Government fails veterans

[playahata1]

(Got this courtesy of BuzzFlash. Long article. Read and weep.)

http://foi.missouri.edu/polinfoprop/permanent.html

The Freedom of Information Center
The Permanent Scars of Iraq

By SARA CORBETT
Sara Corbett is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
The New York Times Magazine
Feb. 15, 2004

Robert Shrode can't sleep.

At night, in the fly-speck town of Guthrie, Ky., in the rented farmhouse he shares with his 20-year-old wife, Debra, he surfs the Internet, roams the house. He lies down and gets up again. He drinks a beer and stares out the window at the black fields beyond. Hours pass. He can't sleep. Before the war, he could have six beers and sleep like a baby, but now that works against him. Drinking may help get his head to the pillow, but it also ratchets up the nightmares. For a while, he sweated out his bad dreams on the living-room couch, and it drove Debra crazy. She would come down from the bedroom, touch his shoulder, ask what the problem was. Shrode would just turn his back to her and not say a word. Now she knows better than to ask, though occasionally when the silence between them gets too deep, she'll put it out there, What're you thinking about?

"Iraq," he'll say. And then the silence falls again.

He pops Ambien to coax some sleep. The results are mixed. On the advice of his doctors, he is taking three different pills for pain, a pill for swelling and another pill for depression. There are days when he is unrecognizable to himself, a guy who a few years ago was a party-loving bartender at a Mississippi casino and who is now 29 and engaged in what can feel like a never-ending battle to see his own future brightly.

(LOTS more)

[Racenut20]

1. Every ChickenHawke in the world should read this.

[leftchick]

2. very disturbing....

this should be required reading for those asses in Washigton who say

"We are safer" :puke:

[tabasco]

3. The corporate cabal considers soldiers expendable.

After they are used up they are worthless, like a broken machine.