He claims post-tramatic stress diagnosis was ignored by Army

By Dean Baker of The Columbian
The Vancouver Columbian
June 16

Vancouver, Wash. A Vancouver soldier who saw more violence and bloodshed in Iraq than he could stand sat on his front porch in Rose Village on Thursday and said he won't go back to the war zone.

Instead, Army Pvt. Ryan Patrick Meeks, 22, has remained absent without leave since April 28.

"I tried to turn myself in," he said. "I went the right route, I thought. I showed the Army I was diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but they didn't even look at it. They just wanted to send me back to Iraq."

Meeks grew up in Vancouver and attended Heritage High School before earning his general education diploma and joining the Army in 2004. He said he learned last month from a psychologist that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from seeing soldiers and Iraqis killed, and from coming close to being blown up himself by mortars and roadside bombs.

Meeks said he went with his father, Randy Meeks of Vancouver, to Fort Lewis on Memorial Day weekend and reported to military police. They gave him a bus ticket to his unit's home base, Fort Campbell, Ky. He got on the bus to Fort Campbell where officials said he'd have to return to Iraq to face a court martial.

He said he wasn't going back to Iraq. Instead, he got back on the bus and came home to Vancouver, he said. He returned home June 5, said his mother, Marcie Meeks of Vancouver.

The Army refused to keep him in the United States and help him deal with his anxiety, emotional instability, depression, anger and hypervigilance, Ryan Meeks said.

"They didn't even know what my mental status was," he said. "They didn't care. It's crazy."

Army officials at Fort Lewis, saying they were unaware of the specifics of Meeks' case, advised that any AWOL soldier should surrender to the Army and face his situation. Army officials at Fort Campbell didn't return a reporter's phone call.

"I don't know about this particular case," said Joe Hitt, a spokesman at Fort Lewis, "but the Army is committed to seeing that each and every soldier is treated with respect and to investigating each claim thoroughly."

Hitt said the Army would be unlikely to seek out any AWOL soldier, but that any police officer could arrest any soldier listed on a computer data base as AWOL

Police said they'd be unlikely to arrest any AWOL soldier unless he was stopped on suspicion of committing some other crime. In that case, police would run the soldier's identification through a computer network and find a federal AWOL warrant and make the arrest, they said.

Marcie Meeks said she hopes the Army will arrest her son and help him.

"We keep waiting for someone to do something," she said. "And they still haven't. They sent him home with no conditioning. They sent him home knowing he was not right."

She said she's worried about his mental condition and intimidated by his anger.

Meeks said he is willing to go to jail for being AWOL, but in the United States not if he has to go back to Camp Speicher at Tikrit, Iraq, where he served for eight months. He was a Humvee driver in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault).

"I don't know if you've been to Iraq, but it's not a nice place," he said. "And the jails aren't, either. ? I was defending my country, you know, and they are going to send me to prison in Iraq?

"It's a sticky situation. I been through the mortars and the roadside bombs, and now they want to send me back to spend my last months in the Army in a jail over there?" he said. "That isn't right."

Meeks, who is due for discharge from the Army in 2007, said he served 45 days in prison in Iraq after being found guilty of smoking marijuana along with two dozen other soldiers while they were still at Fort Campbell. He said that also was unfair because he felt he should have been tried in the United States.

Marcie Meeks said she is afraid for her son. "He is running scared," she said. "He's afraid they are going to shoot him or put him in jail for a long time."

But so far, neither she nor her son has heard a word from the Army.