Coming home: The Army's fatal neglect

Needham is one of at least 13 current or former Fort Carson soldiers to serve in Iraq and then be convicted, accused or linked to a murder in the past four years. Victims like Villagomez who died at the hands of Fort Carson-based soldiers might be alive today if the Army had played closer attention to their mental state, providing necessary healthcare. In another story in the “Coming Home” series that will be published tomorrow, Salon details the cases of several soldiers involved in homicides whose preexisting problems raise the question of whether they should ever have worn a uniform. The story of John Needham, however, is the story of a young man who seemed stable and unscarred until he had driven down too many bomb-laden roads in Iraq.

In 2006, Needham was a happy-go-lucky house-painter with a friendly smile, 6-foot-2 and a sturdy 210 pounds. The 23-year-old entered surfing competitions, played golf, wrote songs on his guitar and dabbled in painting pictures. In his family, he was the funny guy. “John was so full of life,” says his father, Mike Needham.

He was also a patriot who, like his dad before him, enlisted in the Army. In October 2006, not long after basic training, John Needham was sent to Iraq. He was first attached to 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, patrolling a sector in Baghdad rife with insurgents.

Needham saw some action, but he seemed to be holding up. By January 2007, he even got to go home. The Army was preparing for the troop surge and Needham was told that if he didn’t take leave, he might not get another chance. So he went back to San Clemente, Calif., spending time with his family and riding the waves.

In photos from his leave, Needham is smiling. Yet when the camera wasn’t aimed at him, his father says, John was shaky. But it didn’t appear to be a big deal. Just some jitters. Needham seemed to be coping.

Two weeks later, Needham returned to Iraq and then in March or April was reassigned to the Fort Carson-based 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry. With the 2-12, he patrolled al-Dora, a Sunni neighborhood in southern Baghdad.

It was a violent area. In June, Needham and a group of soldiers stopped a car. Inside sat two suspected insurgents. Needham approached with his rifle in the “low and ready” position, aiming it at the face of one of the men, just in case. Needham ordered one of the men to get out.

As the man slid out, Needham noticed he was holding a grenade. The pin had been pulled.

“Grenade!” Needham shouted.

Then he pulled the trigger of his rifle, hitting the insurgent several times in the chest and finally in the head. As the man went down, the grenade rolled toward Needham, who was running to his Humvee.

“The explosion at such a close range was incredible,” Needham wrote to his father in an e-mail following the incident. It briefly knocked him out.

He would receive an Army Commendation Medal for actions to save his comrades and a Purple Heart because shrapnel entered his legs, too deep to be removed. He would also begin to suffer from chronic back pain.

While Needham patrolled al-Dora with the 2-12, improvised-explosive devices were an ongoing threat. He brought home photos from the spring and summer of 2007 that showed the gore he saw with the 2-12. One picture showed a dead body, still dressed in traditional Iraqi clothing, with a rotting skull for a head. Another picture showed an Iraqi with the top part of his head blown off, covered in blood, eyes open, his body placed in a black bag alongside his brains.

Much later, after Needham had left Iraq and was undergoing medical evaluation, one of his commanding officers in Iraq would assure the evaluators that during his combat tour Needham had seen the sorts of things that wound minds. Needham, wrote Capt. Jim Keirsey in a March 2008 e-mail, “encounter[ed] and witness[ed] situations that may contribute to” PTSD. “Every soldier in the unit saw civilians injured by road side bombs, dead bodies from civilians killed from sectarian strife, and most significantly, every soldier patrolled daily under the threat of injury or death” from an improvised-explosive device.

While still in Iraq, Needham sought help. He wrote to his father that he saw a doctor and was given a small handful of Zoloft pills, which treat depression and anxiety, and Ambien for sleeplessness. It didn’t seem to work. “I’m stressed out to the point of completely losing it,” Needham later wrote in an e-mail to his father. “The squad leader brushed me off and said suck it up.”

Needham began to self-medicate with large amounts of alcohol.

