ARLINGTON, Va. — Scott Warner never thought he would have the strength to push officials at Arlington National Cemetery to disinter his son's body and then handle the remains to verify them.

But that's what he did Wednesday, nearly a year after he first heard hints of mismanagement at Arlington. That and problems with his son's burial records convinced him there was only one way to be sure Marine Pvt. Heath Warner's burial was done right.

"I never in a million years thought I'd have to walk what I just walked," Warner said at the cemetery after driving with his wife, Melissa, from their home in Canton, Ohio. "I never thought I'd have the stamina to do with my wife what I did today, to make sure this was our son."

The U.S. Army honors soldiers wounded or killed in combat with the Purple Heart, a powerful symbol designed to recognize their sacrifice and service.

Yet Army commanders have routinely denied Purple Hearts to soldiers who have sustained concussions in Iraq, despite regulations that make such wounds eligible for the medal, an investigation by NPR and ProPublica has found.

Soldiers have had to battle for months and sometimes years to prove that these wounds, also called mild traumatic brain injuries, merit the honor, our reporting showed. Commanders turned down some soldiers despite well-documented blast wounds that wrenched their minds, altered their lives and wracked their families.

The Army twice denied a Purple Heart for Sgt. Nathan Scheller, though the aftereffects from two roadside explosions in Iraq have left him with lasting cognitive problems, according to the Army's own records.

A US military investigation reported that the group randomly targeted civilians for sport. In one incident, a soldier is alleged to have thrown a grenade to feign an ambush as a pretext to shoot dead an innocent villager. Bodies were cut up and photographed and the soldiers are said to have kept bones and a skull as trophies.

A military pretrial hearing will review evidence later this month and decide how to proceed with the case, which could see the men jailed for life. All the accused deny any wrongdoing.

American commanders fear details of the incidents could cause widespread anger in Afghanistan, where civilian deaths have fostered deep resentment against coalition forces.

The five soldiers are accused of forming a “kill team” and murdering three people in Kandahar province between January and May this year.

Seven others are charged with attempting to impede the military investigation, as well as assaulting a private who blew the whistle on their activities.

WASHINGTON — When Lt. Col. Dave Wilson took command of a battalion of the 4th Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, the unit had just returned to Texas from 14 months traveling some of Iraq's most dangerous roads as part of a logistics mission.

What he found, he said, was a unit far more damaged than the single death it had suffered in its two deployments to Iraq.

Nearly 70 soldiers in his 1,163-member battalion had tested positive for drugs: methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana; others were abusing prescription drugs. Troops were passing around a tape of a female lieutenant having sex with five soldiers from the unit. Seven soldiers in the brigade died from drug overdoses and traffic accidents when they returned to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, after their first deployment.

"The inmates were running the prison," Wilson said.

What Wilson had to deal with, however, was hardly an isolated instance.

With the U.S. drawdown in Iraq, the Army is confronting an epidemic of drug abuse and criminal behavior that many commanders acknowledge has been made worse because they'd largely ignored it during nearly a decade of wars on two fronts.

The Army concedes that it faces a mammoth problem.