Veterans for Common Sense

Deserters: We Won’t Go To Iraq

It’s an offense punishable by death during wartime. It’s been committed by 5,500 soldiers since the war with Iraq began.

The men, who have violated military orders and oaths, tell 60 Minutes Wednesday that it isn’t cowardice, but rather the nature of the war in Iraq, that turned them into American deserters.

American soldiers currently living in Canada tell Correspondent Scott Pelley why they made the decision to desert their units, in a report to be broadcast on Dec. 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

One soldier, Pfc. Dan Felushko, 24, tells Pelley, “I didn’t want…’Died deluded in Iraq’ over my gravestone.”

It was Felushko’s responsibility to go with the Marines to Kuwait in January 2003. Instead, Felushko slipped out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., and deployed himself to Canada.

“I was a warrior…I always have been,” Felushko tells Pelley. “I’ve always felt…that if there are people who can’t defend themselves, it’s my responsibility to do that.”

“As we’re sitting here, something just short of 1100 Americans have died. What do you say to their families about the choice you made?” asks Pelley.

“I honor their dead. …Maybe they think that my presence dishonors their dead, but they made a choice the same as I made a choice, and my big problem is that, if they made that choice for anything other than they believed in it, then that’s wrong,” says Felushko. “The government has to be held responsible for those deaths, because they didn’t give them an option.”

Soldiers who want to be assigned to non-combat jobs have the option of applying for conscientious objector status.

Spc. Jeremy Hinzman, from Rapid City, S.D., filled out those forms, and while he waited for the decision on his request, he worked in a kitchen in Afghanistan.

The Army eventually told Hinzman he didn’t qualify as a conscientious objector. “I was walking to the chow hall with my unit and we were yelling, ‘Train to kill, kill we will,’ over and over again,” recalls Hinzman.

“I kind of snuck a peek around me and saw all my colleagues getting red in the face and hoarse yelling, and at that point, a light went off in my head and I said, ‘You know, I made the wrong career decision.'”

Despite his decision to leave the army, Hinzman says he wasn’t looking for a way out of his commitment to the military.

“I was told in basic training that, if I’m given an illegal or immoral order, it is my duty to disobey it, and I feel that invading and occupying Iraq is an illegal and immoral thing to do,” says Hinzman.

“I think there are times when militaries or countries act in a collectively wrong way. …Saddam Hussein was a really bad guy, but was he a threat to the U.S.?”

Hussein may have been a threat to the Iraqi people, but Hinzman maintains that was not enough of a reason for Hinzman to risk his life fighting in Iraq.

“Whether a country lives under freedom or tyranny or whatever else, that’s the collective responsibility of the people of that country,” says Hinzman.

He later adds that his contract with the military was “to defend the Constitution of the United States, not take part in offensive, preemptive wars.”

Army Teams Face Surgeon Shortage
A severe shortage of surgeons in Iraq has left U.S. Army medical teams scrambling to handle the largest number of casualties since the Vietnam War, the New England Journal of Medicine reports.By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer
4:11 PM PST, December 8, 2004

WASHINGTON — A severe shortage of surgeons in Iraq has left U.S. Army medical teams in the country scrambling to handle the largest number of casualties since the Vietnam War, the New England Journal of Medicine will report Thursday.

Despite the numbers — the Army has fewer than 50 general surgeons and 15 orthopedic surgeons in Iraq at any one time — advances in battlefield surgical techniques and care mean a greater percentage of soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are surviving their injuries than in any previous American conflict.

The article by Atul Gawande, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a former senior health advisor to the Clinton White House, paints a picture of a military medical system that has made fundamental changes since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But that system is nonetheless overwhelmed by the scope and severity of injuries among troops in Iraq.

Blast injuries from suicide bombs and land mines are up substantially in recent months and have proved particularly difficult to treat without risking infection, Gawande writes. Eye injuries have caused blindness among a dismaying number of soldiers. And Kevlar body armor, which early in the war proved dramatically effective in preventing torso injuries, provides inadequate protection against bomb blasts.

Soldiers who survive the initial blasts and field treatment are suffering at high rates from later complications, including pulmonary embolisms and deep venous thrombosis, the article states. Some of those soldiers have died of the complications. According to the article, 5{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the wounded being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington have had pulmonary embolisms, a condition in which a blood clot travels to the lungs. Of those, two have died.

