Walking Wounded
By Fred Reed
The American Conservative

January 31st, 2005

Old soldiers don’t fade away

The observant will have noticed that we hear little from the troops in Iraq and see almost nothing of the wounded. Why, one might wonder, does not CNN put an enlisted Marine before a camera and, for 15 minutes without editing, let him say what he thinks? Is he not an adult and a citizen? Is he not engaged in important events on our behalf?
Sound political reasons exist. Soldiers are a risk PR-wise, the wounded a liability. No one can tell what they might say, and conspicuous dismemberment is bad for recruiting. An enlisted man in front of a camera is dangerous. He could wreck the governmental spin apparatus in five minutes. It is better to keep soldiers discreetly out of sight.

So we do not see much of the casualties, ours or theirs. Yet they are there, somewhere, with missing legs, blind, becoming accustomed to groping at things in their new darkness, learning to use the wheelchairs that will be theirs for 50 years. Some face worse fates than others. Quadriplegics will be warehoused in VA hospitals where nurses will turn them at intervals, like hamburgers, to prevent bedsores. Friends and relatives will soon forget them. Suicide will be a frequent thought. The less damaged will get around.

For a brief moment perhaps the casualties will believe, then try desperately to keep believing, that they did something brave and worthy and terribly important for that abstraction, country. Some will expect thanks. But there will be no thanks, or few, and those quickly forgotten. It will be worse. People will ask how they lost the leg. In Iraq, they will say, hoping for sympathy, or respect, or understanding. The response, often unvoiced but unmistakable, will be, “What did you do that for?” The wounded will realize that they are not only crippled, but freaks.

The years will go by. Iraq will fade into the mist. Wars always do. A generation will rise for whom it will be just history. The dismembered veterans will find first that almost nobody appreciates what they did, then that few even remember it. If-when, many would say-the United States is driven out of Iraq, the soldiers will look back and realize that the whole affair was a fraud. Wars are just wars. They seem important at the time. At any rate, we are told that they are important.

Yet the wounds will remain. Arms do not grow back. For the paralyzed there will never be girlfriends, dancing, rolling in the grass with children. The blind will adapt as best they can. Those with merely a missing leg will count themselves lucky. They will hobble about, managing to lead semi-normal lives, and people will say, “How well he handles it.” An admirable freak. For others it will be less good. A colostomy bag is a sorry companion on a wedding night.

These men will come to hate. It will not be the Iraqis they hate. This we do not talk about.

It is hard to admit that one has been used. Some of the crippled will forever insist that the war was needed, that they were protecting their sisters from an Islamic invasion, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. Others will keep quiet and drink too much. Still others will read, grow older and wiser-and bitter. They will remember that their vice president, a man named Cheney, said that during his war, the one in Asia, he “had other priorities.” The veterans will remember this when everyone else has long since forgotten Cheney.

I once watched the first meeting between a young Marine from the South, blind, much of his face shot away, and his high-school sweetheart, who had come from Tennessee to Bethesda Naval Hospital to see him.

Hatred comes easily. There are wounds and there are wounds. A friend of mine spent two tours in Asia in that war now little remembered. He killed many people, not all of them soldiers. It is what happens in wars. The memory haunts him. Jack is a hard man from a tough neighborhood, quick with his fists, intelligent but uneducated-not a liberal flower vain over his sensitivity. He lives in Mexican bars few would enter and has no politics beyond an anger toward government. He was not a joyous killer. He remembers what he did, knows now that he was had. It gnaws at him. One is wise to stay away from him when he is drinking.

People say that this war isn’t like Vietnam. They are correct. Washington fights its war in Iraq with no better understanding of Iraq than it had of Vietnam, but with much better understanding of the United States. The Pentagon learned from Asia. This time around it has controlled the press well. Here is the great lesson of Southeast Asia: the press is dangerous, not because it is inaccurate, which it often is, but because it often isn’t. So we don’t much see the caskets -for reasons of privacy, you understand.

The war in Iraq is fought by volunteers, which means people that no one in power cares about. No one in the mysteriously named “elite” gives a damn about some kid from a town in Tennessee that has one gas station and a beer hall with a stuffed buck’s head. Such a kid is a redneck at best, pretty much from another planet, and certainly not someone you would let your daughter date. If conscription came back, and college students with rich parents learned to live in fear of The Envelope, riots would blossom as before. Now Yale can rest easy. Thank God for throwaway people.

