Troops Pay Price as Military Skimps

The day after her son was killed in Iraq, Jane Bright didn’t know exactly how he died. When I met with her, she only knew that Army Sgt. Evan Ashcraft, 24, was ambushed on a mission near the northern city of Mosul.

Several weeks after his death in July, I started thinking about Ashcraft again when I saw one of the more astounding stories of the entire war.

Parents were buying flak jackets and sending them to sons and daughters in Iraq because soldiers were using outdated vests. To this day, thousands of men and women still don’t have Interceptor vests, a high-tech model that has saved the lives of soldiers shot in the chest with AK-47 bullets.

Bright told me last week that she didn’t know what kind of vest Evan was wearing when his Humvee was hit in July, but no jacket could have saved the San Fernando Valley soldier.

“I saw the area around Evan’s head and ears and neck,” she said, referring to a viewing at the funeral home.

She wonders, though, if another example of cut-rate protection cost her son his life.

Bright, human resources director for an aerospace company, has closely followed the news about a critical shortage of armored Humvees on the battlefront. She doesn’t know if her son had one or not, but soldiers in his unit told her they had no armed escort vehicle the night of the ambush.

It’s war, of course. People are dying and they’ll continue dying no matter what precautions are taken. But Bright and many others are wondering why tens of thousands of soldiers were sent into harm’s way with useless Vietnam-era vests and other discount gear.

“It’s shocking,” says George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley, who exposed the shortage of high-grade flak jackets more than two months ago in an opinion piece for The Times.

Since then, Turley has been under siege, having lost count of the number of private citizens offering money for the purchase of vests the military has failed to provide.

He’s often summoned by congressional representatives for his insights, particularly after the commander of military forces in Iraq told a House Appropriations subcommittee he couldn’t explain the shortage of vests.

And he’s fielded a stream of e-mails and phone calls from soldiers in Iraq.

“There’s a feeling no one is watching their back,” says Turley, who began his mission when a former student alerted him to the vest shortage.

“They get over there and find out they don’t have the Interceptor vests, they don’t have armored Humvees, they’re having to buy their own knapsacks, their boots are falling apart, and even their sidearms are not working.”

Shamed into action, the military has ordered suppliers of the vests and armored vehicles to step up production. Turley says all soldiers should have Interceptors sometime around the end of the year.

But how many soldiers will end up having been maimed or killed because of the delay? Why are private citizens practically holding bake sales to pay for such basic equipment?

“And why is there so little interest in finding out who was responsible for an act of negligence that very likely led to the deaths of American service personnel?” asks Turley. “It is so clear that no one in the military will be held accountable, and the most that will occur is a modest tongue-lashing.”

What isn’t nearly as clear is how you can morally justify sinking billions of dollars into the rebuilding of Iraq, but have trouble scraping together a few million dollars to take care of the soldiers who are laying their lives on the line.

If this is where we’re going to scrimp, I’d like to return my tax cut.

And speaking of the commander in chief, President George W. Bush’s stealth trip to Baghdad for Thanksgiving was bold not for the risk, but for the audacity.

If you want to thank soldiers for their service, you don’t outfit them with second-rate gear and send them into battle under phony pretenses.

You don’t make them fight to keep hazardous duty pay when dozens are coming home as amputees and burn victims.

You don’t dump them on the East Coast upon their return from battle and make them beg the military to cover the cost of the last leg home.

And you don’t, as commander in chief, dishonor their sacrifice by skipping funerals and ordering TV cameras away from coffins that land, one after another, on American soil.

When her son Evan came home, Bright says, it wasn’t just the Dover, Del., base that was off-limits.

“They flew him from Dover to Burbank, and I wanted to be there to meet the plane. But we were told in no uncertain terms that only military would be allowed to be there,” says Bright.

“If I’d had my wits about me, I would have insisted. But they don’t want any media, and they don’t want any attention given to parents who are crying and screaming.”

Let no such image cast a cloud over the White House.

Better to keep grief at a distance, silent as the dead.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.