These aren't the words of a politician, though God knows they should be. They are the words of a mother who has just learned that her son, Army Lt. William "Eddie" Rebrook, whose arm was nearly blown off in Iraq, was presented with a bill for $700 that he was forced to pay before he could leave the Army on the medical separation discharge that they had insisted upon.
It seems that was the cost of the body armor he was wearing at the time his Bradley Fighting Vehicle was hit by an IED (roadside bomb).
The OTV (outer tactical vest) was so blood-soaked that the medic ripped it off his body in order to apply a tourniquet to the severed artery in his shattered arm, before loading the severely wounded lieutenant into a Blackhawk helicopter for swift relocation to a field hospital outside Baghdad. The armor, then considered a biohazard, was burned.
Since a battalion supply officer failed to document this battlefield destruction of said body armor, Lt. Rebrook was told he would have to pay up or spend many weeks more in the Army while he tried to track down witnesses who could write letters backing his claim that the body armor had been burned.
Rebrook, who was an honors graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point and had spent four years in the Army (six months in Iraq), tried to get a waiver from his First Cavalry Division battalion commander at Fort Hood, where he was stationed when he was discharged, but the BC refused. So the lieutenant had to scrounge the money from his buddies.
The new policy is called "report of survey," and Rebrook says he's not the only combat-wounded soldier he knows who's had to pay for equipment destroyed in battle.
What I want to know is, WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
Why did I have to read about this in an article in the small West Virginia Gazette, after picking it up from a link at the official Democratic party website? Why didn't I read about in the New York Times or Washington Post? Why wasn't it reported on all the network news broadcasts?
By the way, within one hour, readers of Americablog had raised the money to repay Rebrook, and by the end of the day, they had raised more than $5,700.
Americablog is a liberal website.
The day after the article appeared, Senators Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller--both Democrats--had demanded to know WHY soldiers were being billed for equipment destroyed in battle by the enemy. They went straight to the source and asked our esteemed secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff.
Both claimed not to have any idea what the senators were talking about.
YET ANOTHER MYTH BUSTED ON BLUE INKBLOTS--the outrageous lie that Democrats and/or liberals hate the military.
They don't hate the military.
They hate military HYPOCRITES.
Ask my son or anyone serving right now and they will tell you that they have to buy much of the combat gear that was once issued by the military. They have to buy their own medals. Up until just recently, many of them bought their own body armor because it was not provided.
Now, it seems, if they don't have official documentation to show that their bloody body armor was cut off their bodies by medics and burned as biohazards while they're loaded onto helicopters and sent to hospitals to save their lives, well, they have to pay the bill. The Army apparently needs the money.
(I've even heard rumors that if a soldier or Marine is killed while wearing body armor provided by, say, his parents, then they do not receive his death benefits, but I have not confirmed that rumor.)
Meanwhile, the budget recently submitted by this conservative Republican president--who never speaks with less than a dozen flags in the background--has the biggest increase in military spending in history, but not for things like body armor. Much of the money is earmarked for massive Cold War weapons systems that, to quote the Boston Globe, "have stratospheric price tags and no discernable enemies to use them against."
Which should make all those fat-cat K-Street defense industry lobbyists who live on Capitol hill very, very happy.
Incidentally, Lt. Rebrook is not going to keep the money that was raised for him both in his Charleston, West Virginia hometown and on Americablog. He's going to give it to the mother of a buddy who saved his life in Iraq. She lost everything she had in Hurricane Katrina.
The right-wing knows all about how to whip up fake outrage over non-issues like the so-called "war on Christmas" and other feigned insults they can shout about on talk radio. They know how to wrap themselves in the flag and get all teary-eyed when they talk about how "our" troops are fighting for "our freedom" blah blah blah.
But it took a bunch of liberals to bring up a REAL outrage.
I thought I was going to write about something other than the war, but you know what? It just keeps getting more and more outrageous, ridiculous, and unconscionable.
posted by Deanie Mills at 6:33 PM
4 Comments:
Once again you start out with a good point, that there is an issue with body armour. If what you say is true it is outrageous and needs to be looked into. Our troops should have body armour, they shouldn't have to pay for it themselves and they shouldn't be paying for their own medical care.
Conservatives as well as most Americans would agree and will demand that something be done about it.
But as usual, you liberal rage takes over and you start bashing Bush and conservatives, implying that they don't really care about our troops.
