Veterans for Common Sense

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 30, 2007 — Ten American soldiers were killed in roadside bombings and a helicopter crash on Memorial Day in Iraq, making May — at 113 fatalities — the third deadliest month of the war.

Six of the U.S. soldiers were killed in an insurgent roadside bomb ambush as they raced to rescue two others, who died in a helicopter crash. The military did not say if the helicopter was shot down or had mechanical problems. All eight died in Diyala province north of the capital.

“We know that the helicopter had received ground fire, but do not know yet the cause of the helicopter going down,” Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said.

Two other American troopers died Monday in a roadside bombing in south Baghdad, the military said.

On Tuesday, gunmen in police uniforms and driving vehicles used by security forces kidnapped five Britons from an Iraqi Finance Ministry office.

About 40 heavily armed men snatched the five Britons from an annex and sped away in a convoy of 19 four-wheel-drive vehicles toward Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold not far away, according to the British Foreign office in London and Iraqi officials in the Interior and Finance ministries.

May 28, 2007 – An Iraq War veteran from Long Island who had gone AWOL was arrested for desertion during a routine traffic stop in Cutchogue, police said.

Christopher Henessy, 27, who gave police an address in Riverhead, was behind the wheel of a 2006 Dodge Charger on Route 48 when he was spotted driving erratically by a police officer at 1:17 p.m. Saturday, authorities said.

When the officer entered his name in a computer database for a background check, he discovered Henessy had a suspended license and registration — and a felony warrant for his arrest.

“In his case, he was wanted by the United States Army,” said Sgt. Raymond Van Etten of the Southold Police.

Henessy told the arresting officer that he grew up in the area, had been in the Army for seven years — including a stint in Iraq — and had earned a Purple Heart, Van Etten said. “He was very cooperative,” Van Etten said.

Henessy was given tickets for driving with a suspended license and an unregistered vehicle, and was held on the warrant at the Southold police station house, police said.

Military police officers from Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn picked Henessy up Sunday night for extradition to Fort Knox, Ky., Van Etten said.

Several phone calls left Monday with representatives of the Army, Fort Knox and the Department of Defense went unreturned.

Soldiers are classified as AWOL — absent without official leave — when they leave their post without authorization. They are classified as “deserters” when the absence exceeds 30 days. The military handles the offense through court-martial, discharge, rehabilitation or administrative punishment.

Coup Co-Conspirators as Free-Speech Martyrs: Distorting the Venezuelan media story

May 25, 2007 – The story is framed in U.S. news media as a simple matter of censorship: Prominent Venezuelan TV station RCTV is being silenced by the authoritarian government of President Hugo Chávez, who is punishing the station for its political criticism of his government.

According to CNN reporter T.J. Holmes (5/21/07), the issues are easy to understand: RCTV “is going to be shut down, is going to get off the air, because of President Hugo Chávez, not a big fan of it.” Dubbing RCTV “a voice of free speech,” Holmes explained, “Chavez, in a move that’s angered a lot of free-speech groups, is refusing now to renew the license of this television station that has been critical of his government.”

Though straighter, a news story by the Associated Press (5/20/07) still maintained the theme that the license denial was based simply on political differences, with reporter Elizabeth Munoz describing RCTV as “a network that has been critical of Chávez.”

In a May 14 column, Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl called the action an attempt to silence opponents and more “proof” that Chávez is a “dictator.” Wrote Diehl, “Chávez has made clear that his problem with [RCTV owner Marcel] Granier and RCTV is political.”

In keeping with the media script that has bad guy Chávez brutishly silencing good guys in the democratic opposition, all these articles skimmed lightly over RCTV’s history, the Venezuelan government’s explanation for the license denial and the process that led to it.

