You may be right, but.....
The Times (London)
August 2, 2002, Friday
What they can't control, they kill
BYLINE: Tim Reid
Four American Special Forces soldiers have murdered their wives in the past month. Tim Reid went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to find that family life in the US military is being crushed under the intolerable strain of September 11 and the war on terror
Brandon Floyd was the ultimate American fighting machine. A member of the elite Delta Force, the highly secretive US equivalent of the SAS, he was a champion triathlete, an ace marksman and a soldier basking every day in the hero worship of the junior ranks. And it was not just his athletic prowess and matinee idol looks that elicited such envy: a strikingly beautiful wife, Andrea, and three doting children made him appear the happiest man in his unit.
But on July 19, in the oppressive afternoon heat of Fort Bragg, the North Carolina headquarters of US Special Forces, something exploded inside Floyd's head. After a screaming row with his wife, after a recent tour of duty in Afghanistan, after combat in Haiti, Bosnia, the Gulf War and Somalia, after 12 months of hiding the fact that his marriage was in trouble, after nine years of never once showing the slightest loss of control, the pressures he had smothered for so long boiled over into a sudden, murderous insanity. Brandon Floyd, "Mr Perfection USA", as one soldier described him, ran to his kitbag, pulled out an automatic handgun and shot his wife through the head. Then he put the barrel inside his mouth and blew the top of his skull off.
They don't scare easily in Fort Bragg - it's not a place where one is meant to show fear - but two hours after the ghastly contents of the Floyds' bedroom were discovered, something else happened that left the military authorities on the base very frightened indeed.
Master Sergeant William Wright, of the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, another Special Forces unit that had returned from Afghanistan in late May, confessed to the murder of his wife, who had been missing for nearly three weeks.
The discovery of her throttled remains meant that four Fort Bragg wives had been murdered by their husbands in little over a month, and three of the men, all Special Forces, had seen recent service in Afghanistan. But what has the authorities at Fort Bragg worried, and the Pentagon twitchy, is not the spectre of some terrible new form of post-traumatic stress disorder triggered by the horrors of Afghanistan. This is not something they can blame on the Taleban. Soldiers and the families of the victims, who have spoken to The Times, say the murders have revealed a destructive phenomenon that lies much closer to home: post September 11, family life in the Special Forces is becoming so dysfunctional, and the military authorities so loath to admit it or provide help, that the killings are going to continue.
The events of the night before last seem to back their case, because murder number five has taken place. Police in Fayetteville, the town that revolves around Fort Bragg, arrested Joan Shannon for shooting her husband, Major David Shannon, part of the US Army Special Operations Command. The 40-year-old was shot in the head and chest while sleeping in his bed on July 23. His wife said she saw an intruder run from their bedroom.
So just what is going on at Fort Bragg? The killing spree, which has left seven dead and 12 children suffering the loss of at least one parent, began on June 11. Sergeant First Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, of the 3rd Special Forces Group, shot his 28-year-old wife Teresa, and then himself, in their bedroom. He had returned from Afghanistan only two days before and had requested leave to resolve "personal issues". Teresa's sister and other relatives, who were visiting, said they heard a noise about 8pm but thought it was made by children playing upstairs. But it was a marital argument turning violent, and moments later Nieves had shot his wife in the head with a .40 calibre gun, before turning the weapon on himself.
On July 9 Sergeant Cedric Griffin, 28, attached to the 37th Engineer Battalion at Fort Bragg - a non-Special Forces soldier who had not been deployed to Afghanistan or anywhere else - was arrested after stabbing his wife Marilyn more than 50 times before setting her body on fire. The couple, who have two girls aged six and two, had been married for eight years but had recently separated.
For all five familes devastated by the murders, the one common thread was marital difficulties. After the murder-suicide committed by Brandon Floyd, his wife Andrea's mother gave her opinion. "I truly in my heart believe that his training was such that if you can't control it, you kill it," Penny Flitcraft told a newspaper. Dorothy Mackey, a former US Air Force captain, says the US military is training its Special Forces to be killing machines, while ignoring signs of growing marriage problems.