If you are really trying to convince people about the body armour issue, why don't you stick to that rather than attacking the motives of the other side. The conservatives would join you on this one. Why go out of your way to alienate them?
Just like the liberals at Mrs. King's funeral. Instead of honoring her life, they had to advantage of the national spot light to vent their Bush rage.
If my rage is off-putting, I'm sorry about that, but there is nothing LIBERAL about it. Talk to just about any returning Marine or soldier and you will see that same rage. Is it any wonder that NINE Iraqi combat veterans are running for Congress as Democrats, and only ONE as a Republican?
My son has been angry since his first deployment, and he is still angry. Ditto my nephew, who just wants to survive his third deployment and get home in one piece to his mama. He is 21 years old and he's seen more death in his young life than you or I EVER will. Ask him how LIBERAL that is.
This president never said one word about what a danger Saddam Hussein was until the '02 midterm elections. Karl Rove is on record as having said that a war would be a great campaign issue. Consequently, Bush started whipping up war frenzy where? In press conferences? States of the Union? Visits to the American people?
No.
He started whipping up war-fever at FUND-RAISERS for his party's base. That is an absolute fact. I howled about it at the time but nobody listened.
The base took up the war-talk and used it as a gigantic BLUDGEON against any Democrat who DARED question the basis for getting into this war, accusing them of being unpatriotic, weak, incapable of keeping our nation secure.
They took a decorated Vietnam veteran presidential candidate and launched the most reprehensible smear campaign ever seen in American politics, questioning every single aspect of his service, mocking him at the Republican convention with their purple-heart band-aids.
What if DEMOCRATS had done such a thing to a Republican candidate? What kind of howling OUTRAGE do you think we'd have heard on the airwaves then????
Dick Cheney went on the talk-show circuit and stated flat-out that to elect a Democrat would result in a "mushroom cloud" of terrorist attacks on American soil and that, furthermore, they had substantial evidence about those famouse WMDs.
To the public, Bush kept saying that he had not yet made a decision to invade, but documents that have since come to light prove absolutely otherwise to that lie. It was the first of many.
They refused to even consider the likelihood of an insurgency, refused to plan for post-war nation building, refused to see the disaster unfolding in front of the eyes of the entire world.
Donald Rumsfeld used his bully pulpit to make the most outrageous claims of peace and prosperity over there I have ever heard in my entire life. He should have been fired. Instead, he's still making those asinine statements.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove got his wet dream of a political ad with Bush landing on that aircraft carrier in MAY OF '03 and claiming that MAJOR COMBAT ACTION IS OVER.
Got the man elected though, didn't it?
They stood back with their hubris and their arrogance and their unspeakable blindness for month after nauseating month while boys and girls DIED.
Now we are half a trillion dollars in debt to finance this debacle. None of the claims they made have turned out to be true. The country is collapsing into civil war and there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
To date, more than 2,640 troops have died. More than 16,000 have been horribly wounded.
My son and my nephews don't even know what the hell they are doing over there. They just want to do their time like a prison sentence and get home. And, I might add, each one of them enlisted, knowing full well that they would be sent to war. They have served this country proudly and with honor, and they deserve so much better than they have received.
It is the most monumental catastrophe of this brand-new century. My son could die or come back maimed AND FOR WHAT?
I really don't know, since the administration changes our reasons for being over there every few months.
So if my rage sounds like just so much "liberal" politics, well, that's just too damn bad.
I have more than enough reason to be outraged, AND SO DO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. It's not liberal and it's not conservative.
IT'S TRUTH.
I guess from your liberal websites, which you admit going to, you get all the "true" information which shows that practically every thing our government says and does to be lies.
Of course, one can go to conservative websites and here their "true" information that directly contradicts yours.
I can understand your concern about your son and I respect that, but in your liberal rage you seem to forget that we are fighting a war on terror against a ruthless enemy. We can't just stick our heads in the sand like the previous administration.
We are going to have to engage the enemy and Iraq may be the best place to do that.
I am not really a conservative or a liberal, and no matter what a person is, they certainly should respect the job our military does and everyone certainly should respect the sacrifices that they and their families are making.
However, what bothers me about the liberals, other than their mindless Bush hating, is that they have no vision on how to fight terror.
They have plenty of things they would do differently than Bush as evidenced by your previous blog entries.
Tell me, how do we keep another 911 from occuring. No rants about Bush, just give an outline of how the liberals would fight terror.
