We are branded as criminals. I'm leaving the army less
than six months after a combined 17 years career because
of the injustice of G rat.
I was a law enforcement agent in South Carolina.
I did nothing wrong. I was never arrested,
never charged, and I lost my job anyway.
I mean, there's times where I broke down
on my knees and like,
what's happening, my career ruined,
about to lose my pension.
How am I going to support my family aid?
The real tragic outcome from this G Rap debacle is
the soldiers and former soldiers who stood up and volunteered
to serve and protect our Constitution are now being treated
as criminals without any kind of due process rights.
And it's horrific what Army CID has done.
At the height of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the Army National Guard came up with a plan to
increase recruitment by enabling
off duty National Guard personnel to go out and talk
to their friends,
Co workers and encourage them to join the Guard.
Do you have the fantastic job?
They were short people and it created thousands
of temporary recruiters. I participated in G Rap while I
was in ROTC at the University of South Carolina working
on my Commission.
The program was very simple.
You had to engage people that weren't in the military,
talk to them about the guard and you would input
their information into a system online and if they ended
up joining you would end up getting paid 1/2 of
your payment. And if they completed basic training,
or I believe shipped to basic training,
you would get paid another $1000 for a total of
$2000 per recruit. I put three people through the program,
that's so $6000. Yeah, I legally recruited 6 orders and
was paid 11,000 from
2005 to 27. And the program by all accounts
worked fantastic.
They discontinued the program in 2012.
There had been some real
corruption or criminal misconduct, very limited when you consider the
size and the scope of the program.
But there were some recruiters that were manipulating data
and giving kickbacks or sharing money with recruiting assistance.
Army leadership testified at Congress and testified to wildly inaccurate
numbers of people who
had participated in the program who they labeled criminals.
I never knew I was on an investigation.
I just returned from every Congress combat patrol in Kabul,
Afghanistan in 2018. The CAD agents that need to do
adna swab
and give fingerprints so they could close my inquiry into
my participation during over a decade ago.
The investigations were incredibly sloppy,
so they would call people on the phone and say
who was the first person you talked to about joining
the National Guard.
And keep in mind this would have been in many
cases 8 or 10 years before
if they didn't say the recruiting
assistant's name. The investigators assumed
the recruiting assistant was guilty of criminal misconduct,
which is absolutely ridiculous. Around
2014 I got a call from a place
I'm not sure what the number was or they didn't
really identify themselves.
They asked quite a few questions regarding Captain DeLeon
and I mentioned to them about him recruiting me to
get into the guard and it was just random.
And they chose what procedures and guidelines to ensure crime
was found versus investigating one.
Most district attorneys would not touch these cases because they
were so tainted
with cookie cutter interrogations, phone interviews,
and poor documentation. And this is one of the most
tragic parts of this entire debacle.
Army CID has this system where they can title you,
and what that means in simplified terms is they're entering
your name in the title block of a criminal report.
And it also would show the offenses you're alleged to
have violated,
whether you're convicted or ever
officially charged. They titled thousands of people involved in G
Rap.
And then they took the extra step of reporting those
names to the Federal Bureau of Investigations
Criminal History Data Center. And so all these people who
were simply titled based on the CID agents
opinion now have a criminal history that
is wrong and illegal because they've said that
that these soldiers and former soldiers were actually arrested or
received into custody and of course they were never arrested.
One of the worst parts of this is that I
had no idea.
I had no idea that this had occurred,
and I found out about years later
when applying for a concealed weapons permit in South Carolina
that I had what looks to be a pending charge.
The impacts of being entitled by Army CID are pretty
substantial.
If you're still in the military service,
at a minimum you will absolutely have difficulty getting promoted.
So I found out in 2019 I was like the
promotion,
the major, my promotion pack got flagged for fraud investigation.
So once you get notified that there's a red flag
in the Promotion view board,
you have 10 days to submit rebuttal,
and then you have 18 months
before they make a decision at the Senate.
All kinds of bureaucratic hoops,
administrative hoops through the Army,
and we even have Congress members petitioned on my behalf.
And by the time 18 months hit for me,
it was April. First it reached,
it expired. So now I'm forced to
remove the list because they didn't follow the timeline.
Now, you can't continue to climb the ladder.
We've seen many, many cases where somebody has moved on
from the Army.
The G rap comes back to haunt them through this
background investigation.
So I have clients that have gone on to be
physician assistants or physical therapists where they have to get
a state
medical license or a real estate agent where they have
to get a realtor license.
I've represented police officers. All of these professions require
a background check. To the layperson.
Looking at a NCIC report,
it looks like the case is still open and still
pending.
But in reality there never was a case.
And so these these former soldiers that are now trying
to get on with a different career
are still having to deal with the the horrors of
G Rap many,
many years later. The Police Department that I was working
for when I found out that I was titled,
they did work with me.
You know, they they heard about my my situation and
they looked through,
you know, the paperwork that they could.
And in their eyes, when it came down to my
credentialing,
there was nothing they could do.
They can no longer employ me because they had to
have a credential law enforcement officer with a clean record.
My wife was extremely supportive
and that's all I could have.
All I could have asked for is this is an
extremely stressful situation for our entire family.
This this had me down for for a long time.
Mentally. I knew that I had to get out of
bed and continue to
to be a good father and put food on the
table and take care of my family.
It's it's very sad. It's very sad and I'll stop.
Myself as a lifer on active duty,
retired 20 years just like my father did,
but in a tough pill to swallow in.
So I now look fine,
but man, on every night I can't stop thinking about
G rap.
I can't stop thinking about the others who's going through
the same thing.
I've seen nothing in the decade or so where I've
been working on G Rap cases to make me think
they are going to overturn their long held decisions.
If you go back and look at these cases using
the same flawed assumptions,
you're going to get the same flawed conclusions.
And Army CID is absolutely not the people who should
be looking at these cases.
They deserve an independent third party review by what I
would call real professional law enforcement.
I do not have a whole lot of hope
for CID reviewing their own cases.
It feels a lot like a fox in the hen
house.
It has a lot of irony to it.
Those of us who choose to serve in the military,
put on the uniform and believe in our rights as
Americans.
This situation is showing that those of us in the
military are not being afforded the rights that we're fighting
for.
Why does it seem like accountability stops at the Pentagon?
There's cowardice in our leadership,
period. Simple, point blank. There's cowardice.
Not one leader is elected to fight for the innocent
soldiers.
I wish I hadn't have helped them out.
I still love my country.
I still love South Carolina Army National Guard.
But this isn't worth it.
And the way it turned out and the way we
were treated and are still treated as terrible.