As the deadline nears for veterans to apply for special pay for having been “stop-lossed” after 9/11, the Defense Department has set up a fast-lane for one group of applicants: survivors of those who have died since leaving the military.

“Every week we get applications from surviving family members,” said Maj. Roy Whitley, the Army’s Project Manager for Retroactive Stop Loss Special Pay. “We deal with those one-on-one, and we do as much work as we can and they go to the top of the list.”

Since Congress voted in the 2009 war supplemental to compensate Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen who were involuntarily extended on active duty, about 30,000 veterans have been awarded back pay amounting to $500 for every month or partial month they stayed beyond their separation date, Whitley said. The average benefit has been about $3,700, according to the Defense Department.

Deadline for submitting an application is Oct. 21. He said the turnaround time is anywhere from two to four weeks.

Whitley was unable to estimate how many vets or surviving dependents will be eligible for the money, but the Army alone estimates it has 125,000 former Soldiers who should be applying for it.

He said the Army has so far been able to identify more than 80,000 people it knows must be contacted and has sent out letters to more than 50,000. It expects to finish up its identification and out-reach program in about 10 days, he said. In addition the Army has placed information posters up at recruiting offices and veterans centers across the country.

Servicemembers – or their survivors – who were stop-lossed anytime between Sept. 11, 2001 and Sept. 30, 2009 are eligible for the special pay, according to the DoD.

Applicants need their DD-214 or a personnel record noting their original expiration of service date. Additional information and required source documents can be found on DoD’s website. The department also set up a Stop-Loss Facebook page.

While Whitney works as the Army’s stop-loss retroactive pay program manager, he said all the services are giving applications from survivors individualized, expedited service.

“They’re at a disadvantage [as civilians]. You don’t understand the records, don’t understand the process … you don’t know the regs. That is our job. There is no surviving family member that does not get taken care of immediately.”

Former Air Force Maj. Mike Almy was deployed to Iraq in early 2003 when he sent what he thought was an innocuous note to his partner back home using military e-mail. Months later, his chain of command deemed the content of that e-mail a violation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and he was administratively booted from the service.

But despite his humiliating ouster, Almy wants back into the Air Force when and if the politically charged DADT policy is lifted.

And he’s not alone.

Nearly 4,000 men and women have been discharged from the services annually under the policy since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell went into effect in 1994, according to a University of California study. Just how many of those discharged want to serve again is unknown, though attorneys and gay rights supporters say there’s no question that potentially thousands booted under DADT are waiting to don the uniform once again.

Almy says he’s ready to return to duty the day after the law is repealed.

The former communications officer had served about 13 years on active duty when an e-mail he sent to his partner was found on a government computer and turned over to his commander.

Despite a career that included four deployments to the Middle East and being cited as an “outstanding field grade manager” just four months before his discharge, Almy was separated from the service and given a police escort from his office at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, “as if I were a common criminal or a threat to national security,” he wrote in a March letter to President Obama.

“The Pentagon Working Group is working to address this [issue],” Almy said in an interview. “They don’t have the answer to that yet, but maybe it will be among the findings when they report on December 1st.”

Aaron Belkin, director of the University of California-based Palm Center, which researches and advocates for gays in the military, said the Defense Department’s working group has “provisionally … decided that after the policy is repealed, gay troops discharged [under DADT] will be eligible to re-enlist exactly under the same criteria as anyone who left the military. They won’t be penalized.”

The exception would be in cases where the servicemember was also discharged for misconduct. “They may have a problem,” he added.

Belkin admits that even if those returning after a discharge for being gay are accepted back into the service, they may lose rank and pay they’d earned during their previous hitch.

“It’s not a hundred percent fair, but it’s not nothing, either,” he said. “It’s a compromise, I guess.”

While in recent years gays discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell have received an honorable discharge, many had previously been given general discharges under honorable conditions or even bad-conduct discharges. Because of that, some gays interested in trying to re-enlist may have to petition the Board for the Correction of Military Records to have the characterization of their discharges changed.

Greg Rinckey, managing partner for the Washington law firm of Tully-Rinckey, said the firm already is getting e-mails for discharged gays who want back in. Even gays who got out with an honorable discharge, he points out, will have the reason noted on their DD-214.