Army medical teams are also worried about what Gawande calls an epidemic of multi-drug-resistant bacterial infection in military hospitals. Among 442 medical evacuees seen at Walter Reed, 8.4{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} tested positive for the infection — a far higher rate than ever seen among wounded troops.

“Just as the rest of the military structure was unprepared for the length of the war and the evolution in the nature of the war, so has the military medical establishment been understandably unprepared for that,” Gawande said in an interview.

“What is striking is that they have been able to adapt in ways that allow them to keep a high rate of survival for the soldiers,” he said. “But there are costs, and what you see is a potential problem on the horizon.”

Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of deployment health support with the Pentagon’s office of health affairs, acknowledged that Army surgeons working in Iraq have had to improvise in some cases, and work outside their specialties in others. But he said that the relatively few number of combat deaths proves the system is working.

“There are certainly going to be times in any location where the workload is going to exceed the personnel present. There are going to be some extremely long hours at times,” Kilpatrick said.

But, he added, “the fact that they have responded as well as they have speaks to the fact that they were well prepared. You can’t anticipate every eventuality. I think the training and preparation that people had has stood them in good stead.”

With just 120 general surgeons on active duty, the Army has been forced to use urologists, plastic surgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons to conduct general surgery on soldiers in Iraq. Many surgeons have been deployed for more than two years in Iraq, and military planners are contemplating pressing some to return again, Gawande writes.

The doctors work in difficult circumstances. In many cases, the military has taken over Iraqi hospitals, and the facilities are flooded with a surge of civilian patients that doctors are unable to treat.

With no clear directive from the Pentagon on treating civilians, some doctors refuse to help even pediatric patients, for fear the children could be booby-trapped with bombs, Gawande writes.

Despite the challenges, Gawande also credits nurses, anesthetists, helicopter pilots, other transport staff and an entire rethinking of the combat medicine system for soldiers’ survival.

The system focuses on damage control, not definitive repair, Gawande writes. Field doctors carry “mini-hospitals” in Humvees and field operating kits in backpacks so they can move with troops and do surgery on the spot.

They limit surgery to two hours or less, often leaving temporary closures and even plastic bags over wounds, and send soldiers to one of several combat support hospitals in Iraq with services like labs and X-rays.

The strategy seems to be working. Although at least as many U.S. troops have been wounded in combat in the Iraq war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 or the first five years of Vietnam, 90{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} are surviving their injuries, compared to 76{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} in Vietnam. In that war, almost all of the wounded who died did so before they could reach MASH units-military surgery facilities — some distance from the fighting.

But the survivors today often have injuries so severe and maiming that their prospects are uncertain, Gawande writes.

Gawande writes about the case of an airman who lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face.

“How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question,” Gawande writes.

Eight Soldiers Plan to Sue Over Army’s Stop-Loss Policy

MORRILTON, Arkansas, December 3, 2004 – The eight soldiers come from places scattered across the country, from this small town an hour northwest of Little Rock to cities in Arizona, New Jersey and New York. In Iraq and Kuwait, where they all work now, most of them hold different jobs in different units, miles apart. Most have never met.

But the eight share a bond of anger: each says he has been prevented from coming home for good by an Army policy that has barred thousands of soldiers from leaving Iraq this year even though the terms of enlistment they signed up for have run out. And each of these eight soldiers has separately taken the extraordinary step of seeking legal help, through late-night Internet searches and e-mail inquiries from their camps in the conflict zone, or through rounds of phone calls by an equally frustrated wife or mother back home.

With legal support from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal-leaning public interest group, lawyers for the eight men say they will file a lawsuit on Monday in federal court in Washington challenging the Army policy known as stop-loss.

Last spring, the Army instituted the policy for all troops headed to Iraq and Afghanistan, called it a way to promote continuity within deployed units and to avoid bringing new soldiers in to fill gaps left in units by those who would otherwise have gone home when their enlistments ran out. If a soldier’s unit is still in Iraq or Afghanistan, that soldier cannot leave even when his or her enlistment time runs out.

Since then, a handful of National Guardsmen who received orders to report for duty in California and Oregon have taken the policy to court, but the newest lawsuit is the first such challenge by a group of soldiers. And these soldiers are already overseas – transporting supplies, working radio communications and handling military contracts, somewhere in the desert.

“You should know I’m not against the war,” said David W. Qualls, one of the plaintiffs and a former full-time soldier who signed up in July 2003 for a one-year stint in the Arkansas National Guard but now expects to be in Iraq until next year.

