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HEALTH-US: For Some Vets, No Way Out of the War Zone

Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO, May 25 2007 (IPS) - The widow of an Afghanistan war veteran who was shot and killed by the Maryland State Police is talking to a lawyer after a state attorney’s report released this month found the troopers’ behaviour was “flawed,” “assaultive” and “militaristic”.

James E. Dean’s widow, Muriel Dean, traces her late husband’s troubles back to the fall of 2006, when he found out he was being deployed to Iraq.

Jamie had already served a 18-month tour in Afghanistan, where he was a sergeant, leading a small infantry unit. He received a number of awards: for service in defence of the nation, good conduct and outstanding marksmanship with rifles and grenades.

But he didn’t return home the same as he left, and when he went to the Veterans Affairs hospital, they diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Jamie wasn’t one to open up anyway,” Muriel Dean told IPS. “The only thing he would ever say is ‘Nobody understands unless they’ve been there. You just don’t understand.'”

He started regular therapy and took his medications, but he also drank.

“He told me that I didn’t want to know what he had to do over there,” Muriel Dean added. “That I didn’t want to know about the things he’d seen and the things that had gone on and I never asked why.”

Muriel Dean said her husband started pulling away from her as the Jan. 14 deployment date grew closer. Then, at 9:10 p.m. on Christmas Day, Jamie barricaded himself inside his father’s farmhouse in rural Maryland.

He called his sister and told her he “just couldn’t do it anymore” and fired a gunshot. Jamie’s sister called the emergency services hotline and the police showed up in force.

They cordoned off the house and fired tear gas inside. They brought in armoured vehicles and blew a hole in the right side of the house. Just past midnight on Dec. 26, a state police sharpshooter shot Jamie Dean dead.

His wife Muriel was furious.

“He was on a family farm,” she said. “There were no neighbours. There was nobody there with him so if he was going to hurt anybody it was going to be himself. Time was on their side. If they had left him alone, he would have calmed down.”

“He would have gone to sleep,” she said. “He would have been fine.”

Earlier this month, the Maryland State Attorney’s office released a report on the incident. It called law enforcement’s response “progressively assaultive and militaristic.”

The report largely agreed with the Dean family’s assessment.

“It is difficult to understand the necessity of an aggressive paramilitary operation, vis-à-vis a containment operation, directed at an individual down at the end of a dark road, holed up in his father’s house with no hostages.”

The family’s lawyer, Daniel Gunther, is reviewing all law enforcement records carefully.

“I’m looking for any deviation from an appropriate standard of care, inappropriate conduct, a course of action that was not necessarily the most viable, one that would not have been typical under those circumstances,” he said, adding a lawsuit was a possible, but not definite outcome of the review.

Then there is the Army’s decision to redeploy Jamie Dean in the first place, despite his diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Pentagon doctors estimate that 12 percent of the 1.5 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD.

However, military guidelines allow commanders to redeploy soldiers suffering from PTSD if their psychiatric disorder is in remission, or if their symptoms do not impair duty performance.

Indeed, Jamie Dean was not the first veteran to have a run-in with law enforcement before a second deployment in what officials in Washington call the “global war on terror”.

In January 2005, for example, 19-year-old Andres Raya of Modesto, California walked out of a liquor store in a Central Valley town and fired off a couple of rounds from his rifle, police told the San Francisco Chronicle.

When a police officer pulled up, Raya shot him twice in the head, apparently at close range, then fled through nearby backyard.

A Marine on active duty, he had already been deployed to Iraq twice. His family told investigators Raya had expressed concern he would be shipped out again. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Raya served in the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines Regiment of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which at that time had had more than 30 casualties during the war, mostly in Al Anbar province, a Sunni-dominated region that includes Fallujah and Ramadi.

Back in Maryland, Muriel Dean hopes her efforts to speak out will have an impact on police behaviour toward veterans in the future.

“God forbid this situation happens again, it needs to be handled differently,” she said. “It happens everywhere that law enforcement goes into these situations all gung ho and it’s not good for them because these guys are trained just like the cops are. They’re trained to kill as well when they’re attacked like that. When they’re already in their minds in a war zone, you don’t put them back in there.”