Killed by the U.S. Army

Private First Class Matthew Scarano, all of 21-years-old, was killed sometime between 9 PM Saturday and 4:45 AM Sunday, March 19, 2006. But he wasn't killed by any insurgent force. He wasn't in Iraq or Afghanistan or even, despite his rank and year-plus of service, active in the United States Army. Matthew Scarano died in his bunk, in the barracks of Bravo Battery 95th, Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The Army officially lists his cause of death as "still under investigation" but he was as surely a casualty of the War on Iraq as any of the 2,400 US soldiers killed in action. In 2005 he had injured his shoulder during basic training, and on March 1 of that year entered the netherworld of Fort Sill's Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program, or PTRP. It is estimated that 15 percent to 37 percent of men and 38 percent to 67 percent of women sustain at least one injury due to the rigors of basic training. Although Fort Sill's is believed to be the worst, the Army has PTRP units also at Fort Knox, Fort Jackson, Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Benning.

More than a year after he entered PTRP, Scarano was still there, no closer to being healed but still subject to the restrictive rules and routine humiliations associated with basic training, still plagued by what he described in an email of March 7, 2006, as "chronic, piercing and sometimes debilitating pain." The Army considered PFC Scarano a trainee; he and the 39 other soldiers in PTRP at Fort Sill considered themselves prisoners.

PTRP is where the Army, desperate for bodies in a time of war, puts broken enlistees. There they are warehoused, in anticipation of the time they manage to recuperate, pass the grueling PT (physical training) test and can be sent to battle; or fail the test, try again, fail again, stumble through the bureaucratic labyrinth until the point they are chaptered out or medically discharged. All were injured in basic training or advanced individual training and so have yet to be granted "permanent party" status in the Army.

Shortly before Scarano's death, the inspector general at Fort Sill had been forced to undertake an internal investigation of the program for assault and abuse of soldiers, inadequate medical attention, command irresponsibility and overall incompetence. To that list (which I should note is unofficial) they may now add negligence and wrongful death. As of the end of March, the Army wouldn't comment on its investigation or on what killed Scarano, although I did receive a pro forma response saying the matter was "still under investigation." But in the week prior to his death, his comrades in the PTRP barracks say, Army doctors had doubled the dose of his pain medication, Fentanyl, an analgesic patch 80 times more potent than morphine, whose advertised possible side effects include difficulty breathing, severe weakness and unconsciousness.

On the night of March 18, according to Pvt. Richard Thurman, Scarano appeared quite pale and weak. However, Scarano had been in the program for so long, longer than anyone else in terms of continuous service, and was often so visibly suffering or so drugged up as to drool and gaze vacantly, that his infirmity on this particular night did not cause special alarm. Shortly after lights out, at 9, Pvt. Clayton Howell noticed that Scarano was lying on his bad shoulder and turned him so he would not be in greater pain when he awoke. At that time Scarano was breathing. When lights came on the next morning and everyone else had risen from their bunks, Howell again went to Scarano; by then he was dead.

What happened next typifies the trapped situation of injured soldiers at Fort Sill's PTRP.

Someone handed Pvt. Thurman a cell phone, saying, "Call your mom." No one encouraged him to call the medic, or the chaplain, or the sergeant, or anyone on post. Phoning at all meant breaking the rules, as did having a cell phone, contraband for soldiers in PTRP. Thurman crouched in a corner and, amid the near-panic of the barracks, hurriedly dialed his mom, Pat deVarennes.