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N7GCW > VETS 14.12.04 02:43l 138 Lines 6972 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 37885_WA7V
Read: GUEST
Subj: DON'T TREAT OUR VETS THAT WAY!!
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Sent: 041213/1715z @:WA7V.#SEWA.WA.USA.NOAM [Walla Walla] $:37885_WA7V
By Dianna Cahn
Times Herald-Record
dcahn@th-record.com
Join reporter Dianna Cahn later today for a live chat on this story.
Middletown - He lost his arm serving his country in Iraq.
Now this wounded soldier is being discharged from his company in Fort Hood,
Texas, without enough gas money to get home. In fact, the Army says
27-year-old Spc. Robert Loria owes it close to $2,000, and confiscated his
last paycheck.
"There's people in my unit right now - one of my team leaders [who was] over
in Iraq with me, is doing everything he can to help me .... but it's looking
bleak," Loria said by telephone from Fort Hood yesterday. "It's coming up on
Christmas and I have no way of getting home."
Loria's expected discharge yesterday came a day after the public got a rare
view of disgruntled soldiers in Kuwait peppering Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld with questions about their lack of adequate armor in Iraq.
Like many soldiers wounded in Iraq, Loria's injuries were caused by a
roadside bombing. It happened in February when his team from the 588th
Battalion's Bravo Company was going to help evacuate an area in Baqubah, a
town 40 miles north of Baghdad. A bomb had just ripped off another soldier's
arm. Loria's Humvee drove into an ambush.
When the second bomb exploded, it tore Loria's left hand and forearm off,
split his femur in two and shot shrapnel through the left side of his body.
Months later, he was still recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
in Washington, D.C., and just beginning to adjust to life without a hand,
when he was released back to Fort Hood.
AFTER SEVERAL MORE MONTHS, the Army is releasing Loria. But "clearing Fort
Hood," as the troops say, takes paperwork. Lots of it.
Loria thought he'd done it all, and was getting ready to collect $4,486 in
final Army pay.
Then he was hit with another bomb. The Army had another tally - of money it
says Loria owed to his government.
A Separation Pay Worksheet given to Loria showed the numbers: $2,408.33 for
10 months of family separation pay that the Army erroneously paid Loria
after he'd returned stateside, as a patient at Walter Reed; $2,204.25 that
Loria received for travel expenses from Fort Hood back to Walter Reed for a
follow-up visit, after the travel paperwork submitted by Loria never reached
the correct desk. And $310 for missing items on his returned equipment
inventory list.
"There was stuff lost in transportation, others damaged in the accident,"
Loria said of the day he lost his hand. "When it went up the chain of
command, the military denied coverage."
Including taxes, the amount Loria owed totaled $6,255.50. The last line on
the worksheet subtracted that total from his final Army payout and found
$1,768.81 "due us."
"It's nerve-racking," Loria said. "After everything I have done, it's almost
like I am being abandoned, like, you did your job for us and now you are no
use. That's how it feels."
AT HOME in Middletown, yesterday, Loria's wife, Christine, was beside
herself.
"They want us to sacrifice more," she said, her voice quavering. "My husband
has already sacrificed more than he should have to."
For weeks now, Christine has been telling her 3-year-old son, Jonathan, that
Robbie, who is not his birth father, will be coming home any day now.
But the Army has delayed Loria's release at least five times already, she
said, leaving a little boy confused and angry.
"Rob was supposed to be here on Saturday," she said. "Now [Jonathan] is mad
at me. How do you explain something you yourself don't understand?"
Christine said the Department of Veterans Affairs has been helpful in giving
Loria guidance about how to get his life back on track, offering vocation
rehabilitation to "teach them to go back out in the world with the
limitations they have."
But the Army brass has been unreceptive, she said.
The Lorias also contacted the offices of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.,
and Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Saugerties. Hinchey's office responded.
"There's enough to go on here to call the Army on it and see if it can get
worked out," said Hinchey aide Dan Ahouse. "We are expressing to the
Pentagon that based on what we see here, we don't see that Mr. Loria is
being treated the way we think our veterans returning from Iraq should be
treated."
Army officials at Fort Hood could not be reached for comment yesterday.
"I don't want this to happen to another family," Christine Loria said. "Him
being blown up was supposed to be the worst thing, but it wasn't. That the
military doesn't care was the worst."
The end of her rope
Christine Loria was at the end of her rope earlier this week when she called
her wounded husband's commanders at Fort Hood, Texas, and gave them a piece
of her mind.
The Army was discharging her husband, Robert, after he lost his arm and
suffered other severe injuries in Iraq, without even gas money to drive his
car home.
"I am up here and he's there. That's 1,800 miles away," she said. "I had to
call his chain of command and scream at them."
Their reaction she said, was "very mature."
"If he feels that way, why is his wife talking for him? Why doesn't he come
talk to us himself?" she remembers them asking her.
"Because on some level, he still respects you," she answered. "I don't have
that problem."
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Lawmakers Help Wounded Soldier Get Home
On Friday a platoon of New York lawmakers came to his rescue. Loria found
himself stuck in Fort Hood in Texas this week when Army officials said he
owed money for travel expenses and for lost equipment.
Rep. Maurice Hinchey and Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton
interceded on behalf of the 27-year-old veteran after his wife, Christine
Loria, told the Times-Herald Record of Middletown about the problem.
Loria was wounded in February. But as he was about to leave the Army this
month, officials told him he had been overpaid for his time as a patient at
a military hospital in the Washington area, and said he still owed money for
travel between the hospital and Fort Hood, as well as $310 for items not
found in his returned equipment.
Instead of a check for nearly $4,500, Loria was told he had to pay nearly
$1,800.
Clinton, Schumer, and Hinchey said Friday the Army had dropped the billing
demands and would allow Loria to return home on leave before he is
discharged.
Clinton's office said late Friday that Army officials were now looking at
the cases of 19 other injured veterans who may have had payroll situations
similar to Loria's.
She blamed Loria's problem on someone in the bureaucracy being unwilling to
help him with paperwork the Army insisted upon.
The lawmakers, all Democrats, said Loria should be able to head home to New
York in a day or two.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=718&e=10&u=/ap/20041210/ap_on_re_us/soldier_s_pay
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