The nearly perfect separation between the military and the rest of the country, or at least the influential in the country, is wonderful for the war effort. It prevents concern. How many people with a college degree even know a soldier? Yes, some, and I will get e-mail from them, but they are a minority. How many Americans have been on a military base? Or, to be truly absurd, how many men in combat arms went to, say, Harvard? Ah, but they have other priorities.

In 15 years in Washington, I knew many, many reporters and intellectuals and educated people. Almost none had worn boots. So it is. Those who count do not have to go, and do not know anyone who has gone, and don’t interest themselves. There is a price for this, though not one Washington cares about. Across America, in places where you might not expect it-in Legion halls and VFW posts, among those who carry membership cards from the Disabled American Veterans-there are men who hate. They don’t hate America. They hate those who sent them. Talk to the wounded from Iraq in five years.

Fred Reed’s writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Harper’s, and National Review, among other places.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Unfeeling President
By E.L. Doctorow
September 9th, 2004

The East Hampton Star

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Draft?
The Charleston Gazette
September 22nd, 2004

Bush’s war needs troops.

Alarm is spreading that President Bush may seek a military draft, or mobilize more of the National Guard and Army Reserve, to obtain enough combat troops to wage his bogged-down Iraq war.

Two bills pending in Congress would launch a new draft for all young Americans ages 18 to 26, both male and female, with no college exemption. Also, a new border agreement with Canada is designed to prevent young Americans from fleeing northward to elude the draft.
When Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards spoke in Parkersburg last week, he vowed: “There will be no draft when John Kerry is president.” His declaration drew a standing ovation from the crowd.

Meanwhile, President Bush, campaigning in Missouri, promised that there will be no draft. He said improving military pay, housing and medical care will attract enough recruits to supply the needed fighting forces.

However, Bush plans a sneaky “backdoor draft,” Democrats Kerry and Edwards allege. Speaking Friday in Albuquerque, Kerry said Bush secretly intends a major Guard and Reserve mobilization just after the Nov. 2 election. Kerry charged:

“He won’t tell us what congressional leaders are now saying: that this administration is planning yet another substantial call-up of reservists and Guard units immediately after the election. Hide it from the people, then make the move.”

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a Marine veteran of Vietnam, said Pentagon insiders told him of the mobilization plan. A White House spokesman ridiculed the allegation.

Amid all this wrangling, it’s overwhelmingly clear that Bush’s war is draining America of thousands of young people and billions of dollars and the nation is forced to meet both needs.

Tragically, the war is a waste. There never was a necessity for it. Bush’s far-right political clique planned to attack Iraq, even before he attained the White House. The 9/11 terrorist strike provided a “cover”, a surge of patriotism that Bush manipulated into justification for war against Iraq. All his pretexts for the invasion turned out to be false.

Although he declared “Mission Accomplished” last year, the fighting grows constantly uglier and more expensive. More than 1,000 young Americans have been killed. Bush needs more and more replacements.

Before the Nov. 2 election, he should tell the American people candidly how many more young soldiers he plans to order into combat, and how he will obtain them.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Young Republicans Support Iraq War, But Not Willing To Join The Fight
By Adam Smeltz
Knight Ridder Newspapers

September 1st, 2004

NEW YORK - Young Republicans gathered here for their party’s national convention are united in applauding the war in Iraq, supporting the U.S. troops there and calling the U.S. mission a noble cause.

But there’s no such unanimity when they’re asked a more personal question: Would you be willing to put on the uniform and go to fight in Iraq?
In more than a dozen interviews, Republicans in their teens and 20s offered a range of answers. Some have friends in the military in Iraq and are considering enlisting; others said they can better support the war by working politically in the United States; and still others said they think the military doesn’t need them because the U.S. presence in Iraq is sufficient.

“Frankly, I want to be a politician. I’d like to survive to see that,” said Vivian Lee, 17, a war supporter visiting the convention from Los Angeles.

Lee said she supports the war but would volunteer only if the United States faced a dire troop shortage or “if there’s another Sept. 11.”

