[Story from April 2015] Soldiers Being FORCED to Remove Combat Patches From Uniforms

Soldiers are livid after being told to remove their combat patches in an attempt to be “welcoming” to new recruits.

It’s an insane move that goes against the unofficial combat patch creed: “You earn it. You keep it. You wear it.” But that’s apparently the policy now for Fort Carson’s 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

Soldiers are told to strip their uniforms bare to the bone, only showing the name, rank, American Flag, U.S. Army tape and the 4th Infantry Division insignia, the Army Times is reporting.

According to officials, the move is designed to promote a “unified army culture.”

Brigade Commander Col. David Hodne issued the requirement. He told the Colorado Gazette it’s not about making new recruits feel jealous.

Hodne’s unit, which has seen a radical reorganization over the past year from tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles to eight-wheeled Strykers, is loaded with brand-new privates whose uniforms are bare of insignia. Instead of standing out, the new guys look like everyone else in training.

“This was obviously started by officers without combat time. This isn’t about making the new guys feel welcome, it’s about making the new officers feel superior.

The fact that we have 22 year old college kids ordering 18 year multiple combat tour veterans and lecturing them on war tells you all you need to know about how broken our commissioning system is.”

“I think it’s an absolutely horrid idea. Simply because some of them don’t fall into the group of those who have gone down range doesn’t mean that everyone else should hide what they’ve done. It’s the military, not a group of middle school students.”

Something from Hodne’s past. More bs.

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing today on sexual assault in the military. And as lawmakers take a closer look at that issue, one local Army captain says he’s the victim of another form of harassment from fellow service members.

In 2008, shortly after the election of President Barack Obama, Capt. Gary Mason was sent to Iraq as a member of the 3rd squadron, 4th Calvary Regiment, 25th infantry division. Mason is African American, and not long after his arrival, he and a handful of other black soldiers allegedly found themselves the target of a racist prank.

Army regulations prevent Mason from speaking to the media, so his wife, Shauniss Mason, speaks on his behalf. As she recalls, the incident happened during a briefing in which a slide show was being displayed.

“[A]nd at the beginning of the meeting a huge slide pops up on the screen and it’s a picture of the black actor Ving Rhames and across his chest is written the word, ‘niggardly”. And so my husband is shocked and he looked around the room and he’s wondering...’What’s going on?’”

Retired Captain Rod Meyer, who is also African American, was present at that briefing.

“[A]ll of a sudden we see Ving Rhames on a slide and the word ‘niggardly.’ Nobody attempted to run up and turn it off or shut that down or get it off the screen, it just cycled through as normal and everyone got their laugh on about it,” he said.

Capt. Mason filed an equal opportunity complaint about the incident. One week later, his wife says, Mason was assaulted by a white soldier named Sgt. Major Royce Mannis for no apparent reason.

“He said that the guy came up to him and just started cursing at him and saying that we’re not happy with your work, and he says that the mans started hitting him in the chest over and over again, and my husband told him that he’d better stop,” she recalled.

Mannis did not respond to requests for comment.

Capt. Mason reported the incidents to his commanding officer, Colonel David Hodne. According to Shauniss Mason, Hodne took no action. Hodne also did not respond to phone calls and emails from WAMU.

“We got a copy of the report and within the report Col. Hodne states; ‘...I don’t have to answer your questions, I’m a colonel, I have too much rank and I don’t have to answer these questions.’ We have a copy of that report and it’s in writing,” she said.

Following a second combat tour in Afghanistan, Capt. Mason returned to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii to discover he was being reassigned to a position of lower authority, despite two successful tours abroad. About this same time, Mason and his wife brought their concerns to the attention of then-Congresswoman Mazie Hirono. An aide for Hirono looked into the matter and soon phoned Shauniss Mason with dire advice.

“He said, ‘Tell your husband don’t let anyone provoke him, because that’s what they want. Once he does something or says something that discredits him, then that invalidates his case,’” she recalled.

Shauniss Mason says the harassment continued. In June 2012, Mason was reassigned and cleared to transfer to Fort Lee, just south of Richmond, Virginia. When Mason arrived with his family at the Honolulu airport to depart for Virginia, he was told his ticket was canceled.

Soon after, Shauniss Mason says, two army officers, Major David Acker and Maj. James Staiano, appeared at the terminal, out of uniform and without documentation, to inform Mason that he was considered AWOL. Neither Acker nor Staiano responded to requests for comment about the incident, which was captured on video by the Masons’ oldest son.

“[M]y husband talks to our attorney, and he says if you don’t get on that plane, you are really going to be AWOL because Ft. Lee is expecting you,” said Shauniss Mason.

Mason buys his own ticket, arrives in Richmond and never hears anything from army officials about being AWOL.

“[W]e realize if he had not gotten on that plane he would have been considered AWOL. He was given an unlawful order by two soldiers who were out of uniform who had no official paperwork,” she said.
Col. Michael Donnelly is the spokesperson for the U.S. Army Pacific. Donnelly says that right now, the Army can’t and won’t respond to the individual charges made by Capt. Mason and his wife.

“While things are still under investigation, and I believe he has filed some lawsuits. It’s probably not prudent on our part to put a characterization on any of those charges whether it’s past present or future,” he said.

Retired Army Major Ricardo Finney is an authority on the Army’s Uniform Code of Military Justice. He’s working with Capt. Mason to resolve his legal actions, which include an equal opportunity complaint filed with the U.S. Inspector General, and a request for protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act.

“There’s dozens of incidents where he, or his family have been targeted by people who figured if they did it he eventually was going to fold, going to go crazy, or shoot somebody, “ he said.

