Insensitive SNAFU Angers Families of Slain Veterans
SANCHEZ: Welcome back. I'm Rick Sanchez in the CNN NEWSROOM. A major snafu. Boy, I'll tell you, it could really affect some of these people. The Army is saying I'm sorry as a result of it. Families of about 275 wounded or dead officers received letters from the Army last month. The letters were actually urging the soldiers to get back to work, to re-enlist. The statement from the Army, officials are contacting those officers, families now to personally apologize from the U.S. military for erroneously sending those letters.</s>STAFF SGT. JEFFREY ALLAN HESS, MARINE CORPS. RECRUITTER: It has definitely become more challenging. I got here about the time that 9/11 happened, just after, and there was a flux of a lot of patriotic Americans that wanted to join, and then after a time has dwindled down, it changed a little bit. It began to get very challenging.</s>WINSLOW WHEELER, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: It's not the first time this has happened. It won't be the last time. A year or two ago, we were sending wounded soldiers bills for not showing up with their units. We were giving them bad credit reports because they were not, because of the pay problems. What this is really all about is the Defense Department is not unique to the Army. Their incompetent financial management, it's incredible, but it's true, that the entire Defense Department doesn't know what it does with its own money. It can't keep straight pay records. It's such a shambles that not only do they flunk audits, their books are in such bad shape they cannot even be audited.</s>SANCHEZ: Well, the obvious question, where is the accountability? Could you imagine if your son or daughter has died in Iraq, and you get a letter from the military telling you that they want them back in? What that says is, we didn't even know they died.</s>WHEELER: It's a system that's out of control. That's been the case for decades. Every year, Congress has problems.</s>SANCHEZ: How do you fix it?</s>WHEELER: By accountability, like you said, by firing people who don't can't keep the records straight, by holding programs in abeyance until they can pass audits. This is a decades' old problems. Annually Congress has hearings about it. They all say how terrible it is, proceed to do absolutely nothing about it, and wait for next year's hearing.</s>SANCHEZ: Let's talk about the topic we planned to talk about to you, originally, when we called you, that is the lowering of the standards. Make us understand what they mean by that. For example, just to speak in concrete terms, who will get in now that wasn't able to get in before?</s>WHEELER: Well, the Army's trying to get up to its authorized level and they're having a hard time meeting their goals for recruitment. In order to increase the size of the pot of people they can attempt to enlist, they're doing things like recruiting fewer people with high school diplomas, people who score lower in the Armed Forces Qualification Testing, people who have visible tattoos, people who have a misdemeanor record, have some problems in their behavior in school, that's one of the ways they try to meet the recruitment goals.</s>SANCHEZ: Do we compromise quality when we do that in our military?</s>WHEELER: Sure do. There's two kinds of consequences. One is that a lot of these people turn out fine. Some of them don't, however, and if he fall out of the system, which means you have to recruit that many more. Also, if you have pressure in the system, as we do now, to hold on to every warm body you can get your hands on, these people show up in deployed units and can be problems at the sharp end (ph).</s>SANCHEZ: One bad apple, right?</s>WHEELER: We've seen it happen.</s>SANCHEZ: We certainly know. We thank you so much. This has been really an enlightening conversation. We thank you for taking the time to talk about these serious problems with us.</s>WHEELER: My pleasure. Thanks very much.</s>SANCHEZ: We're also following a developing story out of Colorado, an avalanche that has buried cars. We'll take you back there, showing the video, as it comes in. Also new information coming to us here at CNN, the most trusted name in news.