RCTV and other commercial TV stations were key players in the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted Chávez’s democratically elected government. During the short-lived insurrection, coup leaders took to commercial TV airwaves to thank the networks. “I must thank Venevisión and RCTV,” one grateful leader remarked in an appearance captured in the Irish film The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The film documents the networks’ participation in the short-lived coup, in which stations put themselves to service as bulletin boards for the coup—hosting coup leaders, silencing government voices and rallying the opposition to a march on the Presidential Palace that was part of the coup plotters strategy.

On April 11, 2002, the day of the coup, when military and civilian opposition leaders held press conferences calling for Chávez’s ouster, RCTV hosted top coup plotter Carlos Ortega, who rallied demonstrators to the march on the presidential palace. On the same day, after the anti-democratic overthrow appeared to have succeeded, another coup leader, Vice-Admiral Victor Ramírez Pérez, told a Venevisión reporter (4/11/02): “We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you.”

That commercial TV outlets including RCTV participated in the coup is not at question; even mainstream outlets have acknowledged as much. As reporter Juan Forero, Jackson Diehl’s colleague at the Washington Post, explained (1/18/07), “RCTV, like three other major private television stations, encouraged the protests,” resulting in the coup, “and, once Chávez was ousted, cheered his removal.” The conservative British newspaper the Financial Times reported (5/21/07), “[Venezuelan] officials argue with some justification that RCTV actively supported the 2002 coup attempt against Mr. Chávez.”

As FAIR’s magazine Extra! argued last November, “Were a similar event to happen in the U.S., and TV journalists and executives were caught conspiring with coup plotters, it’s doubtful they would stay out of jail, let alone be allowed to continue to run television stations, as they have in Venezuela.”

When Chávez returned to power the commercial stations refused to cover the news, airing instead entertainment programs—in RCTV’s case, the American film Pretty Woman. By refusing to cover such a newsworthy story, the stations abandoned the public interest and violated the public trust that is seen in Venezuela (and in the U.S.) as a requirement for operating on the public airwaves. Regarding RCTV’s refusal to cover the return of Chavez to power, Columbia University professor and former NPR editor John Dinges told Marketplace (5/8/07):

  What RCTV did simply can’t be justified under any stretch of journalistic principles…. When a television channel simply fails to report, simply goes off the air during a period of national crisis, not because they’re forced to, but simply because they don’t agree with what’s happening, you’ve lost your ability to defend what you do on journalistic principles.

The Venezuelan government is basing its denial of license on RCTV’s involvement in the 2002 coup, not on the station’s criticisms of or political opposition to the government. Many American pundits and some human rights spokespersons have confused the issue by claiming the action is based merely on political differences, failing to note that Venezuela’s media, including its commercial broadcasters, are still among the most vigorously dissident on the planet.

When Patrick McElwee of the U.S.-based group Just Foreign Policy interviewed representatives of Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists—all groups that have condemned Venezuela’s action in denying RCTV’s license renewal—he found that none of the spokespersons thought broadcasters were automatically entitled to license renewals, though none of them thought RCTV’s actions in support of the coup should have resulted in the station having its license renewal denied. This led McElwee to wonder, based on the rights groups’ arguments, “Could it be that governments like Venezuela have the theoretical right to not to renew a broadcast license, but that no responsible government would ever do it?”

McElwee acknowledged the critics’ point that some form of due process should have been involved in the decisions, but explained that laws preexisting Chávez’s presidency placed licensing decision with the executive branch, with no real provisions for a hearings process: “Unfortunately, this is what the law, first enacted in 1987, long before Chávez entered the political scene, allows. It charges the executive branch with decisions about license renewal, but does not seem to require any administrative hearing. The law should be changed, but at the current moment when broadcast licenses are up for renewal, it is the prevailing law and thus lays out the framework in which decisions are made.”

Government actions weighing on journalism and broadcast licensing deserve strong scrutiny. However, on the central question of whether a government is bound to renew the license of a broadcaster when that broadcaster had been involved in a coup against the democratically elected government, the answer should be clear, as McElwee concludes:

  The RCTV case is not about censorship of political opinion. It is about the government, through a flawed process, declining to renew a broadcast license to a company that would not get a license in other democracies, including the United States. In fact, it is frankly amazing that this company has been allowed to broadcast for 5 years after the coup, and that the Chávez government waited until its license expired to end its use of the public airwaves.