In a MySpace blog post in August of 2007, Needham was showing the strains of war. The post, typos included, reads: “I’m falling apart by the seams it seems the days here bleed into each other I have to find the will to live man I miss my brothers. These walls are caving in my despair wraps me in its web, I feel I’m sinking in, throw me a lifesaver throw me a life worth living. I’m apart of death I am death this is hard to admit but this shits getting old. I fall asleep and pray I die before I wake. The heat is unbearable I wish this experience to wash from me to melt away with the quickness it came, I yearn for the pacific to cool me to refresh every positive ion in me. I want it so bad I would trade a thousand waking moments to be there with you to just be near. The sreets here fill with filth and the stray dogs resemble the locals with their torn pride beaten and batter haggard life that falls into this abyss please tell me you miss me let me know you realized I was gone but not forgotten. With every wish and prayer and every meditation I get closer to home i close my eyes”

And on Sept. 18, 2007, he finally fell apart. As he and a comrade drowned their troubles in booze, Needham pulled out a gun and pointed it at his own head. The friend jumped at Needham.

“Blam!” The bullet hit the wall.

It was a suicide attempt, Needham’s medical records say. A crowd gathered. Needham got into a fight. Things got confusing.

Needham seemed to need intervention more than ever now. But he was not sent for a psychiatric consultation. Instead, he was punished — confined. “They keep me locked up in this room and if I need food or water I have to have two guards with me,” he wrote to his father after 18 days.

John Needham was told that he could face charges and possible time in military prison for illegal discharge of a weapon.

It was then that Mike Needham realized that getting help for his son was going to be a struggle. “There were a number of things that prevented John from getting care, starting after his suicide attempt in Iraq.”

Mike Needham reached Lt. Col. Stephen Michael, the 2-12’s top commander, via phone in Iraq. “After he tried to kill himself, they said he was a criminal. I couldn’t believe it. I called his commander to try to say that John might be suffering from combat stress. I offered him literature. [Lt. Col. Michael] told me John deserved to be in military prison. When I argued, he said, ‘Fuck off,’ and hung up the phone.”

Needham’s father then reached out to Fort Carson’s inspector general, a neutral arbiter of disputes. John finally got medical intervention. He was shipped to Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, where he was diagnosed with PTSD, and then to the Washington, D.C., area, where he received care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Depression was added to his list of ills.

“I don’t know what would have happened to him if I hadn’t intervened,” Mike Needham said. “They made me fight them just so that he could receive help. This is so backwards, I thought. He was entitled to decent care for everything he had already done for his country.”

From Maryland, Needham was sent to Colorado. Salon was at Denver International Airport when Needham arrived in the middle of November 2007. There, Needham was greeted by Fort Carson commanders. Waiting in the wings was Georg-Andreas Pogany, then an investigator for the advocacy organization Veterans for America. At Mike Needham’s behest, Pogany became an advocate for the Needham family, advising John Needham of his right to receive mental healthcare.

It was a tense time. Needham’s father remembers calling Col. Kelly A. Wolgast, the nurse who commands Evans hospital at Fort Carson. He wanted to know why his son was on 12 medications. He was worried about the charges his son faced, although they never came to fruition. He just wanted assurances that his son would get the best care available.

“She just said that care at Evans was fine when I was telling her what happened to my son,” Mike Needham said. “It was like she wasn’t listening.”

While at Fort Carson, Needham, advised by Pogany, kept notes about his treatment. On Nov. 16, 2007, Needham, still wondering if he’d face charges stemming from his suicide attempt in Iraq, wrote in black pen that he felt drowsy and laid his head on a desk. According to Needham’s notes, a staff sergeant found him there and yelled, “This is no time to sleep.” The sergeant then threatened Needham, saying “I will break your fucking face.” Needham told the sergeant to go ahead. The sergeant closed in, inches from Needham’s face, and “called me a pussy and a scared little kid,” Needham wrote.

Weeks later, during a visit with his family in California, Needham reinjured his back. He was brought to Naval Medical Center in San Diego, and then received an official transfer from Fort Carson to the medical center.

Once with the Army’s warrior transition unit at the medical center, Needham had trouble meeting the Army’s standards. Needham was charged with “patterns of misconduct” for failing to appear in formation, insubordination to superiors, and other problems. To Mike Needham, it seemed like the Army, which had acknowledged that John had PTSD, was now punishing his son for displaying the symptoms.

Nonetheless, on July 14, 2008, Needham received an honorable discharge.

