2011年10月31日美国《纽约时报》有一篇关于来自纽约的名叫丹尼·陈（中文姓名陈宇晖）的华裔士兵离奇死亡的报道：2011年10月3日，美军驻阿富汗部队一所哨所内，当班执勤的华裔士兵丹尼·陈被发现头部中弹死亡。种种迹象显示很可能是自杀。但该士兵的家属拒绝接受这样解释。军队方面则表示死因正在彻底调查当中，并表示一定要找出真相。

2011年12月22日《纽约时报》报道，经过大约两个月的调查，美国军方有了结论。丹尼·陈曾多次遭遇其他士兵的欺凌。最为过分的一次，是2011年10月的一个晚上，丹尼·陈在洗澡后忘了关热水器，其他几个士兵对此大为不满，合伙欺凌他：将他从床上拉下来，在地板上拖，用石块砸他并强迫他在地上爬，同时用种族歧视性的语言侮辱他。最后，他们要求他含一口水做俯卧撑，而且不能将水吐出来。10月3日，丹尼·陈在他站岗的时候被发现头部中弹死亡。

目前，美国军方拟对参与欺凌事件的8个美军士兵提起诉讼。这8位士兵的罪名不一，包括过失杀人罪、虐待罪、攻击罪、玩忽职守罪（针对军官）等。这一起诉也意味着军方认为直接死因是自杀，而导致他自杀的直接原因则是被欺凌与虐待。

有观点认为，在美国，亚裔，特别是华裔遭到的歧视，要甚于非洲裔美国人。2002年，哈佛大学法学院首位亚裔教授、一位姓吴的华裔曾写过一本名为《黄色—在美国白人及黑人之外的种族》。他认为，有关种族歧视的讨论仅限于黑人与白人之间的时代已经过去。他在书中写道，亚裔在美国最常被问及的一个问题是“你从哪里来？”。假如你生在、长在美国的纽约，于是你回答“我从纽约来。”，别人仍会接着问，“我问你最初从哪来？”。其实在问你来自亚洲那个国家。这一问题让很多亚裔很不舒服，一些美国人首先是将这些亚裔与其祖先所在国联系，而不是与美国联系。丹尼·陈生前在部队中的日记显示，军队中总有人故意反复问他这一问题。

悲伤的父母（刊载于2011年10月31日《纽约时报》）

丹尼·陈的最后行程--纽约唐人街（刊载于2011年10月31日《纽约时报》）

下面是网络上与此相关的三篇报道，一篇中文，两篇英文。 

一、2012年1月1日加拿大华人网：港刊:华裔美军被欺虐身亡 折射美种族欺凌黑幕(图)

  丹尼·陈的同学及支持者举行纪念游行活动，高举标语要求查明真相

最新一期的香港《亚洲周刊》刊文说，19岁华裔美军陈宇晖驻防阿富汗离奇死亡，八名美军涉嫌凌虐被起诉。事件成美传媒报道热点，华人小区激烈反弹，要求彻查真相。月前加州另一名华裔美军廖梓源也因霸凌而死。廖梓源、陈宇晖事件发生后，亚裔对充斥种族主义和欺凌风气的美国军队，更将采取裹足不前的态度。

文章摘编如下：

纽约唐人街出生长大的陈宇晖(Danny Chen)是个眉清目秀、性情温和的年轻人。父母亲二十多年前从广东台山移民到美国，就像许多欠缺高等学历与技术的新移民一样，他们选择华人聚集的纽约华埠为住地。父亲陈炎桃在餐馆打工，母亲陈素珍是车衣工，陈宇晖是他俩的独子。

陈宇晖在寒微的环境中成长，个性开朗、孝顺父母，他虽不是一个身强体健的男孩，但小时候就立志要当纽约警察。他的想法是先从军，锻炼自己的心身。于是，他在2011年1月仍在纽约市立巴鲁克(Baruch)学院读一年级时，就在母亲反对、父亲没意见之下投笔从戎。没想到，19岁的陈宇晖竟在9个月后离奇死在他所驻防的阿富汗，他的从军之路变成他的死亡之路。

陈没有自杀的理由

美国军方表示陈宇晖死于自杀，在警卫哨塔里开枪打自己的脑袋。但陈炎桃和陈素珍不相信他们的儿子会自杀。陈素珍说，宇晖在9月27日(即死亡前六天)还从阿富汗驻地打电话回家，请她寄他爱吃的肉干。陈母强调她的儿子绝不是一个想不开的年轻人，没有理由会去自杀。

