Some retirement options for Dubya

During a teleconference on Thursday with U.S. personnel stationed in Afghanistan, George Bush reportedly said:

"I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."

Forty years later, the man clearly regrets his decision to remain home when he could've easily arranged a tour or two in Vietnam after he finished college. Apparently he hasn't been able to persuade his two daughters into signing up for gigs in Iraq or Afghanistan, but it's not too late for him to vicariously witness the excitement and romance of combat.

Consider, for example:

The nature and sheer extent of American casualties [in Iraq] — officially in the tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands have sought medical help — has caught the U.S. government off guard.

From wounded soldiers who faced dilapidated conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to troops whose mental problems have been overlooked, Iraq veterans have paid the price.

"The government was not ready for the casualties to come home," says Brad Trower, 29, a Marine Corps veteran from High Ridge who was injured twice in his tour in Iraq.

When Trower returned to St. Louis in 2005, suffering from traumatic brain injury after two vehicles he was riding in were blown up within a month of his arrival, he got "zero response" initially from local Veterans Affairs officials, though he is now doing well.

Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says the nation has failed to heed the lessons of Vietnam, a war whose veterans constitute half of the 400,000 people sleeping on America's streets tonight.

Though the number of veterans today is smaller, the percentage of veterans who become homeless, commit suicide or face other social problems, partly because of a lack of treatment, is similar to that of the Vietnam era, Filner says.

"We know how to deal with it," he says, "but we apparently don't want to deal with it."

[...]

Of the 1.7 million service members with recent combat experience, some 800,000 are now veterans entitled to VA health care and benefits. Of those, 300,000 have had treatment; 40 percent were diagnosed with a mental health problem, more than half with PTSD, according to Veterans Affairs figures released as a result of a lawsuit by Veterans for Common Sense, a nonpartisan veterans advocacy group. Paul Sullivan, the group's executive director, says the patient figure could eventually reach 700,000.

[...]

Thirty-one percent of the veterans have filed disability claims, waiting on the average more than six months for them to be processed. Delays are pronounced for those who returned to small towns or rural areas in the Midwest or South far from VA facilities, as happens with many reserve troops.

There are an estimated 10,000 veterans who have suffered traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan from roadside bombs and other causes, and many of them will require intensive lifelong medical and personal care. Another 800 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan lost limbs due to amputations since 2001.

This tragic situation [1] offers many volunteer opportunities for Bush, even if he's not eager to relocate to Iraq or Afghanistan. After all, he won't be "employed here" after next January 20th. So let me offer a few modest suggestions for how he might spend his spare time after clearing brush on the Crawford ranch:

• He can volunteer for the Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Auxiliary, which offers "the opportunity for fun and friendship, for networking and sharing, as well as a chance to support our hospital and its patients."
• If he has a little spare change after paying his dues at his golf club in Waco, he can contribute to Walter Reed Hospital's Army Emergency Relief Fund , which provides for veterans' "emergency financial needs such as food, rent, utilities, emergency transportation and vehicle repair, funeral expenses, medical/dental expenses, or personal needs when pay is delayed or stolen." And he doesn't even have to wait until he qualifies for unemployment.
  
• Dubya might also join Stephen Colbert in cutting some generous checks for the Fisher House veterans' program, which provides "'a home away from home' that enables family members to be close to a loved one at the most stressful time -- during hospitalization for an illness, disease or injury."

Bush may be denied the "fantastic experience" and "romance" of Iraq and Afghanistan due to his age, but they can vicariously take part in those wars through the accounts of returning veterans by volunteering at Walter Reed, the Waco VA Medical Center or any other VA hospital across the land.

And keep those checks coming, too, George. A recent Harvard study predicts that "taxpayers' cost for the care of injured veterans will run up to $700 billion."

NOTES

[1] The Veterans for Common Sense website is brimming with valuable but underreported information about the plight of veterans. For example, the site cuts through the Pentagon's statistical games: "There are nearly 61,000 non-fatal casualties from Iraq, plus 8,000 non-fatal casualties from Afghanistan. A grand total of 69,000 battlefield casualties from the two wars." Meanwhile, the 3,988 U.S. troops have lost their lives in Iraq, 487 in Afghanistan.

[2] To help him prepare for his new career as a volunteer, Dubya might take a look at Elizabeth Reuben's article on the current situation in Afghanistan in the New York Times Magazine (February 24th).

With a tip o' the hat to Fred Kaplan at Slate and Digby at Hullabaloo. A commenter on Hullabaloo came up with this highly-relevant quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

"They were careless people... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

PHOTO: George Bush playing soldier at the DMZ in Korea (note the covers still on the binoculars).

UPDATE - 3/16/08:

When I mentioned these volunteer options for Dubya on Hullabaloo, a commenter pointed out: "My God, haven't they suffered enough?" The point is well taken, but somehow I don't think anyone needs to lose any sleep over his showing up at a clinic for TBI victims. Bush has already declared his retirement goals: clearing brush, riding his mountain bike and making incoherent speeches for big money.

Spitting on familiar ground

"They use thought only to reinforce their prejudices, and speech only to disguise their thoughts."

—Voltaire (1694-1778), Dialogue XIV

More than three decades after the end of the war in Vietnam, the far right has launched another savage and dishonest campaign against the antiwar movement for its alleged disrespect of U.S. soldiers and veterans, including this week's shrill denunciations of a small group of anarchists who burned a U.S. soldier in effigy during a massive antiwar demonstration here in Portland. The focus, not surprisingly, is on the thirty anarchists rather than the 15,000 people who demonstrated peacefully. Only 14 arrests, on relatively minor charges, were made.

