Posted on 12/12/2007 9:16:26 AM PST by KingofZion
Troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan can relax for a discounted price in Disney World, a luxury resort in Hawaii, or even a fancy lodge in the German Alps.
They can do that thanks to recreation programs funded in part by money service members and their families lost on the military’s own slot machines and bingo games.
While the military argues it is in dire need of the approximately $130 million generated each year from gambling to keep its troops happy and enlisted, critics charge that it is preying on its own and fostering an addiction it does little to prevent or treat.
To Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), the repercussions of raising such revenue from members of the military themselves come at a high cost.
“It is wrong for the U.S. government to use gambling to pay for what we [in Congress] should be supplying for our troops to begin with,” Davis said. “That’s a disgrace and a shame.”
Davis, a Southern Baptist who says he opposes gambling for moral reasons, is poised to introduce a bill that would prohibit the use of gambling devices with the exception of charitable events and state lotteries.
Gambling in the military amounts to a large business, generating revenues of more than $130 million a year — similar to a medium-sized Las Vegas casino. That money gets pumped into recreational programs for the military.
The revenue generated from slot machines at the clubs and bowling alleys on overseas bases and bingo operations on domestic Army installations pales in comparison with the Pentagon’s overall defense budget of more than $500 billion.
Yet the existence of these games has created problems for military personnel, and critics charge the Defense Department has no centralized policy to deal with gambling addiction. Moreover, in late 2006, the Navy at Camp Pendleton, Calif., closed an inpatient program dealing specifically with gambling addiction across the military services. The only other one, in Okinawa, Japan, closed its doors the year before.
Compounding the problem with gambling addiction is a surge in casinos across the country in proximity to military bases, as well as easily accessible gambling over the Internet.
“It’s an excellent idea to pull [the slot machines] off the overseas bases,” said Lenyatta Tinnelle, a former senior airman who struggled with gambling addiction. “Overseas places have nothing to do … it’s so easy to get hooked. ”
Tinnelle first started gambling when she was stationed at Camp Red Cloud in South Korea in the mid-1990s, but her addiction intensified when in 2000 she was deployed to Keflavík, Iceland, where the slot machines available on the former naval base offered a respite from dark, cold evenings and boredom.
The senior airman, who had been diligent about having savings and investing money in bonds over the years, ended up gambling all her $40,000 in savings and wrote about $50,000 in bad checks on the base, said her mother, Valerie Tinnelle, in a phone interview from San Antonio.
She gambled together with her superiors, but none of them ever talked to her about an addiction that was becoming obvious, said Tinnelle. Instead, she was court-martialed after writing the bad checks and put on suicide watch as she was threatened to be thrown in military jail even though she had asked for medical help for her addiction. Lenyatta eventually avoided jail, but was demoted and eventually pushed out of the Air Force.
She stymied her addiction with the help of her civilian friends in Iceland, who took her to treatment, she said. After her case became publicized, she said she received numerous letters from others in the military revealing their problems and congratulating her on bringing awareness to an issue that the military mostly dealt with through the court system.
Lenyatta now works for a defense contractor in Kuwait and volunteered to spend about a year in Iraq with that contractor.
“The military failed my daughter,” said Valerie Tinnelle, who spent about 15 years in the Air Force. She has a son in the Marine Corps and another daughter who served in the Air Force. “They did not help my daughter at all. She suffered mentally from all the embarrassment.”
There should be good prevention and treatment for gambling addiction in the military, she added.
Meanwhile, Davis, who does not serve on any committee with jurisdiction over the military, is in the early stages of garnering support for his legislation in both the House and Senate.
He would like to name the legislation in the memory of Aaron Walsh, a decorated Apache pilot who last year, after he left the military in 2005, killed himself because of his gambling addiction, which started on a U.S. base in Germany and worsened once he deployed to South Korea, according to several media reports.
Davis faces an uphill battle in a Congress that has little awareness of the gambling problems in the military. Furthermore, his legislation could also open the debate over how far Congress should go to regulate military life.
Attempts over the years to raise awareness about the issue by Davis, Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) have largely been ignored by the Pentagon and drowned out by a Congress dealing with too many pressing military issues in a time of war.
“Gambling, it’s as bad an addiction as you can have,” said Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
But Murtha — who deals with defense matters on a daily basis — admitted he did not know much about gambling in the military and was visibly outraged and surprised to hear that those programs could pose a risk of addiction.
As a result, he said his staff is looking into “how much of a problem it is.” He also expressed interest in finding out more about the financial implications related to the operation of slot machines and other gambling operations.
Davis said, “I can’t imagine anyone who supports the troops to have any reluctance supporting this bill,” adding that Congress should be able to find enough offsets to make up the recreation program money earned through gambling.
The Pentagon is likely to put up a fight against efforts in Congress to curb gambling activities.
“I can’t imagine that we would be able to replace that revenue,” said Rich Gorman, chief operating officer of the Army’s Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command. ”That has not been our experience in the past when [slot machines] were removed.”
