bobdina
06-28-2010, 11:09 AM
Ex-GI rebuilds life after taking war spoils
By Chris Kenning - The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal
Posted : Monday Jun 28, 2010 10:10:55 EDT
Less than two years ago, Earl Coffey stood on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, a broken man, holding his Army uniform, photos and military medals in his hands.
The son of Kentucky coal miners, Coffey had watched his life unravel after his theft of a dictator’s desert treasure became an almost biblical curse — running through his hands like sand, landing him in prison and sending him on a downward spiral of homelessness, divorce and drug addiction.
With nothing left, Coffey tossed the remnants of his 13-year Army career into the surf — and began a long walk home to the Appalachian mountains of Harlan County, Ky. Hitchhiking his way through North Carolina, a snow storm forced him to call his mother from a truck stop to ask for a ride.
“Mama, I’m coming home,” he said.
“It’s about time,” she replied.
Coffey, 36, has since rebuilt a quiet life among the coal mines that he escaped by joining the Army — only to become one of seven U.S. soldiers convicted in 2003 of “looting and pillaging” for his part in stealing the $586,000 in cash he found in one of Saddam Hussein’s bombed-out Iraqi palaces.
Stripped of his Army medical and pension benefits and saddled with a bad-conduct discharge, Coffey has since remarried, kicked painkillers, become a lay minister and found a measure of redemption in Harlan working the graveyard shift seven miles deep in Clover Fork Mine.
While he still vacillates between regret and indignity over what happened in Iraq, he has given up thoughts of going back to retrieve a separate bundle of money that he says he found and buried in the sands — and Army investigators never discovered.
“I can tell you that I wish the money hadn’t been there; I wish I never would have seen it,” said Coffey, rubbing his sniper tattoo and pausing in his home to spit a stream of chewing tobacco into a can. “I made one mistake — one huge mistake — but everyone deserves a second chance.”
Growing up, joining up
In 2003, Coffey was a team leader with the 3rd Infantry Division, sleeping in sandy foxholes and patrolling behind big earthen berms in Kuwait — waiting for the long-anticipated U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to begin.
Coffey was a long way from his hometown of Kildav, Ky., a former streamside mining camp where his father, Earl Coffey Sr., worked the coal mines and served in Vietnam.
He and his grandfather, a World War II veteran, thrilled a young Coffey with stories about soldiers bringing back “spoils of war” such as money, weapons and medals.
“I grew up with the stories at a young age,” said Coffey, who grew up in the tiny town outside of Harlan, becoming a marksman after learning to shoot a .22 rifle at age 7.
He joined the Kentucky National Guard at age 17 and married his high-school sweetheart. At boot camp, he was nicknamed “hard charger” for giving himself foot fractures when he ran voluntary laps after a 31-mile rucksack run.
He joined the active Army, then completed sniper, airborne assault and Army ranger training at Fort Benning, Ga.
He served as a Ranger sniper in Somalia in 1993, engaging in several fierce firefights and was shot in the leg during a battle that was later depicted in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
“It’s like what General Westmorland once said, that combat is a delightful thought to a young man who has never seen it,” he said.
Nevertheless, after a short time away from being a full-time soldier, Coffey rejoined active duty after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, determined to serve his country. It didn’t take long before he found himself right back in combat, this time in the Middle East.
Violence in Baghdad
By late March 2003, Coffey was plowing into Iraq in a Bradley fighting vehicle, fighting through Basra and Nasiriyah and enduring sandstorms and Iraqi resistance on the way to Baghdad.
“We were destroying everything, everything we came in contact with, whether it was a building, a bunker, a trench, a human being, it didn’t matter,” he said during a 2004 military court hearing. “At times it was terrifying, and at times you just felt completely emotionless.”
Once, with Coffey’s unit taking sniper fire, he fired two rounds at a figure on a rooftop, only to discover he had shot an unarmed boy.
Another time, at a roadblock, Coffey watched as fellow soldiers — jittery about suicide attacks — fired warning shots to stop an approaching Nissan pickup. When it kept coming they fired a larger round, the resulting explosion lifting the truck in the air.
Inside, two children and a man died, and Coffey saw the surviving woman watch her family consumed by flames.
“It tore me up,” he said.
By April 8, Coffey’s unit had helped capture the Baghdad airport and secure what soldiers called Palace Row, an area near the Tigris River that had housed Iraqi leaders and would later become the heavily fortified Green Zone.
