"Moral Waivers"

PFC Steven Green

When recruiting gets tough, they lower the bar:

On the last day of January 2005, Steven D. Green, the former Army private accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family, sat in a Texas jail on alcohol-possession charges, an unemployed 19-year-old high school dropout who had just racked up his third misdemeanor conviction.

Days later, Mr. Green enlisted in a soldier-strapped Army, and was later assigned to a star-crossed unit to serve on an especially murderous patch of earth.

He arrived at the very moment that the Army was increasing by nearly half the rate at which it granted what it calls “moral waivers” to potential recruits. The change opened the ranks to more people like Mr. Green, those with minor criminal records and weak educational backgrounds. In Mr. Green’s case, his problems were emerging by junior high school, say people who knew him then.

Mr. Green’s Army waiver allowed a troubled young man into the heart of a war that bore little resemblance to its original declared purposes, but which continued to need thousands of fresh recruits...

The share of Army recruits who received “moral waivers” for criminal records increased last year and through the first half of 2006 by 15 percent from 10 percent or 11 percent before the war, according to statistics released this week. (According to the Pentagon, the number of waivers in 2001 totaled 7,640. The figure increased to 11,018 in 2005, and for the first six months of this fiscal year totaled 5,636.)

Asked how the Green situation might apply to someone who tried to enlist today, Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., said it was not possible to apply the Army’s standards to a hypothetical case.

“A waiver is based on the actuality of the person, the totality of their life, the information we have on them — what have been their shortcomings, what have they done in their life to overcome a previous minor mistake,” Mr. Smith said.

On March 13, two months afte he was released from the Midland jail, Mr. Green was one of eight soldiers baptized during a Church of Christ service at Fort Benning.

“You hold that weapon for the first time, a lot of guys are holding weapons for the first time in their lives, and you know this M-16 is meant for engaging the enemy,” said Jason Garber, 19, who was baptized that day but did not complete training. “You wonder, if I do die, where am I going to go?”

A year later almost to the day, a federal criminal complaint says, Mr. Green and the four other soldiers charged in the case drank alcohol, changed into black clothes and then raided the home of a husband and wife and their two daughters.

Mr. Green, the complaint charges, went into a room and killed the parents and the younger daughter. Then, it says, he and a second soldier sexually assaulted the 14-year-old, shot her and tried to burn her body.

And before anyone accuses me of "anti-military bias," let me remind you (as I've noted before) that I'm the child of a career military officer who served his country with pride and with distinction. I'm proud of my father's record and accomplishments.

It's painful to watch Team Bush, thanks to their arrogance, incompetence, and refusal to acknowledge their disastrous failure, destroy the military. But that's just par for the course with these folks, who literally have the anti-Midas touch--everything on their watch turns to rust.