Eye on America: Military Training - July 16, 1996

SCHIEFFER: In tonight's "Eye on America," are your tax dollars taking trips that you cannot afford? A couple of Air Force nurses have blown the whistle on what is billed as a training program. But they say it actually amounts to a vacation with tax payers picking up the bill.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin has been investigating.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE SOLDIER [During Plane Loading]: Good bye, good luck to you.

DAVID MARTIN: The Air Force nurses sent overseas to bring home sick and wounded servicemen and their families. They are reservists with civilian jobs and it is the responsibility of their commander, Colonel Carol Bomar, to keep them ready to carry out that vital military mission.

COLONEL CAROL BOMAR: When I send a nurse and a med tech out to do a mission, I have to do that knowing that they're fully trained.

MARTIN: As part of that training, the Air Force sends them every year to the medical conference of their choice at tax payer expense.

SGT. CARLA MEADERS: They us to bring professionals in the Air Force Reserves and keep them there.

MARTIN: But two members of Bomar's squadron, Sergeants Carla Meaders and Debbie Moone wondered why the nurses had to go to vacation spots like Snowbird, Utah, and Snowmass, Colorado for training.

SGT. DEBBIE MOONE: Just a government-funded vacation, that's all.

MARTIN: Tax payers paid for three nurses to spend five days at the Princess Resort Hotel in San Diego for a conference on sports medicine which included classes on motivating the sedentary to exercise and child athletics and child development.

Did you ever go to your commanding officer and say, in so many words, "This is a boondoggle. You've got to stop this?"

SGT. MOONE: Yes.

MARTIN: And what did your commanding officer say?

SGT. MOONE: Basically that as the commander, she could run the program however she wanted.

COL. BOMAR: I've tried to explain to you that you can't just always look at a hard fast rule because that's not a hard fast rule; that's a guideline.

MARTIN: The guidelines say the conference should be relevant to the military mission, be within a reasonable distance, and offer at least six hours of medical education a day. An Air Force audit found 86% of the conferences attended by Bomar's squadron last year failed to meet those guidelines.

SGT. MOONE: A lot of the course either met none of the requirements, two of the three requirements, or you know, one of the three requirements.

MARTIN: The audit also concluded Bomar permitted nurse to attend conferences at attractive locations of their choice to help maintain morale. A charge she vehemently denies even though she attended one in Snowmass with a full day of lectures on "Man and the Environment."

[Reading Class Titles.]: "Threats to the Mountain Wilderness." "Preserving the World's Rain Forests." "Environmental Activism in the Nineties." What does that have to do with military medicine?

COL. BOMAR: We're in this world. We need to know what's going on with...with the elements in...in the wilderness.

MARTIN: The Air Force has now begun an audit of all 32 medical evacuation squadrons. The story might end there, a couple of whistle blowers forcing the Air Force to clean up its act. But it doesn't.

Before they blew the whistle, Debbie Moone and Carla Meaders had each been rated a top sergeant in the squadron. Since they blew the whistle...

SGT. MOONE: My performance appraisal was considerably downgraded. I was suspended from duty for insubordinate defiance of authority which...

MARTIN: Bomar refuses to discuss it, but both the performance rating and the suspension have been overturned. As for Carla Meaders...

SGT. MEADERS: All my orders were canceled. I've been "blackballed."

MARTIN: For?

SGT. MEADERS: For reporting fraud, waste, and abuse.

MARTIN: So now there is another investigation into whether she has been unfairly retaliated against for blowing the whistle.

At Andrews Air Force Base, this is David Martin for "Eye on America."