite paperwork errors.”
As a result of the investigation, Army Master Sgt. Toni Jaffe, who also served as the California Guard’s incentive manager, pleaded guilty to filing false claims totaling $15.2 million in 2011. Jaffe was sentenced to spend 30 months in federal prison, and three other officers who also pleaded guilty to fraud were put on probation.
Breaking the National Guard’s promise to soldiers whose reenlistment depended on the bonus distribution, the California Guard “assigned 42 auditors to comb through paperwork for bonuses and other incentive payments given to 14,000 soldiers.”
In September 2016, these auditors finalized the investigation, finding roughly 9,700 current and retired soldiers who had been given “improper” bonuses. These soldiers have been told “to repay some or all of their bonuses” since the probe was launched and the first cases were discovered.
According to the California National Guard, these repayments have recovered more than $22 million so far, compromising veterans like Robert Richmond, who now works for a construction company in Texas. He was an Army Sergeant First Class living in Huntington Beach when in 2006, he was asked to reenlist.
“I signed a contract that I literally risked my life to fulfill,” Richmond explained, adding that he only agreed to go back to war because he was told he qualified for a $15,000 bonus as a special forces soldier.
The veteran had gone through a divorce after being deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. Asked to consider the bonus to reenlist, Richmond thought the money was going to give him “breathing room,” so he agreed. In 2007, he was sent to Iraq’s “Triangle of Death,” an area a few miles south of Baghdad known for intense fighting.
In one of the hundreds of missions against insurgents he was a part of, Richmond sustained permanent back and brain injuries after his vehicle triggered a roadside bomb.
In 2014, the California Guard headquarters contacted him, letting the former special forces soldier know he was being urged to repay the $15,000 bonus he received in 2006. If he failed to make the payment, the letter said, he would face “debt collection action.”
Richmond refused to give the government any money back, filing appeal after appeal. “[Impacted soldiers] want somebody in the government, anybody, to say this is wrong and we’ll stop going after this money,” he said.
‘Support the Troops!’: Code for ‘Don’t Question War?’
In Washington, D.C., lawmakers have condemned the Pentagon, saying the soldiers were not at fault for accepting a bonus they were promised.
Promising to open an investigation into the enlistment bonus problem, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) called the Pentagon’s demands “disgraceful.”
“The Department of Defense should waive these repayments,” McCarthy said in a statement. “The House will investigate these reports to ensure our soldiers are fully honored for their service,” he added.
Rep. McCarthy says the government should not be demanding any money back from veterans in his statement. The California Republican and also argued that “we are the ones who owe a debt for the great sacrifices our heroes have made — some of whom unfortunately paid the ultimate sacrifice.”
Instead of using this opportunity to highlight the importance of safeguarding our soldiers and keeping them from engaging in unconstitutional wars that are only successfully sold to the American public because administrations lie, McCarthy celebrates these very soldiers’ sacrifices.
Using this discussion to repeat the traditional “support the troops” line, lawmakers like McCarthy steer the debate away from what’s causing these soldiers so much pain and distress, acting as if relentless war hasn’t been the reason they were lied to. Instead, McCarthy and others are pushing the government to keep its promise without reevaluating how the U.S. government goes about irresponsibly sending these men and women abroad to fight insurgents who didn’t pose a threat to Americans at the time.
In the 1964 film, The Americanization of Emily, which was based on a novel written by a veteran who had been a SeaBee officer on D-Day, character Lt. Comdr. Charles E. Madison gives a short speech explaining that “[those] who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields … perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.”
Failing to discuss the real costs of war with the American electorate while exalting the sacrifices made by those who serve in the military is part of an ongoing campaign — deliberate or otherwise — to keep America involved in perpetual war.
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Don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for it. Instead, read what journalist Randolph Bourne had to say about the country’s thirst for war in 1918:
In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday. …
“With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war.
War, Bourne concluded, “is the health of the state.” This is not because all individuals involved with governing enjoy death and destruction per se, but because “it is … in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned,” which forces the public to unite behind the state no matter what — especially if the occasion leading to war is “terrifying” the public.
While veterans whose bonuses are being questioned ten years later should be heard and protected from government abuse, we must not forget it was government’s own thirst for war that initiated this cycle of deception. Let us not ignore the reasons why we should support our troops — and how we should go about it; simply claiming to be interested in celebrating U.S. soldiers for their sacrifice does nothing for them.
This article (The US Military Lied to Thousands of Soldiers — and Now Veterans Are Paying for It) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to [email protected].
Sad to see our country not serving the people that served it. Its time to clean out Washington!
Fifty years ago when I put on a uniform the first time I was dubious as to the reasons. Now, I’d feel like a fool putting it on and listening to throngs of OTHER fools lauding my “courage” in serving. Fifty years ago when I went to the V.A. hospital, I smelled urine walking down paint-peeling halls, past doped up “heroes” strapped in wheel chairs. The only thing that has changed? Their names. Parents, don’t you think you OWE it to your spawn to show them the truth? How can I feel sympathy for them when their OWN PARENTS allow them to act based upon LIES?
Sewer Nation – Idiot Culture
These soldiers have fallen for the lie that they are serving their country and fighting for everyone’s freedom, having failed to heed Henry Kissinger’s observation that “Military men are dumb and stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.”
I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to fight for these greedy criminals. They’re not “serving their country,” they’re just serving the super rich criminals who have hijacked our government.
