Hammering nails in the blazing sun of the Iraqi desert was not how Amy Washington envisioned spending the 25th year of her life. But when her unit, Albany's Bravo Company, 52nd Engineers, got called up in 2003, she went. She and the other 130 members of the unit served their country, and they thought they could count on being paid for their efforts.

Instead, Washington and about 10 other soldiers from Bravo Company found that not only did the military not pay them what they were owed, thousands of dollars were incorrectly taken out of their paychecks for a "debt" they did not owe.

Officials say that with the mobilization of thousands of National Guard and Reserve troops to Iraq, the military pay system is stretched to its limit and errors like these are not uncommon. Yet no one can fully explain why the problems occurred.

"If I'm going to get called up and go serve, I think I should at least get paid for it," saidWashington, who moved to Oregon from Kentucky to attend college and lives in Sodaville with her husband.

She first noticed something strange when she got her Leave and Earning Statements, the military's equivalent of a pay stub, while she was still in Iraq. Rather than being for a consistent amount every month, the sums deposited into her account ranged from less than $5 to more than $1,500.

Something wasn't right, she thought. But sorting it out while overseas would be difficult, so officers in her unit advised her to look into it when she got back to the States.

When she got home in the spring of 2004 and got out of the military, things still didn't seem to add up. She compared the amount she should have been making with what she actually got, and she concluded the military shorted her about $3,200.

She told her superiors, who said they would get it taken care of. Instead, things got even stranger.

She received one pay stub that showed they'd taken away all the money she'd made in a year — and then another one showing they had put it all back.

Her final paychecks from the Guard showed that $2,204.14 had been removed from her account to settle a "debt."

She continued to receive assurances that things would get taken care of. Instead, in November 2004, she got a notice from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (D-FAS) informing her that they were collecting on $1,626 she supposedly owed.

The notice said it was because she had been paid during January, February and March 2004 and according to their records, she wasn't on duty then. In reality, she was not only on duty — she was deployed overseas.

Washington went to the Inspector General's office for help in mid-November, after spending hours trying to sort out the mess on her own.

They did an audit and told her that indeed, the military owed her more than $5,000 and she did not owe a debt. But to her frustration, she was told that they couldn't just give her the money, nor could they stop the collection process.

"Due to the end of year cut-off, Finance is unable to have this debt erased," a letter from the Inspector General's office reads. "…you will receive a ‘tax certificate' which you should file, together with your Form W-2, when you file income taxes. This is the only method of reimbursement available at this time."

They told her that until she filed her tax returns or got a response to her application to have the payments waived, she would need to keep on making payments on the debt — the debt she doesn't owe.

Washington is fed up with the problems, and she says she could use the $5,000 the military owes her.

It took her six months to find a job after she returned from Iraq, and her current job, for the United Way in Corvallis, barely makes ends meet.

Her husband Andrew Washington, another former member of the B52s, is a full-time college student.

"It's the principle of the thing," she said. "If they owe me money for the time I served, then it should be mine."

Washington is not the only soldier to face problems with her pay.

Sgt. Scott Nyquist, who handles pay matters for the B52s, said that 10 or 12 soldiers in the unit had this problem.

Joe Farrior of Salem hasn't been paid at all since he got back from Iraq. He's working at a restaurant in Salem and still attending drills every month, but all the money out of all his military checks goes to pay the "debt" that started showing up on his pay stubs. He said he's been told it had something to do with taxes.

"I don't even understand it," he said. "All the explanations they've given me seem really bogus."

Derek Fanning of Harrisburg said he also saw pay stubs on which a full year's pay was for some reason given and then taken away. He's out of the Guard now, but he didn't get paid at all for the first two drill weekends he served after he returned.

"I just wasn't in the mood to fight it, and it wasn't life or death for me to have to have the money," he said. "I don't even know where I'm at with it now. I hope my debt is clear."

Joe Lynch of Junction City has also had his account sent to D-FAS because of claims that he was paid for time when they say he wasn't actually on duty.

"One period is when I was in Iraq, and the other was when I was still on active duty stateside after we got back in April," he said. He said they took all his pay from a certain point on and still claim he owes $3,500.

