War Vets Fighting Addiction

They were prepared for war. They were prepared to die for their country. But Fort Carson soldiers say they weren't prepared to come home and fight a different battle -- addiction to illegal drugs.

Many of this country's bravest men and women who volunteered to defend America in a time of war have come home wounded -- physically and mentally -- and are turning to illicit drugs as they adjust to normal life, according to soldiers, health experts and advocates.

"Lots of soldiers coming back from Iraq have been using drugs," said Specialist William Swenson, who was deployed to Iraq from Fort Carson. "Right when we got back there were people using cocaine in the barracks, there were people smoking marijuana at strip clubs; one guy started shooting up," he said.

Fort Carson, just outside Colorado Springs, is home to 17,500 active duty personnel. 4,800 service members are currently deployed in the "sand box" as soldiers call Iraq and Afghanistan. ABC News spoke to more than a dozen soldiers who described widespread abuse of illegal drugs at Fort Carson by service members back from the war.

Specialist Alan Hartmann was a gunner on a Chinook helicopter flying missions from Kuwait into Iraq in 2003. He described the high of flying and the feeling that "nothing can touch you," as well as the terror of being shot at.

Having regularly ferried the bodies of American soldiers killed in combat -- with the helicopter exhaust blowing warm air and the smell of death through the craft -- Hartmann said he had trouble sleeping when he returned to Ft. Carson. The nightmares were too bad, he said.

Army doctors prescribed anti-depressants and painkillers for him -- two-type written pages worth since he's been back -- but he didn't like how the drugs made him feel, Hartmann said. So he said he turned to self-medication with methamphetamines.

"The nightmares were killing me from being over there. The pain was so bad I didn't want to deal with it. Well, amphetamines is a real quick way to get rid of it," Hartmann said. "I was snorting it, and I was smoking it, and then I was hot railing it, and then I got to the point where I was actually injecting it in my arms," said Hartmann, who eventually checked himself into rehab and is now clean.

"(Soldiers are) coming back, drinking, fighting, putting thousand dollar tabs down at a bar and drinking four to five hours, getting to the point where you don't give a crap about anything anymore (or) anybody, don't care if you live or die…the point where you do drugs," Hartmann said. "(Drugs) have been in Fort Carson like crazy."

Another former Fort Carson soldier, Michael Bailey, said he was discharged from the army after testing positive for cocaine. Bailey served two tours, one in Iraq and another in Kuwait.

The stress of his deployment combined with marital problems overwhelmed Bailey who said he twice tried to commit suicide.

"The dose (of anti-depressants) I was on wasn't working, so I was trying an extra one and that wasn't working," Bailey said. "So I started drinking and at one point I did cocaine."

Baily said he failed a drug test the very next day. Even though he was in the process of receiving mental health counseling from the Army, Bailey said he was discharged over his drug use. At the time of his interview with ABC News, Bailey was unemployed and still grappling with feelings of depression and anxiety.

And then there's combat engineer William Swenson who was injured on what was to be his final mission in Iraq when his vehicle drove over a 200-pound improvised explosive device. The blast injured Swenson's spine and he developed syringomyelia -- a condition in which cysts form on the spinal cord.

Swenson said a laundry list of prescribed painkillers was ineffective so he turned to marijuana, the only substance that he said would numb his physical and emotional pain. Swenson failed a drug test after testing positive for marijuana as well as cocaine.

"I think a lot of people using drugs, soldiers mainly, coming back from Iraq, it's just to get an escape from…all those horrible things that came into their mind when they were over there," Swenson said.

Army Denies Growing Drug Abuse Problem

Fort Carson's leadership declined to discuss substance abuse issues with ABC News despite numerous interview requests. Fort Carson also said it could not comment on the individual cases of the soldiers we interviewed, citing privacy concerns.

However, in interviews with ABC News from the Pentagon, the U.S. Army strongly denied there was an increase in drug abuse among soldiers deployed to Iraq.

