On Veterans Day, Don't Forget About the War

[babylonsister]

On Veterans Day, Don't Forget About the War
By Aaron Glantz

November 10, 2008


The War in Iraq has disappeared from the headlines. The ongoing economic crisis has Americans looking inward, wondering if they can keep their homes and their jobs, with little interest in death and destruction half a world away. According to the Pew Research Center, media coverage of the war has plummeted from an average of 15 percent of stories in July 2007, to 3 percent this February, to just 2 percent of stories during the last week of October.

The war also disappeared as an issue in the presidential campaign. Both Barack Obama and John McCain barely mentioned the war in Iraq in their final debate. In his historic victory speech, Obama said "Iraq" only once. Some say the election results show Americans demanding a "change," and in many ways they do. But they also show a collective desire to forget.

Most Americans want to put the war behind them, but this feeling is based not on a coherent critique but on a kind of collective exhaustion. In many ways, we as a country find ourselves in a mood like the one towards the end of the Vietnam War: we are tired and simply want to move on and forget the conflict ever happened.

Yet this feeling can come at a great cost, because it is this same dynamic that led to the betrayal of more than three million Vietnam veterans.

"When I go through airports I see soldiers just sitting up against a wall...by themselves," says therapist and Vietnam veteran Shad Meshad, who heads up the National Veterans Foundation. "No one goes up to them; that positive energy toward them has faded. No one is spitting or shouting, but they're still left with the fact that they're responsible for what they did or didn't do, and they're supposed to think about that alone."

Given the experience of Vietnam vets, Meshad believes that the American people ignore their veterans at their own peril. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, eighteen veterans commit suicide every day and 200,000 sleep homeless on the streets on any given night. By 1986, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey reported that almost half of all male Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder had been arrested or jailed at least once--34.2 percent had been jailed more than once, and 11.5 percent had been convicted of a felony.

"We're going to repeat that same thing, I can sense it," Meshad says, "if we don't take action and Congress doesn't create services to help these folks over the next ten or fifteen years."

more...

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/glantz

[johan helge]

1. K & R

[ballardgirl]

2. ..and all of the past wars

As we continue to lose our veterans from previous wars, we lose their stories as well.