“I think you’re going to see a slew of issues with the BCMR,” he said. “Depending on how many cases go to BCMR, there could be guidance put out by the Defense Department … to change the DD-214 to reflect they were separated under secretarial authority and got an honorable discharge.”

Rinckey said he doesn’t know “how it will play out yet.”

“We’ll wait and see how many people reapply,” he said, especially people who got less than honorable discharges.

Not everyone removed under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is eager to try again, however.

Robin Chaurasiya, who until this month was an Air Force first lieutenant serving as a communications officer, said she would have to be certain things had changed and been made fair in the military before she considered coming back in. Chaurasiya was discharged July 26 for being a lesbian.

“I don’t think repeal of the policy will change everything overnight,” she said. “There’s always going to be some people who can be openly discriminatory.”

“I think it’s going to take years for that kind of change,” she added. “I’m not interested in considering going back in until it is worked out.”

(Photo courtesy of Mike Almy)

SAN ANTONIO – Master Sgt. Todd Nelson lost his right eye and ear in a flash when a car bomb in Afghanistan exploded, sending fire up his arm and over his head.

Although it’s taken years of painstaking work, the military has given him a bright blue eye and ear lightly freckled and pinked from summer sun. They’re not flesh and blood, but the glass and silicon replicas are so realistic, so perfectly customized, that they’ve given Nelson something else: the ability to face the world without shocking it.

“Honestly, people really don’t know it’s artificial,” said Nelson, whose injuries three years ago included third-degree burns, a skull fracture and broken jaw. “In casual social interactions, I see much smaller cases where people stare.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought a new kind of patient to the facial prothestics lab at the Lackland Air Force Base: wounded warriors, who have recently suffered heavy burns and multiple traumas. The lab is one of two major facial prosthetic programs in the Defense Department, and it has seen an unprecedented new stream of wounded Soldiers.

Before the wars, the 26-year-old lab’s patients were almost exclusively cancer and civilian trauma survivors, but “all of that prepared us for wartime, and that’s really why our department is here,” said lab director Dr. Joe Villalobos.

The lab doesn’t track how many Soldiers wounded from the war it’s treated. However, before the wars began in 2001 and 2003, the facility rarely saw combat-related injuries – only an occasional Vietnam-era veteran looking for a new prostheses. Now, partly because the lab is across town from the Army’s only burn center, wounded warriors make up about one-fifth of the roughly 425 patients they treat each year.

While the technology and capabilities at the lab are available in the civilian world, the Lackland lab has the expertise and resources to give Soldiers the best possible care with little concern about the financial burdens that civilian trauma patients might face, he said.

“Our goal is to give them the best of the best,” Villalobos said. “We’re going to give them the ideal treatment.”

Patients at Lackland are treated with a combination of cutting-edge technology and carefully hand-hewed prostethics.

Using specially designed computer equipment, technicians can turn an MRI into three-dimensional molds and create custom-fit pieces to replace missing jaw bones or sections of skull for implant. The lab has even done it remotely, creating a perfectly fitting replacement for one-third of a patient’s skull at a hospital in Balad, Iraq, Villalobos said.

But sometimes, after patients have undergone life-saving surgeries and reconstruction work for basic functionality, aesthetics start to matter. Soldiers tire of stares and flashes of shock on the faces of people unaccustomed to severe burn injuries.

“When your face is affected, you lose your identity,” said Villalobos. “We address that here.”

Not everyone who loses an ear, eye or nose tip is interested in getting a new one. After the memory of what you used to look like begins to fade, “you start to accept who you are,” said Nelson, a 37-year-old Army mechanic from Evergreen, Colo. And because burn patients typically undergo dozens of surgeries (Nelson is at 43 and counting), many are simply too procedure-weary to seek prosthetic ears or noses.

But Nelson said for him, “one of the things that bothered me the most aesthetically was the missing ear.”

He knew getting a prosthetic right ear, sculpted to match his remaining ear on the left, wouldn’t make a functional difference. If anything, the prosthetic has slightly dampened noises.

“It was for form, but I couldn’t help but want some of my form back,” said Nelson, who sometimes wears a hair piece to cover his burned scalp.

To create prosthetic ears, the lab uses cameras that generate 3-D images for technicians to make molds. While adhesive can be used to keep prosthetic ears in place, younger patients like Nelson often opt for titanium implants that allow the prosthetic to magnet on.