"They tried to give me reasons why it was a valid debt but they never seemed to add up." He went ahead and made his first payment.

"I don't want to ruin my credit for I debt I don't even owe," he said.

No one seems to be able to figure out what went wrong.

"I've never found anybody to adequately explain why this occurred," Sgt. Nyquist of the B52s said, and the situation that he describes is a convoluted maze of payments made and received.

According to Nyquist, some soldiers had taxes taken out of their checks while they were overseas, even though soldiers in a war zone are supposed to be free from taxes. When they got back, they got payments in the amount of the taxes they had paid. But when they were back, they were once again in taxable status.

"There was a glitch in the status and the system said you owe X amount of money in taxes," Nyquist said. "This shows up as a debt. We had a sharp guy at the state level who saw it but by the time he saw it … the money was taken out of their accounts and sent to the IRS. Once it's sent to the IRS, all bets are off. It's like a giant steel trap that clamps down, and the money's not coming back."

So, Nyquist said, the soldiers were paid back for what had been given to the IRS, but when they were paid, they were no longer on active duty, and the payment again created a debt.

Why did paying them create a debt?

"Well, there you go," he said. "It should all be even Steven, but if the IRS takes money and then you pay the soldier back money, the system recognizes that as a debt. That's the situation about 10 or 12 of my soldiers find themselves in."

Washington said she's been given that explanation. She's also been told by the military collection agency that the problem occurred because some of her payments came from the Oregon National Guard account, when she was supposed to be paid out of the Army Active Duty account, and she now has to pay the Guard back.

Master Sgt. Douglas Anderson of the Inspector General's office, who reviewed Washington's account, said he could not discuss the situation because of privacy regulations.

Capt. Mike Braibish of the Oregon Military Department's public affairs office said the same thing, though he also said that it sounded like the situation probably stemmed from the difficulties surrounding deploying Guard troops as active-duty soldiers. The pay systems for Guard and Reserve troops are separate from those of active-duty troops, and getting everyone paid correctly can be complex, he said.

Roger Still of DFAS said that an audit of Washington's account is currently going on and he couldn't discuss details. He also said that with so many Guard and Reserve troops deploying on active duty, pay problems like those of the B52s are cropping up around the country.

"It's an old system doing what it's not designed to do," Still said of the military's current pay system.

Some military employees are reckoning problematic accounts by hand, he said, while a new computer system that is supposed to solve some difficulties is in the works for this year.

The soldiers don't seem to know what else to do to get the matter straightened out.

Washington has yet to receive her "tax certificate," which she was told she would have by Jan. 15.

Fanning said that he's waiting until he gets his tax statement for the year, in hopes that he'll be able to tell whether the problem got fixed.

Farrior said he would like to get his debt cleared, but in the meantime he'd at least like to get the amount they say he owes pro-rated so that only a portion of it is taken out of his checks, instead of the entire amount he earned disappearing before he ever sees it. He's never able to get help when he calls the military department in Salem, he said.

"They always say the system is down," he said.

Lynch said he too has had no luck getting help.

"They say to use my chain of command," he said. "But I'm no longer in the military, so I no longer have a chain of command. It seems like they just want it to go away."

All the B52s who had problems with their pay agreed that the officers in their unit tried to help them with the situation.

"They've done what they could do," Lynch said. "This is over their heads."

And Nyquist, in turn, says that the soldiers who are fed up with the situation have "a legitimate gripe."

"The state people are aware of the problem, and we've made the command structure aware of the problem," he said. "But they have yet to figure out a solution to this problem."

On Friday, Washington reported the latest in an e-mail: "Yesterday I received a paper in the mail from D-FAS. It was NOT a certificate of any kind, but was a partial ‘corrected' W-2 form. I took it to an accountant, who said that it is a completely worthless piece of paper in that nowhere does it reflect what the IG's office said I was owed, nor does it even list any meaningful data for tax purposes (no wages, tips, etc. No federal tax withheld). I don't know if this thing is supposed to be some kind of answer or what, but the accountant says I might as well burn it to stay warm."

This story was prompted by a letter Amy Washington wrote to the Democrat-Herald.