afghanistan

I mentioned this in a comment yesterday, but thought it was worth an individual post. Over the course of the last four years, the notion of "The Troops" and what it means to support them has undergone a radical transformation. In 2004, supporting the troops meant putting a yellow magnetic ribbon on the bumper of your car. During the '04 election, the troops were a bludgeon used to beat back Democrats and brand any opposition to the war as unpatriotic - indeed at times it was suggested that dissent was synonymous with giving comfort and aid to the enemy (a treasonous offense).

Since then, we've had four years of conservatives exploiting the troops as weapons and sheilds to fight their political battles, all the while short-changing them on the resources they need to safely execute their orders and build a middle class life once they leave the service.

First came the revelation that Private Jessica Lynch was used as a propaganda tool by the administration to create a war hero and drum up support for the conflict. Then came Cpl. Pat Tillman's death under friendly fire and the subsequent cover-up. Just this year, CREW uncovered shocking evidence that the Veterans Administration was purposefully blocking its administrators from diagnosing and treating PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan vets. And all the while we've had reports that the administration failed to provide our troops the resources they needed in the field. Most recently, it was revealed the VA is blocking voter registration in their facilities and disenfranchising some of our most vulnerable troops.

It hasn't been all bad, though. We've made progress in the last 4 years as well - usually thanks to the Democrats. Early in the primaries, both Clinton and Obama sat down for serious - televised - discussions with young vets about the progress of the war, PTSD, health and education benefits, and more. To my knowledge, this was the first time since the war began that we had an honest national dialogue about what it truly means to support the troops. After a long fight, Democrats passed the 21st Century GI Bill, despite objections by both President Bush and Senator McCain.

Today, those successes continue as the Veterans Affairs Committee and the VA - after much hemming and hawing - plan to launch a massive campaign to raise awareness about and prevent suicide among our veterans.

Culturally, we are in a new space as well. Movies like Stop Loss, and In the Valley of Elah have created a much more complicated - and truer - vision of the troops and their experiences than the sanitized, heroic archetype paraded across the airwaves by political pundits. This trend, too, continues, most recently with the release of Generation Kill, by the creators of The Wire.

Changes to the cultural and political landscape now offer us a huge opportunity to permanently remove the troops as a weapon in the conservative arsenal and create more policies that provides real, tangible support for those who fight on our behalf. For me, this is a big part of a revamped foreign-policy. Young people - as troops, as activists, as now-respected members of the electorate - can help drive that change. This is a huge opportunity for us as a party and as a generation to do right by our peers and put our country back on track.

This is really disturbing. ABC News is reporting that the government is testing drugs with possible violent and suicidal side effects on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. Worse, it failed to notify those veterans of these possible side effects:

Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects, an investigation by ABC News and The Washington Times has found.

The report will air on Good Morning America and will also appear in The Washington Times on Tuesday. (click here to read the Washington Times coverage of "Disposable Heroes")

In one of the human experiments, involving the anti-smoking drug Chantix, Veterans Administration doctors waited more than three months before warning veterans about the possible serious side effects, including suicide and neuropsychiatric behavior.

"Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero," said former US Army sniper James Elliott in describing how he felt he was betrayed by the Veterans Administration.

Elliott, 38, of suburban Washington, D.C., was recruited, at $30 a month, for the Chantix anti-smoking study three years after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He served a 15-month tour of duty in Iraq from 2003-2004.

Months after he began taking the drug, Elliott suffered a mental breakdown, experiencing a relapse of Iraq combat nightmares he blames on Chantix.

"They never told me that I was going to be suicidal, that I would cease sleeping. They never told me anything except this will help me quit smoking," Elliott told ABC News and The Washington Times.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

If it isn't enough that the majority of the 3,889 soldiers (as of 1am CDT 12/14/07) that are now dead from this war are under 30 - now apparently many who have survived the war are so plagued with mental illness that they are committing suicide.

Today I saw a short piece on CNN with heartbreaking parents talking about cooking Thanksgiving Dinner while unknowingly their son was bleeding to death from a self inflicted gunshot wound.

"The number of soldiers who committed suicide increased 15 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to an Army report... The numbers have not previously been released, despite repeated CNN requests for data covering the past seven months."

Reasons given by the Army in 2006

"were failed relationships, legal and financial problems and "occupational/operational" issues. The "typical profile" of a soldier who commits suicide is a member of an infantry unit who kills himself with a firearm.

So when I heard this - knowing that a majority of soldiers tend to be young I wanted to check demographic data.

70% of those who attempted suicide are under 25. Add to that the 16% who are 25-30 and you have 86% of our Millennial soldiers that are attempting suicide. Those who actually succeed 67% are 18-30.

According to Psyciatric News

"The U.S. Army announced in August that 99 soldiers committed suicide in 2006. That translates to a rate of 17.3 per 100,000. There were 948 soldiers who attempted suicide."

Another story I heard a few weeks ago on NPR was about soldiers who are being dishonorably discharged for behavioral occurrence. Often times soldiers who have PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) are discharged dishonorably for poor behavior, going AWOL, or substance abuse while on the job.

"Soldier Tyler Jennings says that when he came home from Iraq last year, he felt so depressed and desperate that he decided to kill himself. Late one night in the middle of May, his wife was out of town, and he felt more scared than he'd felt in gunfights in Iraq. Jennings says he opened the window, tied a noose around his neck and started drinking vodka, "trying to get drunk enough to either slip or just make that decision. . . . Jennings says that when the sergeants who ran his platoon found out he was having a breakdown and taking drugs, they started to haze him. He decided to attempt suicide when they said that they would eject him from the Army."

The piece goes on to say that a GAO study found that 80% of soldiers who exhibited potential signs of PTSD were not referred for mental health follow ups. And even if they do, the unit is so overwhelmed that they don't get the help they need.

It then says that a major problem is when their superiors or friends find out that they have emotional problems that they treat them like "pariahs" saying "they don't belong in the Army."

"Jennings called a supervisor at Ft. Carson to say that he had almost killed himself, so he was going to skip formation to check into a psychiatric ward. The Defense Department's clinical guidelines say that when a soldier has been planning suicide, one of the main ways to help is to put him in the hospital. Instead, officers sent a team of soldiers to his house to put him in jail, saying that Jennings was AWOL for missing work."

And when they can't intimidate them out of their emotional distress, they just fire them.

"Richard Travis, formerly the Army's senior prosecutor at Ft. Carson, is now in private practice. He says that the Army has to pay special mental-health benefits to soldiers discharged due to PTSD. But soldiers discharged for breaking the rules receive fewer or even no benefits, he says.

Alex Orum's medical records showed that he had PTSD, but his officers expelled him from the Army earlier this year for "patterns of misconduct," repeatedly citing him on disciplinary grounds. In Orum's case, he was cited for such infractions as showing up late to formation, coming to work unwashed, mishandling his personal finances and lying to supervisors — behaviors which psychiatrists say are consistent with PTSD."

It's hard to comment on this. The facts clearly speak for themselves. I spent many of my years in college being pissed that people I know were fighting a war I knew was stupid and wrong.

Thomas PM Barnett says it well in his analysis of what we did wrong in Iraq and how we could have done it better:

"I ask you, who joins the military to do things other than war? Actually, most of them. Jessica Lynch never planned on shooting back.

Now, a chunk of them are dead or they want to be. I know it isn't as many people as there were in Vietnam or in WW2 or WW1, but it doesn't diminish the fact that these are my people. My friends and yours, our sisters and brothers, and our college mates. Is this really how we want to treat them?

No wonder they are having hard time with recruitment.