Um, PTS doesn’t make you go AWOL
Several of you sent me links to the article about Jeff Hanks, the soldier who went AWOL during his mid-deployment leave because he couldn’t get treatment for his undiagnosed PTS. Hanks returned yesterday,on Veterans Day to a press conference.
“All I wanted was to be treated. Going AWOL is not what I wanted to do,” Banks told reporters outside the gates of the Army post. He choked up he talked about how his actions might affect his daughters, ages 5 and 3. “I am nervous but I’m ready to accept anything.”
Hanks said in an interview before he left his home in White Lake, N.C., that he chose to return on Veterans Day because he didn’t want to exceed 30 days of being AWOL and face the more serious charge of desertion. His actions and the timing were supported by Iraq Veterans Against the War, and some members of the group were with him as he surrendered.
If going AWOL isn’t what he wanted to do, then why did he do it? And if he didn’t want to be AWOL for more than thirty days (at which point he would have become a deserter), why didn’t he turn himself in on November 10th, or the 9th, or the 8th? Please. He wanted to turn himself in on Veterans’ Day because he wanted to dirty up the day with his blather.
When he returned from that tour, his wife, Christina, noticed that he was always on edge, looking around for IEDs and troubled by crowds at the local Walmart.
But he doesn’t seem to be troubled by crowds of reporters outside of the Fort Campbell main gate, does he? You see people being discharged and held back from deployments for PTS all of the time. It makes you think that some folks are lying about it when they pull stunts like this, doesn’t it?
Especially when they make a splash in the media like this doofus.
Category: Military issues
So which IVAW members were there with him?
If everything about this guy’s PTSD is true, then this is probably another case of IVAW using someone to get more donations to waste on their own useless asses. This just seems like another IVAW stunt.
“Please pay attention to us! Please! Most of us have never deployed but we understand war. We really do!” – IVAW
I don’t know the specifics, but Porter could be right. People are always taking the advide of so-called friends and even strangers. Those guys see a guy struggling and swoop in– the Army won’t help you– no one cares about your PTSD– you gotta show them, bla bla bla bla.
They are definitely preying on the weak. (The cause of the weakness being irrelevant.)