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The Good Soldier

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Always look on the bright side of life... A soldier found one of the business cards Pogany distributes around the base; he's hoping Pogany can help him. "Send me an e-mail with everything that happened, including your deployment dates. Do you have any of your medical records? Do you have copies of your mental-health care records?" he says before hanging up. "That will be a new case" — one of the handful he may get today.

This is Pogany's mobile workplace, one he drives to and from Fort Carson several times a week, on workdays that usually begin at 6 a.m. It's an extension of a home office in the basement of his brick bungalow in central Denver that features a heavily armed G.I. Joe doll, faded prayer flags on the wall, bookshelves stocked with veterans' benefits guides and mental-disorders manuals, and boxes and boxes of soldiers' case files. He pulls his VW office over at a barracks building and flashes the ID card hanging around his neck to the guard in the front lobby. He is there to meet with Nicholas.

"Fucking wild," Nicholas, 21, says of the twenty or so roadside bomb explosions he was exposed to in Iraq. "You hear it, but it's more like your ears start immediately ringing. It feels like a very strong, hot wind that knocks you back when they go off." He only realized their lasting toll once he got back from the war and ran a guy off the road in an inexplicable fit of rage. Later, he recounts with a wry laugh, he flipped out during a training exercise and put a gun to a passerby's head. "I just kind of lost it for a while."

Things weren't so funny when Nicholas's mother first called Pogany several months ago, the night her son was taken to the Evans Army Community Hospital for having suicidal thoughts. Nicholas had just been told he was being redeployed in four days — even though he'd been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a fractured femur and a traumatic brain injury, and labeled temporarily unfit for deployment.

Because of privacy considerations, the Army can't respond publicly to allegations such as Nicholas's, says Fort Carson Public Affairs Officer Dee McNutt in an e-mail. "Each case needs to be looked into separately, and the Army cannot release or discuss information regarding specific cases without a soldier's expressed written consent." But "soldiers are human and will tell their side of the story as they see it," she adds.

As for claims that Fort Carson has been deploying injured soldiers to Iraq, she says, "Medical personnel are responsible for making recommendations to commanders on what resources or level of care a soldier requires to be considered fully capable for deployment. Commanders know the assets available to them in theater and what accommodations can be made for the limitations of each individual soldier. Many times soldiers require care that is readily available in theater."

Pogany helped Nicholas's mother, Dawna Lynn, track down documents proving that his ailments and no-deployment status had been ignored. He encouraged her to contact a congressional subcommittee on military affairs, Fort Carson's inspector general and the installation's commanding general. Soon her son's story was one of the examples reporters were using to demonstrate that the Army was improperly shipping out injured soldiers in order to fill diminished ranks. "There was no way I could have sorted through the military bureaucracy if I didn't have somebody tell me how to do it," she says. "If I hadn't been aggressive and had the right person tell me what to do, my son would have been sent back to Iraq without the proper medical care."

Instead, Nicholas's deployment was called off, and he's expecting to be medically retired. For him, that moment can't come too soon. "I hate this job," he says. "I needed some help, some support. They didn't want to give it to me. They didn't care."

Pogany was angry like Nicholas once, especially during the months leading up to his medical retirement. Angry at the Army for being his whole world and then turning on him and making him a national pariah. Angry that his injury didn't make any sense — whoever heard of a soldier laid low by a stupid pill? Angry that, despite all he'd been through, he still ended up better off than some of his teammates, like Howell or his team sergeant, Kelly Hornbeck, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

"Sometimes I feel like I was the luckiest guy in this whole war," he says. "I went over for what, fifteen days, and came home with two arms, two legs." And he was angry that he was entering civilian life with no job and no idea what he wanted to do with his life. "I was in the toilet," he says now.

He took time off, traveled to Europe. He met Claude AnShin Thomas, a Vietnam veteran turned Buddhist monk who told him, "Once a soldier, always a soldier. It's what we do with the experience that makes a difference in our lives." And then, finally, he got it. "I had to come to grips with the fact that I was shattered. That I was broken. And that being broken wasn't such a bad thing," he says. "And, in a nutshell, I had a choice. I could either get busy living, or I could get busy dying."

He soon found something to live for, something perfectly suited to his background. While he was still in the Army, soldiers had started coming up to him, asking for help. They knew no one else to turn to other than the guy who'd taken on the system and won. A month after leaving the Army, Pogany started working with Robinson at the NGWRC, helping him build on veterans-advocacy tools first developed by Vietnam veterans, shifting the programs to focus on a new generation of soldiers.

"I felt that now that Andrew had successfully survived his battle, he could become a powerful advocate. Intellectually, he was very well put together. He had the intelligence-gathering skills and paperwork skills and organizational skills to be very effective," says Robinson. "The people who are most passionate about these issues are the ones who've dealt personally with them."

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