Meanwhile: A veteran patrols the home front

[babylonsister]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/19/opinion/edclines.php

Meanwhile: A veteran patrols the home front
By Francis X. Clines
Published: June 19, 2007

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And day after day Timmins has to grind his teeth at how swiftly, how vapidly the occasional news of troubled veterans is bumped aside by a deluge of bulletins about Paris Hilton or some other this-just-in frippery.

"It's staggering, sickening," he says. "There are days I scream at the television - lives are being taken, families left in heartbreak."

He half apologizes for being so properly obsessed. He muses that "compassion fatigue" is one of the risks of paying attention to veterans of a failed war now longer and far less glorious than World War II. A once pro-war public would sooner forget about it.

"The point is we got to galvanize this generation of veterans now, and not several years from now," he reminds himself. "Other national themes and issues will quickly follow this war - health care, whatever - and the vets better have a voice in the public dialogue."

But new veterans typically want to get deeply lost again in civilian life, not organize and beg for their rights. The three-year-old nonprofit group employing Timmins is one of the stronger veteran groups, and it has signed up 3,200 actual veterans as opposed to the 70,000 donors and other supporters looking for ways to help.

"In this war, you don't really engage a single enemy, so everybody becomes the enemy," Timmins explains, speculating that a warier veteran is returning, branded with the dark battlefield anomie of Iraq. "You have a generation of vets coming home from a fight where everybody was a threat. The mental health challenge is going to be tremendous."

As he works the home front, the Support Our Troops bumper stickers eat at Timmins. He concludes lip service is better than nothing, but fantasizes asking bumper-sticker patriots exactly how they support the troops.

"I figure they'd fumble, without an answer," he says. Then again, he hardly looks forward to the day the stickers fade entirely from sight.