Forgotten Heroes
I hear all the calls about supporting the troops overseas. How about supporting the troops when they come home?
MSNBC-March 5, 2007 issue – After returning from Iraq in late 2005, Jonathan Schulze spent every day struggling not to fall apart. When a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic turned him away last month, he lost the battle. The 25-year-old Marine from Stewart, Minn., had told his parents that 16 men in his unit had died in two days of battle in Ramadi. At home, he was drinking hard to stave off the nightmares. Though he managed to get a job as a roofer, he was suffering flashbacks and panic attacks so intense that he couldn’t concentrate on his work. Sometimes, he heard in his mind the haunting chants of the muezzin—the Muslim call to prayer that he’d heard many times in Iraq. Again and again, he’d relive the moments he was in a Humvee, manning the machine gun, but helpless to save his fellow Marines. “He’d be seeing them in his own mind, standing in front of him,” says his stepmother, Marianne.
Schulze, who earned two Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in Iraq, was initially reluctant to turn to the VA. Raised among fighters—Schulze’s father served in Vietnam and over the years his older brother and six stepbrothers all enlisted in the military—Jonathan might have felt asking for help didn’t befit a Marine. READ MORE
John, I think that a real effort to do this would require Republicans such as yourself to seek out stories of veterans and their experiences, then posting them here just as often as you post on illegal immigration.
It’s rather disingenuous to post this right here as if you’re not part of the problem.
Look anything to help VETS I am for!!!
Also we will do a radio show on the topic and help raise money for the issue.
If you have ideas please e- mail me.
How do you support a young man who is twisted up inside his brain and really just wants to get back into combat?
A guy I work with has a kid that fits this description.
I hate to say it but for some of these guys I think they are permanently damaged. There are just some things that will tear you up on the inside forever.
They certainly are. It’s why The Deer Hunter was such an apt portrayal of how the mind suffers and is permanently damaged from all of it. Too much puff and glitter accompany our ignorance towards the entire enterprise to even recognize the rot when it’s so clearly in charge of the host. And the regeneration of such an organ is all but impossible, so for the sake of argument, let’s consider the government’s position for a moment.
There’s little tax generating ability left, and the body is no longer capable of reentering battle.
People come and go you see, but budgets of the permanent kind are impossible to shake without reprisals. So they up the copays on the perscriptions, and get some of them deciding between the pills that make the noises stop and keeping the lights on. Such squeezing off of a means for survival will undoubtedly turn the already damaged mind inward more often, which is a bad thing in general…for a veteran it can’t be good.
The message is clear, just like the message to the thousands being poisoned this very moment by formaldehyde in the air they breathe whenever in or around their FEMA trailer.
Those folks are just as useless to the government as are these veterans, and to do the right thing by them would mean doing the wrong thing for the budgets that, as I pointed out, will exist regardless. So much of those budgets are already allocated towards tickers on the NYSE and Nasdaq, that if they suddenly had to go the long route (to individuals, then spent in the market), something would have to be produced in order to reclaim the prize money. Instead by letting the weak members of the herd die off quickly, that money can go directly into a column on a balance sheet, and without so much fuss over production, sales, distribution, etc…the earnings per share can be accurately projected, and so on.
To provide these veterans what they supposedly deserve from the government…I suppose that would throw certain orbits out of whack. And we can’t have that.
(Al,
It’s not formaldehyde in the FEMA trailers. It’s the glue that holds the Luan walls up. They are new trailers and not well built; but neither are they taken care of by the occupants or appreciated.)
Aubrey – it is indeed formaldehyde, from the use of poor materials used to construct the trailers. The assembly line at one company put the time to build at around 12 minutes.
How can you fault the inhabitants for the air quality?
Where did you read about the glue? I’ve researched this a great deal, and feel that I know exactaly what I’m talking about.