Just Above Sunset

Saturday, May 17, as everyone knows, was Día das Letras Galegas (Galician Literature Day), a holiday in Galicia honoring the Galician language – but it’s not for everyone. May 17 was also Norwegian Constitution Day (Syttende Mai) and International Day against Homophobia, and World Information Society Day, and, as every day is some saint’s day for the Catholics, on May 17 you could chose one of three – Saint Paschal Baylon, Saint Restituta or Saint Victor (you decide which one, but it was probably this one, the first African pope). And Saturday, May 17, 2008, was Victoria Day in Canada (actually celebrated Monday, with a day off from work and the usual festivities).  

In the United States, Saturday, May 17, was Armed Forces Day, and CNN had it covered:

An unusual fly-by and the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift were part of the ceremonies held Friday and continuing on Saturday at a major open house at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a letter to visitors published in a program handed out for “Armed Forces Day,” noted it was June 1948 that “the U.S. and her Allies extended a lifeline of support to the people of West Berlin.”

That a good theme for an Armed Forces Day celebrated in the sixth year of an unpopular war, an elective war chosen by a president now with the lowest sustained approval ratings in modern history, and justified by what turned out to be entirely false information. The Berlin airlift was a good thing. We should think of that.

And CNN had a cool video clip:

An unusual-looking fly-by involved three jet fighters surrounding a little propeller plane. That was not an ordinary single-engine aircraft; it was the famous P-51 “Mustang,” from World War II, and the pilot was able to maintain a tight formation with the more modern jet warplanes.

Actually it looked quite mad – the little P-51 bracketed by the notoriously clumsy F-4 from Vietnam days, the new F-22, and a giant F-15 Tom-Cruise-in-Top-Gun Strike Eagle. But they pulled it off. It brought back memories – back in the fifties piling in the car and going out to the airbase at the edge of the Pittsburgh airport and sitting in the cockpit of a now-retired fighter jet and playing pilot. Little boys like that sort of thing. Some don’t grow out of it – the current president made a half-hearted effort at being a fighter pilot as the Vietnam War was raging, even if his motives were less than heroic and he kind of disappeared from service. Of course, John McCain, who would like to be president, was a fighter pilot for real, even if a somewhat reckless one – he crashed a few planes, ran into power lines, and he was nearly killed in the middle of that 1967 Forrestal Fire. Getting shot out of the sky and spending all those years as a prisoner of war was what you would expect – if you are irresistibly compelled to take any risk, to push the envelope, as they say, such things can happen. But it made him a hero, then a senator, and now perhaps the next president. People forget that he had a reputation as a compulsive and dangerous risk-taking maverick – or they like the idea of the next president being a what-the-hell kind of guy.

Of course it’s all part of our admiration for what we also see as slightly appalling – our admiration for those we train to go and ruthlessly kill our enemies, no questions asked – our enemies at the particular moment. That’s odd. No mother wants her son to go off to war, and as a girl swooned over dreamy soldiers, those manly warriors who would happily kill anyone who looked at them funny. It’s complicated.

Armed Forces Day – the third Saturday in May – isn’t complicated. It’s a bureaucratic compromise, created in 1949 with the consolidation of the military services in the new Department of Defense, replacing separate Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard Days. Now we honor Americans serving in the five services more efficiently - if we do. And that is the question.

What we think of those we train to go kill our enemies, to defend us, is reflected in how we treat them – as heroes worthy of our infinite respect, or hapless dopes who never grew up and chose to be cannon-fodder for the politicians trying to consolidate personal power.

Consider how the government itself treats them. The day before this Armed Forces Day, the Washington Post reported this:

A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

VA staff members “really don’t … have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez wrote.

Adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD and has a shorter duration, usually no longer than six months, said Anthony T. Ng, a psychiatrist and member of Mental Health America, a nonprofit professional association.

The problem seems to be that veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be eligible for disability compensation – and that can run almost three grand a month. If the diagnosis is that if you just have adjustment disorder there’s no payout at all – just treatment, if you can ever get it scheduled.

But VoteVets.org got hold of the email and was furious – they are veterans, of course, even if the ant-war ones – and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group, was also outraged. The Post has all the comments, and the Veterans Administration saying that Perez’s e-mail was “inappropriate” and does not reflect VA policy. You see, Perez has been “counseled” and is “extremely apologetic” - but remains in her job.

But the Post points out the problem:

A Rand Corp. report released in April found that repeated exposure to combat stress in Iraq and Afghanistan is causing a disproportionately high psychological toll compared with physical injuries. About 300,000 U.S. military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or major depression, the study found. The economic cost to the United States - including medical care, forgone productivity and lost lives through suicide - is expected to reach $4 billion to $6 billion over two years.

That is a lot of money, and yes, you don’t want to over-diagnose. But you don’t want to cheat the wounded heroes, as we do claim that they are heroes – especially if you feel a little guilty that you asked them to go do what they willingly did, at low pay, in that environment, and it pretty much shattered their minds.

You might look at what is going on here through the eyes of a famous post-trauma specialist, the author and psychoanalyst, Clarissa Pinkola Estés (bio here). As co-editor of The Moderate Voice, she has a few things to say:

In my experience as a shrink these past three-plus decades, Adjustment Reaction is a diagnosis for a child suddenly changing schools and having a hard time. Adjustment Reaction is a diagnosis belonging to a person going through a garden-variety, uncontested divorce.

