About-face
Jim Amsden thought the Army would get his life on track, but it didn't take him long to realize he wasn't a soldier. The same can't be said of the Army.
By SUSAN ASCHOFF
Published November 1, 2005
DUNEDIN - Two Pinellas County sheriff's deputies stood on the lawn, sweat trickling down their faces in the July heat, frustrated by what to do with him. They'd phoned his Army base in Georgia. They'd phoned MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. They wanted a military police officer, a desk sergeant, a piece of paper to take this 24-year-old deserter off their hands.
Fayette "Jim" Amsden, handcuffed for almost an hour in the patrol car, was accustomed to waiting: waiting to find his niche at Dunedin High School, waiting to find the college class that would illuminate a career, waiting for the Army to give him a track to adulthood.
When he signed up two years earlier, Amsden says, he was running behind in life. The military would catch him up.
But from the first week of boot camp, he had still been behind. He couldn't tie knots. His weapon jammed. His paperwork was lost. He was nervous he'd screw up. So he did.
The Army prides itself on turning out the best possible soldiers, but about a third of its recruits don't make it to three years.
When the Army ordered Amsden to Iraq, he did what he had wanted to do since his first days as a would-be soldier.
He left.
Be strongerOn the wall of the house in Dunedin, there is a collection of framed family photos. Glamor shots of Amsden's mother, Lori Hoag, of her fiance, of Amsden and his younger brother, Alex, when they were boys and, at the center, a portrait of Amsden in a camouflage uniform, his jaw squared, with an American flag.
Hoag, who works with special education students at Tarpon Springs High School, enlisted in the Air Force when she was 19. She lasted two years, receiving a medical discharge for asthma.
"I loved it. I would have stayed for life," says Hoag, 45.
She told students that military service was a fine choice, "a first step out of Mom and Dad's house."
Her son never thought about the military much until a Navy recruiter visited St. Petersburg College. Amsden was taking classes part time while working full time stocking grocery shelves. In high school, "if I got a passing grade it was good enough," he says. In college, he got kicked out of class for sleeping. He shaved hours off his overnight shift to focus on school, and the grocery store laid him off.
His friend Andy Kensinger was thinking about the Army. He and Amsden went to the recruiting office near Chuck E Cheese's on U.S. 19 in Clearwater in June 2003. A "very friendly" officer told the pair about getting money for college, about all the places he'd been.
Amsden, then 21, didn't ask about Iraq.
If he was going to enlist, his mom said, go Air Force. The Army was for "grunts." Her son was not a warrior. "He's the kind of kid," she says, "who would worm tourists' fishhooks for them."
Relatives and friends advised Amsden against signing up. The war in Iraq was just 3 months old. He did not listen, he says.
"I think a lot of people who are going to sign up are . . . caught in that beam," he says. "You want to come home in that uniform.
"The recruiter said he'd go into the grocery store and all he was buying was a loaf of bread, and somebody would see his uniform and buy the bread."
At the processing center in Tampa, Amsden considered the Army's 150 jobs. Mechanic. Engineer. Computers. "It was all boring," he says. He liked Special Forces. He would have to enlist for a minimum of five years, but he'd train for three and get a $10,000 signing bonus, he recalls.
On Aug. 13, 2003, he and a half-dozen other men were driven from Tampa to Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training. He did not consider that if he failed to make the cut for the Army's elite forces, he'd be thrown into the infantry. He cannot explain why he thought he'd elude the reality that the Army fights wars.
Private AmsdenHe says he tried his best. He was rarely good enough.
He was often confused, but he didn't dare ask.
On a rope swing from a tower, he was the only one who slammed into the wall.
He was barely a week into basic training when he wrote in his journal: I'm here, but I wouldn't mind going home, even if it's from an injury. The drill sergeant ordered: Raise your hand if you want to leave. I don't want to be here. I almost, but did not, raise my hand, Amsden wrote. The lone recruit who did was "smoked" for weeks.
Recruits were paired with "battle buddies." His buddy, Nick Andersen, often had to rescue him.
"I was confused with hospital corners on the beds. He was making my bed for me. It was simple things that if you didn't do them right, you'd get everyone in trouble," Amsden says.
Alphabetically, they were frequently the first pair chosen to learn a skill. Handed pugel sticks - padded poles with football-size appendages - Andersen and Amsden flailed. "The drill sergeant takes Andersen's pugel stick and just wails as hard as he can and hits him in the head," Amsden says. Amsden knew he was next. He stood immobile as the stick smashed into his head, dropping all 5 feet, 9 inches and 140 pounds of him to the ground.
He got bronchitis and spent two days in the infirmary. When he returned, he says, everyone treated him worse than before: He was a shirker.
His mom, grandmother, brother Alex, an aunt and a cousin drove up for Thanksgiving. Hoag cooked turkey and green bean casserole in the lobby kitchen of the EconoLodge in Columbus, Ga. She was worried about her son.
"It was like I had a robot in front of me. I'd ask, "Want to go out to dinner with me?' and he'd say, "Affirmative.' "
He made it through basic training. He successfully jumped out of a plane. But when they read off the jump school graduates' names, his wasn't on the list. He was supposed to be with a unit training in South Korea, they told him. He was assigned odd jobs until the unit returned, he says.
He was lost in the military. Literally.
'Buck up'Amsden's failure to adjust to military life is not an anomaly. About 30 percent of Army recruits leave before their first enlistment term is over, says David Armor, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and a member of the advisory Committee on Youth Population and Military Recruiting, funded by the Defense Department.