I get my news from news sources such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the three network broadcast news reports, MSNBC, NPR, Time and Newsweek--all of which I read or peruse daily or weekly, depending upon how often they are published or aired.
If I wanted to, I could indeed hang out over there with Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan, but I don't because I know their views will be predictable. I search for FACTS, Anonymous. And everything I put in this blog has been gleaned from reliable news sources.
You have my word on that.
I do not get my news from liberal websites that I have only LISTED here, not necessarily VISITED. In fact, I did not know very many and had to do research to find those to list. I don't earmark them or hang out over there--I can't tolerate the rage. It is too depressing.
No one is arguing the need to fight terrorism, and no one ever has, not on either side of the aisle.
Neither did anyone argue against invading Afghanistan and sending the hounds of hell after Osama Bin Laden. It is the very reason my son enlisted in the Marine Corps after getting his degree from Texas A&M. He wanted to go to Afghanistan, actually, and do his part to hunt down those responsible for 9-11.
Saddam Hussein--again, I'm no fan of his, so don't misunderstand me--had no love for or trust of Osama Bin Laden. He ran a ruthless dictatorship and, contrary to administration claims, had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11.
15 of the 19 hijackers on that terrible day were from Saudi Arabia. Not a single one was from Iraq or had any real ties to Iraq.
If Bush's "predecessor" had launched an attack on Afghanistan, after the first bombing of the World Trade Center, Republicans everywhere would have howled about nation-building. I have said it before--pre 9-11, there was no stomach for war in this country.
Look what happened in Somalia. Remember the screaming outrage over that one incident?
Again, I decry the overall general term LIBERAL to refer to Democrats. Our own congressional district was represented for more than 20 years by a wonderful congressman named Charlie Stenholm who was a conservative Democrat and started the "Blue Dog Democrats" who were the first to work closely with the then-new president, Ronald Reagan.
But thanks to simplistic broad-brushing, now, ANY Democrat or moderate of any stripe, if they protest ANYTHING in this administration, is called a liberal--as if it's a dirty word, something shameful, to be hidden away like people used to do mentally challenged family members.
Thinking Republicans and moderate Republicans are called RINOs--Republican in Name Only by talking heads, as if the party is supposed to march in lock-step--and with only one leg. The right.
Most thinking Democrats, like the ones I quoted in our roundtable discussion on strategies for success in Iraq, believe that our tax dollars would have been far more efficiently used not just to skillfully steer the war and rebuilding in Afghanistan, but to work extremely closely with LAW ENFORCEMENT officials the world over, who are, after all, the first lines of defense whenever a sleeper cell anywhere plots to bomb a subway or train or bus or crash a plane anywhere.
I can do some research and put together proposals that were set forth before we invaded Iraq, but that could take some time. The truth is that, now that we've squandered so much of the country's resources in this ill-planned and ill-conceived war in Iraq, we have (1)destroyed good will worldwide that was ours after 9-11 and could have helped immensely (2)whipped up anti-American hatreds that have INCREASED our danger worldwide, not DECREASED it and (3) gotten mired in a quicksand of a war in which options for success grow dimmer every day.
Consequently, there are so many cracks in the dam now that it will take years, if not decades, to repair the damage done by this administration in their ham-handed attempts to fight unconventional terrorist tactics with a conventional war.
I do get enraged about this war. Every day I comb newspapers and magazines everywhere--reliable, objective news sources--hunting desperately for GOOD NEWS about progress being made over there that will somehow make my family's sacrifices make sense to me. (Not Marines passing out candy but substantive stuff, like efforts to incorporate Sunnis into the political process and away from their IEDs.)
Whatever I find, I share with my son to lift his spirits. But there is just so precious little, and every day it gets compromised by the ineptitude and inefficiency of the people managing this war.
(The war in Iraq and the war on terrorism are two different things. Yes, terrorists are pouring over the borders getting on-site training in the latest explosives before fanning out to Spain or London or the US, and yes, we're fighting them as hard as we can, but this war was not about the war on terrorism. It was about politics, and it was about oil.)
If Democrats don't seem to have plans for fighting terrorism, it could be because they know that the biggest plan of all will simply be cleaning up this monumental mess. Only then can anybody know what to do next.
In the meantime, I dedicate my life to doing what Col. David Hackworth did with his Soldiers for the Truth website (still operational today at www.sftt.com)--and that is shout loud and long whenever I see the troops short-changed in the background, while all the politicians preen in the fore.
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