The Broken Army

“moral waivers”

On the last day of January 2005, Steven D. Green, the former Army private accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdering her family, sat in a Texas jail on alcohol-possession charges, an unemployed 19-year-old high school dropout who had just racked up his third misdemeanor conviction.

Days later, Mr. Green enlisted in a soldier-strapped Army, and was later assigned to a star-crossed unit to serve on an especially murderous patch of earth.

He arrived at the very moment that the Army was increasing by nearly half the rate at which it granted what it calls “moral waivers” to potential recruits. The change opened the ranks to more people like Mr. Green, those with minor criminal records and weak educational backgrounds. In Mr. Green’s case, his problems were emerging by junior high school, say people who knew him then.

Mr. Green’s Army waiver allowed a troubled young man into the heart of a war that bore little resemblance to its original declared purposes, but which continued to need thousands of fresh recruits.
Now, there is shame and rage in the Army — from the ranks of the enlisted to the officer corps — over the crimes attributed to Mr. Green, who was discharged in April on psychiatric grounds, and four other soldiers charged with a rape and four killings in March in Mahmudiya, a town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. A sixth soldier was charged with failing to report the matter after learning about it.

Mr. Green’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Thomas Kunk, told his brother in a recent letter that “his worst fears, the nightmare every commander dreams of, has basically come true,’’ the brother, Peter Kunk, said in an interview describing the letter.

“The three or four people have apparently been involved in a situation that reflects so badly on the Army and all the people in these brigades and companies,” Mr. Kunk said.

In early 2005, a few weeks after enlisting, Private Green immersed himself in a baptismal pool in the back of an Army chapel in Fort Benning, Ga., one of hundreds of young recruits who embraced religion as they faced certain violence.