Coffey spent his days patrolling and conducting raids. He spent his nights sleeping in the abandoned mansions and palaces, waking each morning to the calls to prayer broadcast from mosques.
Sometimes, Coffey and other soldiers would explore those mansions and palaces, which, despite looting, still contained remnants of their former opulence. “To make life easier, we were going to some of the furnished homes and getting beds and blankets, air conditioners, refrigerators, things of that sort,” he told a military court, according to transcripts.
One night he and another soldier, Spc. John R. Getz, were in a bombed-out palace when they stumbled into four safes.
Coffey said “curiosity” made them gather tools to pry them open. Inside, they found documents signed in both Arabic and English that led him to conclude they were in one of the homes of Saddam’s notoriously violent son Uday Hussein.
Breaking a hole in the last safe, Coffey reached in and felt bundles of money.
“There’s more,” he told Getz.
Soon, he had pulled out $586,000 in U.S., Jordanian and British currency.
They decided to keep it.
Other soldiers had found money, they reasoned, and they were risking their lives for Iraq. Coffey figured the money could help his wife, who had been disabled in a car accident.
Coffey said he and several men in his squad divided up the money. His share was about $180,000 in U.S. currency alone, he said.
“Can we get in trouble for this?” Coffey recalled being asked.
“It’s Saddam’s money,” Coffey responded. “Who’s gonna press charges?”
Theft and life unravels
Just two months later, Coffey’s unit was suffering through the miserable June heat in Fallujah, Iraq, deployed from Baghdad to battle insurgents entrenched there. Based in a former Iraqi Army facility, his stolen cash stashed in MRE bags in his backpack, Coffey began spending the money in his off hours.
He bought an $800 satellite phone, Pepsis, chicken from Iraqi vendors and air-conditioning units. He purchased expensive phone cards to call his wife and family.
Coffey’s friend and roommate, Carlos Camacho, with whom he would talk and play chess, had begun to take notice.
“Everyone wanted a satellite phone, and he bought two,” Camacho said during a recent interview from his home in Chicago. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’ ”
Camacho confronted Coffey, who told him the whole story.
Then another solider, Pvt. Ronnie Keith, spotted Coffey taking money from a sealed MRE bag to spend on satellite phone cards. Coming back from kitchen duty that night, Coffey checked the money and found that $39,000 was gone, according to court files. The next day, it was all gone.
“I knew he had seen me with money,” Coffey told the court. “And after he took it, guys in different squads started finding out.”
Although Keith returned about $6,000, news of the cash circulated around the unit. Soon, Army investigators began asking questions.
In August 2003, Coffey returned to Fort Stewart, Ga., with the $6,000 he had left, assuming the matter was behind him.
He took Tammy on vacation to Disney World in Orlando, renting a hotel suite and spending down his cash. He made a down payment on a Dodge Dakota.
“I kept joking that I was spending Uncle Saddam’s money,” he said.
Barely a month later, Army investigators awoke Coffey at 2 a.m., breaking through his door and arresting him. Under questioning, Coffey told them everything, hoping it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But military investigators berated him for stealing from people the Army was desperately trying to win over.
“Looting is ... not condoned here, and it’s not condoned during combat deployments,” George Wright, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an interview.
With prosecutors threatening him with life in prison, Coffey decided to plead guilty, accepting a bad-conduct discharge that barred him from receiving veteran’s benefits and promised him a two-year prison term.
Camacho was reduced in rank to private and had to serve two months detention.
Keith and Getz were both court-martialed in 2004 and imprisoned for more than a year, court records show. Neither Keith nor Getz, who also lost their veterans benefits, could be reached for comment.
Coffey was taken to a military prison at Fort Knox, Ky. At night, he suffered flashbacks of the boy he’d shot, and the Iraqi woman screaming about her dead family.
Released after serving 14 months, Coffey moved to Sarasota, Fla., hoping to salvage his crumbling marriage.
He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, was bored with civilian life and prone to fights. He applied for dozens of jobs, including grocery stores and construction sites but had trouble finding work because of his record.
Tammy left him, and for a time he was homeless.
In May 2008, Coffey was arrested while trying to seek out veterans benefits to help him deal with his post-traumatic stress. When they ran his name, they found an outstanding Florida warrant for possession of stolen property.