陈宇晖死亡消息震撼纽约华人小区，陈宇晖中小学同学、华人社团和民意代表纷纷走出来要求军方详细说明陈宇晖死因，并公布调查报告。在推动调查陈案的华人社团中，成立30余年、主要由土生土长华人组成的美华协会(OCA)纽约分会出力最大、成效最彰。在美华协会纽约分会女会长欧阳萧安(Elizabelh R. OuYang)全力策划下，陈宇晖事件引起美国主流媒体瞩目，《纽约时报》于10月31日在头版和第3页半版醒目刊出陈案，《纽约每日新闻》发表社论要求军方追究。

陈宇晖生于1992年，毕业于纽约130小学、131初中和佩斯(Pace)高中。他的一位高中同学兼好友曾劝他不要去当兵，因他认为陈比较瘦小、说话亦细声细气，也许不适合“牛鬼蛇神”混杂的军队生活。但陈决心从军，先到乔治亚州步兵中心班宁堡(Fort Benning)接受三个月入伍训练。受训期间，他曾向双亲和同学透露，军中有人有时会用种族歧视言语嘲笑他，但他都一笑置之，并不把这些“无聊的事情”放在心上。他在纽约长大，亲历过许多种族讽嘲的实例，因此，只要不是太过分，他都能够容忍。陈宇晖唯一抱怨的是受训操练太严太苦，他不是一个身强体壮的人，许多白人子弟亦受不了严格的新兵操练。

2011年4月，陈宇晖结束三个月的新兵训练，曾回家探视父母并和高中时代的同学见面，大家都没想到的是，那是他们和Danny最后一次的相聚。一周假期过后，陈即被派赴阿拉斯加温莱特堡(Fort Wainwright)步兵第二十五师基地。2011年八月，陈宇晖随步兵第二十五师第一旅第二十一团第三营驻防阿富汗南部坎达哈地区。陈宇晖除了使用社交网站和其它电子通讯工具外，也有写日记的习惯。他说，在入伍训练时有苦也有乐，但在野战部队里，却常遭遇种族歧视的语言暴力，甚至是肢体暴力。包括长官在内，常以怪声怪调叫他的名字或叫他学山羊叫，因他姓陈(Chen)，有人常以讥讽的语调称他为成龙(Jackie Chan)，每天问他好几遍：“你是不是中国来的？

二、<纽约时报>2011年12月22日文章    Army Charges 8 in Wake of Death of a Fellow G.I.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/us/8-charged-in-death-of-fellow-soldier-us-army-says.html?pagewanted=all

One night in October, an Army private named Danny Chen apparently angered his fellow soldiers by forgetting to turn off the water heater after taking a shower at his outpost in Afghanistan, his family said.

In the relatives’ account, the soldiers pulled Private Chen out of bed and dragged him across the floor; they forced him to crawl on the ground while they pelted him with rocks and taunted him with ethnic slurs. Finally, the family said, they ordered him to do pull-ups with a mouthful of water — while forbidding him from spitting it out.

It was the culmination of what the family called a campaign of hazing against Private Chen, 19, who was born in Chinatown in Manhattan, the son of Chinese immigrants. Hours later, he was found dead in a guard tower, from what a military statement on Wednesday called “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” to the head.

On Wednesday, the American military announced that the Army had charged eight soldiers in Private Chen’s battalion in connection with the death.

It was an extraordinary development in a case that has stirred intense reactions in the Asian population in New York and elsewhere and provoked debate over what some experts say is the somewhat ambivalent relationship between the Asian population and the United States military.

The authorities have not publicized much information about the circumstances of the death. Family members said they had gleaned bits of information about the hazing in private briefings with American military officials. But the array of charges announced — the most serious of which were manslaughter and negligent homicide — suggested that military prosecutors believed that the soldiers’ actions drove Private Chen to commit suicide.

Private Chen’s relatives and friends said they welcomed the announcement of the charges, as did Asian-American advocacy groups, which have been pressing the Army to conduct a transparent investigation into the death and to improve the treatment of Asians in the armed forces.

“It’s of some comfort and relief to learn that the Army has taken this seriously,” Private

Chen’s mother, Su Zhen Chen, said through an interpreter at a news conference in Chinatown. Private Chen was her only child.

Private Chen’s parents — his father has worked as a chef in Chinese restaurants, and his mother as a seamstress — live in an East Village housing project.

Private Chen was deployed to Afghanistan in August after completing basic training in April.

In a journal he kept while in basic training and in letters, Private Chen mentioned that other soldiers teased him because of his ethnicity. “Everyone here jokingly makes fun of me for being Asian,” he said in one letter to his parents. In another letter two days later, he wrote, “People crack jokes about Chinese people all the time; I’m running out of jokes to come back at them.”

At a news conference on Wednesday, a Pentagon spokesman would not discuss details about the case, but he acknowledged that hazing, while against the rules of the military, occasionally occurred among its members. He insisted that the armed forces had a zero-tolerance policy toward it.