“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all go so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” people should have realized that he was going to use the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis of evil” consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with 9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr. Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure,” he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

Problems seen in VA, military handling of disorder. 

When he closes his eyes, Edmond Rivera can smell the burning flesh of his fellow soldier. He can see the man — his friend — clawing on the driver’s-side window of his Humvee, trapped by flames after a bomb set his vehicle afire on an Iraqi roadside.

Though Rivera struggled to save his friend, he couldn’t get get into the vehicle. All he could do was stand in the road and listen to the screams.

“You’re two feet away from someone, watching the flesh melt off his bones, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Rivera, 43, said of an experience now seared into his memory. “You can’t forget.”

Though he returned from Iraq more than two years ago, Rivera said his dreams — and indeed, his waking life — still are haunted by that image, and by memories of his own vehicle being twice damaged by explosions while he served as a squad leader in a military police platoon.

Now, the career military man fears driving on Louisville’s highways. On the Fourth of July, he goes from window to window to make sure fireworks and firecrackers aren’t bombs or gunshots.. And he tries to stay in his Louisville home as much as possible because it’s the only place he feels safe.

Like nearly one out of every five Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rivera has post-traumatic stress disorder. And like many others, he experienced delays getting it diagnosed and now faces the possibility of redeployment that doctors say could worsen his condition.

As the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with the disorder grows — some expect it eventually will exceed the 19 percent rate among Vietnam veterans — military and veterans hospitals across the nation say they have placed greater emphasis on screening for and treating PTSD.

“No military in the history of the world has done more to identify, evaluate, prevent and treat the mental-health needs and concerns of its personnel,” said Department of Defense spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith.

Yet there is evidence that screening has had spotty results, and many veterans still aren’t getting the early care that experts say can greatly improve their chances of living a normal life.

A Defense Department task force report released this month calls for a greater focus on prevention and screening for the disorder but acknowledges that the military’s mental health system doesn’t have enough money or staff to meet future needs. Smith could not say how much is being spent on PTSD, saying officials are analyzing that now.

And the Government Accountability Office reports that only 22 percent of military members screened and found at risk for PTSD were referred for further evaluations.

Some, like Rivera, say they didn’t receive any PTSD screening from the military. Rivera was diagnosed only after his girlfriend insisted he go to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville almost two years after returning to the United States.

A couple of weeks ago, Rivera, an Army reservist, got orders to spend 179 days in Honduras, training local fighters. He figures the Army doesn’t know about his disorder, since it was diagnosed by the VA hospital, not military doctors.

But PTSD doesn’t automatically disqualify someone from being redeployed, even though many psychologists, including some within the military, liken it to reinfecting a psychological wound.

Rivera is fighting his potential deployment, saying he just wants to stay home and heal.

“I feel like I’ve served my time,” he said. “Peace is all I want.”

Flashback to attack

As Rivera was driving down the Watterson Expressway with his girlfriend two months ago, an empty box flew up from the road and hit his windshield. He doesn’t remember the rest of the drive, only that it was fast, and that he walked around a Harley-Davidson dealership for 3 ½ hours afterward, decompressing.

His girlfriend, Gail Bratcher, took the wheel on the way home, while he reclined the passenger seat so he wouldn’t have to look out the window.

Mentally, he said, hitting the box took him back to an incident in Iraq three years earlier, when he was an Army staff sergeant, sitting in the passenger seat of a vehicle traveling with a convoy of fuel trucks. The road was nicknamed “IED Alley,” referring to the improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq.

An explosion threw a piece of asphalt onto the vehicle’s hood, he said, bringing him “from calm to 1,000 degrees in a split second.” Rivera, an amateur photographer and videographer, captured the blast on video.