According to Dr. Ian McFarling, Acting Director of the Army Center for Substance Abuse Programs, less than one half of one percent of soldiers in Iraq have tested positive for illegal drugs. "That's a testament to the kind of leadership we have is that they believe that that's not the place that they should be doing drugs," said Dr. McFarling.

But Dr. McFarling said that once soldiers return from Iraq the positive rate doubles to over one percent. In addition, Dr. McFarling said five percent of soldiers back from Iraq seek help for substance abuse issues from clinical providers.

The U.S. Army does offer treatment for soldiers dealing with drug abuse and Fort Carson has a busy Army Substance Abuse Program. But some soldiers are forced off post because Fort Carson offers no in-patient services; others get treatment in the community to avoid the stigma associated with seeking help, soldiers and advocates said.

Since the Iraq war started in 2003, Colorado Springs hospitals and counseling services have seen a dramatic increase in active duty soldiers seeking treatment for substance abuse. Penrose-St. Francis Health Services went from treating no active duty soldiers for substance abuse before the war to between 30 and 40 now, said Phillip Ballard, the hospital's inpatient psychiatrist.

According to Phillip Ballard, "Now that we have larger numbers than the military facilities can treat…it falls upon the civilian community to treat those patients."

Veterans' advocacy groups charge that the problem of substance abuse is much greater than the army wants to publicly acknowledge, and it's growing.

"I've met with veterans from coast to coast, and I will tell you that there is a catastrophe on the horizon," said Paul Sullivan, director of Veterans for Common Sense.

3,057 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were potentially diagnosed with a drug dependency from fiscal year 2005 through March 2007, according to figures provided to ABC News from the Veterans Health Administration. From 2002 through 2004 only a total of 277 veterans were diagnosed with a drug dependency, the numbers show.

"The military right now can say whatever they want, but the truth on the ground is that the soldiers are in a lot of pain, emotional and physical pain, and they're turning to drugs in order to alleviate that," said Sullivan.

Wounded Warriors

More than a dozen Fort Carson soldiers talked to ABC about their drug use, including some willing to be interviewed on camera about their experiences.

--William Swenson was injured in his final mission in Iraq. Prescription drugs provided little relief from physical and emotional pain, Swenson said, so he turned to marijuana and tried cocaine. The army court-martialed Swenson and threw him in jail for 20 days.

--Michael Bailey said he tried to commit suicide twice because of the combined stress of his deployment to Iraq and marital problems. He failed a drug test after using cocaine during a night out on the town.

--Matthew McKane worked as a medic in Baghdad. To escape the daily chaos he and another soldier tried propofol, a powerful anesthetic, McKane said. The other soldier overdosed and died. When McKane returned home he tested positive for cocaine, he said. He is currently in prison awaiting a court martial on misconduct charges. McKane believes he will soon be dismissed from the Army because of his drug use.

--Jeffrey Smith also worked as a medic in Baghdad and said he turned to illegal drugs to cope with emotional trauma inflicted during his deployment in Iraq. After testing positive for illicit drugs, he said he was kicked out of the Army on misconduct charges with no benefits.

--Alan Hartmann was a door gunner on a Chinook helicopter flying missions from Kuwait into Iraq. He suffered from chronic nightmares after returning home and turned to methamphetamines to stay awake, he said.

Five Reasons Sputnik Still Matters

We've looked at every space launch since, and scouted the key missions ahead. But the satellite that started it all is worth a glance back: One groundbreaking Russian robot has made everyday life on earth smarter and faster -- and it ain't finished yet.

Earlier this summer, a crane in Tulsa, Okla., hauled up a rusted 1957 Plymouth Belvedere that had been buried 50 years earlier in a bombproof bunker as a time capsule. The contents included a case of beer, 14 bobby pins, $2.43, a bottle of tranquilizers and 10 gallons of gas -- in case internal combustion engines had become obsolete by 2007.

