Posted by: AzBlueMeanie
It is a Memorial Day tradition to recite "In Flanders Fields" in remembrance of those who made the supreme sacrifice in service to their country:
In Flanders Fields by John McCrae, May 1915
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
But let us also remember our veterans and their families. Many veterans have suffered disabling injuries, both physical and psychological, and they deserve our nation’s full support for their service.
Here are two excellent commentaries to consider from Joseph Galloway, a military affairs columnist for the McClatchy News Service, and Bill Moyers, one of our nation’s most respected journalists.
Commentary: How Can We Really Honor Our Veterans
By Joseph L. Galloway, May 22, 2008
Memorial Day is upon us again, and the more traditional towns will be flying flags and hosting parades and holding ceremonies to honor the million American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who’ve fallen in the wars of history and in the wars of today.
It is good to honor the fallen and to comfort the families and friends who mourn one among them whose death broke their hearts.
This year, however, I’ll depart from tradition and ask that we reflect less on our fallen comrades who are at peace, and more on those veterans — especially those from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — who are alive and need our help.
How strange that today in our country, in a time of war, battles are raging over the need for medical care, educational benefits, employment opportunities and assistance for those who’ve served honorably and come home to begin new lives in a nation they risked their lives to defend.
The shameful thing is that most of those battles are being waged against the very government, the very bureaucracies, the very politicians who sent those young men and women to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the right word here isn’t shameful, but criminal.
On Capitol Hill, our lawmakers debate the pros and cons of a new GI Bill that would provide our latest combat veterans with education benefits at least equal to those that their grandfathers received when they came home from winning World War II.
Our president has threatened to veto that bill if Congress passes it. The Republican candidate to succeed him, Sen. John McCain, a veteran and former prisoner of war himself, refuses to support that GI Bill and offers a watered down, cheaper substitute.
The Pentagon and the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, a former university president, oppose better educational benefits for veterans, for fear that offering them might entice more young troops to leave the service for the campus.
This is odd, coming as it does from a president who talks a lot about supporting our troops, from a senator who draws a 100 percent military disability pension and from a former college president who surely knows the value of higher education.
Others among us wage endless battles and rage against the very agency charged with providing medical care, disability pensions, mental health care and counseling and, yes, the parsimonious educational benefits for all who’ve served and sacrificed for our country — the Veterans Administration (VA).
In recent months, VA officials have been caught providing false statistics that far understate the true number of veterans, old and young, who commit suicide. They’ve ordered doctors to diagnose fewer cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and to substitute a diagnosis of a lesser, temporary stress disorder.
The young people marching home from war and trying to rejoin civilian society, get a job and start a life aren’t having much luck, either. The government’s own statistics show that fully a quarter of returning veterans are employed in jobs that pay wages that put them below the poverty line, or less than $21,000 a year if they’re single.
Marine Maj. Gen. (ret.) Matt Caulfield of Oceanside, Calif., knows that the young men and women leaving military service today are the finest he’s ever known in a long career in uniform — yet they’re having a hard time finding good jobs.
"The CEOs and chairmen in industry all say how their companies want to hire veterans," Caulfield told me. "But this is simply not translating downward to the people who do the interviews and make the hiring decisions. A veteran is someone alien to your average corporate hiring manager, who is a 28-year-old woman with a college degree."
Caulfield, a veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam, said that government and industry are both failing miserably in providing job opportunities for this new generation of veterans. He called it a scandal when some of the best and brightest and most motivated of their generation are consigned to jobs flipping burgers or, worse, to the street corners in big cities where they hold up cardboard signs that advertise: "Homeless Veteran — Will Work for Food."
So let’s review the bidding here this Memorial Day.
Let’s all pay lip service to Support Our Troops. But if we want to be honest, we should edit those yellow-ribbon bumper stickers to say Support Our Troops — As Long As It Doesn’t Cost Anything.
Let’s acknowledge that this new generation of soldiers and Marines is amazingly motivated and talented. They’re expected to be good killers, good diplomats and ambassadors of American goodwill who operate under impossibly complex rules of engagement in impossibly dangerous and deadly environments.
