The following blog is written by my colleague, George Giacoppe (see link on this page). I thought it important to post here.
Ah, for rhetoric to meet the
truth
Of all we were told in our
youth
Where black was so black
That we longed to attack
And white was so white
That we joined for the fight
Because we were the same
Seeking Justice and never fame
Shot on the field of strife
Some lost blood or life
While others lost touch with
the world
Their colors forever furled
Invisible wounds so hard to
find
In the soldiers we leave
behind
Shortly before the recent holidays,
I happened upon a gripping scene as I popped into a nearby Stater Brothers
supermarket. I saw this moving shadow of a man in a Vietnam War hat and a
thin dirty jacket. He was emaciated and frail and literally shaking in
the wind. We spoke briefly about Vietnam and I learned that he was riding
shotgun on escort convoys leaving Da Nang in 1969. I told him that my
year was 1967-1968 and that I was further south in the Mekong Delta; gave him a
dollar and went back to my car with this stark reality engraved in my mind:
we left this soldier behind.
The average wait for VA services is 13 months. If on his own, this
veteran will be dead in 13 months. I went home feeling a little empty and
guilty about the vagaries of fate. That moment, I found a waterproof bag
and loaded it with clean socks a heavy woolen sweater, T-shirts, sundry toilet
articles and a flashlight. Returning to the supermarket, I looked for the
soldier. He was gone. I kept the bag in the car and returned to
Stater Brothers almost daily over the next couple weeks. My description
must have been pretty good, because my wife Louise spotted him outside a nearby
CVS on one of those days. As she sometimes does, she ordered him to stay
put and said that I was looking for him. That day, I had bought orange
juice and one banana. The old soldier needed a ride home. We gladly
assisted. We put his walker in the trunk and left him at home with
the bag of goodies now enhanced with orange juice and one banana. John’s
wife Diana met us and explained that John had Agent Orange induced Parkinson’s
and had PTSD as well as Alzheimer’s. We promised to return.
On the next day, we did return
with food and some additional clothing we bought from a nearby thrift store.
We were treated as warmly as cherished family. This provided enough food
for Christmas. After another week, we returned with additional food and
were invited in, but John was nowhere to be seen. Diana explained that
John often wandered, and that is why she wrote a note for him to carry in his
wallet. He had shown me that note with his address when we drove him
home. There was no money, just a note from his wife so that when lost, he
could be returned to that “home.” Diana had confided that they pay $825 per
month for this hovel with a space heater and that John’s disability payments
had been reduced by $800 per month since he began receiving Social Security
about a year earlier. This leaves the couple with about $200 per month
for the luxuries of food and hygiene. They now owe the VA $15,000 for ‘overpayment’
as a result of getting Social Security. Nice touch. Diana also
commented that they hated to use the kitchen stove since it gave them shocks
when they touched it. When Louise and I entered that home, we were
stunned to find a third world corner of Riverside, California. Words fail
to describe the chaos, grease and grime of this tiny fire-trap. Dante
came close: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” Our nation left
John and now Diana in the hell of no hope.
My clue to hope abandoned came
when I told Diana that she had to solve the administrative problems one at a
time. To get long-term help, she needs her former husband’s death
certificate from San Bernadino County. They need proof of common-law
status after living together for 20 years. They need to get John’s
divorce papers and his DD 214 (proof of service). This stern advice
brought a tear to her eye. Clearly, navigating the tortuous paths of
administration is not for the timid but I showed my inexperience as an advisor
to the afflicted. Oops, John and Diana don’t think like MBAs.
Why cannot the VA get the
money to carry out its mission? The one word answer is “politics.”
Will the current ideological House of Representatives allocate sufficient money
for the invisible constituency of quiet disabled veterans when it would not
willingly allocate money for very visible victims of Super-Storm Sandy?
An organization has been working this legal issue for about five years and only
this month will learn whether the Supreme Court will hear the case referred by
the 9th Federal District Court. Veterans United for Truth has
been joined by several additional veterans groups in this effort to force the
government to recognize a forgotten cost of war, the human cost.
Will this make a difference when we fought two wars without putting either the
Afghan War or the 2nd Iraq War on our national budget?
Ironically, the folks who cheered lustily for those two wars when VP Cheney
stated “Deficits don’t matter” have suddenly gotten religion and want to reduce
the deficit on the backs of the same people who fought the wars instead of
those who gained power from the policy. As we face language such as “entitlements,”
the words of a recent presidential candidate scream in our ears. These
are the 47%, even if they fell into this pit through no fault of their own.
Now I hear “volunteers” used as a weapon against soldiers with traumatic brain
injury and even less visible PTSD. “They volunteered for this duty, why
should all Americans pay for it?” Subsidies to corporation-people are
good. Entitlements to breathing people are bad. Oh, to be treated
as a corporation-person and freed from the bonds of death.
The national answer is simple,
really. We are all in this together and if we cannot carry the injured a
little further and if we cannot rehabilitate them and if we cannot respect
them, then what kind of country are we? The image of commonwealth where
we share in the pain as well as the rewards to the greater good is fading.
It is being replaced with a cannibalistic frenzy where we feed on the less able
and those whom we feel are holding us back. We are leaving our soldiers
behind. What happened to compassionate conservatives? What happened
to “Christian virtue?” What happened to fair play? What happened to
our safety net? Where did our humanity go? We have glorified our
corporations with the trappings of humans where money is free speech and
unlimited political force, but we cannot respect those real people who have
given fully and freely until they can give no more and need to be “takers” in
our commonwealth. The scales tip still further, because we enshrine the
practice of subsidies for those who have already been rewarded richly through
the highest corporate profits on record.
John and Diana are real and
they are in pain and they need help. It is not a mystery and
predestination itself is bunk, but especially when there is a fat thumb on the
scales of justice that decide the fate of our least fortunate whether it is due
to an enemy bullet or a political rebuff. Let us review the real costs of
war and, as a minimum, never enter another one without counting the soldiers we
leave behind both during and after the war. The costs are real and we need
to budget for wars and we need to budget for the record suicides and the
thousands of torn families and the physical and emotional pain inflicted on
those who fight the good fight and sometimes lose.
It takes trained experts to
help the helpless. The Lord knows that I was trained as a soldier and not
a social worker. It takes experts to look under the right bridges to find
the homeless and a trained eye to see the invisible wounds, but it takes us all
to agree to help. It takes us all to change our priorities to include
helping the ones we have left behind.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
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