Since arriving at Ft Lee, Mason’s wife Shauniss says her husband has been treated poorly and has received veiled verbal threats from certain service members on base. Capt. Mason moved his family off base to Maryland, out of concern for their safety. The off-base housing allowance he’s given by the army is not enough to cover two apartments, so his wife and children rent a room from friends while he commutes 150 miles most days, sometimes sleeping in his car. Today the entire family is in counseling and Shauniss Mason says their dilemma is a cautionary tale for those who question the military’s record suicide rate of 349 deaths in 2012.

“There are many people committing suicide who have suffered as we have. You want to know why the army’s rate of suicide is so high? This is why, and I have the answer. Toxic leaders, and people who are stuck in the dark ages, abusing people and not being held accountable for it,” she said.

U.S. Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland is pursuing a congressional inquiry into the charges made by the Mason family.

Hodne seems to have been around a number of odd scenes:

Pat Tillman’s Ranger Brother Kept in Dark About Friendly Fire
By MARK MOONEY Sept. 11, 2009
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Ever since he was a kid, Kevin Tillman was never far from his big brother, Pat.

On April 22, 2002, both were Army Rangers, and Spc. Kevin Tillman pulled up to the scene of his brother’s shooting manning a turret gun on a Humvee just minutes after Pat Tillman was slain in a hail of friendly fire.

“What’s going on?” Kevin Tillman asked his fellow Rangers, having heard the shooting as his vehicle struggled through a rocky, narrow Afghan canyon that kept its speed below 5 mph.

When a Ranger asked the driver of Kevin Tillman’s vehicle if the crew had a litter for carrying casualties, Tillman asked, “Who got hit?” He was told it was an Afghan.

An Afghan had been killed alongside Pat Tillman.

Watch the story tonight on “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. ET and watch best-selling author Jon Krakauer’s first live interview about his new book “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman” Monday on “Good Morning America.”

While standing guard, Kevin Tillman said he became uneasy because his brother’s booming voice and laugh was missing from the scene.

“I started to get a little weird feeling, you know, because my brother’s a pretty loud-type guy,” Kevin Tillman told an investigator who looked into the friendly fire incident.

“Where’s Pat?” he began asking his colleagues.

“He asked me three times,” said Sgt. Jason Parsons.

Finally, the sergeant told Kevin Tillman that his brother was dead.

Tillman was silent for a few minutes. Then he howled and cursed in grief and rage. The platoon’s doctor took his gun away.

But even though it was apparent to most of the platoon members who were present for the shooting’s aftermath that Pat Tillman had been killed by a fellow Ranger, no one told Kevin Tillman.

Later that night, Kevin Tillman was summoned by Maj. David Hodne as Tillman got off a helicopter that evacuated him from the shooting site to offer Tillman a chance to be counseled by a chaplain. Tillman declined the offer, and asked Hodne for a promise instead.

“He asked me to promise to exact revenge on the ambushers,” Hodne testified to an Army investigator, according to Krakauer.

Hodne said he promised that whoever killed Pat Tillman would pay dearly, a vow that Krakauer said was the Army’s first lie to the Tillman family.

Kevin Tillman was born 14 months after Pat Tillman, and because his older brother pronounced “Kevin” as “Nubbin,” the name Nubbin or Nub has stuck with Kevin throughout his life.

While Pat Tillman played professional football, Kevin Tillman was signed by the Cleveland Indians and played professional baseball in the Indians’ minor league system.

When Pat Tillman decided to enlist, his wife Marie remembered telling him, “It’s not fair to Kevin, in some ways — because you know he’s going to come with you.”

The two Tillmans went through the Army’s boot camp together and later the grueling Ranger school. They were both deployed to Iraq and then sent to Afghanistan together. In their off hours, Kevin Tillman lived with Pat and Marie Tillman.

Ranger Ordered to Keep Friendly Fire Secret From Kevin Tillman

Kevin Tillman accompanied his brother’s body back to the States, but on the day he left he asked nearly every Ranger he met to find the notebook that his brother was carrying to jot down his thoughts. All assured Kevin Tillman they would look for it.

Instead, the notebook was burned along with Pat Tillman’s uniform and body armor.

Desperate to hear firsthand how his brother died, Kevin Tillman repeatedly called his unit in Afghanistan trying to reach Pfc. Bryan O’Neal, the youngest Ranger in the platoon who was with Pat Tillman when he died.

Tillman called eight times before someone agreed to allow O’Neal to talk on the phone, but O’Neal was ordered to keep the friendly fire a secret from Kevin.

“I was appalled that when I was able to actually speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him what happened,” O’Neal testified, according to the book.

When the unit returned to the United States, Kevin Tillman was there to greet them and in the ensuing days even worked out with some of the soldiers who had fired on his brother. No one mentioned to Tillman what really had happened back on that Afghan mountain.

Later that day, a senior officer realized the secret couldn’t be kept from Tillman forever, and called him in to tell him the truth. The news stunned Tillman. He also was stunned at how casually his comrades had kept the news from him, including those who had killed his brother.

“I did my PT [physical therapy] with two of the people who killed Pat and then went to breakfast with the P.L. [platoon leader] who eventually got fired, telling him, ‘Hey, you did a good job out there,’ not having a clue what really went on,” Kevin Tillman later testified at one of the seven investigations into his brother’s death.

Kevin Tillman asked Congress for an investigation into his brother’s death because he no longer trusted the generals he served under.

Recapping the string of lies and official reports that called the military’s actions “missteps,” Kevin Tillman testified, “These are intentional falsehoods that meet the legal definition of fraud. ... These are deliberate acts of deceit.”

Despite the betrayal by the Army, Kevin Tillman decided to finish out his enlistment and remained in the Army until July 2005.

In 2008, he published a book about the Iraq war entitled, “The Transparent Pillage.”

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