When a patient has one ear remaining, a mirror-image ear is created. Two missing ears are more difficult, said Villalobos, but the lab has created ears using family members as models.

One Soldier wanted his father’s ears, so the lab took images and created versions that were smaller and less wrinkly to make sure the prosthetic versions were right for the Soldier’s age, Villalobos said.

“It’s easier to create a second ear if they have one already, but if someone comes in and says ‘I want Clint Eastwood ears,’ we can do that,” he said, grinning.

The technicians pay close attention to detail.

Nancy Hanson, the lab’s clinical anaplastologist, carefully matches skin tone using powdered pigment and tiny red and blue embroidery threads to create the visual effect of veins. Freckles are painted on, and tops of ears are pinked to mimic sun exposure. Some Soldiers get “summer ears” and “winter ears” to account for skin-tone variation.

“It’s a combination of a little bit of science, art and ingenuity,” said Hanson. “We deal with very unique situations.”

Nelson’s ear took about two years to complete, in part because his caregivers had to fight growth of scar tissue that kept covering the titanium implants and creating uneven skin on the side of his head.

Nelson said he was shocked at how realistic the fake ear turned out even after going through multiple fittings and coloration sessions to match his skin tone and freckles.

“I do feel like I have the best-looking one ever made,” he smiled.

WASHINGTON — Intelligence officials, past and present, are raising concerns that the WikiLeaks.org revelations could endanger U.S. counterterror networks in the Afghan region, and damage information sharing with U.S. allies.

People in Afghanistan or Pakistan who have worked with American intelligence agents or the military against the Taliban or al-Qaida may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of once-secret U.S. military documents, former and current officials said.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies are asking whether they can trust America to keep secrets. And the Obama administration is scrambling to repair any political damage to the war effort back home.

The material could reinforce the view put forth by the war’s opponents in Congress that one of the nation’s longest conflicts is hopelessly stalemated. Congress has so far backed the war, and an early test of that continued support will come Tuesday when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., holds a hearing on the Afghan war.

Still, the leaks are not expected to affect passage of a $60 billion war funding bill. Despite strong opposition among liberals who see Afghanistan as an unwinnable quagmire, House Democrats must either approve the bill before leaving at the end of this week for a six-week vacation, or commit political suicide by leaving troops in the lurch in war zones overseas.

As that political battle plays out, U.S. analysts are in a speed-reading battle against their adversaries.

They are trying to limit the damage to the military’s human intelligence network that has been built up over a decade inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such figures range from Afghan village elders who have worked behind the scenes with U.S. troops to militants who have become double-agents.

Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said the military may need weeks to review all the records to determine “the potential damage to the lives of our servicemembers and coalition partners.”

WikiLeaks insists it has behaved responsibly, even withholding some 15,000 records that are believed to include names of specific Afghans or Pakistanis who helped U.S. troops on the ground.

But former CIA director Michael Hayden denounced the leak Monday as incredibly damaging to the U.S. — and a gift to its enemies.

“If I had gotten this trove on the Taliban or al-Qaida, I would have called it priceless,” he said. “I would love to know what al-Qaida or the Taliban was thinking about a specific subject in 2007, for instance, because I could say they got that right and they got that wrong.”

Hayden predicted the Taliban would take anything that described a U.S. strike and the intelligence behind it “and figure out who was in the room when that particular operation, say in 2008, was planned, and in whose home.” Then the militants would probably punish the traitor who’d worked with the Americans, he said.

“It’s possible that someone could get killed in the next few days,” said former senior intelligence officer Robert Riegle. He recalled what happened when the U.S. arrested the Soviet double agent, Robert Hanssen: “When people found out what we knew, people died.”

Another casualty may be the U.S. attempts to forge cooperation with Pakistan’s secretive intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.

Multiple American cables complain about ISI complicity with the Taliban. And they also tell the Pakistanis “how much we know about them,” said Riegle, who now runs Mission Concepts Inc., a private intelligence firm.

“You’re not going to see any cooperation,” he said. “People are going to freeze.”

