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Jon Town: The Rocket Said Wounded — the Paperwork Said 'Personality Disorder'

On an October day in 2004, Army Specialist Jon Town was standing in the doorway of his battalion's headquarters in Ramadi, Iraq, when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. It knocked him unconscious, drove shrapnel into his neck, and left him bleeding from his ears. He had served seven years and been honored twelve times, and he would receive a Purple Heart for that day. Two years later, the Army sent him home to Ohio with a diagnosis that said none of it counted: a "personality disorder," a condition the regulations treat as pre-existing — no medical board, no disability pay, no long-term care, and a demand that he repay more than $3,000 of his re-enlistment bonus. Town's fight, carried into print by reporter Joshua Kors of The Nation and into a House hearing room in July 2007, became the public face of some 22,500 such discharges. This page is the documented record of what he did, what was done to him, and what has — and has not — been done about it since.

The service and the promise

Jon Town of Findlay, Ohio, served seven years in the United States Army. By the account Joshua Kors documented in The Nation after an eleven-month investigation, Town was “a soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform.” Like every soldier Kors interviewed for the series, Town had passed the Army’s entrance health screening and a second screening before deployment, deemed physically and psychologically fit both times. None of the soldiers in Kors’s investigation had a documented history of psychological problems before they were wounded.

The promise behind that screening runs in both directions. A soldier the Army has certified as fit, and who is then wounded in its service, is supposed to go before a medical board. The board confirms the wounds, assigns a disability rating, and the rating carries disability pay and long-term medical care. Army Regulation 40-501, Chapter 3-33, is explicit for the wounds of Town’s war: a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder must be discharged through a medical board — the process that can provide the lifetime benefits a personality-disorder separation denies.

A personality disorder, as the Government Accountability Office defines it, is a longstanding, inflexible pattern of behavior that deviates markedly from expected behavior, has its onset in adolescence or early adulthood, and leads to distress or impairment. It is, by definition, something a soldier brought with him. That definition is the whole mechanism of this story: because the condition is treated as pre-existing and not a disability, a separation for personality disorder is quick, cheap, and final — and it relieves the institution of the cost of the soldier. In the Army’s separations manual it is Regulation 635-200, Chapter 5-13: “Separation Because of Personality Disorder.”

What happened

In October 2004, in Ramadi, Town was standing in the doorway of his battalion’s headquarters when the rocket struck two feet above his head. Kors’s account, built from Town’s own words: “The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.” Town remembered waking on the ground, men of his unit around him screaming his name. “They started shaking me. But I was numb all over,” he told Kors. “I could see them, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything. I started shaking because I thought I was dead.”

The shrapnel was removed from his neck and his ears eventually stopped leaking blood. His hearing never recovered. In his own account of the aftermath, Town described losing the hearing in his left ear entirely and half of it in his right. What followed him home to Fort Carson, Colorado, was a cluster the record returns to again and again: deafness, memory failure, depression, insomnia, and a headache that, three years after the attack, was still raging. He received a Purple Heart for the wounds of that day — a fact he stated under oath to Congress, and one no source in this record disputes.

By September 2006, Town and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready. The question was only which door he would leave through. Instead of the medical board his injuries pointed to, doctors at Fort Carson attributed his condition to a personality disorder. Town’s account, corroborated by two soldiers in his unit, was that Fort Carson psychologist Dr. Mark Wexler assured him he would receive disability benefits and VA medical care and would keep his bonus. His wife, Kristy, recalled the same promise: “He said that Wexler had explained to him that he’d get to keep his benefits,” she told Kors, “that the doctor had looked into it, and it was all coming with the chapter he was getting.”

None of it was true. Under Chapter 5-13, Town received no disability pay and no long-term medical care. And because he had not served out the contract attached to his $15,000 re-enlistment bonus, he was required to give back the bulk of it — more than the amount of his final paycheck. He left the Army owing it more than $3,000. “We had this on our heads the whole way, driving home to Ohio,” Town said. “The final day, we find out, none of it was true. It was a total shock. I felt like I’d been betrayed by the Army.”

Town was not an anomaly in the paperwork; he was the example that made the paperwork visible. Kors reported that in the six years before his article appeared, 22,500 soldiers had been discharged on grounds of personality disorder. Applying Harvard professor Linda Bilmes’s estimates of average disability pay and lifetime medical cost, Kors calculated that separating those 22,500 soldiers could save the military some $12.5 billion. Those are Kors’s figures, drawn from Bilmes’s study — an estimate of what the practice was worth to the institution that practiced it.