A series of scandals in the 1950s led to a slot-machines ban on domestic bases. Later, slot machines were removed from Army and Air Force overseas bases in 1972 after more than a dozen people were court-martialed for stealing cash from them in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Slots were restored in 1980.
“We were not successful in gaining the dollars we thought we needed for our recreation activities to recruit and retain an all-volunteer force,” said Gorman.
The Army operates more than 3,000 slot machines on overseas bases, and manages the Marine Corps’ and some of the Navy’s and Air Force’s slot machine operations. The Air Force also runs its own gambling programs. The military currently has slot machines in Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and Korea, but the Department of Defense did not provide the total number.
On U.S. bases, the Army runs bingo programs, which though modest are twice as profitable as slot machines. The Army is able to produce an annual profit of at least $7 million on revenue of about $45 million, according to several reports.
Profits are bound to increase with the adoption of automated bingo, which makes the game faster but also more addictive, critics charge.
John Kindt, a business professor at the University of Illinois who spent many years studying gambling in the military, said electronic and video gambling devices are generally referred to by sociologists as the betting-game equivalent of “crack cocaine” for their ability to create new addicts.
Those playing the slots can risk only $2.50 at a time, but there is no limit on how many times they can play, said Gorman. Most of the money ultimately flows into jackpots, and about 6 percent remains with the house.
Critics charge that gambling outlets rope in those already disposed to gambling addiction: generally risk-takers who thrive on adrenaline rushes. Military life also oscillates between tedium and tension.
Moreover, with the growing number of soldiers suffering from combat-related stress from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, gambling-addiction specialists fear the armed forces will see an increase in the number of pathological gamblers.
“The military does not deny in a certain sense that there is a problem with gambling, but they do not respond to it,” said Mike Catanzaro, a licensed marriage and family therapist authorized to provide psychotherapy who has dealt with gambling addiction for almost three decades.
Catanzaro ran one of the military’s two residential gambling treatment programs at Camp Pendleton. For years, he fought to bring the program and the addiction problem out of obscurity, but with little success. And when the Navy shut down the program more than a year ago, he retired knowing that those fighting with their gambling addiction would no longer get specialized treatment sponsored by the government.
The shuttering of the program came at a time when Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base, was experiencing rising incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which in many manifested itself in abuse of alcohol or drugs and gambling, according to the retired military psychiatrist.
“The military buries the problem,” Catanzaro told The Hill. “Whenever you talk about gambling, the military gets absolutely paranoid. What it comes down to is an issue of money.”
According to the Department of Defense’s own surveys between 1998 and 2003, close to 2 percent of the armed forces — about 30,000 people — have reported problems indicative of pathological gambling. In 1998 the surveys reported a 2.2 percent addiction rate, but in 2003 that rate dropped to about 1.3 percent, or about 17,000 people.
Despite the apparent drop, critics say the Pentagon’s Survey of Health Related Behaviors among Military Personnel was misleading because its methodology was out of date and self-reporting is a poor tool for measuring excessive gambling. Additionally, Catanzaro said that the movement of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan made it difficult to collect all the surveys.
“The study indicates that the numbers are simply finger-pointers and that it could well be a bigger problem than the [survey] is showing here,” he said. He added that the Pentagon has never formulated a policy with regards to gambling.
Davis this year sought to restore the questions about gambling, which have been left out of the questionnaire for two years now.
He unsuccessfully tried to attach an amendment to the 2008 defense appropriations bill to increase funding to the Department of Defense Lifestyle Assessment Program by $100,000 for them to include questions and analysis regarding gambling-related problems in the Survey of Health Related Behaviors Among Military Personnel. But his amendment did not make it through the Rules Committee.
“What we do not have, either in Congress or the military, is the recognition that gambling is a public health issue,” said Keith Whyte, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. The council is a nonprofit organization that receives funding from those in the gambling industry as well as those who oppose gambling.
The lack of dedicated services to address gambling problems results in increased costs for discipline, courts-martial and discharge, decreased morale and loss of critical personnel, said Whyte.
Whyte has been trying to get support in Congress for a federally funded prevention program for gambling addiction.
But the Army’s Gorman countered that there is a range of services for people dealing with addiction, such as the Web-based counseling program One Source, where soldiers and their families can get six free counseling sessions. One Source is available across the entire Department of Defense.
Additionally, the “chaplain’s corps looks after the spiritual well-being of the force,” he said. Meanwhile, the services and the Department of Defense place strong emphasis on financial planning.
“You can’t look at gambling in isolation — that is a clinical issue we have to deal with through our mental health system,” said a Pentagon spokesman. “Any addiction is bad, and we want to make sure that members of the military receive treatment.”
Gorman discounted the anti-gambling criticism as the result of a small anti-gambling lobby group whose work is “not statistically sound.”
“There is a percentage of the American public that is prone to addiction,” he said. “I do not believe there is any basis in data that is credible.”
