Veterans' Day - and?

Over at Chuck for I had a bit to say about having a Day for vets and that there might be a bit more to do than just that. Since Ron has posted a bit on the subject I won't rehash my post here, but I will suggest just a couple ways to honor the vets:

Let's make fewer of them and be more careful about it

Ask a vet today what they need, and then ask for it, and then demand it

If that seems a bit much, consider - just exactly what words do you have that are adequate to express our debt and gratitude?

Memorial Day

The headline reads:
U.S. deaths near grim Memorial Day mark

BAGHDAD - Americans have opened nearly 1,000 new graves to bury U.S. troops killed in Iraq since Memorial Day a year ago. The figure is telling — and expected to rise in coming months.

In the period from Memorial Day 2006 through Saturday, 980 soldiers and Marines died in Iraq, compared to 807 deaths in the previous year.

For the 4th time since my WWII veteran father died I took my mother out to visit his final resting place at Willamette National Cemetery. It's a big place - veterans from WWI, WWII, Korea and an increasing number from Vietnam. There were the widows, sons and daughters paying their respects but there is one image that will stick in my mind. There was a young woman in her mid twenties and two small children sitting on the ground by a grave marker. Now I don't know if that was a husband and father they were morning or if that person died in George Bush's war for oil but the image will remain.

More thoughts can be found at The Gun Toting Liberal and The All Spin Zone.

Who needs to govern when you can pillage?

The Washington Post headline reads:
'It Is Just Not Walter Reed'
This is supposed to be a surprise? Of course it's not just Walter Reed. While constantly bloviating about "support the troops" the administration and the Republicans have treated them like Just so much cannon fodder from day one. And of course it's not just the war - not just the veterans. As Paul Krugman explains in Valor and Squalor the Bush administration didn't get elected to govern - to serve, but to pillage the treasury for a wealthy few who happen to be their friends and supporters.

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

But there is much more than penny pinching involved. Yes we are talking about the "P" word - privatization - the primary tool of the pillager.

We know from Hurricane Katrina postmortems that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to outsource and privatize disaster management, which demoralized government employees and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.

The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

And Mr. Waxman, who will be holding a hearing on the issue today, appears to have solid evidence, including an internal Walter Reed memo from last year, that the prospect of privatization led to a FEMA-type exodus of skilled personnel.

What comes next? Francis J. Harvey, who as far as I can tell was the first defense contractor appointed secretary of the Army, has been forced out. But the parallels between what happened at Walter Reed and what happened to New Orleans — not to mention parallels with the mother of all scandals, the failed reconstruction of Iraq — tell us that the roots of the scandal run far deeper than the actions of a few bad men.

The Bush administration has failed to govern because the have no interest in governing. A government by the wealthy few for the wealthy few.

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The best and the worse

A couple of right leaning commenters in the post below took exception with the "slandering" of war heroes associated with the Swift Boaters.

I disagree with you about the Swift Boats, Ron. There is no doubt that the American soldier has often been slighted by the far left, not just by Kerry and his "Genghis Kahn" nonsense in the 70s, but by Kerry, and others, recently. No doubt there are political motivations behind them, but these guys are first group of their kind to really stand up and take issue, with the "spit on the baby-killer" mentality that many on the far-left, who are dusting off their own Vietnam-era nonsense, still blab on about.
logipundit

Bud Day is a former POW and is the most decorated American serviceman alive. I urge you to look more deeply at who Bud Day is and what he's been doing over the years, including his work with Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve and his legal work as a veterans advocate wrt the VA.

Day is no partisan bomb thrower. If Kerry offends men like Day, then that's Kerry's doing.
Jason

As I said in my response I have no doubt that Bud Day is a hero but I also have no doubt that what John Kerry said upon returning is the truth. War does indeed bring out the best in some and create heroes, it also brings out the worse. Over at Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi has an example of the latter.

"The fellas from 121 started showing up the other day. It's starting to sink in...I'll have to go home, the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end. Like a hobby I'll never get to practice again. It's not a great war, but it's the only one we've got. God, I do love killing these bastards...Morale is high, the Marines can smell the barn. It's hard to keep them focused. I still have 20 days of kill these motherfuckers, so I don't wanna take even one day off. "
-- Letter home from an unnamed Marine F/A -18 pilot in Iraq

Is this an aberration? The answer to that is yes. Is this immoral and dangerously insane? One again yes. Like Vietnam we the Iraq war has created many heroes. It has also created many atrocities by Americans. That's war - it can bring out the best in some and the very worse in others. Yes, atrocities happen and should a war hero who points this out be slandered?

As for the old "spit on the baby-killer" meme: I came home from three years in the army in 1971 to one of the most antiwar cities in the country. No one ever spit on me or taunted me and no one ever spit on or taunted any of the people who returned with me. The blame belonged to the politicians who continued to send Americans into a war to kill and be killed even when they knew it could not be won. Yes Johnson and McNamara knew the war couldn't be won in 1966 and they continued to send Americans into the meat grinder.

Figuratively if not literally

There has been much talk of the myth of Vietnam era soldiers being spit on when they returned. I am a Vietnam era veteran who returned to one of the most anti war cites in the country and I was treated with the utmost respect when I returned in 1971 and never saw anyone who wasn't. While this may not be literally spitting on returning troops it might as well be.
Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

And then we have this:
Bush budget shows cuts to vets’ benefits in 2009
And as we have seen this administration figuratively spits on the troops when they send them over to fight their war of choice.
Thousands of Army Humvees Lack Armor Upgrade
And the chicken hawk war mongers have the nerve to accuse those who oppose this war of not supporting the troops. And of course we have the hypocrite in chief himself, commander codpiece saying this:

“My job is to protect our troops. And when we find devices that are in that country that are hurting our troops, we’re going to do something about it, pure and simple.”

Now explain to me how this is supporting the troops - explain to me how this is not spitting in the troops.

Support the troops

We all know the hypocritical Republicans talk the talk but don't walk the walk when it comes to supporting the troops. Well today we had two more examples of how the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republicans support the troops.

• Veterans face consecutive budget cuts

  The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans' health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.
  
  Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

  So Bush is going to support the tax cuts of his wealthy friends rather than the troops he sent to his quagmire in Iraq.
• Thousands of Army Humvees Lack Armor Upgrade

  The Army is working to fill a shortfall in Iraq of thousands of advanced Humvee armor kits designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs -- including a rising threat from particularly lethal weapons linked to Iran and known as "explosively formed penetrators" (EFP) -- that are now inflicting 70 percent of the American casualties in the country, according to U.S. military and civilian officials.
  
  The additional protection is needed for thousands of U.S. reinforcement troops flowing into Baghdad, where these devastating weapons -- used primarily by Shiite fighters -- are particularly prevalent, the officials said.

How can anyone in the military or any veteran support this administration or the Republicans?