Those Who Have Borne the Battle (43 page)

It is interesting to observe the ways in which the American public has embraced the servicemen and -women and the veterans of the current wars. The wars are really no more popular than was the war in Vietnam, yet instead of the previous pattern of ignoring the Vietnam veterans, those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are embraced as heroes, even as we do not really know them. And the generic use of heroism to describe all who serve further restricts language to identify the truly heroic. One recent commentator pointed out, “It's a lot easier to idealize the people who are fighting than it is to send your kid to join them.”
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Most Americans are uncomfortable approaching some of the seriously injured servicemen and -women. Those who are confined to wheelchairs
or who have prostheses are nearly rock stars when they are spotlighted at ball games or other public events. It is inspiring to be at these occasions. But as strange as this may sound, it is also a little bit troubling in one sense. These are not sustainable moments.

One recent account in the
Washington Post
described sixty-three seconds of warm applause that commenced when the injured veterans were introduced at a Washington Nationals baseball game. People did not approach them during the game, and after the game, as they left the park to go to their bus, no one spoke to them. “The bus puttered through the mostly empty streets before disappearing behind the gates of Walter Reed.” Experiences such as this, an emotional display of gratitude followed by uncertain distance, were not uncommon for the veterans. Greg Jaffe summarized, “After almost 10 years of fighting, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq surface on the home front in fleeting, sentimental and sanitized glimpses. Camouflage-clad soldiers lug rucksacks through civilian airports at the beginning and end of their leaves. Their service is celebrated in occasional television commercials, dutifully praised by political candidates and briefly cheered at sporting events.”
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There is little for rock stars to do once the music stops, or for injured veterans to do once the cheering stops, as it inevitably does for all but a few.

 

 

Frank Woodruff Buckles died in February 2011 at the age of 110. He was the last living American veteran of World War I. Born in Missouri, he was sixteen years old and living on a farm in Oklahoma when the war began. He lied about his age in order to get into the army. He signed up as an ambulance driver because he understood that was a way to get to France quickly. He served in this capacity during the war but was not in any combat situations. When World War II began, Buckles was in Manila working for a steamship company and was imprisoned by the Japanese. He was liberated by Americans in 1945, having lost fifty pounds in prison camp.
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Surely, some young Americans now serving, or yet to serve, in the Middle East wars will live to be as old as Buckles. So the last of these warriors will die in 2105 or after. The music will have died well before that. My fear is that while we are saving and medically providing for the
seriously injured young veterans, some may become wards of the state, many of them for a long, long time. We can do better than that—and they surely can and wish to do better than that. For all of the state-of-the-art medical systems in place, what is inadequately provided in the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration hospitals, and elsewhere in the support system for veterans, is a rich, comprehensive counseling system.

These young men and women need to be reminded and encouraged to reach beyond their condition. They need job counseling and training and educational counseling and opportunity; they need vocational rehabilitation programs that will encourage them to dream for more and enable them to reach these dreams. They need career counseling. The problem is not primarily a financial one in terms of participating in training and educational programs.The post-9/11 GI Bill and the various disability benefits meet most immediate financial needs. What is missing is a personalized counseling program. What is missing is encouragement to aspire to participate and confidence to know this can be done. Beyond that, what is needed is more support for families who function as caretakers, more renovation to make homes accessible and usable, and customized motor vehicles for transportation, in order to enable independence. The citizen soldiers of this generation are entitled to no less.

At Christmastime in 2006 I visited Bethesda Naval Hospital to thank the veterans who were there during this season. The ward was quite full, most now suffering injuries from explosives. Serious injuries. I was impressed by a young marine lieutenant I met. Andrew Kinard was from Spartanburg, South Carolina. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 2005 and had been commissioned in the Marine Corps. In October 2006 he was on patrol with the 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in Rawah when his Humvee was struck by a powerful IED.

Lieutenant Kinard had serious lower body injuries, and he credited his navy corpsman and some of his men with saving his life. He was quickly taken out by ground medevac and then flown to Al Asad hospital. His heart stopped on the flight, but CPR saved him. His heart would stop several more times in the following days. He had serious abdominal
injuries and lost both legs. In fact, he was not really able ever to be fitted for a prosthesis because so much of his hips were gone as well. There were no remaining “stumps.” In previous wars, injuries such as Andrew's would have meant death on the battlefield. Recall the nature of the injury and the rapid death of David Beauchemin's lieutenant in 1965. Andrew Kinard was a tragic-looking figure in December 2006—but he was a remarkably buoyant, thoughtful young man, despite the obvious pain, the medication, the uncertainty.

I have kept in touch with Andrew over the following years, checking in on him. I visited him a year or so later at Walter Reed Hospital when he was undergoing physical therapy. He worked for a time in the office of Senator Lindsay Graham, but he had always had an interest in going to law school. We talked about this, and I have been regularly impressed by his discipline and commitment. Andrew Kinard is completing studies in a joint law and MBA program at Harvard Law School and Business School. His is a remarkable story—but he worries about other seriously injured veterans. He points out that he had a college degree, a good and supportive family, a father who was a surgeon, all of which helped him to navigate what he describes as the “nightmare” of the bureaucracy.

General David Petraeus said of Andrew that he “has taken the rear view mirror off of the bus and has focused forward.”
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Andrew Kinard would be the first to say that he and others need navigators so that they can focus forward. We have to understand, as of course General Petraeus does, that looking back is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it may be a necessary thing. The general also would affirm that learning from experience does not mean being the captive of experience.