The camera also was rolling a month later, when the hastily repaired vehicle — with the words “Ed’s Ouchy” scribbled on the front — drove near another IED. That one cracked the windshield and sent a 30-foot plume of smoke into the air. It also damaged the hearing in Rivera’s right ear, he said, and left shrapnel in the face of another soldier.

After returning to the United States in December 2004, Rivera said, he found himself instinctively searching roadsides for discolorations or strange objects that could be explosives. He looked for phantom shooters on overpasses. His girlfriend took over most of the driving.

As the months passed, Bratcher said, she watched her once fun-loving boyfriend — a man who traveled the globe during his 23 years in the Army and as an active reservist — retreat.

Six months after getting back from Iraq, he reluctantly returned to his human resources job with the Army Reserve, but commuting proved harrowing, and when he got home, he usually stayed there.

He lost interest in chess, golf, even photography. At night, he often woke up in a cold sweat, and Bratcher would sometimes catch him looking out windows, “checking the perimeter.”

When she tried to comfort him or cuddle, he wouldn’t let her get too close.

“He was the same person,” Bratcher said, “but yet he wasn’t.”

“I didn’t know how to feel,” Rivera said.

Rivera was suffering classic symptoms of PTSD — flashbacks, sleep problems, emotional numbness, jumpiness and hyper-vigilance. Some experts say it’s not surprising so many Iraq veterans suffer from the disorder, given the constant stress of close combat and a largely hidden enemy.

Experts also say doctors are better at recognizing the disorder than they were years ago, which may account partly for the high numbers of affected Iraq veterans.

In Rivera’s case, Bratcher wasn’t sure what was wrong, only that he needed to be checked. In November of last year, VA hospital doctors diagnosed him with PTSD and depression.

Screening, treatment

Psychologists say delays in diagnosing PTSD increase the possibility of serious problems, such as depression, substance abuse and even suicide. Ideally, anyone experiencing symptoms for three to four months should seek treatment, say those who work with PTSD patients at the Louisville VA hospital.

But that often doesn’t happen, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, veterans who returned from Iraq or Afghanistan before the end of 2003 didn’t necessarily get screened. After that, the Department of Defense went national with a post-deployment health assessment that includes four PTSD questions.

Bob Wolz of Rineyville, Ky., for example, said he got no screening when he returned from Iraq in September 2003 to Fort Hood in Texas.

But even some soldiers who returned after that didn’t get screened. Officials at Fort Knox’s Ireland Army Community Hospital said they started offering the screening in October 2004. And Rivera said he got no screening when he returned from Iraq to North Carolina in December 2004.

Carl Mumpower, a North Carolina psychologist and national expert in PTSD, said the military recently has gotten better at ensuring that all returning soldiers are screened.

In addition to offering mental health care in Iraq, defense officials said, screenings are now offered within a week of a soldier’s return, and then reviewed with a medical provider. A second screening, added nationally last year, is given about three to six months later.

Screening, however, doesn’t always lead to treatment, according to the federal GAO.

Agency reports from this year and last showed that a relatively small percentage of military members found to be at risk for PTSD were referred for further evaluations: 23 percent in the Army and Air Force, 18 percent in the Navy and 15 percent in the Marines.

Officials could not provide comparable local figures, but Rogers, at Fort Knox, said medical professionals virtually always refer soldiers for further care if they suspect a problem.

One additional problem is that soldiers sometimes choose not to follow up. The defense task force’s preliminary report noted a stigma surrounding mental health problems, which military officials are trying to address.

“They’re concerned it will hurt their military career,” Michael Hollifield, an associate professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Louisville, said of soldiers. “And there’s this thought that people fake it.”

New tour possible

According to a November memo from the assistant secretary of defense, psychotic and bipolar disorders automatically disqualify someone from being redeployed by the military — but PTSD does not.