At home in Findlay, the bill came due in ordinary ways. Town had applied for VA medical care before leaving the Army; seven months later he was still waiting for his first appointment. He tried jobs and was fired when his health made the work impossible. Kristy Town kept the family of four afloat on a minimum-wage assembly-line job at Filtech, an oil-filter manufacturer. The family slid toward bankruptcy, and in May 2007 the phone company shut off their service for nonpayment. Town described that period himself — flashbacks two or three times a day, three hours of sleep a night, and a suicide attempt he survived because a hair dryer he pulled into a bathtub short-circuited. He checked himself into a hospital the next day.

What the institution did afterward

The Army’s first institutional answer to the personality-disorder cases was a review that, on the documented record, did not happen as described. In late October 2006, investigators Andrew Pogany and Steve Robinson of Veterans for America brought a stack of Chapter 5-13 cases, Town’s among them, to Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the acting surgeon general, who promised a thorough review. On March 23, 2007, Pollock’s office announced that the cases had been “thoughtfully and thoroughly” reviewed and every soldier properly diagnosed. An Army press release signed by Lt. Col. Bob Tallman, the Army’s chief of public affairs, added that a panel of experts had “thoroughly evaluated and reviewed” all Fort Carson Chapter 5-13 separations of the previous four years.

Kors’s October 2007 follow-up dismantled each element. The Tallman memo had been ghostwritten by Pollock’s office; Tallman told Kors he knew nothing about it. No soldiers had been interviewed — Pollock’s spokeswoman explained that asking a separated soldier to recall his mental condition “does not hold medical validity.” The “panel” was, as Army Times reporter Kelly Kennedy revealed on May 4, 2007, a single reviewer: Col. Steven Knorr, chief of Fort Carson’s Behavioral Health unit, who had overseen the original diagnoses and made some himself. And on May 16, Army officials conceded the decisive point: the four-year Fort Carson review described in the memo had never occurred. Fort Carson officials also acknowledged that fifty-six soldiers discharged from the base with personality disorder in fact had PTSD — while insisting all fifty-six had been properly diagnosed, including four whose case files the base could not find.

The second part of Kors’s series recorded why doctors said the diagnoses kept coming out the same way. Two Army psychiatrists, speaking under pseudonyms for fear of retaliation, described pressure from superiors to diagnose personality disorder instead of PTSD or traumatic brain injury. One, identified as Dr. Michael Chen, said: “I refused to diagnose as they wanted. They wanted the diagnoses to be personality disorder, instead of PTSD.” He recalled being pressed over a soldier who had returned from Iraq with a large piece of his right calf missing: “Imagine: You get your leg blown off, you get a Purple Heart and now they say it’s from personality disorder.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs reached the opposite conclusion from the Army about Jon Town — quickly, once a person inside it actually looked. After The Findlay Courier profiled Town in April 2007, his case was flagged to the Cleveland VA and then to case manager Janine Wert at the Dayton VA, who took it on April 19 and had him in her office the same day. “His childhood, high school and military history — none of it supports a personality disorder,” Wert said. “I have never in my life heard of personality disorder causing deafness.” On June 11, 2007, the VA ruled that Town had in fact been wounded in combat and declared him 100 percent disabled. The rating guaranteed him VA disability compensation and medical care for life, together with the disability pay for the months since his discharge. On June 25, he received a check for $20,000. “They were ready to repossess everything,” Town said. “And now I knew we weren’t going to lose our cars to bankruptcy.”

The distinction matters, and this page keeps it exact: the VA’s ruling gave Town VA compensation and VA care. It was not Army disability retirement, and the Army gave him nothing. As Kors wrote that October, the Army “to this day insists that Town was not wounded in combat and that his health problems stem from a personality disorder. He still has not received any of the benefits owed him by the Army.”

Congress took the case up on July 25, 2007, when the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, chaired by Rep. Bob Filner, held its hearing on personality-disorder discharges in a standing-room-only Cannon House Office Building room. Town, holding his dog tags, testified: “I want to state that I did not have a personality disorder before I went into the Army, as they have stated in my paperwork. I did not suffer severe nonstop headaches. I did not have memory loss. I did not have endless, sleepless nights. I have posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury now due to the injuries I received in the war, for which I received a Purple Heart.” Pollock did not appear; her consultant, Col. Bruce Crow, testified that if soldiers were being misdiagnosed, “this would be wrong,” and described a surgeon general’s review of 295 cases. Filner rejected an internal paper review: “Let’s have an independent evaluation.” Around the hearing, thirty-one senators wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates demanding an investigation, and Senators Kit Bond and Barack Obama advanced an amendment to freeze Chapter 5-13 discharges, with a companion House bill, H.R. 3167.

