Thank You

I pray that President Obama will learn the lessons of his predecessors and never EVER send our children into harm's way without a goddamned good reason, one that involves our national security and the preservation of America.

Just The Way Republicans Like Them

Given the way we're continually told to support our troops by the righteous right wing blogosphericals...which in my mind means they think we should prop them up as targets...you'd think there would be much more of a hew and outcry about this:

Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

"I've been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they're saying to me, 'We're seeing things we've never seen before,'" said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University's brain injury rehabilitation program.

Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened.

But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first "graduates" of Vanderbilt's program committed suicide three weeks later.

Treat the brain, but not the mind, it seems.

We'll treat hemmorhoids as if they are a life-threatening, debilitating illness...possibly because the wingnut keyboard kommandos suffer from them, so they don't give much fuss to the administration...but a guy who comes home after having his brain scrambled inside his skull by an IED that took out three of his buddies?

Nah. Him, he has to fight the bureaucracy all the way up the ladder:

Though the full number of those suffering from TBI is still unknown, the problem is straining the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Until now, "they were dealing with a cohort of aging veterans with diabetes, heart disease, lung disease," said Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a VA adviser.

Now, these young, brain-injured troops need highly specialized care, and how much it will help long-term is unknown, he said.

People with TBI have frequent headaches, dizziness, and trouble concentrating and sleeping. They may be depressed, irritable and confused, and easily provoked or distracted. Speech or vision also can be impaired.

Some sufferers have been misdiagnosed with personality disorders. Others have lost jobs because of unrecognized and untreated symptoms.

It's precisely this last bit that makes it so easy to ignore, and indeed, deride the disability as just one of those things: someone was born a hot-head, or a sad sack, or a loser. After all, why else would he have joined the army, keeping in mind that most of his critics have come no closer than a video game to actual combat? Republicans like 'em "dumb and loyal," I guess.

Ironically, these same bloggers probably get all weepy-eyed about their latest favorite athlete who has to retire because he's had his bell rung a few too many times by hits to the head.

Excuse me? That you'll give a damn about, probably even excusing the athlete's subsequent arrests for illegal prescription pain killers or his acting out his brain trauma on his wife and kids, but a soldier, who's fighting a war only you and 27% of the people in this country support?

That you get all "It's only a flesh wound" about?

There's something very wrong when the very youngest people with the brightest futures and happiest lives laid out in front of them pick up a gun and go fight a war that no one really understands, no one really wanted, and no one can really see a way out of that everyone can get behind, and come home to find out that the injuries and insults their bodies absorbed on our behalf are not only underappreciated, but UNappreciated by the blood-thirsty vultures who demanded this sacrifice from them in the first place.

How you can help: The Ten In Ten Project

Something You Probably Didn't Think Much About....

For me, reading this article was a "D'Oh!" moment. I had wondered why Reuters featured it, until I gave half a thought to it:

Of the nearly 24,000 wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, about a third suffer from some degree of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to the General Accounting Office.

The government has been on the defensive about veterans' medical care after a probe found shoddy living conditions of recovering wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, considered the jewel in the military's health care system.

A newly-appointed Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors was formed by U.S. President George Bush in response. A major topic is whether the civilian sector could be used more in treating traumatic brain injury, one of the fastest growing injuries of the war.

Brain injuries.

Losing a limb is one thing. Having shrapnel pierce your skin is one thing (my dad has lived into his 90s after having shrapnel nick his heart). Having your brains turned to scrambled eggs because of the concussive force of IED after IED?

That's a completely different kettle of fish.

With a corporeal injury, you see the damage, you fix the damage. Even with a physical trauma to the brain, you see the damage, you fix the damage.

But when you're talking about the effects that shock waves have on that 20 pound (in Republicans' case, about half that) mass of tissue, and what precisely it effects, you've got real problems that are long term and will require a lifetime of monitoring.

So 8,000 men and women have suffered brain damage in five years, just so this is put into perspective.

And the Bush administration's response? Outsource the problem! Here we have a chance as a nation to do right by people who may be irreparably harmed beyond repair, serving their country, and the first thing Bush's cronies can think is to help enrich their friends in the AMA and insurance fields.