“As long as there’s a steady stream of volunteers, I don’t see why I necessarily should volunteer,” said Lee, who has a cousin deployed in the Middle East.

In an election season overwhelmed by memories of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military’s newest war ranks supreme among the worries confronting much of Generation Y’ers. Iraq is their war.

“If there was a need presented, I would go,” said Chris Cusmano, a 21-year-old member of the College Republicans organization from Rocky Point, N.Y. But he said he hasn’t really considered volunteering.

At age 16, Chase Carpenter has.

“It’s always in the back of my mind - to enlist,” Carpenter, a self-described moderate Republican visiting Manhattan this week from Santa Monica, Calif., said Wednesday on the convention floor. He said he’s torn over whether he’d join the military if he were 18.

Others said they could contribute on the home front.

“I physically probably couldn’t do a whole lot” in Iraq, said Tiffanee Hokel, 18, of Webster City, Iowa, who called the war a moral imperative. She knows people posted in Iraq, but she didn’t flinch when asked why she wouldn’t go.

“I think I could do more here,” Hokel said, adding that she’s focusing on political action that supports the war and the troops.

“We don’t have to be there physically to fight it,” she said.

Similarly, 20-year-old Jeff Shafer, a University of Pennsylvania student, said vital work needs to be done in the United States. There are Republican policies to maintain and protect and an economy to sustain, Shafer said.

Then there’s Paula Villescaz, a 15-year-old from Carmichael, Calif. who supports Bush and was all ears Wednesday afternoon at the GOP’s Youth Convention in Madison Square Garden. She doesn’t support the war, but she supports the troops and thinks the United States “needs to stay the course” now that it’s immersed.

If Iraq is still a U.S. issue when she’s 18, Villescaz added, she’ll give serious thought to volunteering.

“I’m in college right now, but who knows?” said Matthew Vail, a 25-year-old from Huntsville, Ala., who works with Students for Bush. He said he might consider enlisting after he finishes his degree at the University of North Carolina, but not until then.

“The bug may get me after college,” he said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Tries To Keep Half Million Vets In The Dark
The Daily Mis-Lead
July 6th, 2004

President Bush celebrated the July 4th holiday by praising veterans, saying “we’re proud of your service, we’re grateful for the example you have set for America.”[1] But a new report shows that more than half a million veterans are going without health care benefits owed to them - and the Bush administration has tried to keep those veterans in the dark.
According to Knight-Ridder newspapers, 572,000 veterans nationwide “are missing out on disability payments from the Veterans Administration”[2] even though they are owed those payments from their service. A large portion of these veterans are not receiving their payments because they do not know about them - a situation the White House has tried to perpetuate. In 2002, VA officials were ordered by the Bush administration “to cease efforts to enroll new patients into its health care system.” The directive said it was “inappropriate” for local VA workers to attend health fairs, open houses and community meetings to educate veterans about what their eligibility and to enroll them in health care programs.[3]

The President’s efforts to prevent veterans from getting the benefits they are owed came at the same time the White House was squeezing veterans programs overall. Specifically, the President has drastically underfunded veterans health care programs, leading to major veterans groups calling his policies a “disgrace” and noting his most recent budget falls $2.6 billion short of what is needed this year alone.[4] The President also raised premiums that veterans pay for their prescription drugs.[5]

Sources:

1. Presidential Remarks, WhiteHouse.gov, 7/04/04,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=44009
2. “Thousands of disabled vets lack disability payments due to poor agency outreach, stigma,” Knight-Ridder, 7/01/2004,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=44010
3. “VA says `no’ to new patients - Service,” VFW Magazine, 9/02,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=44011
4. “VFW Terms President’s VA Budget Proposal Harmful to Veterans VFW Appeals to Congress for Relief,” VFW.org, 2/02/2004
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=44012
5. “Bush calls for electronic medical records,” CNN.com, 4/28/2004,
http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1202081&l=44013

Visit www.misleader.org for more about Bush Administration distortion.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A Failure of Leadership At The Highest Levels
Army Times
May 10th, 2004

Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.

Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.

But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.
There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.

By then, of course, it was too late.

Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.

If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.

He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.

On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness - a failure that amounts to professional negligence.

