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Iraq commanders say no to breaks in combat

WASHINGTON — U.S. commanders in Iraq are rejecting a recommendation by Army mental health experts that troops receive a one-month break for every three months in a combat zone, despite unprecedented levels of continuous fighting and worsening risks of mental health problems.

Instead, commanders are trying to give troops two to three days inside heavily fortified bases after about eight days in the field, said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, chief aide to the ground forces commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno.

“We would never get the job done of securing [of Baghdad] if we went out for three months and came back” for one, Anderson said.

U.S. forces in Iraq spend more time in continuous combat without a break than those who fought in Vietnam and World War II, according to Army psychologists who studied troops in Iraq.

U.S. commanders can’t match the World War II policy, Odierno said in a news conference late last month. “Even in World War II and other times ... we would pull forces off the line and bring them back on. Here we don’t do that,” Odierno said. “They [U.S. troops] are out there consistently every single day. So you have to be mentally and physically tough.”

President Bush committed 28,000 more troops to Iraq this year as part of an escalation that started in February.

Army psychologists say continual combat may cause more mental health problems. Their research, conducted in Iraq last year, shows that 30 percent of soldiers and Marines experiencing high levels of combat demonstrate signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress.

Army Col. Carl Castro, a research psychologist who co-wrote the mental health study, said combat “is extremely, extremely stressful, and we don’t want people to lose sight of that.” That stress is aggravated, he says, by multiple tours of duty and deployments that have been extended from 12 months to 15.

Castro and Maj. Dennis McGurk, who co-authored the study, recommend U.S. troops by company or battalion be pulled back into fortified areas to rest for one month after every three months of combat, a recovery period similar to that used in World War II.

High-level combat is defined as spending at least 56 hours a week outside base camps on patrols or missions, a routine pattern for combat soldiers in Iraq. Psychologists defined the “front line” in Iraq as any time a soldier or Marine is outside a fortified installation.

“At no time in our military history have soldiers or Marines been required to serve on the front line in any war for a period of six-seven months, let alone a year, without a significant break in order to recover from the physical, psychological and emotional demands,” Castro wrote in the study.

Army Spc. Jeremy Osborn, 27, who finished 14 months in Iraq in February, said more breaks would relieve stress. “The body and mind need to take a break from always being on guard,” he said. “Never knowing when we were going to get attacked again was quite stressful.”