The memo calls the disorder treatable, although it says the potential for effective treatment is considered on a case-by-case basis that takes into account the soldier’s vulnerabilities and demands of the job.

If soldiers are diagnosed outside the military health system, such as at a VA hospital or a family doctor’s office, it’s up to them to raise the issue — although officials say they are working to share medical records more easily between the military and Veterans Affairs.

At Fort Knox, Army reservists treated elsewhere and ordered to redeploy must let their commanders know of their diagnosis, said Col. Susan Rogers, a psychologist and behavioral health chief at Ireland Hospital. Even if they don’t initially, it should come up during the pre-deployment process, when soldiers are asked whether they got mental health care during the previous year. And those with mental health concerns or a history of receiving care are evaluated for their fitness to redeploy.

Army officials did not respond to repeated requests for the number of soldiers with PTSD who are now deployed. But several psychologists, including Rogers, said they think that number should be zero.

“I would never recommend that,” Rogers said, adding that soldiers shouldn’t be drummed out of the military for having the condition, but should be directed to appropriate military jobs in the United States.

Redeploying those with PTSD ” absolutely makes no sense. It’s asking for disaster,” said Lebanon, Ky., psychiatrist James Bland, who has treated recently returned soldiers with PTSD. “It’s like sending someone who had a heart attack back to dig ditches. They might last a while, but they may die.”

Irv Mattingly, a Vietnam veteran diagnosed with PTSD who now works with the Kentucky Disabled Veterans Outreach Program, said deploying troops with the disorder could also endanger others.

“Would you like to be in that foxhole with someone who has PTSD?” he asked.

Rivera, for his part, said he has informed Army officials he doesn’t want to go to Honduras and is awaiting a response. He said he dreads the idea of driving around the country and the even remote possibility of facing combat. “I just don’t want to get shot at,” he said, adding that he wants to find a civilian job and retire from the military.

In the meantime, he said, he continues to work to exorcise the demons of war with therapy at the VA hospital, weekly support groups and the anti-depressant Zoloft.

“I live minute by minute, day by day and just hope nothing goes ‘boom,’ ” he said. “When you see the things I’ve seen and had to do the things I’ve done, you don’t forget.”

Reporter Laura Ungar can be reached at (502) 582-7190

BAGHDAD, IRAQ — Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought: ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

A small minority of Delta Company soldiers — the younger, more recent enlistees in particular — seem to still wholeheartedly support the war. Others are ambivalent, torn between fear of losing more friends in battle, longing for their families and a desire to complete their mission.

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in the company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers in this 83-man unit over a one-week period, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

It is not a question of loyalty, the soldiers insist. Sergeant Safstrom, for example, comes from a thoroughly military family. His mother and father have served in the armed forces, as have his three sisters, one brother and several uncles. One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, he walked into a recruiter’s office and joined the Army.

“You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you,” he recalls thinking at the time.

But in Sergeant Safstrom’s view, the American presence is futile. “If we stayed here for 5, even 10 more years, the day we leave here these guys will go crazy,” he said. “It would go straight into a civil war. That’s how it feels, like we’re putting a Band-Aid on this country until we leave here.”

Their many deployments have added to the strain. After spending six months in Iraq, the soldiers of Delta Company had been home for only 24 hours last December when the news came. “Change your plans,” they recall being told. “We’re going back to Iraq.”

Nineteen days later, just after Christmas, Capt. Douglas Rogers and the men of Delta Company were on their way to Kadhimiya, a Shiite enclave of about 300,000 people. As part of the so-called surge of American troops, their primary mission was to maintain stability in the area and prepare the Iraqi Army and the police to take control of the neighborhood.

“I thought it would not be long before we could just stay on our base and act as a quick-reaction force,” said the barrel-chested Captain Rogers of San Antonio. “The Iraqi security forces would step up.”

It has not worked out that way. Still, Captain Rogers says their mission in Kadhimiya has been “an amazing success.”