Adjustment Reaction is not a diagnosis for men and women who have been to war and who suffered serious ongoing or sudden trauma. Perhaps most telling in this shell game of diagnoses, treatment for diagnosis of Adjustment Reaction is most often not covered by insurance.

It is a pat on the head – you’ll get over it. But we’ve seen it before:

This means, injured vets of this war, would be thrown down into the same trench dug for previous vets, wherein government whistles and pretends Agent Orange exposure, for instance, is a figment of imagination, instead of a serious incremental illness. This means vets would be encumbered to pay for much needed medical help, from their own meager funds. This means vets will be left on their own - for life - to deal with catastrophic injuries suffered while in employ of their own government.

She does admit there could be scammers, but not that many:

Our soldiers didn’t just slip in an aisle of the grocery store and become disabled. They went to war, a fighting, shooting, deadly war. They managed to come home.

Not all vets with PTSD are invisible to us: those men you see wandering on the streets in their cammies after their war service, they were no scammers either. If anything, the military system AW - after war - has scammed many of them out of righteous and timely effective treatments for their most serious war wounds long ago.

As for those who think that, well, they’re just drug addicts and alcoholics – she argues that this is probably true. That’s what happens:

Given their lack of a required and timely medical care upon return from deployments, in many ways, since these soldiers didn’t have best medicine, they’ve been primed to settle for the poorest.

Even now, after so long, were they offered good medicine, solid compassionate treatment, many street soldiers might not accept it. Daily i.v. drip of cheap anesthesia can seem enough. To their minds, others on the street often understand more and better than any cleaner, better-dressed, well-fed outsider.

They are the outsiders now:

… they no longer have consistent touch with a core self. They might try but then refuse help, because the spirit and soul of the soldier is in some way still on duty, back on the Mekong delta or outside of Baghdad, or still in some way, marching NPD, Night Perimeter Defense… to keep all of us and their buds safe from harm.

All this is something to think about each year when Armed Forces Day roils around again. Go look at the murals the VA Hospital in Westwood – Lest We Forget and Unit Insignias – and know that across the street, in the hollow under the freeway overpass, there’s a small tent city of hollow-eyed veterans with nowhere to go, waiting for treatment. The murals were designed and painted by the veterans, their buddies, friends and families. That’s not government work.

You see, it is complicated. We created this problem, out of what we thought was necessity, and may have often been necessity. So the Armed Forces Day holiday is oddly ambiguous.

Now, with McCain, we have to resolve the ambiguity. And something that popped up in the Des Moines Register speaks to that, this odd story:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, “and he has a hard time thinking beyond that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said Friday.

“I think he’s trapped in that,” Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa reporters. “Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous.”

Harkin said that “it’s one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that’s just how you’re steeped, how you’ve learned, how you’ve grown up.”

That raises the big question – having that Military Mind may not be such a good thing. A ten-year-old boy sitting in the cockpit of a crapped-out F-86 back in 1957, dreaming and making zoom-zoom sounds, isn’t exactly presidential.

Of course a McCain spokesman said Harkin’s remarks were offensive and showed that Democrats are out of touch with Americans’ values:

“Senator Harkin’s comments are an affront to the many thousands of Iowans who have served our country so valiantly for generations,” said spokesman Jeff Sadosky. “This sort of attack shows just how out of touch Democratic leadership has become with the values that have made our country so great.”

But Harkin himself served as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War, even if he was not in combat. But Harkin says that wasn’t the point:

He said that “I just want to be very clear there’s nothing wrong with a career in the military” and that he has friends who are generals and admirals who have served the country well.

“But now McCain is running for a higher office. He’s running for commander in chief, and our Constitution says that should be a civilian,” Harkin said. “And in some ways, I think it would be nice if that commander in chief had some military background, but I don’t know if they need a whole lot.”

Neither of the Democratic candidates served in the military, of course, and this may be a political game – or maybe it isn’t. The job of president seems to have a lot to do with geopolitics – defining our place in the world, and working out the strategies and specific policies that keep us safe, not to mention all the issues relating to trade policy and healthcare and education and the economy and the nation’s fast-deteriorating infrastructure, along with energy and environmental issues, and the matter of convincing congress and the public that what you propose should be done. That may not be the job for a maverick fighter pilot. At least Eisenhower had been a general, and a master administrator (you remember D-Day).

Add that McCain doesn’t even want to sign onto the new GI Bill of Rights, as explained here:

McCain found himself on the losing end of a fight on Senate floor yesterday - a fight he wasn’t even there for. In a long distance face-off between a campaigning McCain and fellow Vietnam War vet Sen. Jim Webb, the issue was who best crafted a new GI bill that would pay for veterans to go to college. McCain’s version, backed by the White House, was killed on the Senate floor.

McCain’s defeat came not only at the hands of Democrats, but by the hands of six of his Republican colleagues - among them war veterans John Warner and Chuck Hagel. Those Republicans and a few others had previously signed on as co-sponsors to Webb’s measure.

In the simplest terms, the Webb bill would effectively pay for tuition and housing at a four-year public college for those serving at least three years of active duty. The McCain measure isn’t as generous, as it increases existing education benefits by $400 a month for the same time served: from $1,100 to $1,500.

The whole this is explained in detail, but it comes down to McCain and the administration opposing this – the president will veto any such bill – arguing that the benefits were too generous and too early in active duty service, and that would hurt reenlistments, and we’d have no one to go fight for us.

The whole thing makes your head spin. On Armed Forces Day what are we to think of these people who fight for us?