Everyone should READ Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket”. It’s 12 pages! He stated that by the time he was done, he could have taught Al Capone a few things but on a GOBAL scale. It’s always been a tool of those that run the business. Even the American Revolution wasn’t as revolutionary as one might think as the nations was sold back to it’s new ownership to get out from under the monarchy by Alexander Hamilton (useful puppet as was JP Morgan) for the First Bank of the United States. The DOD uses people as Butler states, with the wounded forgotten, especially those that come back traumatized, unable to function normally ever again.
Most vets will defend to the death their belief that what they did was
“honorable”. They’re trapped in their own conundrum much the same as the “Synagogue of Satan” as regards their framing/torturing/murdering their Lord’s only begotten Son. They simply CANNOT admit Christ is the Son of God because then they’d have no choice but to admit they slaughtered the only begotten of their Lord. Same train of thought for vets. If they admit being “duped” then they have to face the horrible fact that they have committed murder – squared and no longer fool themselves into believing they did an “honorable” service. THAT will be a hard thing to accept.
As a disabled, service-connected veteran myself, I take issue with the premise of the author. Lauding the heroism of our soldiers is not a mistake or misdirected. Our participation in military operations was and is driven by our faith in the United States of America and what it stands for. The lies of any administration- (including the present one) should never be seen as justification for ignoring or discounting the sacrifices that our men and women in uniform made, and the sense of duty and honor that originally drove them to serve.
I think that a distinction should be made between the influence that multi-national corporations have (directly and indirectly) on government policies and actions, and the devotion to duty and honor of our enlisted and commissioned personnel. The question of what is truly “in the best interests of the national security of the United States” often gets skewed when destabilization of existing governments in the oil-rich Middle East gives the petroleum industry the leverage to arm twist our political leaders into a declaration of war. The men and women who fought in these wars did so because they believed and had faith in the honor of the United States government; not because they themselves were corrupt.
I have personally seen men and women in VA hospitals around the country who carry on in spite of the fact that they’ve lost arms and legs to an IED– their lives shattered. To go into an armed conflict, knowing full well that this was one possible outcome you faced, takes tremendous courage. Never forget that. The fact that they decided to re-up for a cash bonus was (again) prompted by an act of good faith. The federal government needs to waive repayment. The fraud here was perpetrated by the recruitment agent-not the veterans.
“Our participation in military operations was and is driven by our faith in the United States of America and what it stands for.”
You’re forgetting one supremely important part of the equation; millions of innocent people slaughtered in their own “back yard” – property stolen, cities destroyed, the good earth un-tillable for centuries because of the unnecessary use of D.U. munitions…
The foul way they treat us upon return should be enough for one to “shelve” their misplaced faith in a nation never as good as they told us and much worse now than anyone cares to think about.
Defending one’s homeland from incoming aggressors is an honorable thing. Allowing oneself to be “duped” into invading OTHER lands for an obviously corrupted administration only “renting” the halls of government is a disgrace. Particularly when one considers the heinous treason of our own president, (Johnson), secretary of State, (McNamara) and last – but not least – “Wet Start” McCain’s daddy the admiral threatening our fellow servicemen with “court-martial or worse” should they ever reveal the treachery committed against us by Israel aboard the Liberty and covered up by the Judas Class which is the case much more often than not.
Murder is murder, whether the body count is one or one million, whether it’s committed by a delusional lad convincing himself he’s defending “mom and apple pie” 8 thousand miles away
or a psychopath wanting to practice his blood-lust wrapped in the “honor” of a uniform just to return home, join law enforcement and summarily PISS on the constitution he supposedly “defended with his life”.
Do I wish them ill? of course not. Will I laud them as “heroes” as a group? Of course not. Each one has his reason and it’ll eventually be worked out between him and his Creator. One should remember though, God hasn’t designated a particular flag/people His representatives on earth and reading one’s heart to the very core is where His justice will come from. I wonder how many soldiers consider this seriously when they wake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night wishing they had thought about it a bit longer before they place the muzzle in their mouths and pull the trigger.
But, again, that’s a question each one has to answer for themselves.
It may surprise you to find that I agree with much of what you said here. I personally knew a former Force Recon Marine who was a sniper and did quite a bit of “wet work” for the CIA in the Middle East. During Operation Jawbreaker, he and his team were tasked with infiltrating a small, obscure village in Afghanistan or Iraq to capture or kill a high-level member of the Taliban or Al-Quaida. But when they reached their objective- (the man’s home) all they found was the man’s wives and children. My buddy’s team called in the missed opportunity, but then were ordered to kill the civilians for the psy-ops impact it would have. (This is of course a violation of the Geneva Convention on Warfare) and they refused the unlawful order. Over the next two years, every member of my friend’s team was “suicided” and three attempts were made on my friend’s life as well. He wacked all three of the would-be assassins, but they eventually got him with genetically modified MRSA. These were honorable men, but the government that sent them obviously was not.
Grrr. Decent/honorable men have no business rubbing shoulders with the likes of government/flags/etc. It’s a trick to get same to do their bidding. That’s the trouble with the general public. They refuse to believe the facts that scream out to them from every direction. We’re all pawns to their greed/evil. Most of their evil would never have seen the light of day were it not for the web giving we pawns a forum we can afford. Sorry about your friend.
Thank you, Paschn. Jeff was a truly honorable Marine. Even lived his life like a modern-day Samurai under the guidelines of the Bushido Code. I think the bottom line is, somewhere up the food chain in WASHDC, even members of the elite forces are considered “expendable”.
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