US soldier's arrest exposes abuse of Washington's war cash

Lakewood, Washington: Captain Michael Nguyen had a profitable tour of duty in Iraq - so profitable, in fact, that soon after returning to this working-class neighbourhood near the Army's Fort Lewis, he was parking a Hummer H3T outside his apartment.

Then a $70,000 (Dh257,134) BMW M-3 showed up. People notice cars like that on a street filled with pickup trucks, old Chevys and low-end sport-utility vehicles.

"I spent 10 years in the military, and I can tell you, nobody's giving me bailouts like that," said Mark Smith, who lives across the street.

The big-ticket cars raised eyebrows in more places than the neighbourhood.

Federal investigators found Nguyen's $6,169-a-month army paychecks untouched in the bank since his return from Iraq in June 2008, while he made a lot of high-end purchases.. In a federal indictment, prosecutors alleged that Nguyen managed to skim more than $690,000 in cash while overseeing millions intended for reconstruction projects and payments to private Iraqi security forces northeast of Baghdad.

Nguyen, 28, is accused of packing stacks of cash into boxes and mailing them to his family's home.

His indictment is just one of the many prosecutions emerging from the expensive post-war reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Justice Department has secured more than three dozen bribery-related convictions in the awarding of reconstruction contracts.

The prosecutions reveal the extent to which the Pentagon's policy of using "money as a weapon system" has left its soldiers vulnerable to the lure of cash awash on battlefields.

"This was more cash than Donald Trump had ever seen in his life," said Robert J. Stein, a US army official jailed for nine years for bribery, theft and money-laundering case.

"When you work around money like that," he told investigators, "it becomes, 'So what, it's just paper.'"