"These killings haven't really surprised me," she says. "The pattern of the past four years has been an escalation of military members being abusive to their spouses. It's not getting any better. If the military leadership doesn't understand the warning signs - and right now they're ignoring them - it's not going to get better. They're teaching these people to be ultra-violent without leaving them any safety valve."
But officials at Fort Bragg, home to 50,000 soldiers and their families, say they have a range of programmes and support networks to help families deal with the stresses of separation and army life. The Army Community Service helps to prepare units and families for deployments and reunions; the Family Advocacy Programme deals with domestic violence, child abuse and spouse abuse, and offers free classes on parenting, stress and anger management; and every Fort Bragg unit has a Family Readiness Group to help families deal with the problems of deployment. "We spend a lot of time and effort putting these family readiness groups together," says Colonel Tad Davis, Fort Bragg's garrison commander. "Could we do more? Could we do a better job? The answer is yes. And that's one of the things we are continuing to work on with the units that are continuing to deploy overseas."
Henry Bean, manager of the family advocacy programmes, says: "To be honest, what has happened is mind-boggling. I was completely caught off guard. We're going to look at these cases to prevent them happening in the future."
A Pentagon spokesman says: "There are all sorts of support groups, and people know it. There is no reason why they cannot seek help."
After all, soldiers have always been trained to kill. As Jimmy Dean, a retired Green Beret master sergeant, said last week: "None of my team members ever came back home and murdered anybody." But Fort Bragg has never suffered a spate of killings like this, although locals still talk of the infamous 1970 killings of the wife and two daughters of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, a Special Forces doctor. He was convicted after a sensational 1979 trial.
So why is it happening now? Is it the pressures of September 11? Congress established the Defence Department task force in 1999 after findings showed that the rate of domestic violence incidents in the military had risen by more than a third, to 25.6 per 1,000 soldiers in 1996 from 18.6 per 1,000 in 1990. At the time, domestic violence rates were declining among the overall population. But during that six-year period, there were 61,000 cases of military spouses suffering domestic violence, five times higher than the number in the civilian population.
The task force has issued two major reports in the past 18 months calling for sweeping changes in the way the military handles domestic violence cases, including a requirement that military units keep track of the names of soldiers under restraining orders. But critics claim that the army goes out of its way not to prosecute domestic abuses because under federal law those convicted would lose their right to carry a gun, and thus become useless soldiers.
Some wives complain privately that army commanders have pressurised them not to bring charges. "The Fort Bragg murders have at last persuaded people to wake up to the scale of the problem the military has," says Christine Hansen, of the Miles Foundation, which investigated military abuse. "The commanders will do anything rather than lose a soldier."
Get talking to Special Forces soldiers in any Fort Bragg bar and within seconds they will tell you that the pressures of being married and raising children in the military are often too much for a couple to cope with. Special Forces can be away for up to 10 months a year, and the pay is low. A Green Beret with five to seven years' experience earns $ 25,000.
Infidelity, on both sides, is a major problem. A 25-year-old special operations staff sergeant who took part in the US Tora Bora and Anaconda campaigns against the Taleban this year (he also knew Brandon Floyd) believes that the pressures of September 11 have tipped highly pressurised soldiers over the edge. "Brandon was the all-American boy," he says, "but something must have pushed him to breaking point. On Delta Force they are wired tighter than anyone. They are the most competitive people I have ever seen. The officers watch your every move. If you ever said you needed psychological help, or any type of help, you would lose your job. You've got to keep everything contained, all the time, even on leave. There's a perfection there that is constant.
"Brandon was having marriage problems, but why did he do that? Well, things have been cranked up since September 11. A lot of us have had a stop loss put on us, which means you cannot leave for years. I am suddenly stuck in the force until 2030, I can't quit, I can't even change jobs within the force. If you are having family problems you can't suddenly withdraw at any time. You used to be able to do that. That's caused a lot more stress. I want to get out of the military some time. To hear that I can't get out for another 30 years is ridiculous, and frightening."
