by Renee Ruby

Created on: June 15, 2009

What a horrible thought! As if our soldiers didn't have enough to worry about in regards to protecting their country! Well it seems to be a distressing truth.

I am the mother of a 19 year old soldier to that joined the military not just to serve and protect but to find the man within the child. His time at basic was fairly uneventful. When we visited him at graduation I saw a proud boy, slightly uneasy about the prospects of being sent to war yet ready to take on the task presented him. The next step in his journey was to attend school to be trained in his chosen path. Unfortunately this prospect took a terrible turn.

From what I understand, my son was attacked on base by several (6-8 maybe) fellow soldiers performing a gang initiation ritual. He was beaten to the ground and his head was repeatedly bashed against the pavement and his neck pressured into unnatural angles. He was taken to the base hospital and treated for cuts and bruises, a concussion and neck trauma. Some of his assailants were jailed soon after but then released. He was told that the attack was gang related.

When he relayed this information to me I was appalled. I never would have thought such a thing could happen on a US military base! And especially not from men that he may one day have to rely on for his life! Since then he has been afraid for his life. Several, if not all, of his attackers are still roaming the base until trial. The physical injuries are nothing compared to the mental trauma he now suffers. As this situation has climaxed he has been assigned a "permanent" battle buddy. Someone who stays by his side at all times. At first it seemed this was a logical progression of investigation. But it got quite confusing as we discovered that his battle buddy was actually undercover intelligence. It seems that soldiers under cover are circulated in AIT bases to weed out undesirables and find these gangs!

My son's latest "battle buddy" spoke to me personally and said that he had been assigned to my son for four days and that in his trained opinion my son had become mentally unstable as a direct result of the attack and that he was going to obtain a waiver for him to be released on a medical discharge. I had received several unsettling text messages from my son just prior to this conversation and a friend who lived close-by went to the base to check on him and called me with disturbing descriptions of my son's state of mind and treatment by the Army. The attackers are all running around an

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