Funny how peace advocates like Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. Tammy Baldwin become leading champions for veterans, and chickenhawks like Dick Cheney and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) take direct aim at our veterans.
This difference of opinion and commitment is the one reason veterans' advocates maintain hope for a change in direction at the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) that Obama needs to cleanse of embedded neocon-minded civil servants. To sum up the attitude among veteran advocates toward the Bush-Cheney-neocon DVA, I cite the words of one veterans' attorney: "Fuck [the AEI's] Sally Satel and fuck Dick Cheney." Linked is a piece in Veterans Today with text from Jason Leopold and Mary Susan Littlepage's report on the Obama administration and its project on changing the DVA.
It's no great surprise to learn that training young adults to kill and put themselves in the line of fire tends to lead to psychological complications later in life.
Under Bush-Cheney, the DVA went from indifferent to hostile in the face of 25-million American veterans and many Americans for whom supporting veterans means slapping a flag on their car.
"We have to understand that for far too many troops and their families, the war doesn't end when they come home. Just the other day our own government's top psychiatric researcher said that because of inadequate mental health care, the number of suicides among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan may actually exceed the number of combat deaths. Think about that. Think about how only half of the returning soldiers with PTSD receive the treatment they need. Think of how many we turn away - of how many we let fall through the cracks. We have to do better than this."
- President Obama, April 2008
"[I]t's also very likely that some of the veteran baby boomers who have filed claims in recent years did so not out of medical need but out of a desire for financial security ... [T]he rush of applications for long-term disability entitlements reflects the extent to which the culture of the DVA since Vietnam has become fixated on PTSD."
- Dr. Sally Satel, American Enterprise Institute, March 1, 2006