To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.

That’s good, but not good enough.

This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential - even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Is Military Draft In The Works?
By Andrew Greenley
The Chicago Sun Times

April 23, 2004

There’s a sign on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, that there’s a military draft in the works. The Defense Department has announced that Selective Service is making preparations for another draft, “in case one is needed.” The New York Times in an inane editorial pleads with the president to articulate a goal for the war that if it “was clear and comprehensive and people understood how to reach it, then Mr. Bush could . . . even bolster the desperately straitened military with a draft if Americans understood the need to sacrifice.”
If the editorial writers of the New York Times are talking about a new draft that would send young men and women to die in the deserts of Iraq fighting crazy religious fanatics, then the idea is certainly being whispered about in the upper echelons of American society. A draft would not be proposed before the election — if it were, Bush would be wiped out in a landslide. But a wise person would not bet against the draft being proposed next January.

What in the world is the Times talking about? Why should Americans sacrifice for the Iraq War? Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination can one seriously argue that the war in Iraq is to defend vital American interests. We found that there were no weapons of mass destruction there and no connection with al-Qaida or the Sept. 11 attack. The only issue seems to be whether we can impose democracy on Iraqis who don’t seem seriously to want it or to prevent a civil war that will happen anyway as soon as our army leaves. Americans are supposed to accept the need to sacrifice their unwilling sons and daughters to fight for such absurd goals?

There are many authoritarian liberals who have a kind of illicit romance with the draft. Young people owe their a country a part of their lives, even their lives itself (not their own sons and daughters’ lives, of course). Military service is good for you, some veterans insist. It will make a man out of a drifting late adolescent. What it will do for a young woman remains to be seen — probably teach her how to live in a world where rape is commonplace.

Building up the army with a draft will serve only the needs of the Bush administration to “win” a war. Gen. Eric Shinseki, then-chief of staff of the Army, said that 200,000 would be needed to pacify Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld made fun of him in public. Now the Defense Department seems to be engaged in remote planning for a draft army that will be much larger.

How many men and women, it must be asked, will be required to pacify Iraq and to turn it into a freedom-loving democracy? How long will it take, how many lives must be sacrificed to protect the honor and the legacy of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and their crowd of imperialists?

Doubtless it will be argued in favor of a draft that we all must make sacrifices for a war on terrorism. It might be better if one sent men and women in their 40s to fight in a foolish, unjust, immoral, criminal war. It would be good for them. They’d have to lose weight and get back in physical condition.

Bush has made “the war on terrorism” a mantra to cover everything his administration has done. But the Iraq war has nothing to do with the war on terrorism, as we now know. It was a plan of Cheney and Rumsfeld and their coterie of “neo-conservative” intellectuals (like Paul Wolfowitz) long before they came to power. It was supposed to make the United States a major power in the Middle East; to provide a democratic alternative to the typical Arab autocracy; to give the United States control of major oil fields; to take pressure off Israel, and to establish that the United States was a superpower that could go anywhere in the world and do anything it wanted. The “war on terror” was only a pretext to implement this plan, as accounts of the early White House reaction to the Sept. 11 attack seem to indicate.

Does one have to say that none of these goals have been achieved or can be achieved?

I wonder why Sen. John Kerry sounds so much like Hubert Humphrey in his support of the continuation of the war. I hope at least he makes opposition to a new draft a major issue in the election.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Letter From An Army Vet
By Terry Dobbelaere
Salon

December 5, 2003

A disabled Vietnam-era vet visits a Minneapolis V.A. hospital and discovers that many fellow vets oppose the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.

I received a letter from the V.A. Administration about a month ago to report on Nov. 24 at 2:20 p.m. for a doctor’s appointment. The “waiting list” for DAVs [disabled American veterans] has taken up to three years to secure a primary physician in the new V.A. Medical Center in Minneapolis, but as the result of private grants, some federal funding and some volunteers, they have imported a few dozen doctors and medical assistants to alleviate this problem.
As I was waiting in the general call area, where you wait as they determine which doctor you will see first, which test to be given, etc., I was with approximately 100-125 other veterans. This was a diverse group ranging from very elderly men in wheelchairs on oxygen and with assistance, to recently returned soldiers from Iraq.

