Two Wounded Soldier Stories

The BBQ Pit
1

Here’s one.

Here’s another. Part One. Part Two.

The first one is about a sniper who lost his eye and has been in bureaucratic limbo at Walter Reed. It’s a sad story, with a few Helleresque catches thrown in. It makes me very angry that anyone should have to go through this, but a wounded soldier? No fucking way.

The second one just breaks my heart. Absolutely breaks my heart. Just a snip, to sum up their travails.

This guy has permanent brain injuries that effectively turn him into a child. He will never work again. He needs constant supervision. They stand to lose their farm. And the capper? (My emphasis)

What the fuck are we doing? How can we treat our soldiers this way? Is “the system” so inflexible that no one can step in and fix this? How many more families have been destroyed like this? How can *anyone *in the chain of command sleep while shit like this happens, and I mean all the way to the fucking top?

If I seem incoherent, I’m sorry. Words literally fail me.

Bring them home, goddamnit, just bring them home.

2

On top of that are the Americans who response to this is, “Well, they knew what they were signing up for. They signed on the dotted line.”

3

Unfortunately, this shit is what happens after they COME home. Maybe we ought to relocate the Pentagon to Iraq, or is it the VA? Let them learn a little empathy once some RPGs come zingin’ through their office windows.

4

If we bring them home before their heads literally explode maybe they can function in society again.

It’s easy for me to pick on the Commander-in-Chief, because I truly believe he is a subhuman immoral bastard. But what about the pencil pushers who fuck up these families’ lives? Are they too overwhelmed to do their jobs properly? In the first story, the case manager just seems like a fuck-up. How can he just not care?

5

Reenlistment bonuses are conditioned on completing the enlistment. And while I think it sucks that people with combat injuries don’t get theirs continued, it also sucks to a lesser degree when a guy working on an aircraft carrier develops hearing loss or a bad back, also gets discharged, and loses his bonus as well.

Let’s work on fixing the hospital and disability system - the bonus issue literally is small potatoes compared to these, and if we have to concentrate on fixing a couple of things, better work on what is most broken.

6

And the pesky not getting paid thing.

7

You might imagine that parents all over the US are actively discouraging their children from joining up because of shit like this.

Ot may be costing the individuals way too much, but its costing the US plenty too, recruitment is down.

8

Right. Military pay is its own special hell.

9

That typically is my line, but it’s not a blanket statement covering everything.

Whoever wrote up the enlistment bonus clause of the contract if a fucking inhuman genius. Get injured/killed before your enlistment is up? Forfeit (or worse, return!) your bonus money.

Contra, IME, it isn’t just the military bureaucracy that is this fucked up, but, given the war, it is fairly prominent in the news and such right now.

My own experiences are nothing compared to the travails of these returning vets, but there were a couple of times in my time in Army Green that I could’ve strangled the life (slowly! oooohh soooo slowly!) out of some pencil-necked, pencil-pushing, donut-munching, coffee-swilling, gold-bricking, lard-assed fucktards in the Army.

Where’s Ray Liotta and Kiefer Sutherland when you really need them?

But here’s a real good question for you, as well: where’s their Congresscritters? Their state reps, their Governors? Nothing like a phone call (or better yet, a visit!) from a Senator (or two), as well as a handful of U.S. Representatives, to get the Top Brass off of their ass and make the bureaucracy work the way it’s supposed to.

I’ve seen it happen, with my nephew in '05. Seems his recruiter didn’t dot all the “i’s” or cross all the “t’s” before shipping my nephew out to Ft. Sill, OK, for basic training. While still in the reception station, he was yanked out of rotation and had paperwork started to discharge him due to visible tattoos. Now, he’d only been there about 48 hours. You wouldn’t think it would take long to get him out and back home.

Six weeks later, he was still there. It seems “they” thought he made a great “Area Maintenance Specialist,” and had him working KP, Area Beautification, Barracks Cleaning Detail, etc., while his discharge was “being processed.” Then his wife went into premature labor, and it took phone calls from Senator Dick Durbin, as well as Congressman Jerry Costello, to get the Ft. Sill post Commander to bring enough heat on the Reception Station commander to finally kick my nephew loose.

Now that was over something trivial, like discharging a person who was never really in the Army, and was in the process of being sent back home anyway.

I shudder to think of what it would take to actually get something accomplished for real soldiers, in real need.

10

I knew that there would be at least one of three particular shitheads who would say this, and sure enough, one came through.

What I don’t understand is why a soldier’s family has medical bills. Does the Army not offer a medical plan, for Christ’s sake?

11

C’mon. It should be obvious that I wasn’t defending, merely explaining. Having dealt with this kind of bureaucratic nonsense firsthand (though, admittedly, I didn’t screwed over to this degree) I certainly wouldn’t defend it.

Of course, I do plead guilty to having become resigned to it over time, but that’s a different matter entirely.

12

OK. He didn’t get his bonus because it is policy. Isn’t it also policy to get paid? You can’t have it both ways.

I suppose my complaint is that stories like these seem to be the hidden cost of war. Sure, Our Glorious Leaders can warn us that there will be casualties, sacrifices must be made, blah de fucking blah. Fine. NONE of *this *shit is acceptable. Any military leader advocating starting a war and knowing that the wounded and their families would be treated this way is a goddamn horse’s ass and morally bankrupt as well. Any military leader who does not speak out in outrage is a chickenshit motherfucker who does not deserve his commission.

Our soldiers are not just cannon fodder.
I cannot imagine being “resigned” to a system that treats its own so shabbily.