He added that the customers at the slot machines are not the young soldiers, but rather more senior members, retirees and civilian employees. “The young folks play video games and are into athletics,” he explained. “About 50 percent of the Army is single … and more interested in dating and social interaction.”
Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), a retired admiral, said that there should not be prohibition of gambling on bases but rather more attention spent on setting limits and regulations and establishing prevention programs.
“There is a fine line between asking young men and women to give the ultimate sacrifice and making life-and-death decisions and then saying that they are not mature enough to make conscious decisions on their own,” he said in an interview. “Where do you draw the line?”
Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), a proponent of gambling whose district includes Las Vegas, said that gambling does not trigger addiction. Instead, she said, that behavior is the manifestation of an addictive personality.
“The military is not a helpless waif in this; they will do what they want to do,” she told The Hill. “Members of Congress should not waste time with nonsensical issues telling the military what recreational activities they should allow on bases.”
The military’s problem may also be compounded by the fact that gambling has boomed over the last decade.
“They can’t say anymore that they did not know,” Whyte said. “There is a lot of deliberate neglect. The fact that a commander closes the only inpatient gambling program and nobody notices is appalling.”
Service members do have the option to go to outpatient clinics, but those do not necessarily specialize in gambling and lump it in with other addictions, said Catanzaro.
The Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton treated nine pathological gamblers in its outpatient program over the last year, said hospital spokesman Douglas Allen. Most of the patients developed their addiction due to the availability of gambling on the Internet as well as the American Indian casinos in Southern California.
Patients at the hospital receive at least 20 hours per week of group therapy, individual therapy and educational groups. A large component of treatment is the introduction and incorporation of support-group services such as Gamblers Anonymous or Smart Recovery, which are similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, said Allen.
Once out of the military, veterans are able to find more help within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA has a world-renowned program in Brecksville, Ohio, which deals specifically with gambling addiction.
Just recently, Whyte and the Ohio congressional delegation successfully fought off the VA’s plan to destroy 35 years’ worth of data from its problem-gambling treatment program. Whyte said that the files hold detailed clinical information on thousands of veterans who suffered from gambling problems and potentially contain the keys to unlocking the causes of problem gambling.
“Things have not changed that much since the 1970s [in terms of treatment] and the availability of gambling has only increased since then,” Whyte said.
Meanwhile, a pilot study conducted by the Veterans Administration of Central California found that pathological gambling is more prevalent among military veterans than in the general population and may be associated with combat-related PTSD. A study of veterans undergoing treatment for PTSD showed a rate of problem gambling as high as 17 percent.
Data for 120 subjects were analyzed. Seventy-five percent of those studied were 56 to 60 years old, 92 percent were combat veterans, 80 percent were Vietnam vets and 75 percent had a VA diagnosis of PTSD.
The Army’s Gorman said that the service has not seen a spike in the use of the military’s slot machines among people returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, in part because most soldiers return to the United States from the war zones.
Would you rather the troops spend their pay on hookers while overseas?
I am in Italy and their are slot machines all over the bases. Young enlisted people are pouring their paychecks down the drain. They really need to get rid of them.
It would be cheaper. In all seriousness, prostitution is against the UCMJ now and people are getting court marshaled like crazy now. Gambling is legal.
I'm not in favor of the govt helping our military people lose their hard-earned money.
Just wondering where you are in Italy...
I’d like to see if those who are caterwalling about this have ever said Word One about the way the government-run Lotteries take advantage of the poor, or whether this is just another attempt to “get Bush” and make the military look bad.
I stayed at the Shades of Green Resort in Disney World. It was a right nice place. Room fees were based on rank. The higher your rank the higher the room charge. I thought it was fair.
Has to do with the MWR funds. I wonder if the writer or congress critters understand how MWR works?
You mean the reporters who have the USAF flying F-14s?
I doubt they know how the non-approriated funds MWR operations like the clubs and commissary work.
I am in Sigonella. Also I believe you live in Allentown...I grew up there.
Not if you can find a way for them to get it free without having to get married..........
It strikes me that troops who are prone to gamble will find other venues to do so. Better that they do so on base, where their losses are more or less handed back to them in a different form, than at a crooked game operated by mobsters outside the base where they are cheated and possibly in physical danger.
If they’ve got enough pay to do anything other than their jobs and basic personal upkeep we’re paying them too much.
That'll show 'em!
Who writes articles so long and loses people in the first paragraphs?
We trust our troops with defending our freedom.
I trust them, as adults, to decide whether or not they’d like to gamble.
I don’t gamble - I have to admit that I don’t quite “get” it, but if people want to, they can as far as I’m concerned.
Small world! I’m about 20 minutes from Allentown. I never heard of Sigonella. We’re going to Italy and Sicily next Sept. and really looking forward to it. It’s a Globus trip.
http://www.globusjourneys.com/Product.aspx?trip=8ZL&source=GL_Product_EU_Italy_Vacations
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