While Americans are caught up in American Idol it is “just so negative!” to think about the real costs of war. Rob Timmins should know. He’s come from the back alleys of Baghdad to American culture and is astounded.
More than 26,000 returning fighters are dealing with war wounds, 45,000 with post-traumatic stress disorder. The government’s backlog of benefit claims reaches to the hundreds of thousands, with the data transition from soldier to veteran status a computer disaster between the Pentagon and Veterans Administration.
Mr. Timmins tries to make the public grasp that troops are being returned to second and third combat tours with untreated mental disorders. At home, there’s homelessness on the rise for veterans who also discover that the G.I. Bill can’t cover the cost of public college. Their unemployment rate is three times the national average.
Francis X. Clines could have pitched this ball a little harder but any ball at all might catch some new attention.
*
And of course, this was all perfectly predictable by past and on-going behavior of the government and citizens with regard to injuries of the last, please-do-we-have-to-talk-about-it-again, war: Vietnam. Agent Orange. Disaster unto the fifth generation….
My father walked in the wake of those [low swooping, powder trailing] planes. He remembered the defoliants’ descent over the jungle, slow as snow. He recalled the white coated leaves, the way his throat burned when he breathed the humid air, the strange discoloration he found when he blew his nose. He remembered bathing in a bomb crater, dead birds floating on the surface. Last year, after five years fighting throat cancer that he and his doctors attributed to exposure to the dioxin in Agent Orange, my father died. He was 61.