Disabled Vets The Most Courageous People In The Universe

[TheMastersNemesis]

I remember my worst fear in Vietnam was being severely wounded and unable to function or take care of myself. I remember going to our headquarters unit and looking through the casualty reports. We had a casualty log at battalion headquarters that was separated into killed in action and wounded with a brief description of circumstances and wounds suffered.

I would frequently had to go down and look through this log when I had casualties in my unit. It was a gruesome read that I hated to have to read it. There was so much "traumatic amputation" in that log and we had casualties "every single day" How horrible it must be to be whole one second and have some significant part of you gone forever. To be able to recover and go on with life even when your being has been so completely devastated is beyond me.

One thing that the American public has been allowed to escape are the images of many of these vets. It is easy to go to war and support war when you are protected from the real cost of these wars and their eviscerating images of the disabled.

Today some of the disabled vets have been so badly damaged that they are not in public view. We can now save soldiers that were completely impossible to save during Vietnam. What they face and what they do being so disabled is a testament to the resiliency of he human spirit and the desire to not only live but thrive. I get so furious when I hear GOP talking points. They simply do not want to provide the money to care for these people. It will take even trillions of dollars to provide lifetime care for many of these vets. And too too many of them will be in VA hospitals or nursing homes for the rest of their lives.

Most Americans today are too young to see what I saw as a child. I am 68 so that experience goes back quite a ways. During the early 1950's believe it or not it was not uncommon to see a veteran sitting in the street selling pencils. It was common to vets selling little artificial poppies to raise money.

The GOP really wants to return us that America. And it is unacceptable. I do not understand how we are being even civil to these people.

[The River]

1. I Remember

those not so good old days. I remember the legless fellow selling pencils out in
front of the 5 & 10 cent store, the vet who lived his life looking out of a second floor
window on the town square; too disabled to come out in public and the poppy sales
when Memorial Day rolled around.

I'm headed out to the regional VA in a few minutes for an appointment. Most of us
VN vets are just suffering the maladies of old age. It's the young guys returning from
Iraq and Afghanistan, in motorized beds and wheelchairs with missing limbs or
reconstructed skulls (TBI's) that break my heart.

It's better than it was but still not good enough. I won't be happy until the VA goes out
business for a lack of patients. That won't happen until we learn that war is not the answer.
I won't hold my breath.

[msedano]

2. a WWI vet's story

Veterans helping Veterans:

My Dad, a WWII veteran, explained our treks as an obligation he had to a fellow veteran with no way of getting to the hospital. If we didn’t take Mr. Gardner to the Veterans Hospital, and if Mr. Gardner didn’t get his treatments, he’d die. So we’d drive him. Mr. Gardner sat wheezing next to me. Now and again he would tell me in his whisper voice about the battlefield and his inability thirty years later to fill his lungs with a deep breath of clean (in the 1950s) Redlands air. One day we drove Mr. Gardner to the hospital, and drove back home to Redlands without him. I never saw “old Mr. Gardner” again.



http://labloga.blogspot.com/2008/11/veterans-day-2008-pit-from-pole-to-pole.html