Soldier arrested at VA hospital for being AWOL

Soldier arrested at VA hospital for being AWOL
By Jeffrey McMurray - Associated Press Writer
Posted : Monday Nov 19, 2007 22:10:42 EST

LEXINGTON, Ky. — A Kentucky soldier facing his second tour of duty in Iraq said in a jailhouse interview Monday that he was seeking mental help at a veterans hospital when police showed up in the middle of the night to arrest him.

Spc. Justin Faulkner, 22, of Stanton, Ky., is accused of being absent without leave, even though he insists his superior officers at Fort Campbell knew about his mental problems but refused to provide adequate treatment.

Instead, he checked into a VA hospital Thursday in Lexington, and doctors there told him they wanted to keep him until Monday for observation. He wouldn’t make it that long as police showed up at the hospital shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday to take him to jail.

“It’s humiliating, degrading,” Faulkner said in an interview with The Associated Press Monday afternoon, just minutes before his release from the Fayette County Detention Center. “It’s made me lose respect for the military. To come and arrest me at the VA, it wasn’t like I was trying to hide, trying to run. I was getting help. I am being punished for getting help.”

Faulkner, who concluded a one-year tour of duty in Iraq in February 2006, was due to head back there Monday to join the rest of his unit. He was released from jail on the condition he report back to Fort Campbell Tuesday.

He said he would but insisted the Army would be “foolish” to send him back considering the post-traumatic symptoms he has been experiencing since realizing a few weeks ago that a return trip to Iraq was likely.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/11/ap_awolarrest_071119/

sent to desert training was put in a tent with no cooling for the entire training, all of which he missed, and was later shipped out.

apparently there were a lot of injured soldiers in that training, because they needed higher numbers to look prepared for iraq