Then the real headache began. The Army’s disability ratings system, which assigns percentages to gauge a soldier’s level of disability on a scale of zero to 100 percent, gave Needham a 20 percent rating for his back and just 10 percent for his PTSD, according to his medical records.

By law, Needham should have received 50 percentage points for PTSD alone. The difference in scores is an important detail, one that might have saved Villagomez. If Needham had received a total score of 50 on the disability scale — which a PTSD diagnosis by itself should’ve guaranteed — he could have received personalized support for his day-to-day issues, whether psychological, physical, financial or career. He also would be guaranteed lifetime military health benefits. With 10 points for PTSD and only 30 overall, he didn’t get the one-on-one attention he needed to transition back to civilian life.

At one point he freaked out, “naked, whimpering,” his father says. “But we couldn’t get him everything he needed psychiatrically.”

Less than two months after his discharge, on Sept. 1, 2008, Needham clashed with Villagomez in his San Clemente condo, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. It began when Villagomez physically fought with another woman in the residence. Needham broke up the fight, calling 911 to report it. The woman left, but Villagomez stayed with Needham.

When officers arrived, Needham allegedly attacked them at his door while nude and drunk. Officers subdued the 25-year-old with a Taser.

They discovered Villagomez unconscious, severely beaten and barely breathing. Rescuers rushed her to the hospital, but they were too late.

“We believe what happened was he had a flashback and lost control,” Needham’s father says. “Something triggered it, as if he felt he was back in Iraq and being attacked.”

Needham isn’t the only soldier to be discharged with a PTSD rating lower than the 50 points that the law requires for full benefits, according to a class-action lawsuit by the National Veterans Legal Services Program. The independent nonprofit, which fights to see that the nation’s 25 million military personnel and veterans receive benefits to which they are entitled, alleges that “thousands” of Iraq war veterans with PTSD are currently being denied care through Veterans Affairs because they were discharged with illegal PTSD ratings. The Army recently acknowledged the law in an Oct. 14, 2008, Defense Department directive, ordering that soldiers discharged with PTSD receive the proper rating.

Bart Stichman, a co-executive director for NVLSP, wasn’t surprised to hear about problems at Fort Carson, saying his office is aware of them.

“Untreated post-traumatic stress disorder is bound to create bad behavior,” Stichman said. “Often what happens is if soldiers can’t find help, they medicate themselves with alcohol or drugs and it leads to problems.”

Col. Wolgast of Evans hospital declined to comment on Needham’s case — or any others — citing medical privacy laws. Maj. Gen. Mark Graham assembled a task force late last year to explore an unspecified number of cases, many of which have shocked Colorado Springs. The task force is delving into all the aspects of the soldier’s histories — “not just healthcare,” said Wolgast, who is also a member.

“There is no evidence that we find that anything is a trend right now for those soldiers,” she added.

Asked whether it is appropriate for commanders to downplay or ignore the possible hidden wounds of war, such as PTSD, Wolgast said no, and doesn’t see it as a problem among Fort Carson’s troops. “I don’t think anyone is out to maliciously go after a soldier. I don’t believe that at all.”

She added, however, that if allegations that soldiers with mental injuries were mistreated by commanders proved true, the Army would then “clearly help that young leader understand a better way of going about taking care of that soldier.”

While Wolgast declines to link soldier healthcare and violent crimes to PTSD, Sheilagh McAteer, a Colorado public defender and a member of a federal Health and Human Services task force exploring ways to divert combat veterans who resort to crime, sees compelling links.

McAteer says soldiers returning home after traumatic war experiences are struggling with violence. Some are winding up in prison and Army officials need to wake up and recognize the problem, she adds.

So far, though, the Army is “refusing to take responsibility,” McAteer says. “That’s a problem.”

John Needham is now sitting in the Orange County Jail, awaiting trial for murder. He has pleaded not guilty. Bail has been set at $1 million. A pretrial hearing is scheduled for next month. Salon’s attempts to reach Needham in jail were unsuccessful.

Now Needham is gone too. He died on Feb. 19, about 10 days after back surgery at a Veteran’s Affairs hospital in Tucson, Ariz. The circumstances surrounding Needham’s death are unclear. According to his father, Mike Needham, an older brother discovered John Needham slumped over his bed at his mother’s house in Arizona, his face blue. Efforts by his brother, and then rescuers, to revive him were unsuccessful.