13

Fine for you to say. But the fact of the matter is that by any objective standard the members of the WWII generation fought a war that had far more societal acceptance and approval, and this did not stop both the military of the day and the society at large from treating those soldiers and veterans a hell of a lot worse in a great many ways.

Now if you can square that particular circle, please spell it out for me. I’d love to hear this.

Seems to me, though, that the use of the military to achieve national policy goals and the treatment of those soldiers and veterans are two separate questions. Related questions, to be sure, but separate ones - and I think if you really separated them, you’d have a lot more agreement about how to go about things.

Unfortunately, you did not do so in your OP - you chose to play politics:

I’m sure you realize these particular guys are home. That isn’t stopping them from getting fucked over, and everything I know both from my own time in and my experiences talking to veterans of every conflict going back to WWII show that this is a longstanding and intractable problem. If it hasn’t been fixed since 1950, I really don’t see it being entirely fixed in the next couple of years. I’m funny like that.

So yeah, I might be resigned - resigned to what I can accomplish. And one of these things is making stuff like this a nonpartisan and nonpolitical issue. Unfortunately, for folks like you, everything is political - so this must be so as well.

A military that would screw around with my discharge date (and potentially my civilian employment) because of a hearing shift they couldn’t quite diagnose right, and this in peacetime, is a military that would screw these guys over in a war. And funny, but I never saw much outrage from either party when this was going on - though in retrospect, this lack of readiness in military medicine in the mid-1990s sure screwed us over a few years later, didn’t it?

I think it did. I think you would agree with that.

14

No, the hidden cost of war are the casualties that never signed for it, won´t get any redress, compensation or benefits for their death and wonded and won´t ever have the option to call a representative to intercede for them. They alse are something like the 90 or 95% of deaths and injuries.

The most you´ll hear about them its some statistic that fades from memory very easily.

15

I wonder if this is the result of the influence business has on our culture and government.

I’m not sticking this solely at the feet of Rumsfeld and CEO Bush, either. Clinton was much more business-oriented than truly liberal, and certainly the Marc Rich pardon shows the “forgive the guys at the top” mentality that rules the business world; also, McNamara worked for Democratic administrations to bring the hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis he’d learned in business to the Vietnam war.

In general, this class of complaint, although hideously exemplified by the plight of wounded soldiers, isn’t unique. American business practices and jargon are filled with “pre-existing conditions,” layoffs to save the corporation money, failure to honor retirement plans, insider trading only for the big fish, and sundry other ways to penalize the front line workers (how’s that for a military metaphor?).

It’s bad when it happens to single moms working retail, auto workers supporting families, paralyzed football players not getting their non-guaranteed bonuses, and injured soldiers. It’s probably worst of all for the soldiers, true, but it’s a society-wide problem.

Sometimes I think it would be nice if business was one of the things America does, instead of the only thing America does.

Sailboat

16

This is the kind of shit that makes it easy to forget that Catbert was once a satirical archetype.

17

Really? In what ways, exactly?

It really doesn’t matter. Just because bullshit is endemic doesn’t make it any less bullshit. If it happened back then, it was wrong. It’s still wrong today.

No doubt is does seem that way to you. Not to me, though. Unless you can have one without the other.

If the military really believes that there is an acceptable level of fucking over wounded soldiers, then it needs to revisit its mission statement.

How, exactly? War itself is political. Whatever position you take on the war is a political one.

You’re the second one to make this mistake. On purpose, I hope. But in case it is unclear, I want to bring home the ones who are not home. The ones who are home do not need to be brought home. They are already here. Also, you don’t need to look out for robbers going *down *the mountain. There is no payroll money going *down *the mountain.

So we do nothing? So complaints are useless? Bullshit.

But that’s not what you said, is it?

In what way am I making it partisan? And who exactly are “folks like me,” asshole? You know absolutely fuck all about me.

What party do I represent?

18

I really don’t care what party you represent. BTW, I’m a local Republican committeeman. That doesn’t change the fact that the Republicans in Congress in the 1990s were complicit in cutting 35% of our nation’s military hospitals even though 35% of the patients hardly went away. In fact, patient loads stayed about the same.

They were assisted in that by a Democratic administration and a military that is supposed to be nonpolitical and nonpartisan.

Now, a lot of good things have happened in military medicine in recent years - advances in trauma care, transportation, prosthetics, and the like. But none of this will obscure what happens when a shooting war starts and you’re short 35% or more of your hospital beds.

Now, you say this isn’t a partisan political issue for you? Your level of outrage is deeper than recreational? Good. Put it to productive use. And I don’t mean protesting the war, or protesting the protesters. Doing so might be a good thing to do in its own right, depending, but it provides no immediate help to any soldier.

Instead, a donation of time or money to any of these organizations would be better placed:

Fisher House allows military families to be close to a recovering servicemember in a military hospital.

Operation Homefront provides emergency assistance to military families and wounded servicemembers.

Each service also runs its own relief society, all of which accept donations:

Army Emergency Relief
Air Force Aid Society
Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society

Now, I’ve stated before that I’m as skeptical of people whose sole commitment to the troops is a magnet on their car as I am of people whose sole commitment to them is posts on a message board. Now, every day I go to work I can point to things I have done to help our servicemembers. And I do donate to some of these charities. Far short as I fall, I do far more than most.

What are you doing? If you don’t feel you’re doing enough, send a few bucks along to one of these organizations, or another one, or donate some time instead. And choose one that actually does some good for the military members, and not some political activity - they’ll be plenty of time for that too.

19

Boo Hoo! Poor quasi-mercenaries didn’t get paid their blood money. Cry me a fucking river. Reap, meet Sow.

20

Huh. My “Assholes of the SDMB” list seems to be out of date. Let me just pencil your name in there until the next official reprinting.