“This just isn’t about that. This is a matter of fairness. My job was to go over and perform my duties under the contract I signed. But my year is up and it’s been up. Now I believe that they should honor their end of the contract.” Some military experts described the soldiers’ challenge as both surprising and telling, given the tenor of military life, where soldiers are trained throughout their careers to follow their commanders’ orders.

These soldiers’ public objections are only the latest signs of rising tension within the ranks. In October, members of an Army Reserve unit refused a mission, saying it was too dangerous. And in recent months, some members of the Individual Ready Reserve, many of whom say they thought they had finished their military careers, have objected to being called back to war and requested exemptions.

Mr. Qualls, 35, who says he sometimes speaks his mind even to his superiors, is the only one among the eight whose real name will appear on the lawsuit against the Army’s military leaders. The rest, who fear retribution from the Army – including more dangerous assignments in Iraq – are described only as John Does 1 through 7.

Aside from the shared expectation that they would have gone home by now, these soldiers’ situations could not be more varied, as interviews with their families made clear.

One is a member of an Army band, ordered to travel Iraq this year performing music. Another is an Army reservist in a New Jersey transportation company with 18 years of service behind him. Another is an Arizona National Guardsman in his 20’s, whose wife says he sounded subdued, even tearful, when she spoke to him in recent days on a phone line from Kuwait.

“The whole morale in his unit is on the floor,” she said on the condition that she not be named, to avoid revealing her husband’s identity.

Although Army officials said they could not comment on a lawsuit, particularly one they had not yet seen, they described the stop-loss policy, which was first instituted during the first Persian Gulf war more than a decade ago, as a crucial lesson learned in Vietnam, where troops were rotated out just as they had become acclimated to a treacherous environment.

“If someone next to you is new, it can be dangerous,” said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman. “The bottom line of this is unit cohesion. This way, the units deploy together, train together, fight together and come home together.”

Some soldiers like Mr. Qualls, though, say they wonder if the rule is not just another way to keep troop numbers high, particularly at a time when the military has been stretched thin and the number of troops in Iraq is expected to rise still more, to 150,000, in the coming weeks.

In recent months, at any given moment, the stop-loss policy has affected about 7,000 soldiers who had been planning to retire, leave the military or move to a different military job. The rule affects soldiers whose enlistments are scheduled to end within 90 days before their unit is deployed, those already deployed, and those whose term would end up to 90 days after their unit returns. On Friday, Army officials said they did not know the total number who had been affected so far. No date has been announced to end the policy.

Jules Lobel, a lawyer for one of the eight soldiers, described the central complaint this way: They were fraudulently induced to sign up, Mr. Lobel said, because nothing in their enlistment contract mentioned that they might be involuntarily kept on.

But experts not involved in the case say the government has generally been granted broad legal authority when it comes to the obligations of soldiers in matters of national security and times of conflict.

“The courts have traditionally ceded to the military,” said Gary D. Solis, who teaches law at the United States Military Academy at West Point. “Even if the gents win at the trial level, the government is not going to quit. They cannot afford to. There is a potential cascade effect here.”

Phillip Carter, a former Army captain and an expert in military and legal issues, said: “Rarely have we seen people win such cases. At best, this is symbolic protest.”

The soldiers and their families, however, say they do not see it that way. Their hopes are far more practical. They want to go home.

Mr. Qualls was one of the first soldiers to find Mr. Lobel and Staughton Lynd, another lawyer now working with the Center for Constitutional Rights on the case and whose antiwar activities date to the Vietnam era. As Mr. Qualls wandered the Internet one day in Iraq, he said, he came across news reports of a National Guardsman in California who this summer had become the first to challenge stop-loss in court.

Mr. Qualls said he immediately began sending e-mail messages that guardsman’s lawyer, Michael S. Sorgen, and was eventually referred to Mr. Lynd and Mr. Lobel, who were separately beginning to hear from other soldiers who had found them in recent weeks in a variety of ways.

Some of the soldiers e-mailed or called the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force or the G. I. Rights hot line and were referred to the lawyers, Mr. Lynd said. The wife of one soldier said she handled all the research for his case herself, studying his enlistment contract and newspaper clippings and finally coming across Mr. Lynd’s name. And a 54-year-old mother from Long Island said she began making calls on her son’s behalf, first to her representatives in Congress and later to anyone she could find.

“My son,” she said, “is not someone afraid to follow orders and fulfill his obligation. He’s a very compliant soldier, but he feels like he’s being stabbed in the back.”

