I've gotten into a lot of conversations lately because of slamming congress over their veterans bills. Some want to pretend that congress should keep spending money because our veterans are worth every dime but in the process, it never seems to occur to enough folks that in this case, wasting money is also wasting their lives. What good does it do to continue to spend money when the results are worse than doing nothing?
I don't know about you, but our veterans deserve a congress that actually works to understand that issues and not just keep spending money on what has failed.
Sure it makes for a good soundbite on the nightly news to say they have yet another bill in response to yet another hearing for yet one more tragic tale of a veteran suffering instead of healing. Sure it all sounds good to have grieving parents sit in front of elected officials as if none of them had ever heard anything like it before but the truth is, we know the difference.
If you are new to Wounded Times, here's a little bit of background on what has been going on.
First the VA never had an appropriate budget. Not just during these wars, but from all wars going all the way back to the beginning. When veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq were coming home there was already a line of Gulf War veterans, behind Vietnam veterans, behind Korean War Veterans, behind WWII veterans the dwindling WWI veterans.
In 2006 Congress was
pushing the Bush Administration to increase the VA budget, 5 years after sending troops into Afghanistan, because nothing was prepared for the wounded coming home or any other veteran already standing in line.
This is what they were up against.
Although the Bush administration expects the backlog to continue rising, its 2007 budget proposal calls for decreasing the staff that directly handles such cases - 149 fewer workers, from the current year's 6,574.
The VA has long wanted to reduce its backlog to less than 250,000 claims. But the department's most recent projections have it rising to nearly 400,000 by the end of 2007.
In addition, the average time to process claims, which the VA had said would drop to 145 days, or 125 days, or even 100 days, is projected to increase this year and next, to more than 180 days.
Nothing really new to veterans but what was new was that they also knew
Marines were going hungry in Iraq. Just didn't fit in with the narrative of "support the troops" claim, so most folks ignored it.
The Providence Journal didn't ignore it.
The Iraq war has been the war fought on the cheap _ not enough body armor, not enough armor on vehicles, not enough night vision equipment.It has been the war in which packages from back home have had to fill some crucial needs.Now, we have chow call at the Greenwood Credit Union in Warwick, R.I. It's the latest in home-front intervention. It's partially in response to the unthinkable image of U.S. Marines approaching Iraqi citizens and asking for food because they do not have enough.
Bad enough but it was a lot worse than most folks thought. There was a nasty little trick being played other than stop-loss keeping troops deployed longer than they were supposed to be. They were redeploying troops already diagnosed with PTSD and sent back.
November 2007, 7 years ago, there was a battle going on in Washington. A battle for our veterans and promises to hold Congress accountable for what they failed to do.
VoteVets put out a press release. Their link isn't working anymore so they may have forgotten all about this.
The largest political group of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans today reacted angrily to news that the House of Representatives failed to get the 2/3 vote needed to override President Bush's veto of spending for military veterans.
"It is unconscionable, with estimates of problems veterans face getting worse every day that so many in Congress would fail to stand up to this President on behalf of our nation's veterans," said Jon Soltz, Iraq War veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org.
People were upset. At least the people paying attention to all of this long past being appalled by what was going on. A veteran in Albany was talking about having a
box full of medals and a head full of horrors
Albany -- The U.S. House could vote on an Iraq war-spending bill as soon as tomorrow. It would finance another four months of combat, at $50 billion.
As this war approaches its 5th year, thousands of veterans are back home, and now facing a different battle.
When Joseph Drennen talks about his service in the National Guard, he doesn't speak of it as though it were a burden, but more of an honor. "I got an opportunity in December of 2003 to be redeployed with Alpha company 115 signal battalion as a medic."
While deployed to Iraq, his knee was injured when his team was fired upon. He returned after 10 months in Iraq, but he brought home much more than a knee injury.
"I have a box here that I keep all my medals, ribbons and all that and that's what the American public sees."
But Drennen says there are invisible wounds that veterans like himself carry around. "What they don't see are the sleepless nights, the drugs we have to take to keep us functioning on a daily basis, the trauma that we go through. The nightmares, the flashbacks, the problems we have just getting by day to day."
By December came more testimonies from broken hearted parents.
Tim Bowman's parents hoped the loss of their son would cause the congress to do something about saving others.
Mike and Kim Bowman are on the first of six panels of witnesses who were scheduled to testify at the hearing, which will focus on suicide prevention and treatment within the VA health care system.
Two authors of books about post-traumatic stress disorder also will testify, as will veterans’ advocates from Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, Vietnam Veterans of America, the American Legion and Disabled Veterans of America. After the testimony from other panelists, including officials from the VA’s Veterans Health Administration and inspector general’s office, the authors and veterans service organizations’ representatives will return to share their reflections on that testimony.
According to the committee, the Veterans Health Administration estimates there are about 1,000 suicides per year among veterans receiving care through VHA, and as many as 5,000 suicides per year among all living veterans.
Oh,yes but then Congress did something about all of this going on. More money, more promises and this is what they did.