Stop loss is the power of the military at times of national crisis to bar key personnel with special skills from retiring or taking leave. Since September 11 the US army, navy and air force have imposed stop loss orders on more than 40,000 active-duty members, including most special operations soldiers, pilots, linguists and military police.They are revoked after the deemed threat recedes, but what worries soldiers is that September 11 has created an open-ended crisis, with no end to the stop loss orders in sight.
One woman married to a Green Beret told the Fayetteville Observer: "The Special Forces lifestyle and demands at present have played a bigger role in the killings than the Special Forces leaders want to admit. My husband cheated on me while on deployment, and not one person contacted us to offer support, not one person sent the chaplain over. No matter what they say, Special Forces is not about family values."
Slumped in front of me at a table in a roadside Burger King in Mason, Ohio, about 40 miles north of Cincinnati, Archie Watson says he believes he knows what's going on at Fort Bragg, and it has nothing to with al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.
On Tuesday he and his wife Wilma buried their daughter Jennifer Wright, strangled on June 29 by her husband William, the 36-year-old Green Beret who confessed to the killing three weeks later. "Life in the Special Forces causes the most terrible strain on marriages, and since September 11, the pressures have been relentless," says Watson, 62. "Soldiers have been working double shifts, every single day, whether they are in Afghanistan or back in Fort Bragg. Well, for Bill and Jennifer, those pressures were the gun, but it was the pressure from the military that pulled the trigger.
"You see, Jennifer had noticed changes in Bill. She was more nervous of him. It started about a year ago. Part of the reason for their problems were these trips. He would be away for up to 10 months a year sometimes.
"Recently, when he came home it started to take him a long time to adjust. He wasn't as friendly. He would sometimes go off by himself, or hide in the garage and work.
"We were down there in May, just after he got back from three months in Afghanistan, and he had withdrawn into himself. He would never talk about his missions, because he wasn't allowed to. He never talked to Jennifer about them. But Jennifer knew that he had killed men, and she was getting worried. She had a conversation with her mother a month ago and said that Bill scared her sometimes, that he had started saying things that were scary, and his temper was a whole lot worse.
"She was tired of military life. They had been married 14 years, and for 13 of them - they have three boys, 13, nine and six - she's been raising them pretty much on her own. She'd been trying to get him to take a desk job. But he liked the Special Forces. He liked the lifestyle. It boiled down to him getting out of the Special Forces or she was going to leave him.
"She must have given him an ultimatum. Something snapped in Bill. He had never shown any sign of violence before that. He had never lifted a hand to her."
When his daughter went missing, Wright told police that she had left him. But her father refused to believe that she would leave her three boys. He drove 12 hours south to Fort Bragg. "Yes, I suspected him. I was there four days. I knew it when I looked at him. There was something in his eyes. I looked into his eyes and I knew he'd killed her.
"He said he would never hurt my daughter, because he loved her. But it was obvious that he had killed my daughter and had hidden her body. His eyes looked kind of sad. He must have snapped, because I know Bill did love her. Who couldn't? Who couldn't love a beautiful girl like that?" And he begins to cry.
After long interrogation by the police, Wright led sheriff's detectives to a section of woods near to the town in Hoke County, where, in 100-degree heat, they found Jennifer Wright's decomposed body in a plastic bag. She was 32.
Just before Wright left for Afghanistan in March, he sent three e-mails to authorities at Fort Bragg asking for marital help. Mr Watson said they received a visit from an army chaplain, which was all but useless. "Why couldn't someone have picked up on the anger to defuse this situation? I believe this could absolutely have been prevented if they had helped. The military did nothing in real terms. This should be standard policy, but they have no real policy to help married families at all, and the pressures are worse than ever.
"And my son-in-law will be given a dishonourable discharge, and the Army wipe their hands clean, they have no more obligations, and everything he worked for for 18 years is gone. The children get nothing, except $ 800 each from the social services.
"The only thing the Army paid for was to ship my daughter back to Ohio. They offered nothing for the funeral. And they sent her back up here in a galvanised, square container, 6ft long, with the top screwed down. They could have at least sent her back in a nice casket. They should have treated her like a proper soldier's wife, like a casualty of war."
And at this, the grief-stricken father breaks down again.