Now there are reports, since discredited, of incidents involving demonstrators who alleged spat on, or near, veterans in New York and Washington, D.C.

This loathsome strategy is already too familiar from the Vietnam years and their aftermath, as discussed on the very first post to appear on Runes in December, 2006. In each case, the reported incidents were either grossly exaggerated or didn't occur at all. As Jack Shafer writes at Slate, in reference to a Newsweek article that perpetuated this pseudohistory:

"Like other urban myths, the spit story gains power every time it's repeated and nobody challenges it. Repeated often enough, it finally sears itself into the minds of the writers and editors at Newsweek as fact."

Shafer continues:

"The myth persists because: 1) Those who didn't go to Vietnam -- that being most of us -- don't dare contradict the "experience" of those who did; 2) the story helps maintain the perfect sense of shame many of us feel about the way we ignored our Vietvets; 3) the press keeps the story in play by uncritically repeating it, as the Times and U.S. News did; and 4) because any fool with 33 cents and the gumption to repeat the myth in his letter to the editor can keep it in circulation. Most recent mentions of the spitting protester in Nexis are of this variety."

An anonymous comment on my earlier posting added:

"What I find particularly troubling about seeing headlines and articles like this is that I don't think the journalists involved even realize they're saying something that anyone would disagree with or take issue with in any way. The propaganda here is so thick and constant it's become unconscious. Only through decades of repetition can something so utterly false become this assimilated into our everyday discourse."

Meanwhile, right-wing hysteria—and the resort to such desperate tactics—seems to increase in direct proportion to public opposition to Bush's illegal war in Iraq.


PHOTO: Part of a large antiwar demonstration in Portland, Oregon, in March, 2006. (Photo by author.)

Return of an urban legend

On September 10th, The Oregonian published a story by reporter Seth Prince under the headline "Once a protester, now a supporter of troops." The story itself was an account of the purported transformation of a former protester against the Vietnam and Iraq wars into a "supporter of the troops," as if those were mutually exclusive positions.

It's unlikely that Mr. Prince wrote the headline, and there was little hint that he considered any of the implications of his story. But the headline and his story combined to offer yet another variation on a nauseatingly familiar theme: war protesters don't support the troops in Iraq, encourage their enemies and undermine morale.

This is a classic straw-man argument: those who oppose the war necessarily, and even deliberately, undermine our troops. Fortunately, a majority of American voters have now rejected George Bush's manipulative suggestion that questioning the war endangers the troops in Iraq.

Over the last forty years, I've attended numerous demonstrations against the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and at each one the overwhelming majority of protesters expressed unequivocal support for American troops while challenging the flawed policies and assumptions that placed them in harm's way. In my experience, admittedly a long series of anecdotes, nearly all antiwar marches were led by protesters holding a large banner that read "Support Our Troops - Bring Them Home Now" (or some variation of that sentiment).

This is not to deny that some U.S. troops have demonstrably participated in atrocities, both in Vietnam and Iraq. Still, I have yet to hear an opponent of either war express anything short of full support for American troops and a strong desire to bring them home quickly and safely. The real lack of support has come from the Bush Administration, which has provided nothing to the troops but flawed assumptions, inept leadership and inadequate forces and equipment.

We can only hope that returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts will receive better treatment from politicians, the Veteran's Administration and their fellow citizens than their predecessors in Vietnam, who faced widespread indifference.

Yet the myth persists that the worst abuses of Vietnam veterans came from war protesters, who purportedly spat on them and called them "baby killers" at airports when they returned home. In Rambo: First Blood (1982), the title character states at one point that he returned home from the war and saw "all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting on me, calling me a baby killer..."

Even if such incidents occurred, I'm convinced that they were extremely rare. Bob Greene, a veteran, claims to have documented 63 spitting incidents in The Homecoming, his 1989 book. But the underground newspapers of that period are full of articles and letters expressing unqualified sympathy and support, to the extent of providing assistance to AWOL soldiers and deserters (like at Portland's Shelter Half).

Other journalists have taken a close look at this question and concluded that the "trashing" of the troops never happened at all. Chris Clarke, in an angry article for Counterpunch in 2003, called the myth a "damned lie." In his 1998 book, The Spitting Image, Vietnam Veteran Jerry Lembcke confronted the myth directly and found no evidence whatsoever to support it, concluding that it's an urban legend.

Perhaps researchers will eventually determine whether Vietnam veterans were, in fact, confronted or abused by antiwar activists--and if so, on what scale. Popular films like Rambo, The Deer Hunter and Forrest Gump seemed to help create a false historical memory that has evolved into a common assumption, perpetuated primarily by the right, that is intended to drive a permanent wedge between the antiwar movement and the rest of the country. The result is a myth that has little or no factual basis and is, to many of us who challenged the war, deeply offensive.

Meanwhile, such tired arguments from four decades ago continue to be thrown in the face of those who oppose the Iraq war while supporting the U.S. troops who wage it. George W. Bush partied through the Vietnam war—at least when he wasn't campaigning for Republicans—and Dick Cheney had "other priorities," as he admitted. So the rest of us, especially our troops in Iraq and their families, have to pay the price while they relearn the lessons—and repeat the mistakes--of forty years ago.