Army Cuts 1,000 for Personality Disorders

By LOLITA C. BALDOR

WASHINGTON – The Army discharged more than 1,000 soldiers last year for personality disorders, the reason it gave for this year’s discharge of a private now accused of raping a young Iraqi woman and killing her and her family.

That total represents about 1.2 percent of the 83,000 soldiers given early discharges during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2005. That was a bit higher than the less than 1 percent discharged for those reasons during the 2001 fiscal year before the war in Iraq began.

Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the Army’s surgeon general, told reporters Friday that the disorder usually is not associated with combat trauma and may be a lifelong problem that is not always easy to identify in military screenings. He said soldiers exhibiting such traits would not be automatically discharged because many can continue to perform well.

Steven D. Green, who pleaded not guilty through his public defenders Thursday, was discharged because of an “anti-social personality disorder” according to military officials and documents. That condition is defined as chronic behavior that manipulates, exploits or violates the rights of others, such as someone who repeatedly lies, fights or breaks the law.

According to a federal affidavit, Green, 21, and other soldiers targeted a young Iraqi woman after spotting her at a traffic checkpoint near Mahmoudiya. They later went to her house, raped and killed her and shot members of her family, the affidavit said.

Green is being tried in federal rather than military court because he no longer is in the Army

Kiley told Pentagon reporters that personality disorders – which are not forms of mental illness – do no necessarily exclude people from serving in the armed forces. In fact, he said that up to 4 percent to 5 percent of the soldiers have taken sleep medications or antidepressant drugs at one time or another during their combat service.

Altogether, there were nearly 493,000 people in the Army during the 2005 fiscal year, compared with about 481,000 in 2001. The Army discharged 805 soldiers for personality disorders in 2001, 734 in 2002, 980 in 2003, 988 in 2004 and 1,038 in 2005.

Mental disorders represented between less than 1 percent to 1.4 percent of the total early discharges for those years. The total number of early discharges ranged from about 69,000 to more than 87,000. Soldiers can receive early discharges for a number of reasons, but most often they are for physical fitness issues.

Kiley said the Army is allocating more resources that ever to combat stress and provide mental health counseling for soldiers on the battlefield.

Currently, he said, there are about 200 mental health and behavioral health personnel in Iraq and 25 in Afghanistan. Many of them are assigned to different regions of the country and travel in small teams to the forward operating bases to meet with soldiers.

The Army, he said, is trying to find ways to encourage soldiers to use the mental health services and overcome the perception among the military that seeking mental health counseling is a sign of weakness.

“There is something very demanding and tough about being in combat,” said Kiley. “And anything that would be perceived as being weak and not ready and tough carries with it some stigma.”

As a result, he said, the Army is trying to reach out regularly to soldiers while they are in combat, and officials are encouraging entire units to go through mental health screenings so that soldiers will feel more comfortable doing it if they see their commanders and unit leaders participating.