The raw data released Sunday may also prove useful in a wider way to America’s “frenemies” — the intelligence services of countries like China and Russia, who have the resources to process and make sense of such vast vaults of data, said Ellen McCarthy, former intelligence officer and president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

Former CIA chief Hayden added: “If I’m head of the Russian intelligence, I’m getting my best English speakers and saying: ‘Read every document, and I want you to tell me, how good are these guys? What are their approaches, their strengths, their weaknesses and their blind spots?’ ”

Former CIA official Paul Pillar described what he called the coming chill in the U.S. intelligence community, which had been pushed into sharing information across agencies in the aftermath of the intelligence failures that led to 9/11.

“The pendulum will now swing back,” he said. Pillar, who now teaches at Georgetown University, said the community would shift from “need to know” back to “need to protect.”

WASHINGTON – Suicides among Army and Air National Guard and Reserve troops have spiked this year, and the military is at a loss to explain why.

Sixty-five members of the Guard and Reserve took their own lives during the first six months of 2010, compared with 42 for the same period in 2009. The grim tally is further evidence that suicides continue to plague the military even though it’s stepped up prevention efforts through counseling and mental health awareness programs.

“Suicides among military personnel and veterans are at an epidemic rate, and it’s getting worse,” said Tim Embree, a former Marine who served two tours in Iraq and is now a legislative associate for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group.

The Army recently announced that 32 Soldiers, including 11 in the Guard and Reserve, took their own lives in June, a rate of one a day and a level not seen since the Vietnam War, according to the military.

Seven of the suicides occurred in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The worrisome trend is reflected in Missouri, where the state Army and Air National Guards have suffered six suicides so far this year, their highest total in a decade. They account for nearly a quarter of the 27 suicides experienced since the Missouri Guard started keeping records in 2001.

“We’re all devastated,” said Col. Gary Gilmore, joint force chaplain for the Missouri Guard. “From their battle buddy right next to them all the way up the chain, each one has a tremendous personal impact and sense of loss.”

Explanations are hard to come by. The suicides could have nothing – or everything – to do with the victims’ military service.

“It is the separation from our families, it is the lack of a support structure in our personal lives sometimes, financial challenges, relationships – we know that,” Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a recent talk about the suicide problem to troops in South Korea.

Unlike active-duty troops, Guard members are part-time Soldiers and airmen. Except for deployments, they are together for only 39 days a year for training. They rely largely on private medical care.

Some of the possible triggers for military suicides, such as multiple combat deployments, are not always factors.

In Missouri, for example, only two of the six who committed suicide this year had served in Iraq or Afghanistan, both in 2005. Only one had been deployed previously, in 1991.

Of the six, one was a woman. Three were between the ages of 18 and 25, two between 37 and 55, and one between 26 and 31.

“Honestly, we don’t know what’s going on or we would solve it,” said Maj. Tammy Spicer, a Missouri Guard spokeswoman. “We have 11,800 members, and six took their lives. It is not a Soldier in a uniform in an armory committing suicide. It is someone on off-duty status in their community with their family nearby that’s making that choice. We need help in this battle.”

Experts said the deaths had underscored the difficulty the military was having in grappling with its suicide problem after a decade of war, compounded by a shortage of mental health professionals. Last winter, Army officials said they needed 750 to 800 more psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and social workers.

The stigma over acknowledging mental health problems remains another roadblock. Warriors are reluctant to show weakness.

“It’s a continuing catastrophe that can be prevented if the military hired more mental health care professionals, provided more education about mental health and stopped treating mental health problems as a criminal justice problem,” said Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Two Democratic senators, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Patty Murray of Washington state, introduced legislation in May that would require the Defense Department to embed mental health counselors in all National Guard and Reserve units.

The military has mounted a more aggressive campaign to reach out to service members who might be experiencing stress and other mental health issues. Part of its focus is emphasizing to fellow troops and officers the need to be aware of what their comrades might be experiencing.

The Missouri Army and Air National Guards have partnered with the state Department of Mental Health to provide more access to its services.

“That means my guys in remote areas now have a community mental health resource right there,” Gilmore said.

Psychological health wasn’t high on the National Guard’s agenda until recently, but Capt. Joan Hunter, the director of psychological health at the National Guard Bureau, said its program had counseled 2,800 troops, including more than 250 considered to be high-risk.

“I think we’ve saved lives,” she said.

LONDON -– WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says there appears to be evidence of war crimes in the thousands of pages of leaked U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan.

Assange told reporters Monday that “it is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime. That said … there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material.”