By a vote of 409-4 the House today passed legislation funding the Department of Veterans Affairs for FY 2009. The bill (HR 6599) includes $3.8 billion for mental illness treatment and $584 million for substance abuse treatment in the VA, significant increases over current year funding. Overall, the Veterans Health Administration budget is set at $40.8 billion for FY 2009 -- $1.6 billion more than the President requested and $3.9 billion more than current levels. It is projected that the VA will serve 5.8 million veterans in 2009.
For homeless veterans, HR 6599 allocates $130 million for the homeless grants and per diem program, rejecting a proposal from the Bush Administration to cut the program by $8 million. This allocation also includes $32 million to hire additional personnel as part of the joint HUD-VA "VASH" program for veterans supportive housing. A separate bill funding the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) appropriates an additional $75 million at HUD for rent subsidies, i.e. the housing side of this joint program.
The bill also includes $500 million for medical research at the VA, $38 million more than the President requested and $20 million more than was allocated in FY 2008.
If you don't read Wounded Times, I only track news reports and some of the links to the original stories are gone now, but mine are still up so use the links and then you can see where the original story came from at least.
Maybe it is a good time to take a look at the years and other parents who had to travel to Washington hoping that their story, their loss would make a difference. Really easy to find them considering that there are
twice as many veterans committing suicide than the civilian population but all the press wants to talk about is the 22 a day, taken from 21 states as an average, when they bother to talk about any of this at all.
Private First Class Jason Scheuerman nailed a suicide note to his barracks closet in Iraq, stepped inside and shot himself. What the soldier's father, Chris, would learn about his son's final days would lead the retired Special Forces commando, who teaches at Fort Bragg, to take on the very institution he's spent his life serving — and ultimately prompt an investigation by the Army Inspector General's office.
Chris Dana came home from the war in Iraq in 2005 and slipped into a mental abyss so quietly that neither his family nor the Montana Army National Guard noticed.
He returned to his former life: a job at a Target store, nights in a trailer across the road from his father's house.
When he started to isolate himself, missing family events and football games, his father urged him to get counseling. When the National Guard called his father to say that he'd missed weekend duty, Gary Dana pushed his son to get in touch with his unit.
''I can't go back. I can't do it,'' Chris Dana responded.
Things went downhill from there. He blew through all his money, and last March 4, he shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. He was 23 years old.
As Gary Dana was collecting his dead son's belongings, he found a letter indicating that the National Guard was discharging his son under what are known as other-than-honorable conditions. The move was due to his skipping drills, which his family said was brought on by the mental strain of his service in Iraq.
The letter was in the trash, near a Wal-Mart receipt for .22-caliber rifle shells.
All across America, veterans such as Chris Dana are slipping through the cracks, left to languish by their military units and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
His story got so much attention that then Senator Obama, serving on the Veterans Affairs Committee went to meet with his step brother at the Montana National Guards.
Since Dana's death, his stepbrother Matt Kuntz has campaigned for more awareness of the costs of untreated post-traumatic stress syndrome in Iraq war veterans.
Wednesday, he was invited to meet with Sen. Barack Obama to share the message he's been spreading statewide for more than a year. At a quiet picnic table at Riverfront Park, Obama sat across from Kuntz, his wife, Sandy, and their infant daughter, Fiona.
But it isn't just "elected in Washington" addressing all this. State by state they have been doing the same thing.
For two years, Edward Robinson was stationed at a Navy hospital in Portsmouth, Va., helping treat wounded troops returning from battle in Iraq. The experience was so emotionally taxing that when Robinson moved home to Annapolis in 2006, his life started unraveling.
Robinson tried to kill himself four times, he said in emotional testimony before a panel of Maryland legislators yesterday. The 35-year-old told lawmakers that he was hospitalized five times, and his mental illnesses grew so bad that his wife recently left him.
Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has proposed legislation to close gaps in federal care for returning service members. The measures would establish a $3.5 million pilot program to help veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan navigate the federal system to obtain care for mental and behavioral health problems.
That was in 2008. My intention when I sat down to do this was to put up stories of the rest of the family members telling members of congress what happened to their veteran and why their heart ripped out caused them to do whatever they had to in order to prevent another family from suffering as well. The problem was when I started to review more and more of their stories, I was having a hard time seeing. Between tears and fury, there just doesn't seem to be a point in doing that since congress won't even review what CSPAN has recorded for history with all the other hearings. It isn't just the VA committees in the act but members of the Armed Services committees as well. They get to talk, pretend to care but not a single one of them have the balls to admit they absolutely suck at what they are getting paid to do.
It is their job to fix what is wrong and hold people accountable for screwing it up in the first place after taking taxpayer money to do a job they failed.
So no, they don't get a pass and this is why they do not deserve any kind of trust from any of us because we see graves filled as more and more parents/family members take chairs in front of congress trying to keep some graves empty. The trouble is, when you see the videos on CSPAN, you'll notice how many of the chairs are empty where elected officials are supposed to be.
