Friendly fire

[March 28th, 2007] Two years and 7,000 miles separate Spc. Ryan Preston of Gresham from his service in Iraq.

Yet Preston now faces a fresh battle—with his superiors in the Oregon Army National Guard.

Preston, whose six-year commitment to the Guard ends in October, learned in February that the Guard was planning to charge him $4,000 for military equipment it now considers missing from the year-plus he spent fighting in Iraq.

That list of personal equipment includes two canteens Preston says he had to leave on the battlefield under enemy fire. It also includes several other items—from Kevlar vests to body armor breast plates—that Preston says he left in military custody when he departed the Middle East.

A front-line infantry soldier, Preston served in Iraq from March 2004 until April 2005 with the Eugene-based 2nd Battalion of the 162nd Infantry.

For the 24-year-old Preston and his mother, this new financial fight raises questions about the military's treatment of returning soldiers and the lumbering bureaucracy that still governs much of its policy.

Advocates for returning soldiers say it's not uncommon for veterans to be charged for missing equipment, and it's not always the soldiers' fault.

"It's a really big problem," says Adele Kubein, a mother of an Oregon guardswoman and a Corvallis member of Military Families Speak Out, a national antiwar group. "It's adding insult to injury."

Speaking at his mother's house in Gresham about the dispute, the baby-faced Preston wore a red Brandon Roy Trail Blazers jersey and the dog tags he received during basic training in June 2002. But his boyish enthusiasm disappeared when the topic turned to the missing equipment.

"I've sacrificed so much of my personal life for the military," he says. "It's almost more worth it to pay for it. But I'm not going to pay for it."

"He loved the army—he did," adds his mother, Karen Preston. "And this has just done it for him."

A spokesman for the Oregon National Guard, Lt. Stephen Bomar, says it's not yet clear whether Preston will have to pay for any or all of the equipment, although Preston contends he initially was told he would. Bomar would not confirm the $4,000 amount.

According to Bomar, the National Guard has begun an investigation. The probe is likely to take a few weeks as it goes up the ladder, from the company commander to the battalion commander to the brigade commander, before reaching the judge advocate general's office.

Preston has signed sworn statements saying he lost some of the items, including two canteens and a canteen cover, while fighting in Sadr City, Iraq, in August or September 2004. The military has asked him to provide additional statements from soldiers who were there to corroborate his story, he says. However, many of those soldiers are no longer with the Guard and have scattered across the country, Preston says.

Meanwhile, most of his equipment, Preston's mother says, is missing because the military has mislabeled the boxes containing his gear.

Before leaving the Middle East in April 2005, Preston packed his own personal equipment into a shipping container that traveled from Kuwait to Colorado before ending up in Eugene. (Sensitive items, like rifles and night-vision goggles, were shipped separately and are not among the missing items.)

The military requires soldiers to take responsibility for the equipment again when it reaches them in the United States, says Bomar.

But Preston says nobody told him he had to go to Eugene. And, he adds, he asked several times for his items to be brought to the Portland area, as he was juggling a new full-time job as an overnight security guard at the Rose Garden, adjusting to civilian life and trying to cope with the aftereffects of war without proper therapy. He also has no car.

Eventually the Guard shipped items belonging to members of Preston's unit in Gresham from his battalion's base in Eugene, his mother says. But only one of Preston's bags showed up. Because all of his gear has been in military possession since leaving his hands, Preston says he shouldn't be charged for it.

"The army has their gear," his mother says. "That's the bottom line."