Born Under Punches

So let’s get something straight right now. To point out that our military has been overextended, taken for granted and neglected, that’s no criticism of the military. That is criticism of a president and vice president and their record of neglect. – Candidate George Dubya Bush in 2000

With the billions this administration throws around without a second thought, Bush being the animated rubber stamp that he is, why are veterans’ benefits the one matter in which they suddenly decide to become stingy? I’ve been convinced for a while now that the message is, ‘thank you for your service, now the President would be grateful if you would do the country another favor by dying as soon as possible’. He thinks nothing of wasting billions annually on a missile defense system Reagan remembered from a movie he was once in, but when Democrats insisted early in the session that the VA was underfunded for 2005, there suddenly wasn’t enough money to avoid taking that risk. Low and behold, the White House now informs us on a Friday that the VA budget is a billion short of what’s needed.

If that wasn’t enough, another one of Bush’s ideas is to classify veterans earning over $25,000 a year as ‘wealthy’, then using that classification to charge them $250 a year to use the VA health program, while increasing their co-payments. This would force the veteran to pay $11 for a prescription that costs the VA only $4, hence arranging it so the veteran him or herself is funding the program rather than the taxpayers. Why? Obviously he doesn’t adequately value the sacrifices that were made by Americans to become ‘veterans’ in the first place.

Neither do Republicans in Congress, who refused to support an amendment to the $82 billion emergency funding bill for the Iraq war earlier in the session that would have adequately funded the VA, meanwhile pushing forward legislation to limit the death benefit to only cover soldiers who were killed at war. So the soldier who dies in a helicopter accident while training to deploy to Iraq doesn’t deserve the benefit according to them, and in the spirit of classifying some as ‘wealthy veterans’ to squirm out of any kind of responsibility they can, if a loophole is available, Republicans will apparently jump on it, while at the same time consistently claiming the patriotic high ground. As if the very decision to send troops to war alone defines one’s patriotism, rather than following through by ensuring all who volunteer to serve are provided the benefits they were promised.

What is it they have against these people who volunteered to serve? Is it some deep seeded resentment over never having had the courage to enlist themselves? Does it curl up the stomach of President Bush, Cheney or Karl Rove to think that a veteran might live long enough to march in one of those parades that for years had only managed to remind them of how cowardly they all were when it was their time? What’s the logic behind sending these people off to war only to maneuver in such ways that lay the cost of their health care where it doesn’t belong? For a group of people who never came close to a battlefield themselves, they sure seem to have a distorted view of who’s deserving of benefits and who is not.

The government makes distinctions based on whether an injury or death suffered on the job was in a specific geographical area, as well as leveling the amount of compensation in a way that punishes success once the veteran enters the job market with the ‘wealthy veteran’ threshold. Talk on the floors of Congress concerning who deserves what places a purely opportunistic value structure on military service that denigrates the fact that whether or not one suffered an injury in Fallujah or Fort Benning, everyone volunteered to serve. The message they’re sending is, ‘if you volunteered and did not happen to be wounded in battle, you need to help pay for the care of those who were.’ That’s the taxpayers’ burden to bear, not the veterans’.

Do they honestly think that the recruitment numbers are going to go back up as more people become aware of what might happen to them if they foolishly sign their life away for the sake of these selfish frauds? There are two wars being fought on the other side of the world right now, and nothing is guaranteed in terms of either Iraq or Afghanistan being stable twenty years down the road. The success or failure of both missions rely heavily on the military being able to sustain troop strength over an extended period of time, yet the troubles facing the military are dealt with passively, with the bulk of legislation aimed at figuring out how to squeeze every dollar they can from the troops themselves.

While the father of a marine is told by his son that the command ‘urged’ him to purchase $600 dollars worth of gear prior to deployment for the sake of his coming home alive, recruiters will soon be fed the names, social security numbers, grades and phone numbers of students as young as 16 years old. This data will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass, a marketing firm hired by the Pentagon to analyze student data and identify targets for recruiters based on their personal profiles and habits. Will the recruiters then instruct these kids to purchase body armor, a poncho liner and camelback on their own, before reporting to basic training?

I’m sure they won’t, nor will they make it known that while last year all a recruiter had was a product and a nameless potential customer going to high school, now they know who’s got the low grades and God-willing, the low self esteem as well. Equipped with this information, recruiters can focus their energy on the most vulnerable, the most apt to buy what they’re attempting to sell. Targeting the underachievers, sending them off to war with less than what they need to survive, then shorting them on their promised medical care once out – this is the business model for the present and future of our nation’s military. This is our government doing everything it can to stock the military with bodies without having to pay anything close to top dollar.

Because as the Republicans in charge see it, the real money needs to be spent on pie in the sky technology out of Star Wars, overpriced Halliburton chili-mac and bribes to piece of shit dictators who jail their people for merely questioning authority. The real money has been earmarked for years, and pork cannot be sacrificed for the sake of a D student who can’t sleep because of night terrors due to post traumatic stress. No, it’s simply a matter of ‘some guys are lucky and some aren’t’. Give this business model a good decade or two and perhaps we’ll all luck out with a generation of veterans who are already familiar in their teenage years with huffing gasoline or downing a glass or two of Wild Turkey to relieve stress.