“We’ve captured 4 of the top 10 most-wanted guys in this area,” he said. And the streets of Kadhimiya are filled with shoppers and the stores are open, he said, a rarity in Baghdad due partly to Delta Company’s patrols.

Captain Rogers acknowledges the skepticism of many of his soldiers. “Our unit has already sent two soldiers home in a box,” he said. “My soldiers don’t see the same level of commitment from the Iraqi Army units they’re partnered with.”

Yet there is, he insists, no crisis of morale: “My guys are all professionals. I tell them to do something, they do it.” His dictum is proved on patrol, where his soldiers walk the streets for hours in the stifling heat, providing cover for one another with crisp efficiency.

On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. The soldiers saw men in the distance erecting barricades that they set ablaze, and the streets emptied out quickly. Then a militia, believed to be the Mahdi Army, began firing at them from rooftops and windows.

Sgt. Kevin O’Flarity, a squad leader, jumped into his Humvee to join his fellow soldiers, racing through abandoned Iraqi Army and police checkpoints to the battle site.

He and his squad maneuvered their Humvees through alleyways and side streets, firing back at an estimated 60 insurgents during a gun battle that raged for two and a half hours. A rocket-propelled grenade glanced off Sergeant O’Flarity’s Humvee, failing to penetrate.

When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

Captain Rogers admits, “The 29th was a watershed moment in a negative sense, because the Iraqi Army would not fight with us,” adding, “Some actually picked up weapons and fought against us.”

The battle changed the attitude among his soldiers toward the war, he said. “Before that fight, there were a few true believers.” Captain Rogers said. “After the 29th, I don’t think you’ll find a true believer in this unit. They’re paratroopers. There’s no question they’ll fulfill their mission. But they’re fighting now for pride in their unit, professionalism, loyalty to their fellow soldier and chain of command.”

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said.

As for his views on the war, Sergeant O’Flarity said, “I don’t believe we should be here in the middle of a civil war.”

“We’ve all lost friends over here,” he said. “Most of us don’t know what we’re fighting for anymore. We’re serving our country and friends, but the only reason we go out every day is for each other.”

“I don’t want any more of my guys to get hurt or die,” he continued. “If it was something I felt righteous about, maybe. But for this country and this conflict, no, it’s not worth it.”

Staff Sgt. James Griffin grew up in Troy, N.C., near the Special Operations base at Fort Bragg. His dream was to be a soldier, and growing up, he would skip school and volunteer to play the role of the enemy during Special Operations training exercises. When he was 17, he joined the Army.

Now 22, Sergeant Griffin is a Delta Company section leader. On the night of May 5, as he neared an Iraqi police checkpoint with a convoy of Humvees, Sergeant Griffin spotted what looked like a camouflaged cinderblock and immediately halted the convoy. His vigilance may have saved the lives of several soldiers. Under the camouflage was a massive, six-array, explosively formed penetrator — a deadly roadside bomb that cuts through the Humvees’ armor with ease.

The insurgents quickly set off the device, but the Americans were at a safe distance. An explosive ordnance disposal team arrived to check the area. As the ordnance team rolled back to base, they were attacked with a second roadside bomb near another Iraqi checkpoint. One soldier was killed and two were wounded.

No one has been able to explain why two bombs were found near Iraqi checkpoints, bombs that Iraqi soldiers and the police had either failed to notice or helped to plant.

Sergeant Griffin, too, understands the criticism of the Iraqi forces, but he says they and the war effort must be given more time.

“If we throw this problem to the side, it’s not going to fix itself,” he said. “We’ve created the Iraqi forces. We gave them Humvees and equipment. For however long they say they need us here, maybe we need to stay.”

On Memorial Day this Monday, Americans will remember the men and women who gave their lives in defence of the nation, as well as what that nation stands for and promises to become. Some among us, however, honour those sacrifices not just once a year but throughout the year.

