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An injustice to American veterans |
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Bill Horne,
Monday, November 26th, 2007 |
A unit of the Minnesota National Guard has just returned from serving 22 months in Iraq... the guard unit with the longest tour of duty in Iraq... The nonsense started by discharging these heroes at 729 days of service. One more day and they would have been eligible for benefits. Benefits such as the GI bill.
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Folks, I have shared thoughts with you concerning our veterans twice this past year. Now, however, I find it necessary to once again discuss the shoddy way we are treating our returning young military men and women.
Our politicians wave the flag and make speeches on Memorial Day and Veterans Day; but except for those two days, it sure seems to be "out of sight, out of mind."
Before we look at the two current situations, I want to briefly review the two past issues that we have covered. I must admit that I have a personal reason for my concern. Way back in my day, I do not remember veterans being treated as second-class citizens.
If it had not been for the GI bill, I would never had been able to afford college. In fact, I can remember most classes I attended included a dozen or more veterans. Today, in the classes that I teach, 170 students, I believe I have only three veterans total and the latest disclosures explain why.
Early in this past year, we looked at the military hospital situation and how we were turning these operations over to private, for-profit corporations and that patient care was deteriorating. We also looked at the fact that many more soldiers are surviving battlefield wounds and, because of this, we have more wounded being shipped back home for care.
The second thing we looked into was the effort to reduce costs and to reduce the number of returning soldiers that the medical units would have to include. The military discharged more than 20,000 young men and women needing medical attention by using Chapter 5-13.
This means that these soldiers were given a "pre-existing physiological disorder discharge" and therefore, were not entitle to medical help or any other benefits whatsoever - even though many of them had been wounded in battle and had come home with Purple Heart honors.
Now comes word from different parts of our country that young returning veterans have a higher unemployment rate of from double to four times that of the general population. Some of this problem, I am sure, is caused by the fact that the person that left our society and the person returning from military duty are not the same. Whether that person saw actual combat or not, they were trained to kill and their life in the military was far different than the good life we live.
Employers - and even families - expect the returning men and women to be the same people that left for combat. And, that cannot be. They are forever changed. This is why we have laws that state that our returning military may go back to the jobs that they left.
From what I have discovered though, many companies are not honoring this commitment. The Department of Labor is no better. The Department of Labor, whose mission is to protect labor, has an inclination to side with the company and not the veteran. Thankfully, there is still our court system and it has been leaning toward our veterans.
The problem with the court system is that many of our vets are not in the mood or have the funds for this type of long, drawn-out fight. They were expecting to be welcomed back with open arms and, when they are not, it is just one more obstacle that they must deal with.
Now comes the latest injustice. A unit of the Minnesota National Guard has just returned from serving 22 months in Iraq. Their tour was extended. This extension gave them the distinction of being the guard unit with the longest tour of duty in Iraq.
As soon as the government was finished using them, it immediately began finding ways to refuse their well-earned benefits. The nonsense started by discharging these heroes at 729 days of service. One more day and they would have been eligible for benefits. Benefits such as the GI bill.
My estimate is that by not giving this Minnesota unit the GI bill educational benefits, it saved you and me, taxpayers, in the area of $2 million to $3 million. We have, to this point, spent more than $1 trillion with an estimated $2 trillion more to be spent; $3 million is like a drop of water in the ocean. Not only did these young men and women earn this reward, but we should consider their education an investment.
When I talked to someone important about this issue I was told that "we look at everything we can to save money."
I don't know if being cost-conscious where it concerns our military personnel during a time of war is a good thing or not, but I do know this; taking away a re-enlistment bonus because a soldier was injured cannot be right, and taking away medical benefits by lying about our soldiers' mental condition cannot be right, and taking away the GI educational benefits from the unit that served the longest tour cannot be right, and by refusing to give returning vets their jobs back when they return cannot be right.
This is not what my America is supposed to be about. We should be helping our returning veterans because it is morally the right thing to do. But even if we want to look at it from a self-centered, selfish point of view, it is still the right thing to do. The word is getting out on the street that we don't take care of our own. It is becoming more and more difficult to recruit good people to serve in our military.
To fill our military ranks, the past few years, we have had to double the number of recruits that we allow in the service who score below 30 on the aptitude test. We have also had to increase the number of recruits by thousands upon thousands that require waivers because of past criminal or medical problems.
We are a warring nation. There have been 12 presidents to this point in my life and every one of them has led us into some kind of military conflict. We are currently hiring private mercenary military for our war in Iraq that actually outnumber our citizen military. This situation has never worked for other countries in the past.
We should take care of our military because it is the right thing to do. But if we as a nation have reached the point where only our self-interest is important, then we should take care of our military men and women so that we can stay home, safe and warm.
Bill Horne is a professor of economics at Southern State Community College and a columnist for The Times-Gazette. |
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