What the pressure produced, in order:

The committee returned to the subject on September 15, 2010, in a hearing titled “Personality Disorder Discharges: Impact on Veterans’ Benefits” (Serial No. 111-97). Kors testified alongside Sgt. Chuck Luther, the subject of his third Nation investigation, “Disposable Soldiers” (April 26, 2010) — a twelve-year soldier with twenty-two honors whose blinding headaches after a mortar blast at Camp Taji were likewise attributed to personality disorder, and who testified he had been held for weeks under guard in an aid-station room, under constant light and loud music, until he signed, leaving with a $1,500 bill. The Army’s written answers for that record characterize Luther’s confinement as a suicide watch undertaken for his protection. DoD’s position remained what it had been in its report: discharges were down, and no soldiers had been wrongly discharged. In December 2009, VA doctors had diagnosed Luther with traumatic brain injury and PTSD and rated him 80 percent disabled — the same pattern as Town: the VA recognizing, case by case, what the Army’s paperwork had denied categorically.

In March 2012, Vietnam Veterans of America and Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic published Casting Troops Aside, from records pried loose through Freedom of Information Act litigation: more than 31,000 servicemembers discharged for personality disorder from fiscal year 2001 to 2010. VVA’s stated objective, from its 2010 lawsuit onward, was a systemic review of the discharges themselves — the remedy the Pentagon’s own review had declined to perform.

Where it stands now

For Jon Town personally, the VA account is closed and has been since June 2007: a 100 percent disability rating, VA compensation and care for life, and the $20,000 in back disability pay that arrived on June 25 of that year. No Army account was ever opened. The Army never conceded that the rocket in Ramadi wounded him, never sent him to the medical board the regulations describe for PTSD, and never paid him Army disability. The label the Army chose — personality disorder — is the one that remains in his separation record unless he individually wins its correction; the documented record contains no such correction.

For the class of soldiers Town came to represent, the practice was reformed prospectively and never repaired retrospectively. The August 2008 instruction made a repeat of Town’s exact path harder: a deployed soldier can no longer be separated for personality disorder on one clinician’s say-so, without corroboration, surgeon-general endorsement, and the PTSD question addressed in writing. GAO’s audits and VVA’s litigation established that the pre-2008 system frequently failed even its own paperwork rules. But no mass re-review of the 22,600 — or of the more than 31,000 separations counted by 2010 — has ever been ordered. Each veteran who wants the record corrected must still carry the case individually, one file at a time.

Kors, looking back in a 2016 talk, put the final count as his reporting had tracked it: since 2001, over 31,000 soldiers discharged with personality disorder. The Town family’s part of that number is one. What that one case proved, in the government’s own hearing rooms and in the VA’s own ruling, is that the diagnosis could be attached to a Purple Heart, to shrapnel, and to deafness — and that it took a hometown newspaper, a case manager in Dayton, a national magazine, and a congressional hearing to get one soldier’s file to say what the rocket had already said.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

This story was fought in hearing rooms more than on battlefields, and the surviving video record is correspondingly spare: the 2010 hearing testimony of the soldier whose case followed Town’s, the reporter’s own account of how the investigation was built, and the profession’s recognition of that reporting. Three films, all from the reporter’s archive — the bench for a 2007 print investigation is thin, and this page uses what honestly exists rather than padding it.

The 2010 testimony. Sgt. Chuck Luther describes to the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, on September 15, 2010, how he was held at Camp Taji's aid station until he signed a personality-disorder discharge — the case that proved Town's was not a one-off. (Joshua Kors.)

The investigation, explained. Kors recounts how he documented the personality-disorder discharges — the Town case, the doctors who spoke out, and the Pentagon review that interviewed no one. A full transcript is printed in the video's description. (Joshua Kors.)

The recognition. Kors accepts the National Press Club's Hume Memorial Award in 2011 for the personality-disorder investigation, with a clip from the 2010 hearing at the top. (Joshua Kors.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.