War on the Cheap

The disgraceful episode that we see being revealed at the Veteran's Administration is a shame that no civilized nation should have to endure. Even more so, our wounded and other veterans of military service should not have to endure such disrespect and callous treatment. Lastly, if the battlefield did not claim them then inaction by the people charged with healing their wounds should never be the cause of their death.

General Eric Shinseki

We tend to view experiences such as these through the prism of emotional attachment and there is ample cause to view it that way. After all, it is ourselves who sent these men and women to act on our behalf so that we would not have to experience not just the horror of the battlefield but also the discomfort that such sacrifice would bring our families. It is a sad indictment that we found it necessary to offer up men and women unnecessarily but having done so it is our devout duty to care for them in the best way possible. We have failed in that duty. It is not just General Shinseki or some administrators who have failed. It is us since those people were acting on our behalf. The buck stops here.

September 11, 2001 was a shock to the national psyche that our nation had not experienced for sixty years and it left us thirsty for revenge against those who would dare come into our country and destroy significant buildings and some 3000 people in the process. That thirst galvanized us to war, first in Afghanistan where the assailants were harbored and then in Iraq for reasons still debated. There was little awareness that those wars would be more than brief campaigns for our vaunted military and, to be sure, our military performed its task with expedience. It was the aftermath that few anticipated. Years of occupation punctuated by guerrilla tactics using deadly Improvised Explosive Devices that could wreak havoc on our patrols and our soldiers and marines and therein lies the problem.

There were quite a number that returned from Vietnam with wounds both visible and invisible. It was years before Agent Orange exposure was recognized as an illness caused by injury on the battlefield. PTSD was identified but treatment lagged far behind while thousands were lost to suicide, depression and alcoholism. By the time we engaged ourselves in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan medical science had developed to the point that huge numbers of combatants that would have previously died on the battlefield were now being saved to encounter lives of desperate need for support. The rise in survival rates for traumatic brain injury swamped the military medical system with need for treatment still unanticipated and undeveloped. Survival from loss of limbs is now common but the treatment for those who suffered the effects of explosive devices was still in its infancy. Repeated deployments to combat situations where soldiers and marines were subjected to unimaginable, constant stress left even those who returned seemingly unscathed with horrible psychic wounds. Neuroscientists understand very well how repeated and constant stress leads to psychotic breaks but the military requires people to do just that. No one returned unharmed.

And this is the septic miasma in which the Veteran's Administration found itself immersed by 2002. People in Washington DC act all surprised at the recent news that the VA has been falsifying records. Did they really think we were doing that great a job? Has no one been paying attention to the news of the wounded coming home and the desperate lives they face? I remember for a fact that early in the wars there were warnings of just this kind of thing but the powers insisted there would not be that many since we would not be in combat that long. Now, thirteen years later everyone is all surprised. Yeah, right.

This is first and foremost a stark result of the refusal to recognize reality and fund expansion of medical services in the Veteran's Administration to meet the exploding need. The ideologies of the budget battles overwhelmed our commitment accept the price of waging war and left us swamped in the shame of neglecting those who we sent to do battle for us. There are already those who are denying that the Veteran's Administration is drastically underfunded but that is only to deflect blame for allowing their slavish adherence to partisan politics and ideology to undercut those to whom we owe the highest respect. While it is true that the budget for the VA has doubled over the course of the wars it still failed to keep up with the increased casualties. It did not allow for combatants who would survive horrifying injuries at a much higher rate than previously experienced.

This is not to say that there is no falsifying of records to indicate that wait times are acceptable. It remains that administrators at some level ordered their subordinates to create those false records. Just how high up the chain of command the duplicity goes is yet to be discovered but what must not happen is for some Congressional Committee demand that heads must roll, play politics with it and then go back to business the same old way. Anyone with any knowledge of corporate or governmental bureaucracies knows that these acts of falsification did not occur in a vacuum. If adequate resources had been available there would have been no need for falsification. The Veteran's Administration is a governmental bureaucracy and it will function like any other bureaucracy. It is populated with people just like you and me who want to keep their jobs and take care of their families. It has people in it who are ambitious and seek promotion. All of this occurs separately from those whose responsibility it is to actually deliver medical care. Yes, they should have risked their jobs and blew the whistle but before you become too harsh think about how you would have handled that in your job. Not too many of us will be that principled. There were those who sounded the alarm but they were pushed aside because the uncomfortable truth is that we saw, or should have seen, the dramatic increase as the wars dragged on.

My take? Those who planned and approved these wars did not do their due diligence to prepare for the results. As a people we allowed our thirst for revenge and lack of exposure to sacrifice to cloud our judgement. You can't go to war on the cheap. We will be paying for this for a long time and the cost will be many trillions of dollars more than we were led to believe.

What do you think about it?  Let me know.