Supporting the Troops

Supporting the Troops

Every day I drive my car around town and observe cars with those ubiquitous slogans in support of our military. Often they take the shape of yellow ribbons; other times they use the standard rectangular bumper sticker shape. Either they state unequivocally: “Support our troops” (and these often also sport a military affiliation) or they say “Support our troops. Bring them home” (and these may have more explicitly anti-war stickers as well).

I have nothing but respect for those who feel their support for the women and men serving in Iraq and Afghanistan strongly enough to make such a public statement in favor of those fighting the war, no matter how they feel about the war itself. But lately, after five years of this fighting overseas and enough time to see what has become of returning veterans, I have begun to wonder: What actual good do these bumper stickers do?

These professions of support for the troops have come to seem increasingly “gestural” -- they acknowledge a debt to those serving our country, they may assuage the conscience of those left behind or those who have chosen not to send their sons and daughters to fight, but ultimately they have little tangible effect on the fates of the soldiers fighting in the field, and more importantly on the lives of the soldiers returning home.

Today's Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will not suffer the fate of those who served in Vietnam and returned to domestic hostility on U.S. soil. They will not be spat upon; they will not be called “baby-killers.” But they are just as likely to be subject to the insensitive question - “How many people did you kill?” or to the equally insensitive response, “Oh, you served in Iraq. That's great” --followed by silence and indifference.

But beyond the ways that we greet these soldiers upon their return, I also can't help wondering about a more fundamental economic question: how ready are these vets to find a job?

As someone who has been on the hiring end of the job market these past few years, I can tell you that I have received many resumes from returning vets, and most of them wanted to make me weep. They usually arrived without cover letters and with an emphasis on “leadership” as their leading job qualification. I never doubted the leadership skills of these job-seekers, but I did wonder who in the world was advising them on how to seek a job in the private sector, when these generic resumes were so clearly setting them up to fail.

In addition to the hope of finding a better job when they return home, many of those serving in today's military signed up, at least in part, because of the promise of educational benefits. Serve your country today, these young people were told, and you'll get enough money to go to college. That too has turned out to be a less than reliable promise.

My fourth-grade teacher served in World War II and was designated as two-thirds disabled after losing his leg to a land mine. He attended Yale University on the G.I. Bill and went on to become the headmaster of a fine private school (he was teaching my fourth-grade class in his “retirement.”)

By contrast, today's vet has a snowflake's chance in hell of attending an Ivy League university on current G.I. benefits. Those same benefits that were created to allow World War II vets to attend college without incurring substantial debt, now cover only sixty percent of a public college education in 2008. Attending a private university is out of the question under these circumstances, when the maximum payment per year is $9,600 for each returning vet, and the average cost of a public college education is $16,000 per year, even for in-state students.

For Thomas Sim, a Korean-American, who returned to attend UC-Irvine after his service in Iraq, the transition from military to college life has proven to be considerably more difficult than he had anticipated. “The GI bill is--to be blunt—it's chump change...School is very expensive and as much as the GI bill helps, I still have to rely on myself,” Sim told NPR correspondent, Alex Cohen. Sim has also been surprised by how little students talk about the war outside of his classes: “I would rather have someone, even an antiwar demonstrator, I would rather have someone come up to me, and start ranting to me...I would rather confront that than confront a shrug of the shoulders and someone saying, 'Marines, oh that's cool” and then have them walk away with their iPod,” (“Marking the Transition from Serviceman to Student,” Day to Day, March 17, 2008).

For as much as our political and military leaders voice constant and often vociferous support for our active military, their policies, and the bureaucratic decision-making that determines how disabled a returning veteran might be, have sent a far different message, not just with respect to a diminishing support for college education benefits but also with respect to more basic needs like health care.

For example, because of medical advances, today's soldier is much more likely to survive the explosion of an IED (“improvised explosive device”). These soldiers will receive state-of-the-art medical attention in Iraq and later when they are removed from the scene of an attack to Germany for immediate surgery.

The problems for these soldiers come later when they reach the stage of needing follow-up care, particularly if that care involves psychological as well as physical trauma.

Daniel Zwerdling, a veteran NPR reporter, first broke the story of how returning soldiers were being denied and even punished for requesting help with mental help problems, especially PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), as early as December 2005. That ground-breaking reporting led to Congressional investigations of problems at Fort Carson, Colorado, as well as sub-standard conditions, including infestations of rats and roaches, at Walter Reed Hospital.

However, these scandals have proven to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the obstacles put in the path of veterans seeking care for disabilities incurred during their military service. For example, a recent NPR report discovered that “Colonel Becky Baker of the Army Surgeon General's office told the Veterans Administration to discontinue counseling soldiers on the appropriateness of Defense Department ratings [of their disabilities] because 'there exists a conflict of interest,'” (“Document Shows Army Blocked Help for Soldiers,” Morning Edition, February 7, 2008).

The Defense Department's reluctance to rate soldiers' disabilities accurately may be explained by the realization that medical care for a returning vets over his or her lifetime may be as high as $700 billion according to a recent Harvard University study. Over 200,000 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities thus far, with 900,000 still deployed on active duty. The Harvard study predicts that the cost of medical care and compensation benefits for returning veterans will skyrocket once those troops return home, (Linda Bilmes, “Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits,” (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP07-001).

So if you support the troops because you believe the Iraq War is worth fighting, or if you believe we simply need to bring our troops back to the U.S. and end the fighting in Iraq, you can do something that will truly benefit them.

Write your representatives and demand that our federal budget include sufficient appropriations to cover the treatment of psychological as well as physical damage to these men and women; demand that the military stop underestimating the disabilities of returning vets, and finally, ask that the GI bill cover the full cost of education at a public university.

The least we can do for the women and men returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just to meet them with yellow ribbons, but to insist that our government provide them with the medical, psychological, and educational services necessary to help them make the transition to civilian life.

If we are truly patriots, we will be stop at nothing less than this.