Despite our best research efforts, we're still relying on internal combustion engines, but much in our lives has changed dramatically since 1957. Some of those everyday changes can be traced back to the launch, 50 years ago, of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The launch was a coup for the Soviet Union, and kick-started a new period of scientific innovation in the United States that culminated in the Apollo missions. Even though we haven't returned to the moon since 1972, plans are being hatched to go back -- and go beyond (NASA now says it will send Russian technology to find water on Mars and the lunar surface). Sputnik's impact continues to pervade life in the stars and back home, even as the little silver ball that could hits the half-century mark.

1. Weather You wouldn't want to bet your life on the accuracy of a weather forecast, but we're a lot better than we were in the pre-Sputnik age. The first weather satellite, Tiros I, was launched less than three years after Sputnik -- and quickly found a previously undetected tropical cyclone off the coast of Australia. Equipped with two television cameras, two video recorders and a crude communications system to send images back to Earth, Tiros I snapped 23,000 pictures during its 78-day mission, giving meteorologists their first overhead look at the cloud patterns that characterize storms. A global network of weather satellites came a year later.

Weather prediction has become commonplace on the 6 o'clock news, but now scientists want to use satellites to turn it on its face. Atmospheric researcher Ross Hoffman has proposed using infrared beams from satellites to warm the air around hurricanes as a method to change their direction. Sure, it's a long shot -- but so was Sputnik.

2. Communications The next major satellite milestone occurred in 1962 with the launch of Telstar I, the first "active" communications satellite that could amplify and retransmit incoming signals. Telstar ushered in an age predicted by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ) back in 1945, when he wrote that satellites "could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet." The first live transatlantic images were shots of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, broadcast from Andover, Maine, to a receiving station in France.

How important is the network of communications satellites that orbits above us now? When the Galaxy IV satellite malfunctioned in 1998, about 30 million pagers went silent, ATM and credit card payments were disrupted, and some television stations simply stopped broadcasting because of a lack of available programming.

3. Google Earth Surveillance satellites have been around since the U.S. Midas (Missile Defense and Alarm System) satellites were launched in the 1960s. But it was only in 2005 that the general public got its first taste of the power of satellite photography, with the launch of Google Earth. Zooming in with ultrahigh resolution on locations both familiar and unfamiliar provides an undeniable voyeuristic thrill -- but the potential of open-access satellite imagery is only beginning to be tapped.

When billionaire aviation pioneer Steve Fossett disappeared last month, crucial rescue workers and volunteers searched for his plane by combing through high-resolution photos snapped by GeoEye, a company that owns two Earth-imaging satellites. And the quality of images should only get better: Last month, DigitalGlobe, the company that provides images for Google Earth, launched its new satellite, WorldView-1. The new satellite will cover 290,000 square miles per day, with a resolution of less than 2 ft., revisiting each spot on average once every 1.7 days. Look up and smile for the camera!

4. Textiles For many people, the first thing that pops to mind when you say "space program spinoffs" is astronaut ice cream -- which, while interesting, is a little too chewy to qualify as a society-altering development. But the Space Race that Sputnik's surprise launch kicked off has produced a surprising number of trickle-down benefits, not all of them obvious.

Some space suits, for instance, contained more than two dozen layers of specially designed textiles, which have been redeployed in various civilian capacities. For example: Teflon-coated fiberglass, first used in the 1970s in space suits, is now found as a roofing material in stadiums around the world, including the 257-ton inflated roof of the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, held up by air pressure.

5. Mars Missions The biggest difference between the pre- and post-Sputnik eras might be that, 50 years ago, we had pretty much finished exploring everywhere we could physically reach. Now there's a universe of unknown destinations that are about as accessible to us as the Americas were to Europeans in 1500, or the North and South Poles were in 1900: We have the tools to get there, but the journey might kill us.

Thanks to new technology, we can take on unthinkable levels of exploration without even sending people -- the rovers that have been trundling around Mars since 2004, space telescopes such as Hubble and the forthcoming James Webb. But President Bush's "Renewed Spirit of Discovery" agenda also calls for a return to the moon by 2020, followed by manned missions to Mars. After that -- well, there are six other planets (seven if you count Pluto) in this solar system alone.