Needham, a tall, blond, sturdy California surfer and house painter, was deployed to Iraq in 2006. Not long after arriving, his life turned into a blur of roadside bombs, bloodshed and confusion. He was knocked unconscious by a grenade, suffering a brain injury. Shrapnel ripped into his legs. His back eventually gave him problems. He got a Purple Heart.

The damage to Needham wasn’t just physical. He also suffered from mental wounds. In Iraq in September 2007, when the carnage he had witnessed and participated in became too much, Needham pointed a pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. It would have ended there if a friend had not leaped forward to push the gun aside. The bullet hit a wall. Needham, who had a clean bill of health when he entered the Army, was shipped home.

When de Yoanna met him briefly in the airport in Colorado, Needham seemed nervous. He’d spent several weeks receiving care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Back at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Needham complained about punishment instead of treatment for his mental issues. His commanders threatened him with charges for discharging his weapon in his suicide attempt. Superiors also harassed him for falling asleep while heavily medicated. He was called a pussy. Though he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Needham was punished for showing symptoms: failing to appear in formation, insubordination to superiors, and other problems.

With the advocacy of his father and others fighting behind the scenes, the charges against Needham disappeared and in July of 2008, the Army had washed its hands of him. He received an honorable discharge and a partial disability — but his benefits didn’t provide full access to mental health treatment, a critical gap in his care.

Had he received such care, things might have been different just weeks later. In September 2008, Needham made headlines across the country after allegedly beating his girlfriend, 19-year-old aspiring model Jacqwelyn Villagomez, to death in his San Clemente, Calif., condo.

After 10 months in a maximum-security jail cell awaiting trial, Mike Needham raised the $1 million needed to bail his son out to prepare for the murder trial.

Based in Colorado, de Yoanna traveled to California last summer and spent several days with Needham — part of Salon’s ongoing effort to understand veterans struggling with the hidden wounds of war.

Needham told de Yoanna during that visit that he couldn’t provide specifics about his case, fearing any statements he made to the press might become ammunition for prosecutors. He emphasized, however, that he was “not the murderer” authorities and the press had made him out to be. Looking over the crashing waves he loved to surf, the war veteran also said he had become an outcast and wanted to leave his home and live somewhere on the California coast where nobody would know him.

So he lived in the present, often on the beach. He surfed some, hoping the ocean would restore his body, but the pain in his lower back persisted.

After a first V.A. surgery on his back in Los Angeles that did not go as planned in late November, Needham struggled with severe pain. He developed an addiction to painkillers and was hospitalized in Long Beach in the following weeks to deal with it. Then his family brought him to Tucson, hoping the V.A. hospital near his mother’s home would do better. There was another surgery a few weeks later and one more — Needham’s third – earlier this month. Each was an effort to repair Needham’s deteriorating lower back.

Though Needham had a serious infection after his last surgery and a “tumor the size of a grapefruit” on his back, according to his father, he was only cared for by a visiting nurse while staying at his mother’s home at the time he died.

Autopsy and toxicology reports are being completed; medical investigators did not return a call to Salon by deadline.

Needham’s father feels the Army and perhaps the V.A. let his son down. “He never got correct care in the Army and, in my opinion, never got correct care from the V.A. either,” Mike Needham said. “What if they helped him when he first struggled after the explosions in Iraq? Instead, they sent him into battle day after day and harassed him when he struggled. As for the V.A., I think they’re the medical authority and responsible. I question why he was on outpatient status with a tumor the size of a grapefruit on his back.”

Mike Needham plans to join with family and friends in a small private ceremony to scatter the ashes of his son at the beach where he loved to surf. “That’s our spiritual altar — the ocean.”

View a slide show

According to the report, “Survey data from this investigation suggest a possible association between increasing levels of combat exposure and risk for negative behavioral outcomes.” The study also says that “combat intensity/exposure . . . may have increased the risk for violent behaviors” and that its “findings are consistent with recent research on combat exposure and subsequent behavior outcomes among Soldiers.”

