The Oregonian covered the Winter Soldier event in Portland. There were three panels, soldiers and Marines, family members and clinicians and supporters of war resisters. The soldiers gave heart wrenching testimony such as that of Chris Arendt.

Christopher Arendt said he joined the National Guard after hearing war stories from his grandfather, who had proudly counted the number of shells he’d fired during World War II.

In 2004, seven years after his grandfather’s death, he recalled forcibly extracting a Guantanamo Bay detainee from his cell and watching as the man’s head was smashed into a metal fence post. At that moment, he told a crowd of more than 100 at the First Unitarian Church in Portland on Saturday, Arendt couldn’t tell the difference between himself and the images he’d seen of Nazi soldiers. now living in Portland. “What I hate about myself over there was the callousness, the emptiness. I wish I was angrier while I was there.

“But it’s impossible to keep yourself — the sane, the normal, the feeling. You figure, ‘I’ll feel later.’ Three years later I’m still trying to do that.”

The Oregonian provides a link to my testimony here.

McCain has not scored well on veterans’ benefits at all. In fact, the entire GOP have scored very low on supporting the troops, much lower than the Democrats, in stark contrast to typical public perception of which party supports our troops.

For many military families, the release this month in a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determining that intelligence activities leading up to the occupation of Iraq were deliberately distorted, is not a revelation. The report’s conclusions, that the administration knew claims of weapons of mass destruction, ties to al Qaeda and confirmations of 9/11 hijackers to Iraq were false or not supported by intelligence were no surprise. The real surprise is that the media have not covered the report, or as Bill Moyers said, “… the media have failed to tell the people what they need to know”.

Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D- W. VA who originally voted to go to war, declared the handling of pre-war intelligence as an ”… absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion..”. This cynical manipulation caused Rep Dennis Kucinich, D-OH, to file 35 articles of impeachment in the House. The House vote passed 251 to 166 to impeach and was moved on to the judiciary committee where it is likely to stay untouched.

Today, I look at my son, John’s medical disability evaluation after serving two tours in Iraq in the Marine Corp and see words like chronic, severe, major depressive and recurrent. A young life coldly and clinically assessed and summed up in thirty pages and permanently disabled by cynical manipulation.

John enlisted in the Marine Corp two weeks before 9/11 and my heart sank that morning as I realized we would likely go to war. Like so many young men he was swept up with a wave of patriotism fueled by youthful testosterone, repeated images of the towers falling and the cynical manipulations of men who never fought in a war. He couldn’t wait to fight for his country.

Despite test scores that allowed him to choose any MOS, John chose infantry. To his mother’s dismay, he chose to be a Marine assaultman with an eleven second combat life expectancy. He would proudly die defending his country if he had to.

While I have been critical of the occupation of Iraq from the beginning, it was not until John’s second tour that I learned how poorly the leadership was prosecuting the war and the added risk this placed our troops under. A new, Rumsfeldian, lighter, faster, deadlier, Pentagon doctrine was sold to the public right along with the non existent yellow cake uranium and the non existent ties to al Qaeda with devastating effect on our warriors.

A good friend lost his oldest son, Alex during the siege on Fallujah. For three days, Alex, a squad leader, called for reinforcements and more ammunition for he and his men but there was no manpower to spare, not even to deliver more rounds. Alex survived three hours after firing his last round until unable to defend himself he was shot and killed.

In Ramadi, firefights were almost a daily occurrence for John and the rest of Weapons Platoon. Most firefights last only a few minutes, John says, “…you find each other, move forward and step into another one.” However, also undermanned in Ramadi, Weapons Platoon sometimes operated with as little as six hours sleep in three days and it was one of these periods that saw one of their longest firefights.

Normally, the Marines would rely heavily on air support but this was often not the case in Iraq. Exhausted and taking fire from all around the Marines called for air support and fought for 90 minutes on the ground under heavy fire. Finally, after suffering more casualties they gave up on air support and at significant added risk took out the targets with shoulder mounted rockets.

Insufficient manpower forced wounded Marines back into combat sooner than recommended by medical personnel. John was lucky enough to survive five full hits by IEDs in his hummer only to be sent right back out again despite evidence of concussion. Soldiers are experiencing six to twenty five bomb blasts during their tours of duty and TBI (traumatic brain injury) affects tens of thousands of our troops.

John and his battle buddies were put at unnecessary additional risk due to mismanagement of the war. Chronic sleep deprivation is implicated in the high percentage of Weapons Platoon suffering from severe and debilitating post traumatic stress disorder and everyone suffers from mild, moderate or severe TBI.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, calculates the cost of the Iraq war at three trillion dollars. Included in these calculations are the future costs to communities and military families of taking care of wounded veterans. Military families are hit the hardest often giving up jobs and income to care for their loved ones.

It has been brought to my attention that some of our civic leaders are encouraging our local youth to enlist in the military. The military can be a fine and honorable career choice but I wonder if the future cost to the community has been taken into full consideration.

Local civic leaders never attempted to speak to my son, not even to thank him for his service but if they had he might have told them that the transition from Department of Defense to the VA is not seamless. Winding through the process can take months and the burden for entering the VA system falls entirely upon the veteran. During the lengthy and complicated application period the costs of care for that veteran are borne by the family and not reimbursed.