If it’s not that when they come back, the five dollar a pop heroin or backwoods meth will finish the job the war started. Maybe the President will decide to allow veterans to trade in their GI bill for half priced Jack Daniels and Budweiser. Better yet, a nifty ‘vaccine’ can be created along the way that kills off a good percentage of them twenty years down the road, like the depleted uranium managed to do in the first Gulf War. The 1200 already sick from the anthrax vaccine might have some ideas concerning this, but like Gulf War Syndrome, don’t hold your breath for any truthful insights from the government. While they insist that soldiers were never exposed to depleted uranium and those who describe symptoms are merely suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, 67% of babies born to the 400K veterans who suffer from Gulf War Syndrome have birth defects. As more step forward, the government’s position becomes more indefensible with each year that passes.

It’s clear that the government never ‘has’ to admit to anything if they don’t want to, and if we’re mostly talking about D students ten years from now, they probably won’t know the first thing about writing to Congress or how to get their story out there. That’s the beauty of scraping the bottom of the barrel for bodies, you’re not likely to get someone with the background or awareness necessary to defend themselves once they’re not being shot at. With the Abu Gharib scandal in mind, does the government really want an upper middle class child who might be the son or daughter of a talented lawyer? Hell no. That’s the kind of kid who could end up being more trouble than they’re worth. That’s the kind of kid who could someday start his own website and point out their bullshit as it actually unfolds.

I think about how I came about the idea of joining the military myself, and what I experienced personally quite often. In an infantry battalion I saw the results of this particular strategy all around. How they tucked us away with the weapons ranges on a base in Germany out in the sticks, while the Air Force, Navy and higher skilled Army units were situated closer to the cities. We were paid just enough to get out once in a while, while keeping ourselves drunk on cheap booze for as long as the money would last. Slot machines starting popping up all over the post, as did the salesmen pushing compounded interest retirement plans not likely to be worth anything to a corpse. The isolation clearly had a purpose as after having served in some aforementioned ‘higher skilled’ Army units before the assignment in Germany, the combat arms units were definitely full of soldiers who were much more likely to raise hell.

The living quarters in comparison were just as reflective of who was occupying them. While non-combat arms units generally had a higher rate of single rooms, in the sticks there were four heroes sharing a single camode and shower, in two man units barely the size of a low-end motel room. I can still hear the chow hall cooks proclaiming ‘you can’t have two starches’, as well as the day and night constant rat-a-rat-rat of machine gun fire and random kabooms from the range just next door. A year or two of that convinces many to marry the wrong woman just to get out of the barracks, some of whom happened to be on a combat arms Army base in the middle of nowhere for the specific purpose of finding such a schmuck. A friend of mine who married the wrong woman to get out of the barracks was drinking himself to death last I knew, when he came home from Bosnia to find his wife pregnant with a kid that wasn’t his.

This was just one way that a deployment could manage to tear a soldiers’ life apart. Deployments being the stuff of promotions for career officers, when one rolled down the pike, everything else went on hold. In order to deploy during the years I was in, the unit had to maintain a minimum level of readiness, most importantly when it came to the number of deployable personell. During a pre-deployment alert for Kosovo that was eventually put on hold, I suffered four broken ribs during a training exercise on riot control. Because our level of readiness was on the edge already, the battalion doctor was given an order to prevent anyone from becoming non-deployable. As result, I was denied access to an x-ray and was told for a month that my ribs were bruised, given some Ibuprofen and told to ‘drive on’. If it happened to me, it’s safe to assume that similar examples exist throughout the military when an officer’s career path is at stake.

Dangers a plenty in the world of fatigues. Lots of pitfalls and voices that manage to convince one after another that to get out and lose their modest salary would amount to imminent doom. Of course, the war all too often makes that decision for them now, whether by stop-loss or death. Considering the job market for a former D student with no legs, maybe President Bush is right in considering a veteran making over $25,000 a year ‘wealthy’. Perhaps we’re witnessing one of the most brilliant schemes in history to euthanize the weakest within a modern society, while making sure the American death industry has customers to sell their weapons to that don’t exclusively wear turbans.

When there was no war to filter these products into the right hands, they ended up going to Iraqis, Iranians and guys like Osama Bin Laden. War or no war, the guns, missiles and ammunition were going to be sold one way or the other. Perhaps every one that ends up in the hands of an American soldier is one less that has to ‘fall off the truck’ and into the hands of a drug dealer in Baltimore. Wishful thinking at best, as there are plenty to go around. With that in mind, President Bush is unloading missiles to Pakistan at this very moment without so much as a peep from the media who failed to alert us when Reagan was doing the same thing twenty years ago. That the attacks on September 11th were cultivated in part by such unethical arms deals should, but unfortunately won’t, prompt a higher level of criticism this time around.

And so it goes this seemingly endless cycle of production and consumption our current thread of leadership shamelessly engages in decade after decade without much attention at all to the effect it has on the American population. The underfunding of veterans’ health care is merely a symptom of a broader campaign to condition American society to expect less and feel lucky to have even that. They bastardize intellectual thought, replace it with theology, go to war with our ‘enemies’, while constantly arming our future ‘enemies’.

While the Chinese have cultivated a generation of highly productive citizens by limiting each household to only child. Here in America we’re doing it our own way.