It's Veterans Day, again. When I was working, it was one of the few holidays I took off. Of course, when I was a cop, holidays were too lucrative to take off. Under our old contract, we got paid for the day regardless if we took it off or worked. If we did work, we got paid at time-and-a-half, so the temptation to whore the overtime was great. I wasn't as bad as some, but I worked almost all the paid holidays, taking off only Veteran's Day and my birthday, which I took as a floating holiday. Today, I asked Ana, my wife, if I could sleep in. I prepped potatoes for home-fries last night and, except for fending off the ravenous cat at 5 AM, I got my wish. Of course, since I seldom sleep more than four or six hours these days, I'd been up at three something and was reading until nearly six, but I turned the light off and rolled over before Ana's alarm went off at seven.
What I was reading was the account of one soldier's experience in Iraq back in the early days of the Iraq War. John Crawford, a National Guard sergeant with prior service in the 101st Airborne, arrived in Iraq with the first invasion forces and ended up spending a year and a half in Baghdad. His stories, episodic and reading as if he was telling them over beers or a campfire, were oddly familiar. His experiences mirrored those of so many of my contemporaries who had served in Vietnam, complete with the crushing boredom, terrible living conditions, horrible weather and, if you substitute sand for the tropical muck of Southeast Asian, a familiar environment, hostile to people, especially those raised in the US of A.
The other feat similarity is that the command authority -- the Chain of Command -- has learned just about nothing about how to fight an unconventional enemy in the intervening years. His take on officers rings with a familiar tone to that which I heard from troops who spent far more time in Vietnam than I did. I was there briefly, up close to the DMZ, near Hue at a place called Phu Bai. The Army Security Agency had a forward listening post there to monitor the Lao Neutralist forces when they shifted too far East for our radio net in Thailand to reliably pick up. I was never actually in combat there -- the First Marine Division had it pretty well secured and we were in their area of operations when we were there, but many of the Marines with whom I spoke had.
Our library -- the one named for Tony Hillerman, our own Erna Ferguson Library being remodeled -- had a display of books about the military on a table. I picked up Crawford's The Last True Story I Will Ever Write and the story of the formation of Delta Force by Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta. I figured that I could forgo John Ringo's military Sci-Fi novels for a bit and read something real. Of course, Ringo, himself an Airborne veteran, he of the 82nd, writes stories that ring quite true, even if they are set in far off places in future times or in a former Soviet Georgia that is mostly created out of his imagination, but also rings true.
I left the Army in the fall of 1969, before my 25th birthday. I was angry at the great green machine for a variety of reasons and had determined not to re-enlist, although they dangled some nice incentives, including a shot at Warrant Officer's school in six months after a promotion to staff sergeant. I actually had to think about that for a few minutes before turning it down. I'd had enough of Army life and was under the misapprehension that civilian life would be vastly different. When I was drafted, in '65, I had only had a small taste of adult life. I turned 21 in basic training at Fort Dix and most of the time between graduating high school had been spent in activities I had chosen more for pleasure than for gain. I went to classes at Columbia, not fully enrolled, but auditing classes with the intention of doing so,. I'd been accepted, but wasn't sure what I wanted to do. While I pondered, the local draft board was deciding to make my choice for me.
Basic training did a decent job of scraping the civilian veneer off me and re-plating me with Army green, at least a surface coat. Inside I was still me, but I could pass for a soldier. With some they did a better job, getting to the marrow of some of my generation and really making them GIs through and through. From what I have read, the military has been far better -- perhaps since Roman times -- at creating soldiers from civilians than they have been at turning them back into civilians when their time of service -- be it two years, a three-year-hitch, four years like mine or a career of twenty years -- was up. We now have a nice, neat medical term for the results called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD for short. It manifests differently in people and some are only mildly affected by it. But, in the worst cases, it can lead to suicide, homicide, alcoholism, drug-dependence, homelessness and a host of other ills.
I lost track of the number of homeless wrecks with whom I dealt as a cop at the Hospital who were genuine veterans with PTSD. There were some poseurs for sure, but far more with stories that rang true and with that look in their eye and tone in their voice that spoke of having seen things they couldn't unsee but wished they could.
Recently, Ana's office hired a new person to handle billing, mostly dealing with the insurance carriers, including Medicare, that pays for the most of their client's treatment for a variety of mental ills. He is a young man, in his late twenties, a disabled and medically retired veteran of the Iraq war. He, like so many of his contemporaries -- and like John Crawford -- entered the military mostly to have a shot at a better education after their hitch was up. The commercials on TV and the print ads speak loudly and grandly of all the benefits that are there for only a few years of your time. It's an All-Volunteer military, unlike the mixed-bag when I served. Inducements are needed. But, almost like the case that led to the Bonus Army after WW I, many of these promises have not been kept or have been kept at greatly reduced rates. This young man had his stipend reduced and had to find a full-time job and reduce his college time drastically. So much for the promises.
The news is quick to pick up stories of the worst cases, the junkies, still wearing parts of their issue uniforms when they are found OD'd in some dark place. Or when they can't deal with the very different pace and stress of civilian life and act, as they had been trained, with quick violence, often against a loved one. But these are the worst cases and perhaps nothing could have been done for them. In my opinion, the military, the VA didn't really try as hard as they could. The government has been quick to cut benefits to veterans in tight economic times. Even Bush, who was himself sort of a veteran, did it and our current community-organizer-in- chief, with no experience of the military, has done even more. He gives lip-service in thanking our troops, but has kept them at the sharp end far longer than he promised and has done little to improve the lot of those returning, after innumerable stop-loss extensions, to civilian life.
So, on this day we remember those who served -- and I remember, vaguely, when it was still Armistice Day, celebrated on this day to commemorate the end of World War One at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I know the significance of the poppies handed out for a donation to a veteran's organization, symbols of all of those fallen in the poppy fields in Flanders.
I ask you to write to your congress critter and ask them what they are doing for veterans beside mouthing noble words. And I ask you to remember someone you knew who isn't there because they fell in service to their country.
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