Even if you take the most cynical view of this situation, that it's a marvelous opportunity to do research on brain function and trauma, this should be handled by the government, nevermind that the government not only ought to be footing the bill for this, but the government ought to have direct oversight over the treatment of these injuries suffered for an illegal invasion of a sovereign people who did nothing to harm Americans.

Pretty disgusting and feckless, if you ask me.

tags technorati : Bush Iraq brain injuries

Subterranean Homesick BLues

Johnny's in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement
Thinking about the government
The Man in the trench coat
Badge out, laid off
Says he's got a bad cough
Wants to get it paid off
Look out kid
It's something you did

It's going to be hard to pin this on anti-war protestors as was so successfully done after Viet Nam:

Before he left for the war, reservist Karl Botkin's company threw him a going-away party. When he returned from Kuwait, his West Babylon firm changed his schedule to include weekends and withheld a raise he said he was due. Botkin, 50, walked away from his job.

Stephen Labate, a 39-year-old stock broker, expected to come back to Morgan Stanley and start right where he left off after nearly a year in Iraq -- his second extended tour as a reservist. But all the time away on active duty decimated his portfolio of brokerage accounts and he couldn't rebuild. So he left the company to look for another job. Unemployed for seven months, he felt having "reservist" on his resume was "radioactive" to most prospective employers.

And then there's Jonathan Bradfield of Medford, who came home from Iraq with shrapnel lodged in his back and post-traumatic stress disorder. After being back at work a little more than two years, he was fired -- and is now facing bankruptcy.

Sickening, isn't it?

The law is on their side, of course. The law essentially states that returning service members get their old positions back with the same salary and benefits plus any raises, promotions or bonuses they would have received had their work not been interrupted by military service. However, of the tens of thousands of soldiers we sent over there to fight this invasion on the cheap, less than one percent will likely avail themselves of this law, mostly because they don't find out about it until it is too late.

Botkin's commander and friends told him to file a USERRA claim. But the problem was in the details. The law required that he submit a letter to his employer, Commercial Driver Training in West Babylon, within 90 days of his intended return to work, saying he wanted his job back. But when he learned that, it was too late. He had already fought by phone with his boss and filed for unemployment.

You come home from a conflict, the last thing you want to do is start filing paperwork.

And of course, this being America, far be it from the employer to make any sort of sacrifice for an employee! After all, we were all told to go shopping to help out!:

Kim Carsten, the school's director, said the company abided by all applicable military employment law. She said the school now requires all instructors to work a weekend day and that Botkin would have received his raise after 30 days.

"We weren't trying to give him any heartache," Carsten said. "But we have a business to run, too, and we had to fill the position to be able to keep up with our training needs."

Disgusting.

Worse, the bill collectors don't care if you're off fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. The problem becomes, who "they" is, considering bill collectors can be even more terrorizing than terrorists themselves. I should know. I was one once, in a different lifetime many years ago.

I suspect we're going to see a wave of bankr-- uh oh, the new bankruptcy law will make it nearly impossible for these brave men and women to start over with a clean slate, won't it? They'll be spending decades working at jobs that pay much less than the ones they've lost, because once a reservist or Guardsman, always a reservist or Guardsman:

"Whether consciously or unconsciously, a lot of people look and see 'reservist' and put it in the bottom of the pile," [Stephen Labate] said of his resume. "They figure, you're going to be gone again. Most reservists these days don't even put it on their resume."

Labate, the father of twin infants, finally accepted a job as a banker at a JP Morgan/Chase branch near his home in Deer Park -- at a substantial pay cut.[...]

"The military have almost become aliens in the corporate world," said employment consultant Wesley Poriotis, of Wesley Brown and Bartle in Manhattan. He compares the divide between "the military's self perception and the business world's perception of the value they provide employers" to the Grand Canyon.

So we have men and women fighting a battle who will be coming home to an alien land, very different from the one they left years ago, a far harsher and less secure world.

This crisis, as unseen as it is, will make the Walter Reed Building 18 scandal look like socialized medicine. We didn't go to war with the army we had, or wished we had. We went to war with the army we could get on the cheap and we are asking them to sacrifice yet more in our hubris and cynicisms.

And this time, we're tag-teaming them between government and business, one of which is supposed to protect citizens from the other.

tags technorati : iraq veterans bush snarky snarcasm snarkasm iraq