One soldier’s wife, from New York City, said she received an e-mail message from Military Families Speak Out, an antiwar group, about the possibility of a lawsuit, and urged her husband to be part of it.

Asked whether antiwar forces were instigating this lawsuit, Mr. Lobel, who like his co-counsel describes himself as openly opposed to the war in Iraq, laughed and said no. The soldiers and their families came on their own, he said.

“They were desperately looking for some way to solve their situations, and it looks like most of the people they found who were trying to counsel or represent people in their situation were antiwar people,” Mr. Lobel said. “But to me, the most interesting aspect of this whole thing is that it’s not a question of antiwar or pro-war. It’s not a question of red states or blue states. This stop-loss question is just about fairness.”

As part of a rest-and-relaxation leave allowed some soldiers, Mr. Qualls arrived at his modest Morrilton home just in time for Thanksgiving supper with his wife, Cheryl, and their daughter, Kelly.

Seated at his computer on Friday, he fiddled with a pen as he pondered whether he might face retribution for taking legal action, something he says he told his unit commanders nothing about before he left. He said his family had struggled financially and emotionally with him gone, and he has to put them first now.

“The other thing,” Mr. Qualls said, “is you’ve got thousands of people over there in the same situation as me and somebody’s got to do something. Why not have it be me? I can’t worry about what people will say.”

Mr. Qualls is due back at his radio post on a base north of Baghdad this coming weekend. He said he hoped a judge would issue a temporary restraining order and allow him to stay home. But if he loses, he said, he will get on that plane.

Chicago Sun-Times Investigates the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Here are links to the five articles printed in the Sun-Times:

Article #1: Illinois wounded veterans at bottom for VA benefits

http://www.suntimes.com/special_sections/veterans/cst-nws-wvets03.html

Article #2: VA chief coming to Chicago

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/vetreax03.html

Article #3: VA Benefits brouhaha brings in feds

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-wvets04.html

Article #4: Nearby states play it cheap with disabled vets

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-wvets05.html

Article #5: Long-term care a challenge for soldiers

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-vastates06.html

If you are a veteran (or veteran’s family member) in Illinois with a concern about obtaining healthcare or disability benefits the Department of Veterans Affairs, you have several options:

1. Contact the Department of Veterans Affairs: www.va.gov (800) 827-1000, and tell the VA Secretary about your problems.

2. Contact the Chicago Sun-Times:

    VA Healthcare Problems: Lori Rackl, lrackl@suntimes.com

    VA Disability Problems: Cheryl Reed, creed@suntimes.com

3. Contact your U.S. Senator or U.S. Representative: See your local directory

4. Contact a veterans group:

    Veterans of Foreign Wars: www.vfw.org

    American Legion: www.legion.org

    Disabled American Veterans: www.dav.org

    Paralyzed Veterans of America: www.pva.org

    Vietnam Veterans of America: www.vva.org

    National Gulf War Resource Center: www.ngwrc.org

Election critics protest at Statehouse

By JOHN McCARTHY
The Associated Press
12/4/2004, 3:55 p.m. ET

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Melissa Hedden, a key John Kerry supporter in her community, has been busy with charitable work since the election. So she decided to find out Saturday why so many people are questioning Kerry’s loss in the Ohio presidential election.

To read the House Judiciary Committee letter to Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, dated December 2, 2004, please click on this link: http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/ohblackwellltr12204.pdf

Hedden, 48, of suburban Upper Arlington, was among the 400 people who gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse to demand an immediate recount of the results or at least look into Election Day irregularities around the state.

Hedden said she was one of the founders of the “UA for Kerry” movement in her predominantly Republican suburb. She’s convinced the 2 percentage-point victory President Bush will officially receive on Monday is inaccurate.

“There was no doubt in my mind that Kerry had enough votes. My fear was the votes would not be counted and that’s been borne out,” Hedden said.

The crowd braved winds over 15 mph and temperatures in the mid-40s to listen to speakers who claimed Ohio voters were the victims of a fraud that took votes from Kerry and gave them to Bush. Some compared it with the current election troubles in Eastern Europe.

“I would like to welcome you to the Ukraine,” said Susan Truitt of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, speaking in the shadow of a statue of Ohio Republican William McKinley, the 25th U.S. president.

Cliff Arnebeck, a lawyer representing some of the election critics, said the fraud details would come out in an Ohio Supreme Court filing contesting the election, likely on Monday.

