Disgrace

They send them to war but they do not take care of them. There is no greater disgrace to America, save an unnecessary war, than callous, demeaning treatment of young Americans sent to fight who are not taken care of in the most basic ways.

We've all heard the stories about missing body armor, and even of official attempts to forbid families from supplying it to their soldiers. We've read stories about Halliburton providing tainted food and tainted water to troops in Iraq. There are many other horror stories from Iraq, some so awful that it's hard to believe them, or at least to verify them.

But soldiers do return, and here we can look at the evidence. Two stories about treatment here, one large in scope, and one smaller and more specific, but just as disgraceful.

A government study shows that less than a quarter of soldiers who show evidence of traumatic stress disorder "are referred for additional evaluation and treatment." Considering that the government's figures show only 5% of the veterans show such signs, while independent groups maintain the figure is much, much higher, this really means that almost none of the returning soldiers who need psychological attention are receiving it.

This is not the only instance of the government cheating veterans of needed medical care--physical as well as psychological. The GI Rights Hotline deals with cases of veterans all the time denied medical care and medical benefits unjustly. But sometimes it's a smaller story that reveals the true degradation we are experiencing. Not one about missing limbs or destroyed minds. But one about something as simple as sweatpants.

The smaller story comes from the Santa Cruz (CA) Sentinel: a group of citizens there are collecting sweatpants for trauma and spinal cord injury patients at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital. A woman visiting there saw veterans wearing ill-fitting castoff sweatpants-- for instance a man in a woman's pair of yellow sweatpants that was entirely too small. Sweatpants are preferred for patients because they are easy to take off and put on. But the hospital, described as the nation's premiere facility for treating serious wounds such as those incurred in roadside bomb explosions in Iraq, cannot provide sweatpants for patents.

The story is played as a call for donations, so apparently we are so used to spending a trillion dollars on warfare but can't afford sweatpants for soldiers whose lives have been shattered, any more than our government cares to provide adequate mental health care to soldiers whose minds they mindlessly traumatized. All for what? Oil barons? Halliburton? The party of Smirk and pals? They have no shame, their morality is sheer hypocrisy. They dishonor not only America but the human race.