But if they come home wounded, their brains rattled by the huge IEDs of the new way of war, and if they suffer the horrors of PTSD nightmares and flashbacks, let’s dump them on the streets with the least amount of help and benefits possible, as cheaply as possible.
For sure we don’t want to improve their chances, better their future prospects, by offering them the same college benefits we gave their grandfathers six decades ago. God help us if they all get college degrees and figure out what we’ve done to them.
McClatchy Washington Bureau | 05/22/2008 | Commentary: How we can really honor our veterans
Memorial Day
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, May 23, 2008
We honor our war dead this Memorial Day weekend. The greatest respect we could pay them would be to pledge no more wars for erroneous and misleading reasons; no more killing and wounding except for the defense of our country and our freedoms.
We also could honor our dead by caring for the living, and do better at it than we are right now.
There has been a flurry of allegations concerning neglect, malpractice and corner cutting at the Veterans Administration especially for those suffering from post traumatic stress disorder – PTSD – or major depression, brought on by combat.
A report released by the Rand Corporation last month indicates that approximately 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer PTSD or major depression. That’s one of every five military men and women who have served over there.
Last Friday’s Washington Post reported the contents of an e-mail sent to staff at a VA hospital in Temple, Texas. A psychologist wrote, "Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out." She further suggested that a diagnosis of a less serious Adjustment Disorder be made instead, especially as she and her colleagues "really don’t… have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD."
Now PTSD is not a diagnosis arrived at without careful, thorough examination. But to possibly misdiagnose such a volatile and harmful disorder for the sake of saving time or money is reprehensible.
Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake immediately said the psychologist’s statement had been "repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization." Nonetheless, there’s plenty of other evidence to raise concern.
The rate of attempted and successful suicides is so scary, the head of the VA’s mental health division, Dr. Ira Katz, wondered in a February e-mail how it should be spun. "Shh!" he wrote. "Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?"
This apparent cover-up prompted the House Veterans Committee to hold hearings earlier this month. Congressman Bob Filner, committee chairman, questioned Dr. Katz and Veterans Affairs Secretary Peake. "What we see is a pattern that reveals a culture of bureaucracy," Filner angrily said. "The pattern is deny, deny, deny and when that fails, it’s cover up, cover up, cover up — there is clear evidence of a bureaucratic cover-up here…
Rep. Filner raised the question of criminal negligence. "We should all be angry about what has gone on here," he declared. "This is a matter of life and death for the veterans that we are responsible for and I think there was criminal negligence in the way this was handled. If we do not admit, assume or know, then the problem will continue and people will die. If that’s not criminal negligence, I don’t know what is."
Secretary Peake said, "I can appreciate that the number of 1000 suicide attempts a month might be shocking but in a system as large as ours… and consistent with the literature, we might well expect a larger number of attempts than that."
The front page of Sunday’s Houston Chronicle featured an in-depth study of just one of the suicides — Bronze Star recipient Nils Aron Andersson of the 82nd Airborne Division. "A victim of the war within," reads the Chronicle headline.
Andersson returned home from two tours in Iraq and was reassigned to duty as an Army recruiter. "Did he come back different?" his father asked. "I don’t think there’s anybody who goes over there and fights on the front lines who ever comes back the same."
In March 2007, Andersson sat behind the wheel of his new Ford pick up – less than 24 hours after his wedding – and fired a single round from a .22 caliber semi-automatic into his right temple. He was 25 years old.
"I don’t think Aron let the Army down," his father said. "I think the Army let him down. I think the care wasn’t there that he really needed."
Only about half of those service members diagnosed with PTSD or depression have sought treatment and about half of those received what the RAND study describes as "minimally adequate treatment." Minimally adequate treatment for what could be a matter of life and death.
Once upon a time, kids asked their fathers, "What did you do in the war, daddy?" It’s a question the next generation could ask all of us who stood by as our government invaded Iraq to start a war whose purpose and rationale keep shifting and whose end is nowhere in sight, and who look now with nonchalance upon the unseen scars of those who are fighting it.
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