Coffey pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail.
“I had literally hit the bottom of the barrel,” he said. “I was as low as a person can get in life.”
That’s when he decided to go home to Kentucky.
Back in Harlan County, a new life
The wedding took place outside the tiny Community Church in Kildav on a sweltering September day in 2009.
Coffey had returned to Harlan County seven months earlier, rail thin and withdrawn, and he was embarking on his fourth marriage with Tonya Greene, 32-year-old divorced single mother whom he’d known since childhood.
She had helped him heal his wounds as they talked late into the night about what happened.
“At first ... he’d sleep two to three hours a night, wake up rocking and sweating and shouting with nightmares,” she said. “He didn’t come back from the war, mentally, until only recently.”
They put off their honeymoon in Gatlinburg, Tenn., so Coffey could start working the mine. His new bosses knew about the convictions but gave him a chance at a job.
He started going to a local church and a group of pastors informally ordained him. Now, he holds Sunday services in his home for a handful of people and hopes one day to lead a church.
He has begun formulating plans to write Kentucky congressman for help in an appeal he plans to mount to have his bad-conduct discharge changed and, he hopes, his veterans benefits reinstated.
“I’m so glad that he’s doing better,” said his mother, Claudette Ledford, who lives in a streamside mobile home in Kildav. “I think being back home has really helped.”
But his past is never far behind. After a Florida newspaper wrote about him in 2008, a Sarasota screenwriter penned a fictionalized screenplay about his story, based in part on a jailhouse interview.
More recently, a film company has expressed interest in telling his story.
At times, Coffey feels like he got a raw deal for taking money from a dictator the United States was overthrowing. At other times, he says he knew what he was doing was wrong.
“For the rest of my life I have to live with the things I seen and done over there,” he said. “But I’d like people to understand what our soldiers go through, physically and mentally.
“It’s important that people understand I’m not a thief. This was combat, a different mindset. If I found this money in America, I would turn it in.”
Sometimes, friends and relatives offer to help him return to Iraq and dig up the cache of money he buried near Palace Row.
But Coffey believes the cache has most likely already been found or ruined — and he wants nothing more to do with it.
“I have no thoughts of ever going back to Iraq,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t want it. It’s blood money. Literally.”
By Chris Kenning - The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal
Posted : Monday Jun 28, 2010 10:10:55 EDT
Less than two years ago, Earl Coffey stood on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, a broken man, holding his Army uniform, photos and military medals in his hands.
The son of Kentucky coal miners, Coffey had watched his life unravel after his theft of a dictator’s desert treasure became an almost biblical curse — running through his hands like sand, landing him in prison and sending him on a downward spiral of homelessness, divorce and drug addiction.
With nothing left, Coffey tossed the remnants of his 13-year Army career into the surf — and began a long walk home to the Appalachian mountains of Harlan County, Ky. Hitchhiking his way through North Carolina, a snow storm forced him to call his mother from a truck stop to ask for a ride.
“Mama, I’m coming home,” he said.
“It’s about time,” she replied.
Coffey, 36, has since rebuilt a quiet life among the coal mines that he escaped by joining the Army — only to become one of seven U.S. soldiers convicted in 2003 of “looting and pillaging” for his part in stealing the $586,000 in cash he found in one of Saddam Hussein’s bombed-out Iraqi palaces.
Stripped of his Army medical and pension benefits and saddled with a bad-conduct discharge, Coffey has since remarried, kicked painkillers, become a lay minister and found a measure of redemption in Harlan working the graveyard shift seven miles deep in Clover Fork Mine.
While he still vacillates between regret and indignity over what happened in Iraq, he has given up thoughts of going back to retrieve a separate bundle of money that he says he found and buried in the sands — and Army investigators never discovered.
“I can tell you that I wish the money hadn’t been there; I wish I never would have seen it,” said Coffey, rubbing his sniper tattoo and pausing in his home to spit a stream of chewing tobacco into a can. “I made one mistake — one huge mistake — but everyone deserves a second chance.”
Growing up, joining up
In 2003, Coffey was a team leader with the 3rd Infantry Division, sleeping in sandy foxholes and patrolling behind big earthen berms in Kuwait — waiting for the long-anticipated U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to begin.
Coffey was a long way from his hometown of Kildav, Ky., a former streamside mining camp where his father, Earl Coffey Sr., worked the coal mines and served in Vietnam.
