Who Really Cares About Active Soldiers and Veterans?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Last night, I watched on C-SPAN a campaign stop by John McCain. At the outset, the  Senator thanked several prominent supporters for their military service. Nothing unusual.  Politicians and candidates for political offices pander to all kinds of constituencies and interests. They all do. Republicans and Democrats. President Bush is the leader of the cheer-leading crowd on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. These people do not miss any opportunity to publicly praise and thank members of the U.S.military and their families for the sacrifices they make for the good of their country. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all. Regardless of one’s position on the Iraq invasion, anti-war sentiments should never affect one’s support for the men and women who are sent to war. But trying to prove their own patriotic zeal by celebrating the patriotism of the military does not mean that these same people work hard in support of active soldiers and veterans. This became crystal clear a year ago, when the intolerable conditions for outpatients at Walter Reed Medical Center, considered the nation’s the top-military hospital, were revealed in the Washington Post. As Dana Priest and Anne Hull wrote at the time,
“[T]he outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.
On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.
Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.”

Last February, the nation was shocked by these and subsequent revelations about the conditions at Walter Reed and around the country. But since then, active soldiers and veterans have continued to receive more lip service from politicians than real attention to their problems and efforts to find solutions.