Critics say Ohio’s numbers are suspect because of disparities in the vote totals for different Democrats on the same ballot; the disqualification of more than 90,000 presidential votes on punch-card ballots because they could not be determined; the Election Night lock-down of Warren County’s board of elections because of an alleged terror threat; and a computer glitch on election night that recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush in one suburban Columbus precinct.

It’s the computer problem that worried Nathan Cobb, 28, a graduate student from Columbus. He said the technology would make it easy to manipulate votes.

“There seems to be a lot of evidence of something fishy,” Cobb said. “You have no idea what the heck goes on in there. It’s not that hard to program a computer.”

State and county election officials have said there were irregularities on Nov. 2, but no more than any other election. They adamantly have denied there is any evidence of widespread vote switching or other wrongdoing.

Ohio was the state that the election hung on, and Kerry would have won the presidency had he carried the state’s 20 electoral votes. He conceded the day after the election, saying there was not enough provisional and other ballots to swing the results his way.

Bush won Ohio by about 119,000 votes, according to an analysis of county board of elections results by The Associated Press.

A federal judge in Columbus on Friday ruled that the recount may proceed. But it probably won’t begin before Dec. 13, when Ohio’s 20 electoral votes are counted.

John Ciprian, 46, who made a 75-mile trip from Dayton for the rally, said he doubts a recount would change the result but that the allegations critics have made should be investigated.

“I’m just trying to educate myself about this,” Ciprian said.

Slow-Rolling Democracy in Ohio

George W. Bush’s political allies appear to be slow-rolling a requested recount in Ohio, leaving so little time that even if widespread voting fraud is discovered, the finding will come too late to derail Bush’s second term.

Though balloting occurred on Nov. 2, more than a month ago, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell still hasn’t certified an official vote, a move now expected on Monday, Dec. 6. Since Blackwell also has battled requests from third-party candidates for an expedited recount, a review of Ohio’s vote now won’t begin until Dec. 13, at the earliest, according to Blackwell’s office. [See Boston Globe, Dec. 1, 2004]

But the Dec. 13 date is the same day the electors of the Electoral College meet to formally select the President of the United States. So even if the recount uncovers enough fraud to reveal John Kerry as the rightful winner in Ohio, it would be too late to change that outcome.

Meanwhile, as Ohio’s official foot-dragging has gone on, Bush’s election-night lead has continued to shrink with the counting of overseas and provisional ballots. The Associated Press reported on Dec. 3 that its vote tally of Ohio’s 88 counties showed Kerry narrowing Bush’s lead to 119,000 votes from about 136,000 votes, leaving Bush with a 2 percent lead.

But Kerry also might stand to gain a substantial number of votes from a recount that would examine ballots thrown out by antiquated punch-card voting machines. They are  used mostly in poor areas, especially African-American neighborhoods that are Democratic strongholds. Other voters, believing that Ohio’s electronic systems were susceptible to vote rigging, have sought audits to check for tampering.

Instead of embracing these examinations to resolve voter doubts, however, Secretary of State Blackwell and other Bush allies in Ohio have resisted the demands. Now, the clock is running out for any meaningful review. [Citizens demanding a full recount in Ohio scheduled a rally for Dec. 4 in the capital of Columbus Other protests are being organized in the days leading up to the Electoral College meetings on Dec. 13.]

Florida Echoes

In some ways, the United States is witnessing a repeat of Election 2000 where Bush first frustrated Al Gore’s demands for recounts in Florida and then had five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court block a recount ordered by the state Supreme Court. Finally, the five Republican justices in Washington required that a reorganized Florida recount be conducted in two hours, a clearly impossible task that handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

Placing national unity as a priority over democracy, the U.S. news media stepped in after Election 2000 to sweep away any lingering doubts about Bush’s legitimacy. The unity message was that the United States needed to put the contentious election in the past, even though Bush was the first popular-vote loser in more than a century to move into the White House.

This protection of Bush’s fragile legitimacy gained even greater momentum after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The “united-we-stand” sentiment put the New York Times and other leading news organizations in a particular quandary in November 2001 when they completed an unofficial recount of Florida’s votes.

The recount discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted, Al Gore would have won Florida regardless of what standard of “chad” was used. In other words, Gore was the rightfully elected President of the United States, not Bush.

