The gravel crunched unexpectedly in our driveway, so I went out to see what was up. Lo, a U.S. government car bearing a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young man in camouflage gear. A recruiter. He was looking for a prospect with my wife’s name.
Upon learning that she had lately turned 73, he appeared a bit crestfallen, but only for an instant. Then he graciously gathered himself and agreed to leave a recruiting packet for us to convey to someone younger, maybe unemployed.
The packet was chock full of well-scrubbed, determined young faces building a future while protecting their nation. The text was awash with promises of strength, challenge, variety, potential, bonuses, tuition aid, counseling and stipends.
No mention of wounds, funerals, homelessness, suicides, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). No photos of the maimed or the deceased returning from the front, either.
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Recruiters, being savvy, know well all these omissions, which are internally corrosive to some of their own sensitive souls. They commit suicide at an accelerated rate, much like combat veterans. Indeed, with the current reduction in fighting, suicide deaths in the military are now about equal to combat deaths.
Conversely, some non-suicidal troops just say, “Screw it,� and desert. The Pentagon admits that about 5,000 are simply missing from duty, many no longer willing to impose further degradation upon the residents of a devastated and occupied land. By definition, deserters are scarcely in a position to tell their stories back home, but it wouldn’t matter much anyway. The patriotic corporate press does not traffic in such imperial embarrassments.
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Only recently, in fact, has the press even caught on to the reality that personal hazard for returning soldiers does not end with discharge. The evils they have seen and endured, and maybe participated in, stick to them like burrs. Mental illness abounds, leading to the breakup of families, joblessness, homelessness and attempted suicides, which are now estimated at about 1,000 per month.
The federal response to this hardship is much like that of a former car owner who finally unloads the thing on eBay. He doesn’t want to hear about it again.
But like bad pennies, needy vets keep popping up. They want treatment for PTSD, Gulf War Syndrome and rape, as well as for lingering physical wounds. They also want those benefits that were promised by so many bushy-tailed recruiters.
Retired General Eric Shinsecki is in charge of all that at the Veterans Affairs Department. He’s the one President George W. Bush demeaned for telling the truth about troop level needs in Iraq. We’ll see if he gets canned again for telling the truth about the needs of vets.
Since President Barack Obama, like his predecessor, seeks to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, he may not be thrilled at the bad news about veterans any more than was President Bush. Even today, the Pentagon is reluctant to alert the VA as to who is coming home to be discharged, and Gov. M. Jodi Rell has killed a state program tracking their needs in Connecticut. The recruiters don’t mention any of that.
From a practical standpoint, the president might save himself a lot of grief by appointing a commission to figure out if we really need to be in Afghanistan at all. It already has a reputation as the graveyard of empires. Maybe we should not put our own at such needless risk.
Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.