“We treat each other with respect and dignity, or we go home,” the spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said. “There’s a justice system in place to deal with it. And that’s what we’re seeing here in the case of Private Chen.”

The accused soldiers, all members of a unit based in Fort Wainwright, Alaska, included an officer and seven enlisted soldiers, the military said in a statement. Lawyers for the eight could not be reached for comment on the Army’s charges.

The case is among very few from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts in which American soldiers have been implicated in the deaths of fellow soldiers.

In October, several Marines were ordered court-martialed for their roles in the death of an Asian-American Marine, Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, from California, who killed himself in April in Afghanistan after being subjected to what military prosecutors said was hazing.

Until Wednesday, the military had said little publicly about the investigation into Private Chen’s death, and in the vacuum of information, suspicion flourished among relatives, friends and advocates in the Asian-American community over whether American military investigators were planning to whitewash the inquiry.

But military officials insisted all along that they were conducting a thorough investigation and that its integrity depended on the tight control of information.

Sgt. First Class Alan G. Davis, a spokesman for the military’s headquarters in southern Afghanistan, said Wednesday that there had been two investigations into Private Chen’s death: one conducted by the regional command, which resulted in the charges, and one by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is continuing.

The eight suspects, who have not been formally detained, are still stationed in Afghanistan, though on a different base and under increased supervision, another military spokesman, Lt. Col. Dave Connolly, said.

Private Chen’s relatives and advocates for the family said the charges caught them by surprise.

“I didn’t think the case would move this fast,” said Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation. Reaching for a Chinese aphorism, he added, “You cannot wrap a fire with paper: the truth will come out.”

“We are cautiously optimistic about today’s news,” he said, adding that the authorities “have to create an atmosphere in which Asian-Americans feel safe.”

Elizabeth R. OuYang, president of the New York chapter of OCA, a civil rights group that has been working with the family, vowed to continue pressing military officials on the case. She has helped keep the matter in the public eye by organizing a prayer vigil and a march in memory of Private Chen. She has also met at the Pentagon with Army officials to emphasize the importance of the case and to demand measures to improve the treatment of Asians in the military.

The eight charged in the case are members of the 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. Five of the soldiers — Staff Sgt. Andrew J. Van Bockel, Sgt. Adam M. Holcomb, Sgt. Jeffrey T. Hurst, Specialist Thomas P. Curtis and Specialist

Ryan J. Offutt — were accused of involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide and assault consummated by battery, among other crimes, the military said.

First Lt. Daniel J. Schwartz, the only officer among the eight defendants, was charged with dereliction of duty, the statement said.

Sgt. Travis F. Carden was charged with assault and maltreatment, and Staff Sgt. Blaine G. Dugas was charged with dereliction of duty and making a false statement, the statement said.

Matthew Rosenberg contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Noah Rosenberg from New York.

二、<纽约时报>2011年10月31日文章 Soldier’s Death Raises Suspicions in Chinatown

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/nyregion/after-soldiers-death-a-chinatown-family-seeks-answers.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=us

Friends and relatives crowd into Su Zhen Chen’s small apartment in an East Village housing project, bearing food and solace for her and her husband. A community leader sometimes shows up to pay respects, or a military official arrives with papers to sign. Adults gather in the cramped living room for hushed chats in Chinese as children do homework at the kitchen table. For Ms. Chen, these are welcome distractions.

But at night, when the apartment goes quiet, the grief surges back, and Ms. Chen sits with a portrait of her son, her only child, and ponders what unfolded on a dusty military base half a world away. “It’s so sad that he loved the Army and this happened,” she said.

On Oct. 3, her son, Pvt. Danny Chen, was found shot to death in a guard tower on an American outpost in Afghanistan. He was 19 years old.

Three days after his death, a military official told Ms. Chen and her husband, Yan Tao Chen, that investigators had not yet determined whether the shot to the head was self-inflicted or fired by someone else.

But the official also revealed, the Chens said, that Private Chen had been subjected to physical abuse and ethnic slurs by superiors, who one night dragged him out of bed and across the floor when he failed to turn off a water heater after showering.

Since then, the military has given little information about its investigation to the Chens, immigrants who speak no English.

And though military officials have reassured the Chens that a thorough investigation is being conducted, their grief is laced with suspicion, shared by their supporters in the local Chinese community, that they will never learn the truth.

For decades, Asian-Americans have had an uneasy relationship with the military, enlisting at lower rates than other ethnic groups.

Many Asian-American families have emphasized higher education and white-collar occupations, rather than the armed services, as a way to get ahead in America, experts say. The dearth of high-profile Asian-Americans in the upper echelons of the military may have also discouraged enlistment.