The new facility has much more room and better accommodations than the old facility at Fort Snelling. We had comfortable chairs, and TVs were stationed overhead for everyone to see and hear if they chose to. During my wait, our president, George W. Bush, appeared on the TV for a news conference. It became readily apparent that President Bush was speaking to a large group (apparently) of soldiers from Fort Carson, Colo., and astonishingly to me at least, he was once again wearing a military uniform!

For those that know me it is no surprise and to those that don’t know me, I am no “fan” of President (Shrub) Bush. I want to make this clear so there are no accusations of misrepresentation, and this is primarily why I remained silent as this speech by Bush continued on. Something phenomenal was happening: At each “central table,” where the controls and speakers for the television sets are contained in the remote controls so as not to disturb others, the channels all went to his “speech/send-off” and the volume was turned up to the point that even the most hearing impaired were being moved to hear what was going on.

Then it started. First, a veteran around 50 years old in my area said, “I can’t believe he has the guts to wear that uniform!” Others around the room started making remarks like, “Count the lies!” and “Didn’t he learn anything on that aircraft carrier?” I’ll clean up the language, but not long into Shrub’s obvious photo op there were so many men and a few women veterans either yelling at each other or at the TV that staff members came in thinking someone had a serious health issue, or that perhaps an unstable patient had gone into a rage.

Uniformly and, as best as I could decipher, almost all the men in that room were either angry, disgusted, frustrated or simply insulted. I have held the belief that retired military are abundantly GOP supporters, so I simply couldn’t contain myself anymore. I am, admittedly, an activist and advocate for labor rights and whom they support. Clearly Mr. Bush is not in that crowd so I rose and walked to the middle area and asked if I could have everyone’s attention. I explained my background, my current status both in the civilian world and as a DAV, and said that I wasn’t registered with any political party and that I considered myself independent in order to support candidates that represent my interests and concerns the best.

Surprisingly all but one of the televisions was turned off and we ended up having a town hall sort of meeting. Occasionally someone would get called for his or her appointment and, astonishingly to me, a couple of guys passed their time to the next number as they had things to get off their chests. In brief, out of approximately 100 men that were participating we did hand votes and spoke. The highest-ranking veteran was a “bird” colonel from Silver Bay, and there were 13 commissioned officers, 7 WWII, 14 Korea, 3 Iraq and the rest were, presumably, Vietnam. One after another, veterans spoke of how frustrating it was to have once felt proud and to now watch our group being leached of promised benefits and assistance. The WWII veteran from Owatonna spoke eloquently of marching in over 50 parades with his Legion/VFW Honor Squad with pride, and how he felt no such pride today as he viewed the young men behind the “Joke,” as he put it, that was speaking on the TV.

I did ask how many in the room supported the effort in Iraq: It was a little over half until Greg stood up and said, “Terry, loaded question! What part of the effort do you mean? Should we have gone? Are we there for military reasons or an alternative reason?” He stated he was sure that everyone in the room supported the troops, and would I rephrase my question. At that point I admitted I had a bumper sticker on my vehicle that stated “We Support the Troops” in bold letters and then below in smaller letters “But NOT the unelected residents of the White House!” The room went crazy! Greg reestablished some order and asked how many felt my bumper sticker represented how they felt last winter prior to invading Iraq. Counting me there were only nine of us.

Greg then asked, “How many feel the way the bumper sticker reads today?” We had to explain the question over again to a few of the more disabled or elderly veterans and then he asked for a show of hands. Amazingly, I observed even the staff members at the counter with their hands up! If there were more than a just a few in the room who didn’t have their hands shown, I don’t know where they were.

I then asked, “In order to be fair and considering that the news conference had probably inflamed some, would anyone care to speak, without interruption or argument, in support of the minority in the room?” After another request and an awkward moment passed, a man standing by one of the wheelchair-bound veterans raised his hand. His name was Joseph, from Eden Prairie, and he worked as a volunteer driving vets to their appointments at various places in the metro area. He was hesitant to speak, saying he “wasn’t a patient, wasn’t disabled, but was a veteran.” We asked him to speak up. Joseph explained he had been a lifelong Republican and had voted straight ticket for over two decades. He admired Reagan and thought highly of Bush I, and was disgusted when the late Sen. Wellstone opposed the invasion of Iraq. He felt G.W. Bush was “a decent man, with good intentions” and that he sincerely felt Bush felt terribly about the casualties in Iraq. But he said, “We must respond to 9/11 somehow!” The room went silent, some started to mutter about oil, money, etc., until they were reminded of our agreement not to interrupt or be hostile to a speaker from the minority. I admire Joseph for the courage it took to speak up in an obviously uncomfortable situation.