"Most people who are not suitable, either the military gets rid of them," says Armor, "or they find a way to get rid of themselves." Drug or alcohol abuse, mental health problems, criminal behavior, injuries or homosexuality can all lead to discharge.
In January 2004, Amsden talked to the base chaplain about quitting. "You haven't even (been) with your regular unit yet," the chaplain told him. Amsden dropped his bid for Special Forces and was sent to Fort Stewart, Ga., and the 3rd Infantry Division.
He injured a toe, so while his unit took combat training in Louisiana, he was put on a radio in a tent, his foot in a space boot. They gave him a squad automatic weapon for field exercises. The SAW jammed.
The captain screamed at him: Worthless. Incompetent. A screwup.
In Florida, hurricanes were strafing the state, and he was worried about his family. He told the chaplain he wanted to go home. "Buck up," the chaplain said.
His mother showed one of his letters to a psychologist because she was afraid he was going to hurt himself.
"I lost all confidence in the military," says Hoag. "They were responsible for him," he was in trouble, and no one would help, she says.
"I think I was having anxiety attacks," Amsden says. "I was talking really fast, pacing, really nervous. A buddy took me to mental health. Everyone thought I was lying, that I was a crappy soldier. My sergeant said people should be cool around me."
Now they not only thought he was incompetent, he says, but also crazy.
Breaking the contractBy fall 2004, Amsden's unit awaited orders to Iraq. On a trip home for Christmas, the question he'd been asking himself almost since he'd stepped out of the van from Tampa grew more insistent: What if I just left?
"Eight people in my unit had gone AWOL," he says.
On Jan. 17, five days before Amsden was to leave for Iraq, he bought a bus ticket online, paid $50 for a taxi to the Savannah Greyhound terminal, then paced overnight, afraid he'd be caught, when the bus to Clearwater was four hours late.
He phoned his mom from the terminal and said he was coming home. "I remember that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach," Hoag says.
Officers from the base left a couple of messages on Amsden's cell phone and at his mother's house, informing him he was absent without leave. Pentagon officials say only 1 percent of service members are reported AWOL each year. The military does not typically hunt them down but puts their names in a national database for law enforcement.
"After a couple weeks," Amsden says, "I didn't think anyone would be looking for me."
He phoned the GI Rights Hotline, a network of nonprofit organizations, many of them antiwar groups, that provide information to service members. Most of the hotline's current calls are from National Guard members ordered to combat for second and third tours, grasping for a way to stop soldiering, says program coordinator Steve Morse.
An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 service members were reported absent without leave in 2004.
"We consider AWOL and desertion crimes, crimes against our Army," says Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman. "They disregard everything we stand for."
An Army study found most run because of financial and personal problems, or failure to adapt to military life.
"There are people who shouldn't be there," says Morse. The average age of active duty Army recruits is 21. It is a time in life, Morse says, when people make missteps. But in the military, you can't change your mind.
Amsden's mother, opposed to the war but supportive of the men and women who fight it, no longer believed the Army was doing right by its soldiers, by her son.
She paid $1,700 for a psychological evaluation for Amsden, but the results were inconclusive.
She looked for an attorney to argue for discharge. An expert in military law costs a fortune.
On April 1, a Friday, Amsden answered a call from Georgia. A sergeant, using the phone of one of Amsden's friends, said if he turned himself in by Monday, he would be discharged within six weeks. His friend came on to assure him the offer was real.
Amsden went back to Fort Stewart on April 4. A week later they told him he was going to Iraq.
"I felt like I was conned," Amsden says. Hart, the Army spokeswoman, says she cannot address Amsden's case specifically but that the decision on what to do with an AWOL soldier or a deserter - one who is absent 30 days or more - rests with his or her commander.
Amsden left his clothes and laptop behind and drove home. He lived with his grandmother for two weeks, hiding his car behind her house.
Then in mid July, after his third day at a job at Starbucks, Amsden turned down the street to find two sheriff's cars parked at his mother's house. He called her from his car. "You might as well come home and get this over with," she told him.
The deputies could find no warrant for Amsden and no one to take him into custody. Hoag thinks they were asked to check on Amsden by officers at Fort Stewart. She said she would drive her son back.
She worried he was going to jail to serve the three years remaining on his contract.
Amsden's legal counsel, assigned at the base through its Trial Defense Services, recommended he write a statement acknowledging his mistakes:
I understand that my going AWOL was the wrong thing to do. I am sorry for whatever difficulties I have given to my unit for not attending the Iraqi deployment with them. . . . I did what I was told and I did my best but most of the time I did not feel like I did well enough. I don't feel that joining was a mistake . . . but I should've done much more research.
On Sept. 8, Amsden received an other than honorable discharge.
"I didn't really care," he says. "I just wanted out."
Changing viewsIn October, the Army launched a new marketing campaign and will spend $1-billion over five years to persuade parents, particularly mothers, to let their children enlist. Since the Iraq war bogged down, the Army has experienced its worst enlistment numbers since the 1970s. Last year, the shortfall was almost 8,000 soldiers.
Hoag no longer tells students to choose the military.
She cannot read the newspaper anymore. The stories about hometown soldiers killed in combat, all hearts and flowers and heroes, are too painful. She doesn't understand why they had to die.
"I couldn't send (my son) back, and he's killed in Iraq, and it's my fault," she says.
Amsden says he lived a two-year nightmare and it's over.
He doesn't tell people about the Army unless they ask. He worries what his friend Andy will think of him. Andy enlisted nine months after he did, in the infantry. "I told him not to," says Amsden. Andy is in Iraq.
Susan Aschoff can be reached at aschoff@sptimes.com or 727 892-2293.