On Sunday, the online whistleblower WikiLeaks posted some 91,000 leaked U.S. military records of six years of the war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures. Both the White House and Downing Street have condemned the release. But there may be more. Assange says that the group has files that concern every country in the world — though on other subjects.

Assange says there’s “no reason” to doubt the reliability of 91,000 pages of leaked U.S. documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Speaking Monday in London after the release of the classified U.S. military records, Assange said the veracity of the material isn’t in doubt. But he says “just like dealing with any source you should exercise some common sense. That doesn’t mean you should close your eyes.”

Shocking in scope if not in content, the leak of 91,000 classified U.S. records on the Afghanistan war by the whistleblower website Wikileaks.org is one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history.

The documents cover much of what the public already knows about the troubled nine-year conflict: U.S. spec-ops forces have targeted militants without trial, Afghans have been killed by accident, and U.S. officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.

WikiLeaks posted the documents Sunday. The New York Times, London’s Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel were given early access to the records.

The release was instantly condemned by U.S. and Pakistani officials as both potentially harmful and irrelevant.

White House national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones said the release “put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk.” In a statement, he then took pains to point out that the documents describe a period from January 2004 to December 2009, mostly during the administration of President George W. Bush. And, Jones added, before President Obama announced a new strategy.

Pakistan’s Ambassador Husain Haqqani agreed, saying the documents “do not reflect the current on-ground realities,” in which his country and Washington are “jointly endeavoring to defeat al-Qaida and its Taliban allies.”

The U.S. and Pakistan assigned teams of analysts to read the records online to assess whether sources or locations were at risk.

The New York Times said the documents reveal that only a short time ago, there was far less harmony in U.S. and Pakistani exchanges.

The Times says the “raw intelligence assessments” by lower level military officers suggest that Pakistan “allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.”

The Guardian, however, interpreted the documents differently, saying they “fail to provide a convincing smoking gun” for complicity between the Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban.

The leaked records include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive U.S. special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what U.S. officials considered high-value insurgent and terrorist targets. Some of the raids resulted in unintended killings of Afghan civilians, according to the documentation.

During the targeting and killing of Libyan fighter Abu Laith al-Libi, described in the documents as a senior al-Qaida military commander, the death tally was reported as six enemy fighters and seven noncombatants — all children.

Task Force 373 selected its targets from 2,000 senior Taliban and al-Qaida figures posted on a “kill or capture” list, known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List, the Guardian said.

WikiLeaks said the release Sunday “did not generally include top-secret organizations,” and that it had “delayed the release of some 15,000 reports” as part of what it called “a harm minimization process demanded by our source,” but said it would release the documents later, possibly with material redacted.

U.S. government agencies have been bracing for a deluge of thousands more classified documents since the leak of helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That was blamed on a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Spc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md. He was charged with releasing classified information earlier this month. Manning had bragged on line that he downloaded 260,000 classified U.S. cables and transmitted them to Wikileaks.org.

A Joint Base Lewis-McChord Army sergeant has pleaded guilty to child sex trafficking and could face 10-15 years in prison under terms of his plea agreement.

Sterling Terrance Hospedales, 27, was charged with sex trafficking of a child and attempted sex trafficking of a child stemming from an investigation last year by the Pacific Northwest’s federal Innocence Lost Task Force and the Lakewood police, as well as federal and military authorities.

Hospedales lured two runaway girls, ages 16 and 17, into prostitution and posted nude photos of the girls on the classified-ad website Craigslist in ads saying they would trade sex for money, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle. He entered his plea Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

When he was arrested last year, he was assigned to the 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, and had been stationed at what then was Fort Lewis since March 2005. Hospedales also faces a dishonorable discharge from the military.

The investigation began in April 2009, when Lakewood police were alerted to a juvenile runaway from the Seattle area who was posting the ads.

Investigators from the federal task force that targets sex trafficking of children found both girls, who told authorities that Hospedales was their pimp.

The 17-year-old told investigators that she worked out of Hospedales’ apartment.

The 16-year-old said she was recruited by Hospedales in Wyoming and had arrived in Lakewood only a week earlier. She said she had photographs taken of her that were posted on the Internet, but she had not started earning money for Hospedales.

Hospedales, who is from Florida, was arrested as he left the Lakewood apartment.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, Hospedales is required to register as a sex offender when he’s released from prison.

He is set to be sentenced Oct. 25. The charges carry between 10 years and life in prison.