Posted on 9/3/2007, 6:19:10 AM by World_Events
Sargent Binkley says trying to escape the nightmares that haunted him from his military service ultimately led him to a San Mateo County jail cell.
The former Army Ranger captain from Los Altos said he was tormented by the smell of decomposing bodies in a mass grave in Bosnia, and the face of a teenage boy he gunned down during a raid on a marijuana plantation in Honduras.
Trying to deal with the trauma, Binkley said he became addicted to painkillers that military doctors prescribed for a fractured pelvis and dislocated hip. Now he is charged with robbing two pharmacies at gunpoint in 2006 - one in San Mateo County and the other in Santa Clara County - not of money, but of drugs.
"The only goal of my life was to obtain those, and I knew where they were," Binkley, 32, said in a jailhouse interview in Redwood City. "It got to the point of desperation and almost life and death."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Yeah, right. It’s not his fault.
It happens; but the libs should not make a victim out of this poor man. I dislike the libs so much for doing that to this man.
A lot of rangers will be angered by the tangential information in the story. The man took a wrong turn and apparently had a drug problem.
We’ve seen so many of these articles that turned out bogus in the last few years that I’ve grown more cynical than I’d like...
That was my first impulse; like you anytime I read about PTSD and these kinds of things, and they claim to be Special Forces or Rangers or the like, it gets my B.S. alert ringing.
The only thing immediately corroborating his claim is the article mentioning one of his West Point classmates that knew him.
He could also have been to Ranger school and Ranger qualified, but not a “real” Ranger that spent time in Battalion.
Who wants to bet that this guy never came any closer to military service than watching Platoon while stoned.
Who wants to bet that this guy never came any closer to military service than watching Platoon while stoned.
I’m sure there will be a follow up article about troops coming home from WW2 with a morphine addiction. SFGate is ubiased, correct?
I smelled BS on that part too.
Captain Sargent Binkley ?
He’s 32 and a former Ranger captain? I mean, it’s possible, but likely? At any rate, Ranger-qualified officers are a pretty rare breed. I expect we will find out sooner or later.
Are you or have you ever been in the Army?
Being 32 and a former captain is no big deal.
There are plenty/lots of Ranger qualified officers in the Army, and a few in the other services who got slots to go to the course. There’s a big difference in having graduated the course and being in one of the battalions.
No, never had the privilege of serving in the US military. Thanks for the insight.
The only Sargent Binkley I could find a reference to in the military was an O-2.
No surprise. Your source may never have been updated to O3.
Yeah, I thought of that. I doubted he was what he said he was, but...there ya go.
Yeah.
Right.
Anyways, it fits the cemented Media notions, so it will be ‘told’ that way, even if it obviously stinks.
Does the SF newspaper headline other stories, “Non Military Vet robs...........”?
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