Salon’s Coming Home series showed that soldiers who returned from combat duty with symptoms of stress were often ridiculed or otherwise discouraged from seeking help, were overmedicated or misdiagnosed, or chose to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Many had been deployed even though they were already displaying signs of combat stress. Additionally, some of the soldiers involved in violence against themselves or others had preexisting conditions that should have disqualified them from service, but were allowed into a military hard-pressed for new recruits via waivers.

The 126-page report issued by the Army Wednesday — an epidemiological study, or EPICON in military lingo — focused largely on 14 of the Army post’s soldiers allegedly involved in murders since 2005. Ordered by Fort Carson commander Maj. Gen. Mark Graham in the wake of the slayings, it is studded with statistical evidence that buttresses Salon’s investigation. The numbers point to a link between violent behavior and substance abuse, repeated deployments, exposure to combat and enlistment waivers. In addition, many of the 14 soldiers allegedly involved in murders witnessed incidents described in the report as War Crimes. Five either heard of or witnessed the “murdering/killing” of non-combatants; three, “detainee abuse;” and, two, “fabricating evidence to justify attacks or criminal acts.”

Yet the Army officials presenting the report denied that it established any cause-and-effect relationships. Eric Schoomaker, the Army’s surgeon general, waved his hands across his chest under clear blue skies during the outdoor press conference, dismissing the notion that the report proved a tie between soldier-involved killings and the horrors those soldiers experienced in the war.

“While this is probably the most intensive and in-depth investigation on the clustering of violent-on-violent crimes in the Army that we’ve ever seen or are aware of,” said Schoomaker, “it is still in many respects preliminary.”

Without causation, there is no way to establish how the murders could’ve been prevented. “We would all like to look back at the cluster of misconduct and criminal activities,” said Schoomaker, “that resulted in devastating human tragedies here in Colorado and be able to say, ‘This is the reason they happened and we know exactly what could have been done to prevent them,’ but that’s rarely the way things work when dealing with human behavior.”

Without causation, there is also limited accountability. While commanders were blamed for standing in the way of soldiers receiving mental health and substance-abuse care, Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the Army’s director of personnel, said the report “was not a tool that was intended to be used to either fix accountability or to be used for any sort of disciplinary action that may follow.”

Schoomaker, Rochelle and Maj. Gen. Graham, who was also on the podium Wednesday, were able to deny cause-and-effect because of caveats in the study. The authors of the report, a 24-member team assembled the Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, issued recommendations to stop the belittling of soldiers who seek mental health care and to identify units with high exposure to combat. They stopped short, however, of positing causation, saying that “”the cross-sectional nature of the study does not allow for making causal inferences.”

Thus Schoomaker could say, truthfully, “It’s pointing the finger to levels of causation, but we don’t know direct causation yet. … I’m very reluctant to put cause and effect there. In fact, the authors [of the report] are very careful to say these are correlations … not necessarily one causing the other.”

Yet Schoomaker also seemed to place some blame on the soldiers themselves for failing to seek help. He suggested that units where the soldiers were more willing to get help were less likely to be plagued with violence. The study, he noted, analyzed two brigades at Fort Carson, the 4th and the 3rd. “What did seem to differ between the two was the willingness and ability of those soldiers within the unit where crimes were committed to seek and get effective care for emerging behavioral health problems — alcohol and drug problems — and prompt attention to misconduct.”

But Schoomaker also claimed that the experiences of the 4th and 3rd Brigades in combat were “similar.” That’s not what’s indicated in the report — the 4th Brigade, where the murder suspects were clustered, had eight times more combat deaths than the 3rd. Moreover, the report indicated that the Army itself played a role in denying care to the soldiers — half, some with suicide issues, were sent back to Iraq “early,” according to the report.

U.S. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, who met on Tuesday with Schoomaker, issued a statement following the release of the report, noting it raises “serious questions about whether the military is doing enough to help service members transition from battle back into civilian life.”

“This is a matter of life and death, for our service members – and civilians,” Udall stated. “We must do everything in our power to ensure that the military is providing all necessary treatment and support to protect our service members, their families, and our communities.”

That could be a long road. The report indicated that “overall staffing” for behavioral health at Fort Carson’s Evans Army Community Hospital between 2006 and 2008 was just 65 percent of authorized positions.