He and his grandfather, a World War II veteran, thrilled a young Coffey with stories about soldiers bringing back “spoils of war” such as money, weapons and medals.
“I grew up with the stories at a young age,” said Coffey, who grew up in the tiny town outside of Harlan, becoming a marksman after learning to shoot a .22 rifle at age 7.
He joined the Kentucky National Guard at age 17 and married his high-school sweetheart. At boot camp, he was nicknamed “hard charger” for giving himself foot fractures when he ran voluntary laps after a 31-mile rucksack run.
He joined the active Army, then completed sniper, airborne assault and Army ranger training at Fort Benning, Ga.
He served as a Ranger sniper in Somalia in 1993, engaging in several fierce firefights and was shot in the leg during a battle that was later depicted in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
“It’s like what General Westmorland once said, that combat is a delightful thought to a young man who has never seen it,” he said.
Nevertheless, after a short time away from being a full-time soldier, Coffey rejoined active duty after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, determined to serve his country. It didn’t take long before he found himself right back in combat, this time in the Middle East.
Violence in Baghdad
By late March 2003, Coffey was plowing into Iraq in a Bradley fighting vehicle, fighting through Basra and Nasiriyah and enduring sandstorms and Iraqi resistance on the way to Baghdad.
“We were destroying everything, everything we came in contact with, whether it was a building, a bunker, a trench, a human being, it didn’t matter,” he said during a 2004 military court hearing. “At times it was terrifying, and at times you just felt completely emotionless.”
Once, with Coffey’s unit taking sniper fire, he fired two rounds at a figure on a rooftop, only to discover he had shot an unarmed boy.
Another time, at a roadblock, Coffey watched as fellow soldiers — jittery about suicide attacks — fired warning shots to stop an approaching Nissan pickup. When it kept coming they fired a larger round, the resulting explosion lifting the truck in the air.
Inside, two children and a man died, and Coffey saw the surviving woman watch her family consumed by flames.
“It tore me up,” he said.
By April 8, Coffey’s unit had helped capture the Baghdad airport and secure what soldiers called Palace Row, an area near the Tigris River that had housed Iraqi leaders and would later become the heavily fortified Green Zone.
Coffey spent his days patrolling and conducting raids. He spent his nights sleeping in the abandoned mansions and palaces, waking each morning to the calls to prayer broadcast from mosques.
Sometimes, Coffey and other soldiers would explore those mansions and palaces, which, despite looting, still contained remnants of their former opulence. “To make life easier, we were going to some of the furnished homes and getting beds and blankets, air conditioners, refrigerators, things of that sort,” he told a military court, according to transcripts.
One night he and another soldier, Spc. John R. Getz, were in a bombed-out palace when they stumbled into four safes.
Coffey said “curiosity” made them gather tools to pry them open. Inside, they found documents signed in both Arabic and English that led him to conclude they were in one of the homes of Saddam’s notoriously violent son Uday Hussein.
Breaking a hole in the last safe, Coffey reached in and felt bundles of money.
“There’s more,” he told Getz.
Soon, he had pulled out $586,000 in U.S., Jordanian and British currency.
They decided to keep it.
Other soldiers had found money, they reasoned, and they were risking their lives for Iraq. Coffey figured the money could help his wife, who had been disabled in a car accident.
Coffey said he and several men in his squad divided up the money. His share was about $180,000 in U.S. currency alone, he said.
“Can we get in trouble for this?” Coffey recalled being asked.
“It’s Saddam’s money,” Coffey responded. “Who’s gonna press charges?”
Theft and life unravels
Just two months later, Coffey’s unit was suffering through the miserable June heat in Fallujah, Iraq, deployed from Baghdad to battle insurgents entrenched there. Based in a former Iraqi Army facility, his stolen cash stashed in MRE bags in his backpack, Coffey began spending the money in his off hours.
He bought an $800 satellite phone, Pepsis, chicken from Iraqi vendors and air-conditioning units. He purchased expensive phone cards to call his wife and family.
Coffey’s friend and roommate, Carlos Camacho, with whom he would talk and play chess, had begun to take notice.
“Everyone wanted a satellite phone, and he bought two,” Camacho said during a recent interview from his home in Chicago. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’ ”
Camacho confronted Coffey, who told him the whole story.