Later, when I reached my appointment up on 4E and met my doctor, I was amazed to hear that even he was aware of what had taken place! I will not expound on what he said other than he went to school in Texas, medical school in Northern California, and residency in Massachusetts and was being hired, after this temp assignment, to Dallas again. He stated, “I would be very hard put to find a supporter of the Bush administration on the staff,” and that it was “sad” how those were either “uninformed, blatantly biased by the media, or simply refused to believe what was so obvious” in their continued attacks on liberals and support of “men being maimed for profit!”

Interesting day, thought I would share it with you. If you are tempted to believe the “military in support of Bush” propaganda, I suggest you visit your nearest V.A. medical center. People that have “been there, done that” or treat the injuries incurred by those that served aren’t being fooled one bit as far as I observed. A tremendous erosion of support for this administration is well underway among that group.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A Full Division’s Worth of Casualties
By David Hackworth
January 2004

David Hackworth says that we have taken a full division’s worth of casualties in Iraq so far…

Even I — and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week — was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq — about the number of warriors in a line tank division.
We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we’ve lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA!

Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military’s Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries. Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire. Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:

* Orthopedic surgery — 3,907

* General surgery — 1,995

* Internal medicine — 1,291

* Psychiatric — 1,167

* Neurology — 1,002

* Gynecological — 491

Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can’t be confirmed — Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal. Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because “in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once.”

The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it’s safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the USA…

The scary thing is the 18,000 “non-battle injuries” evacuated out of the theater of operations in seven months. 18000/135000 * 12/7 = .228, which means that in a year 23% of this bunch of guys and gals in their twenties and thirties are having non-war related medical misadventures serious enough to require treatment back in Germany or the USA. That’s an unbelievably large accident/disease rate, and makes me very worried about what might really be going on.

The cream of the U.S. army are not military police. They should not be used as military police. Those in the Pentagon and the White House whose policies have turned them into military police should be… they should be sent to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as undercover agents in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Read More About This Here

The David Hackworth Website

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Vietnam Vet Takes Aim At War
By Kit Miniclier
The Denver Post

Friday 5 December 2003

Purple Heart-winning officer a prominent peace activist in Colorado.

In his youth, Vietnam War veteran Charles Elliston recalls, “I was a conservative. I used to think war protesters were nut cases - agents of the enemy.”
Today, former Chief Warrant Officer Elliston, 55, is an outspoken anti-war activist who proudly wears his Army uniform to give himself credibility.

The uniform is immaculate, as are his Vietnam combat ribbons, his Purple Heart, and the silver wings with wreath and star that identify him as a senior Army aviator.

Elliston also wears pins on his uniform. One reads “NO perpetual war for perpetual peace.” Another reads: “Vietnam Veterans Against the War.”

Fourteen months ago he attended his first anti-war rally in Denver, in full uniform. Another vet handed him a “No Blood for Oil” sign and one reading “Bush Lied. Our Soldiers Died. End of Story.”

Although he is increasingly strident in his opposition to war, Elliston is quick to say “this isn’t about me, or my wound or my story. It’s about the message. I only wear the uniform because I think military service gives me some additional credibility to speak about war and its consequences.

“Without the uniform, I’m just another guy with an opinion. With the uniform I’m a former warrior with an opinion. I think that makes a difference.”

Elliston arrived in Vietnam on April Fools’ Day 1970 and was flown home precisely three weeks later, after his jaw was ripped apart and his teeth torn out by an enemy machine-gun bullet. He was hit on his seventh day of combat flying, in the co-pilot’s seat of a Bell UH-1 series Iroquois, better known as a “Huey,” which eventually became the most widely used military helicopter in the world.