In the best spirit of “mourn for the dead and fight for the living”, the guys in Sarasota, Florida who joined together as Veterans for Common Sense (FLVCS) have been paying homage to their fallen comrades not simply with prayers and flowers, but, all the more critically, by working to sustain the ideals and aspirations for which they gave their lives.

As Gene Jones, the chair of the group, recalls, the idea of creating FLVCS first came up in the course of a fall 2002 lunchtime conversation among three friends, each of them a lawyer and Vietnam veteran – Dennis Plews, who saw combat in Southeast Asia as an artilleryman, Mike Burns, who was shot down over North Vietnam and spent five-years in Hanoi Hilton (alongside John McCain), and Jones himself, who served as an Air Force linguist.

Still outraged by the apparent theft of the 2000 presidential election, and increasingly worried about the Bush administration’s eagerness to invade Iraq, the three were now also agonizing over the prospect of being represented in congress by none other than the Republican Katherine Harris, the former secretary of state of Florida who had validated the 2000 election results that led to the Supreme Court’s anointment of George Bush as president. Tossing ideas around as they ate, Burns, Plews, and Jones resolved to work politically in support of “anybody except her”.

Harris was elected to congress that November. Still, the three veterans, along with the nearly 300 others who responded to their calls for action, would not give up. They now set themselves to opposing the Administration’s drive to war. Laying claim to the memory and legacy of the revolutionary patriot Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense had turned America’s colonial rebellion into a democratic revolution and whose Crisis Papers sustained his fellow citizens’ energies through the darkest days of the struggle, they dubbed themselves Florida Veterans for Common Sense – an act reminiscent of those who on their return from southeast Asia in the late 1960s formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War and called themselves the “winter soldiers”.

To the now middle-aged guys of FLVCS, Paine’s words – most notably, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country, but he that stands it now…’ – remained powerful and moving, for, as they saw it, Americans once again faced a major crisis, indeed, an ever-intensifying one that threatened to seriously undermine American democratic life. And given all that has happened since then – torture, domestic spying, no WMDs, and so on – we know that they were sadly prescient.

Though angered by the Bush administration’s appropriations of God, flag and the concept of freedom, the men of FLVCS have never spouted self-hating, anti-American rhetoric, for they do not see Bush and his cronies as representing what the nation is really about. In fact, as their statement of principles declares, they are determined to redeem the best of American history and ideals: “As veterans, we support the founding principles of the United States…liberty, equality, human rights and democracy.”

Furthermore, in contrast to the conservatives who underwrote Bush’s two campaigns, they neither hate government nor profess any desire to run down public services. To the contrary, their FLVCS manifesto calls upon the government “to provide returning veterans the best medical and psychological treatment.” And while they call for a “timely withdrawal of American troops from Iraq,” they do not push pacifism or demand a reduction in defence spending. As they put it, the United States needs “a strong military designed to protect citizens against 21st century threats both foreign and domestic”. But as they also make clear, which distinguishes them from their antagonists: “As veterans, we support the ethical and humane treatment of prisoners and oppose all torture.”

More than a collection of petition-signers, the founding members of FLVCS – joined by younger veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq – have in the course of the past four and a half years staged educational events, raised money for disabled veterans, marched against the war, lobbied for enhanced veterans benefits, and campaigned for anti-war candidates.

They have witnessed further defeats. In 2004 they did what they could to counter the swift-boaters’ assaults on John Kerry’s character. And in 2006 their candidate in the race for Florida’s 13th congressional district was defeated in an election reminiscent of 2000. But they could take solace in the fact that Harris lost her 2006 race for Senate and that Americans have evidently come to see what the Bush administration is really about.

This Memorial Day, I will join in remembering and honouring those who served the nation and died doing so. But I will also salute and toast the guys of Florida Veterans for Common Sense. Fortunately, they came back alive and – in a fashion that would make Paine proud, I’m sure – they never forgot what America was supposed to be about.

Harvey Kaye is a professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and the author of “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America.”