To avert the predictable conservative outrage over the recount findings, the major national news outlets simply buried the “Gore-won” lead. Instead, they topped their stories with a bogus analysis that a recount would have left Bush as the rightful winner.

The analysis assumed, falsely, that so-called “overvotes,” where voters checked a candidate and wrote in the name, would not have been included in the recount. But the news organizations were erroneous in this assumption because the judge handling the Florida recount had ordered those votes tallied and almost certainly would have added them to the state’s total, since they were clearly legal under Florida law. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White House.”]

Now, with Team Bush running out the clock in Ohio, one has to wonder what contortions the mainstream news media would put itself through if a belated recount – after Bush’s election is formalized – shows that Kerry should have won Ohio and thus the White House.

Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com.

The way our country treats returning soldiers is a national shame

Supporters of our invasion of Iraq cheerlead from their armchairs for the women and men of our military. Some folks send packages of goodies and letters to soldiers and sailors. Veterans for Peace stand on a street corner each week asking to bring our troops home. These are all examples of different ways we express our support for U.S. soldiers.

But what about support when they come back? While some historical references reflect an effort to support our soldiers upon their return from battle, our history of neglecting soldiers also flourishes and seems to be getting worse.

For example, in 1693 Plymouth Colony offered support with an order that any disabled soldier injured while defending the colony would be maintained by the colony for life. And in 1780, the Continental Congress offered half pay for seven years to officers who served until the end of the war.

However, the Continental Congress also promised some soldiers land in exchange for their service. Looking at genealogy sites on the Internet, one can find desecendants of these soldiers still trying to collect on those unfulfilled promises.

In 1917, Congress authorized disability compensation, insurance and vocational rehabilitation to help support the 200,000 wounded and 5 million returning soldiers from World War I.

On the other hand, in 1924, these same World War I veterans were promised a bonus payment of $1,000. In July of 1932, during the Great Depression, between 12,000 and 15,000 veterans and their families marched in Washington, D.C., to demand immediate payment of their bonus. They camped in shantytowns along the Anacostia River until their numbers grew to 25,000. At one point, 20,000 veterans walked slowly up and down Pennsylvania Avenue for three straight days protesting the government decision not to pay their bonus. By late July, riots began after police shot two of the marchers. Gen. Douglas MacArthur then led a machine-gun squadron, troops with fixed bayonets and a number of tanks to destroy the shantytowns and disperse the marchers with tear gas, injuring hundreds of veterans in the process.

In 1944, the GI Bill of Rights was enacted. Veterans were supported by providing money for education, low-interest mortgage loans and $20 a week while looking for employment.

While some of these benefits are still available today, nearly 300,000 current veterans can be found homeless each night, and more than 500,000 veterans will experience homelessness sometime during the year.

Korean and Vietnam veterans received little of the support and recognition that previous veterans received. Thirty years after being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and suffering numerous medical problems, a neighbor of mine finally began to receive compensation from our government’s admission that Agent Orange is toxic.

Because of situations like this, nearly three times the number of Vietnam veterans died after coming home than died during the war.

Today, there are reports of U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, being secretly transferred from Andrews Air Force base, under the cover of darkness, to military transport planes and dispersed out to military hospitals across the country. Why? So that we do not see them.

Coffins of dead U.S. soldiers cannot be photographed returning home. Why? So that we do not see them.

Is this the kind of support we want to give to our soldiers? Hiding them from the public eye? Relegating them to the streets to fend for themselves? Are we trying to hide something?

Is it easier to support the mythical, invisible image of a brave soldier fighting for “glory” and “freedom” than it is to support the very real limbless, psychologically damaged or lifeless person returning from Iraq?

Why are we increasing spending in Iraq to make more disabled veterans, and then cutting spending to care for them when they come home by closing VA hospitals and decreasing benefits?

Come on. We can do better than that.

If we really want to support our soldiers, let’s demand proper medical care and compensation when they come home. Let’s make sure that every soldier returning from duty in a war zone is evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) so that we can detect and treat the estimated 1 in 3 Iraq veterans who will have it.

Let’s assure that all U.S. soldiers from the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq are tested for exposure to the wind- dispersed, depleted uranium (DU) that is suspected to have caused numerous illnesses in more than 200,000 Gulf War veterans, and has caused and will continue to cause birth defects, cancer and early deaths for decades to come.

Support our troops? Yeah, bring them home and help them heal.

Tim Pluta is a veteran currently living in Mars Hill. He can be contacted at timpluta@hotmail.com