The chopper was third in line to deliver reinforcements to a besieged special-forces team. The landing zone had been carved out of the jungle and, unknown to them, was now ringed by the 57th North Vietnamese Rifle Regiment. Two days earlier they had delivered 400 reinforcements to the same landing zone and met no hostile fire.

The first chopper got in and out safely, but the second one was shot down in a ball of fire, its wreckage blocking the landing zone.

“We were on a final approach when (the second helicopter) went down. They say ‘never fly over enemy guns,’ but we had no choice,” Elliston said.

Hostile fire that hit his chopper killed one crew member and wounded him and another.

By then, after less than a month “in country,” Elliston said, “I had a vague understanding that it makes no difference to the peasants who wins a war. Their lives improve when the fighting stops.”

After his jaw was wired shut at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, he read about the shootings at Kent State University, where a contingent of Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on May 4, 1970, killing four students and wounding nine others.

“I was overwhelmed with the fact I was wounded in combat fighting to preserve democracy while troops (at home) were firing on student protesters who considered Vietnam an illegal, immoral war,” he says.

His rehabilitation at Fitzsimons lasted about two years.

“I lost virtually all my teeth, but I learned to talk with my jaws wired shut. I feared there would be years of speech therapy,” he said. However, he soon knew he wouldn’t need that, after he learned how to say “chrysanthemum.”

“It took another 30 years of studying,” he said, before he concluded “we will have to answer someday for what we did” in Vietnam.

“What is relevant is that I am trying, although I’m not convinced I am having any impact,” he said.

“We as a nation must stop thinking of ourselves as exceptional and worthy of special privileges above other nations and peoples. We must stop glorifying war. We must stop praising institutional murder.”

Elliston, a commercial airline pilot who regularly flies to Asia, the Middle East and South America, said he often speaks out at rallies in this country, and on the Internet, in opposition to war. He is listed on the roster of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

“Only when our nation behaves honorably and honestly with all other nations, giving respect as we wish to be respected, seeking only peace and justice for all nations and peoples, will we be worthy of the rigors our military veterans have endured in our name,” he said. “I wish I was convinced that most, if not all, wars declared and undeclared were not based on false pretenses, as was the case in Vietnam and now Iraq.”

Speaking at a “Support our Troops” peace rally in Colorado Springs earlier this year, he said: “I have come here today to honor our men and women in uniform and to work to prevent them from being sent into harm’s way unnecessarily.

“Truly supporting our troops would mean ensuring that they are guaranteed ample, high-quality medical care,” he said, adding: “We must not conveniently dismiss the psychological trauma many of them have suffered, and will suffer, as a result of their experience with the horror of war.”

He shared the anti-war platform that day with retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Owen Lentz, a 30-year veteran who wore three hats during the 1991 Persian Gulf War as director of intelligence for the U.S. Space Command; the North American American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD; and the Air Force Space Command.

“He is as much of a patriot as I consider myself,” Lentz said of Elliston. “I find it hurtful to the entire national dialogue that people in opposition to war are considered unpatriotic by some. Dialogue is important.”

Stuart Chase, a Boulder mental-health worker who spent 20 months in Vietnam with the Marines, said he met Elliston at an anti-war rally in Denver.

“He was very impressive in his Army officer’s uniform, and he wore peace buttons on his lapels and carried a big American flag,” Chase recalled. He introduced Elliston to other groups “working for peace and justice.”

Elliston said he is alarmed by familiar-sounding pronouncements from the Bush White House. “This is the same pattern of lies disseminated by the White House during Vietnam, ‘Things are really going well.”‘

The Vietnam War, “like most military adventures, was cloaked in altruistic pretenses of disposing of dictators, of liberating oppressed peoples, of empowering democratic rule and of increasing our own nationally security.

“So far, those lofty goals have seldom been the result,” Elliston said, noting that “once again our nation is engaged in an undeclared war.”

As the 62nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor looms Sunday, Elliston noted that some historians concluded that Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt anticipated an attack but “felt it was necessary to have a catastrophic attack like that to mobilize the American public to get into World War II.”

“There are also implications that Republican President Bush knows more about 9/11,” he said, noting that the White House has been “very secretive” and has refused to release documents, just as FDR did after Dec. 7, 1941.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)