Post-traumatic stress disorder may be the largest lingering, chronic condition of these wars. The nature of these wars, with all zones being combat zones, the need constantly to be alert when off the bases because everyone not in a NATO uniform is a possible enemy, a high-level wariness because every innocent-looking place or thing possibly holds a lethal explosive, the pattern of frequent deployments with the stress that accompanies that, including family and relationship stress, along with the cognitive damages from explosions—all of these factors make PTSD a near epidemic among some troops.

There may be serious consequences from these conditions. More American active-duty troops committed suicide in 2009 than were killed in combat. Army and marine personnel had particularly high rates. These two service branches normally had more deployments and were more likely to be in stressful situations on the ground. Nonetheless, while overall lower, the air force and navy also had suicide rates approach record highs for their services. For the first time since these data were recorded, the rate of active-duty military suicide exceeded that of civilians in the same age groups. It is the case that about one-third of the suicides happened during deployment, about one-third following deployment, and about one-third among those who had never deployed.

General Peter Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the army, and General James Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, have taken on suicide and PTSD as a major priority. They were joined by senior leadership in the air force and navy as well as other military and civilian officials. There is far greater awareness today in identifying servicemen and -women with problems—and far, far greater sensitivity, at least in most commands, in addressing these problems. The leadership has made clear that a “Shape up!” bark at a despondent serviceman or -woman is no longer acceptable. Needless to say, the emotional, medical, personal, and cognitive conditions that explain some of the suicides will not quickly go away when these servicemen and -women are discharged.

For most Americans, those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are not the boys—or girls—next door or down the street. Or perhaps even across town. When our citizens do not know many of these young men and women personally, they are more likely to see them and their service as abstractions. Americans warmly salute them, display magnetic ribbons on automobiles affirming support, and applaud their sacrifice, but this has little real impact.

While veterans do appreciate the public support, some are also a bit uncomfortable with a condescending tone that is often a part of it. When a group of veterans was brought out onstage for a fund-raiser in New York, one officer who was there noted, “They were rolled out like some sort of orphan kid. I'm sure the organizers meant well. I know they did. But it wasn't respect, really. It was pity.” One veteran noted of the general
relationship he felt with the public, “We aren't victims at all. But it seems that the only way that some can be supportive is to cast us in the role of hapless souls.”
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If we have no personal relationships with those who are fighting our war, then we think of the war as a geopolitical drama, and we think of those fighting it as heroic action figures, or perhaps as victims, but also less as real lives with real dreams at real risk. In 2007 Secretary Gates told a group of marines that every evening he wrote to families of those killed in the wars. With his voice breaking, he commented, “For you and me they are not names on a press release or numbers updated on a web page, they are our country's sons and daughters. They are in a tradition of service that includes you and your forebears going back to the earliest days of the republic.”
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The homeless rate among veterans is higher than it is for nonveterans, and the unemployment rate is higher for the veterans of the current wars than it is for the rest of the population. In the fall of 2011 Congress passed the Obama “Hire Heroes Act” that provides tax incentives to companies hiring unemployed veterans.
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Many businesses have billboards and television commercials embracing the veterans. Not all are training and hiring veterans, especially those with serious medical issues. In 2008 America's top corporations through their foundations contributed less than 1 percent of their gifts to veterans organizations. All corporations should spend at least as much on their own veteran employment programs or contribute as much to veteran organizations as they do on advertising budgets that feature veterans.
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In the spring of 2010, Colleen Getz waited at Washington Reagan Airport for a flight to Florida. The airline representative announced that the plane was filled and requested volunteers to surrender their seats to travelers on standby. Volunteers would receive compensation. No one stepped forward. Then the representative said that the seats were needed for a family who had been at Dover Air Force Base to receive the body of their son, a marine who had been killed in Afghanistan. The family was taking him home on this flight. Colleen Getz and two other passengers volunteered.
There were six family members. The airline representative asked several times for the additional volunteers. The family stood near him, “dignified and mute, weighed with grief and fatigue,” during these repeated pleas.

After twenty or more minutes, the representative asked, voice breaking, “This young man gave his life for our country. Can't any of you give your seats so his family can get home?” A few minutes later the additional volunteers stepped forward. Dr. Getz wrote of her fellow passengers, “It was not that they did not think it was the right thing to do. Rather, it was because they were busy trying to assimilate this unexpected confrontation with the irrevocable cost of war and to figure out how to fit doing the right thing into their plans—to fit it into their lives not previously touched by this war.”
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There is little doubt that most Americans are interested in doing “the right thing” for veterans. But they have no clear sense of what this right thing might be. Few American families are touched by these wars. It is a video-game war with drones and nameless young Americans whose very identity is shielded by protective gear, fighting it out over there someplace. Colleen Getz established contact with the family of the dead marine. Justin Wilson was twenty-four years old when he was killed by a roadside bomb. He was a talented artist who had married his high school sweetheart the day before he shipped out to Afghanistan. His family said he was proud to be a marine and honored to serve his country.

Among the many forgotten of these wars are the families of those who serve. We see glimpses of them when there is a local story about a funeral or an interview of a parent or spouse of a casualty. In the hospital wards, waiting in lounges or sitting in rooms, are these parents and spouses and siblings and friends. They seek to encourage and to support even as they need these things themselves. Sometimes they are there for weeks and at a considerable financial cost. They support all around them and brighten the rooms with pictures and cards and memories. In addition to those enduring at the gravesides and hospital rooms are the families, including children, of hundreds of thousands more, waiting and worrying, often through multiple deployments. The emotional excitement of homecoming, often captured by local news outlets, is followed by
the tensions of adjustments and the constant worry about the timing of the next deployment.