In New York’s Asian population, the reaction to Private Chen’s death has underscored this feeling, and community leaders say the case threatens to chill attitudes toward the military.

“The family deserves the truth — the honest truth,” said Melissa Chen, one of Private Chen’s aunts.

Private Chen kept a journal while deployed, relatives said, but military investigators have so far shared only three pages of it with the family. On one, a cartoonish face with an angst-ridden expression is scrawled alongside the misspelled message: “Watever happens happens.”

On another, a list of notes, in what looks like Private Chen’s handwriting, describes procedural failures, including “Didn’t clear weapon,” “Didn’t hydrate,” and “No attention to detail (little things).”

Relatives said they had no idea what to make of the pages. The military’s decision to release them while retaining the rest of the journal has only added to their bewilderment.

A spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Command said officials in Afghanistan were conducting a “thorough, in-depth investigation” into Private Chen’s death.

“We’re not only investigating to determine the cause and manner of his death, but also the circumstances leading up to his death,” said the spokesman, Christopher Grey. “We take this investigation and the tragic loss of Private Chen very serious and will not close our investigation until we are fully confident we have determined exactly what transpired.”

He added that no other details would be released until the investigation was completed.

From the little that the military has told them, family members believe that investigators are focusing on suicide as the cause of death. If that is the determination, the case may echo that of another Asian-American, Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, a Marine from California who killed himself in April in Afghanistan after fellow Marines allegedly subjected him to a brutal hazing. Last week, the Marines were ordered court-martialed.

But among Private Chen’s relatives and friends in New York City, nobody will accept that he killed himself. “I know him well enough to know he would not commit suicide,” Ms. Chen said in Taishanese, a Chinese dialect, her voice hardening in anger. “I suspect someone went after Danny.”

In interviews with Private Chen’s relatives and friends, and in a review of a personal journal he kept and letters he wrote to his parents, a portrait emerges of a child of Chinatown who, amid self-doubt about his physical abilities, strived to succeed in the military.

Private Chen’s father worked as a chef in Chinese restaurants, and his mother was a seamstress in a garment factory. He was a good student who led a subdued social life, playing video games and watching movies with cousins and a small group of friends. In recent years, he took up handball.

Early on, he wanted to be a New York City police officer, his parents said, and planned to spend a few years in the military before joining the police. “He wanted to catch bad guys,” his father said.

His mother said she tried to talk him out of enlisting because of the dangers. His father supported his choice, however reluctantly, because it seemed honorable.

To recruiters, Private Chen was probably a welcome sight. Asian enlistment rates have historically been low, and military officials have been trying to raise those numbers. The Asian population in the United States is nearly 5 percent, according to the 2010 Census.

For most of the past decade, Asians have been less than 3 percent of all military recruits, rising to 3.2 percent in 2010, officials said.

At the same time, minority advocates have expressed concern over the treatment of Asians in the military.

“There has to be an environment where they are integrated, protected and supported,” said Elizabeth R. OuYang, president of the New York chapter of OCA, a civil rights group. “It’s unclear that that’s the case.”

Private Chen was the first of his extended family to serve in the American military.

At basic training in Fort Benning, Ga., Private Chen’s experience did not seem unusual. He endured rigorous training, tedium and occasional homesickness, according to a journal he kept and weekly letters he sent to his parents.

He confessed to doubts about whether he was strong enough to make it, describing himself as “the weakest one left.” Yet he never suggested that he would quit, and was often enthusiastic about some of the training, particularly weapons instruction.

He revealed that he was teased by other recruits because of his race, but seemed to take it in stride. “I get made fun of for being Asian/Chinese everyday but it’s not hard core,” he wrote his parents. “All for the sake of jokes. I get them back, too.”

He completed training in April and was assigned to a brigade at Fort Wainwright in Alaska. In August, he was deployed to an outpost in volatile Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.

The details of Private Chen’s life in Afghanistan remain a mystery to his friends and parents in New York. Several members of his battalion did not reply to e-mails seeking comment, and none of them have reached out to his family. A press officer for the brigade denied requests for interviews because of the investigation.

During deployment, Private Chen called home three times and sounded upbeat, his parents said.

“I’d ask him how he was doing over there, is it hard? And he would say ‘I knew it would be hard,’ ” his mother recalled. “I asked him if anybody was bullying him, and he replied, ‘That’s to be expected.’ ”

On Sept. 20, he sent a Facebook message to Raymond Lam, a childhood friend from New York City.

“It sucks here all sandy and everything,” he wrote. “Prob gunna b bak at around May-June one of those i have no idea but whatever.”

“Is it like dangerous at all?” Mr. Lam asked in a message on Sept. 27. But Mr. Lam never heard back.