Then another solider, Pvt. Ronnie Keith, spotted Coffey taking money from a sealed MRE bag to spend on satellite phone cards. Coming back from kitchen duty that night, Coffey checked the money and found that $39,000 was gone, according to court files. The next day, it was all gone.
“I knew he had seen me with money,” Coffey told the court. “And after he took it, guys in different squads started finding out.”
Although Keith returned about $6,000, news of the cash circulated around the unit. Soon, Army investigators began asking questions.
In August 2003, Coffey returned to Fort Stewart, Ga., with the $6,000 he had left, assuming the matter was behind him.
He took Tammy on vacation to Disney World in Orlando, renting a hotel suite and spending down his cash. He made a down payment on a Dodge Dakota.
“I kept joking that I was spending Uncle Saddam’s money,” he said.
Barely a month later, Army investigators awoke Coffey at 2 a.m., breaking through his door and arresting him. Under questioning, Coffey told them everything, hoping it wouldn’t be a big deal.
But military investigators berated him for stealing from people the Army was desperately trying to win over.
“Looting is ... not condoned here, and it’s not condoned during combat deployments,” George Wright, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an interview.
With prosecutors threatening him with life in prison, Coffey decided to plead guilty, accepting a bad-conduct discharge that barred him from receiving veteran’s benefits and promised him a two-year prison term.
Camacho was reduced in rank to private and had to serve two months detention.
Keith and Getz were both court-martialed in 2004 and imprisoned for more than a year, court records show. Neither Keith nor Getz, who also lost their veterans benefits, could be reached for comment.
Coffey was taken to a military prison at Fort Knox, Ky. At night, he suffered flashbacks of the boy he’d shot, and the Iraqi woman screaming about her dead family.
Released after serving 14 months, Coffey moved to Sarasota, Fla., hoping to salvage his crumbling marriage.
He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, was bored with civilian life and prone to fights. He applied for dozens of jobs, including grocery stores and construction sites but had trouble finding work because of his record.
Tammy left him, and for a time he was homeless.
In May 2008, Coffey was arrested while trying to seek out veterans benefits to help him deal with his post-traumatic stress. When they ran his name, they found an outstanding Florida warrant for possession of stolen property.
Coffey pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail.
“I had literally hit the bottom of the barrel,” he said. “I was as low as a person can get in life.”
That’s when he decided to go home to Kentucky.
Back in Harlan County, a new life
The wedding took place outside the tiny Community Church in Kildav on a sweltering September day in 2009.
Coffey had returned to Harlan County seven months earlier, rail thin and withdrawn, and he was embarking on his fourth marriage with Tonya Greene, 32-year-old divorced single mother whom he’d known since childhood.
She had helped him heal his wounds as they talked late into the night about what happened.
“At first ... he’d sleep two to three hours a night, wake up rocking and sweating and shouting with nightmares,” she said. “He didn’t come back from the war, mentally, until only recently.”
They put off their honeymoon in Gatlinburg, Tenn., so Coffey could start working the mine. His new bosses knew about the convictions but gave him a chance at a job.
He started going to a local church and a group of pastors informally ordained him. Now, he holds Sunday services in his home for a handful of people and hopes one day to lead a church.
He has begun formulating plans to write Kentucky congressman for help in an appeal he plans to mount to have his bad-conduct discharge changed and, he hopes, his veterans benefits reinstated.
“I’m so glad that he’s doing better,” said his mother, Claudette Ledford, who lives in a streamside mobile home in Kildav. “I think being back home has really helped.”
But his past is never far behind. After a Florida newspaper wrote about him in 2008, a Sarasota screenwriter penned a fictionalized screenplay about his story, based in part on a jailhouse interview.
More recently, a film company has expressed interest in telling his story.
At times, Coffey feels like he got a raw deal for taking money from a dictator the United States was overthrowing. At other times, he says he knew what he was doing was wrong.
“For the rest of my life I have to live with the things I seen and done over there,” he said. “But I’d like people to understand what our soldiers go through, physically and mentally.
“It’s important that people understand I’m not a thief. This was combat, a different mindset. If I found this money in America, I would turn it in.”
Sometimes, friends and relatives offer to help him return to Iraq and dig up the cache of money he buried near Palace Row.
But Coffey believes the cache has most likely already been found or ruined — and he wants nothing more to do with it.
“I have no thoughts of ever going back to Iraq,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t want it. It’s blood money. Literally.”