John might have shared that GI benefits do not come close to covering the cost of a quality education as they did after World War II. Presidential candidate John McCain discouraged a bill to improve GI benefits and President George Bush threatened a veto of that bill, fearing its enactment would adversely affect retention or re-enlistment.

Today active duty and retired military are committing suicide at a rate of 120 per week. In what can only be described as a national disgrace, one in four of America’s homeless population served their country, only to fall through the cracks of bureaucratic paperwork and end up living on the streets. Not included in official DoD casualty lists are the thousands of soldiers afflicted with service related diseases like leishmaniasis, a potentially fatal disease transmitted by sandflies.

These are details we need to know. These are facts our youth need to know before enlisting in the military. These are facts our civic leaders need to know to plan for our future.

What military families learned from the under reported SSCIR is that our loved ones did not sacrifice life, limb and sanity fighting for their county. Instead they were and are fighting for their government and the distinction between country and government is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. Our loved ones are fighting for a government whose foreign policy mission has brought about a $100 per barrel increase in the price of oil since the war began.

The SSCIR is a confirmation of a gross betrayal of public trust and a cynical manipulation of the passionate patriotism of our youth. It reveals a criminal misuse of our greatest resource, our children. The young man John might have been is gone, lost to the flawed mission and cynical manipulations of men who, in the words of retired Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, “…never had to execute these missions — or bury the results.”

Bronze star recipient Sgt Nils Aron Andersson, combat veteran turned recruiter, originally from Oregon commits suicide. Married only 24 hours earlier, his new wife follows him and commits suicide a day later.

“He was morally opposed to putting more young men into that situation, where they could be injured or killed or see the things he’d seen,” Maxey said.

His superiors repeatedly criticized him for failing to meet his goal of signing two new recruits a month and assigned him five-page essays or extra duty as punishment, she said. In February 2006, he was passed up for promotion to staff sergeant.

“It wasn’t that he was lazy or not working. It’s just that he was not getting recruits and being punished for it, constantly,” she said. “It was just not the job for him.”

How do you support the troops? More than 120 veterans per week commit suicide but the VA and the Pentagon do not want you to know and took steps to deliberately hide this fact from the public.

Meanwhile, GI benefits, severely stripped during the last few years are up for a vote to restore full college tuitions and housing, etc… A certain GOP presidential candidate offered a watered down bill, little more than a bandaid and VoteVets have a campaign to fight it and pass a genuine GI Bill.

UPDATE: Veterans find that the current GI Bill is inadequate for getting an education. The Washington Post has a story up about it here.

Traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress disorder both characterized by severe physiological and irreparable damage to the brain are subject of a new study released by the RAND Corporation.

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-leader and a researcher at the nonprofit RAND.

“Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The 500-page study is the first large-scale, private assessment of its kind — including a survey of 1,965 service members across the country, from all branches of the armed forces and including those still in the military as well veterans who have left the services.

Its results appear consistent with a number of mental health reports from within the government, though the Defense Department has not released the number of people it has diagnosed or who are being treated for mental problems. The Department of Veterans Affairs said this month that its records show about 120,000 who served in the two wars and are no longer in the military have been diagnosed with mental health problems. Of the 120,000, approximately 60,000 are suffering from PTSD, the VA said.

The report entitled “Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery.” indicates that only 53% of service members seek treatment. It is so important that we encourage our returning veterans to seek help before they join the ranks of homeless veterans now comprising 25% of our homeless population.

A fellow peace activist wrote this and gave me permission to post it here. It is moving and thoughtful and attends to the too little attention given by the mainstream media upon these gut wrenching testimonies of our wounded warriors, our true winter patriots.

Editor:

As noted in The World (March 17, 2008), Sunshine Week is set aside “by media organizations and other groups to combat government secrecy and bring attention to the public’s right to know.” The World newspaper has been especially diligent over the years in trying to hold public officials to the requirements of open meeting laws, and they deserve kudos for that.

There is another kind of secrecy, however, that is rampant in our nation and that pertains to secrecy by omission and self-censorship by those same media organizations. Occasionally such actions are so blatant that they would cast shame and embarrassment on our media sources if they were at all serious about living up to their role of The Fourth Estate. Alas, they appear too often now to be “for the State.”

For instance, how many of us watched the Winter Soldier Hearings held on Palm Sunday weekend in Silver Springs, Maryland? How many even knew of their existence? Of course, you wouldn’t have if you depended on the mainstream media for relevant news, because there has been almost complete silence regarding this gathering. Our government did not want the light of day – sunshine – to illuminate the facts-on-the-ground in Iraq, and so there was near-blackout of this event. Was it censorship or self-censorship by the media?

How appropriate that these hearings should be held on the weekend before Easter when self-professed Christians have been engaged in a six-week season of penitence leading up to Easter. Let there be no misreading of the gut-wrenching sorrow and penitence displayed by these finest and bravest of our military who have been repulsed and broken by what they have seen and personally done. They are also the finest of our sons and daughters who have taken to heart and now tether their future lives to the beliefs and values set forth in our Constitution.

I wonder how many of our elected officials, local, state or federal, bothered to honor and support these soldiers by listening to their testimony?

Roberta Stewart

Bless them every one.

Peace be upon you…