I don’t think I can overstate the disgust in our government that this subject gives me. I know many VietNam veterans who have suffered poor health care, much waiting and waiting to get what they need (or not)……and now we have these kids coming home to the same. Our government wants to hide them away from the public. They are used for photo ops, yet they can’t even get a set of clothes. Sickening. We send them to war without the proper equipment, we keep them there longer than they should be, and when they come home wounded, we don’t provide them with the proper care. I do wonder how many homeless Iraq Veterans there are and will be. Another generation of homeless soldiers is in the making. As some Iraq war vets become homeless, they join the approximately 300,000 veterans the VA estimates are homeless in the US at any given moment and the half-million who experience homelessness in the course of a year. How any Senator or Congressman, Republican OR Democrat can stand up and say they support the troops when this shit is going on is beyond me. They have the means to fix this problem, yet Veteran’s benefits are being cut. We are spending billions of dollars a week for a war, yet refuse to fund the care for our veterans. Go figure……
From the Washington Post:

Perks and stardom do not come to every amputee. Sgt. David Thomas, a gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform. Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, David, 42, was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T’shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.

David tangled with Walter Reed’s image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A case worker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row.

” ‘Are you telling me that I can’t go to the ceremony ’cause I’m an amputee?’ ” David recalled asking. “She said, ‘No, I’m saying you need to wear pants.’ ”

David told the case worker, “I’m not ashamed of what I did, and y’all shouldn’t be neither.” When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.

Still, for all its careful choreography of the amputees, Walter Reed offers protection from a staring world. On warm nights at the picnic tables behind Mologne House, someone fires up the barbecue grill and someone else makes a beer run to Georgia Avenue.

Bryan Anderson is out here one Friday. “Hey, Bry, what time should we leave in the morning?” asks his best friend, a female soldier also injured in Iraq. The next day is Veterans Day, and Bryan wants to go to Arlington National Cemetery. His pal Gary Sinise will be there, and Bryan wants to give him a signed photo.

Thousands of spectators are already at Arlington the next morning when Bryan and his friend join the surge toward the ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. The sunshine dazzles. Bryan is in his wheelchair. If loss and sacrifice are theoretical to some on this day, here is living proof — three stumps and a crooked boyish smile. Even the acres of tombstones can’t compete. Spectators cut their eyes toward him and look away.

Suddenly, the thunder of cannons shakes the sky. The last time Bryan heard this sound, his legs were severed and he was nearly bleeding to death in a fiery Humvee.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Bryan pushes his wheelchair harder, trying to get away from the noise. “Damn it,” he says, “when are they gonna stop?”

Bryan’s friend walks off by herself and holds her head. The cannon thunder has unglued her, too, and she is crying.