Veteran With Cancer Wins Money To Save his Life, Can't Collect!!

Now what is wrong with this picture?

Cancer Victim Wins $1 Million, but Can't Get It

Rules Say Prize Must Be Stretched Over 20 Years

And nobody ever thought about the possibility of a situation like this arising, or did they?

Now New Yorkers may already know about this. If you do I hope you've contacted Albany with a few questions. I'm going to be up in Syracuse tomorrow, till next week, for my folks 65th wedding anniversary, and while there I plan on making a few calls myself.

But Schenk's dream-come-true soon turned into a nightmare. When he contacted the New York State Lottery about paying him the money in a lump sum, he learned that the rules of that particular game mandate a payout over 20 years, providing him only $50,000 a year. And he's been given only 12 to 18 months to live.

Well New Yorkers, you have what finally sounds like an Activist Governor, after all these years, hit him and the legislature with jammed lines!

Another action needed for Veterans, todays, from IVAV. It came in an e-mail call so I'll pass along the whole E:

Troops Need Counseling. Tell Congress.

A few days ago, we told you about the 2007 IAVA Legislative Agenda, which gives Congress 31 actions they can take to really support troops and veterans. Now, we need your help to make it work.
Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Barack Obama (D-IL) have introduced S117, the Lane Evans Act, which would address one of IAVA's Legislative Priorities: establishing mandatory mental health screenings for all returning combat veterans.

This bill would ensure ALL our troops get the counseling they need when they return home from war. The Lane Evans Act has bipartisan support -- but to get it moving, you need to let your legislators in Washington know that you stand behind it.

It only takes five minutes to make a difference for our veterans. Call your two Senators and your Representative today, and urge them to support the Lane Evans Act.
Click here to get your legislators' phone numbers. Below is a rough outline for what you can say when you call:

Script for Calling Your Representatives
"Good Morning/Evening.
My name is (Your Name) and I am calling from (City) .
I encourage (Name of your Senator/Representative) to stand with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, by passing S. 117 - the Lane Evans Veterans Healthcare & Benefits Improvement Act.
I believe that every returning soldier needs and deserves access to mandatory mental health counseling.
Thank you and have a good day."

Send a loud and clear message to Congress - tell your representatives you want them to stand with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Pass this on to three friends, and tell them to do the same. We're not relying on big-money TV ads or lobbyists - we're relying on you, our friends and supporters, to help create real change in Washington.

Thank you for standing with us.
Sincerely,
Patrick Campbell
Veteran, Operation Iraqi Freedom
Legislative Director
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America

P.S. This week, IAVA is bringing a delegation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to DC to meet with the legislators who can create real change in Washington. We're going to be blogging from the road every day during our trip. Check IAVA Blog for details.

'Democracy'

Discovering What Democracy Means
By Bill Moyers

Monday 12 February 2007

We are often asked whether our kind of journalism matters. People are curious about why we give so much time to novelists, playwrights, artists, historians, philosophers, composers, scholars, teachers-all of whom we consider public thinkers. The answer is simple: They are worth listening to.

Some years ago I was invited to testify before a House of Representatives committee on funding of the arts and humanities. Opponents were making their skepticism felt toward PBS, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I had been present at the creation of all three during my time in the White House with Lyndon Johnson, and now all three were once again in the crosshairs of conservatives like Ronald Reagan who were asking: "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" Reading Shakespeare, it was said, does not erase the budget deficit. Plunging into the history of the 15th century does not ease traffic jams. Listening to Mozart or reading the ancient Greeks does not repair the ozone layer.

We had recently produced two series on poetry called "The Language of Life" and "The Power of the Word." Our series on "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth" was resonating far and wide, much to the displeasure of sectarian dogmatists. We had created a documentary special called "The Power of the Past," about how Florence valued art for public, and not merely private, consumption. Our series "A World of Ideas" offered conversations from a wide spectrum of voices: Chinua Achebe, Carlos Fuentes, Northrop Frye, Joseph Heller, Thomas Wolfe, Richard Rodriguez, Bharati Mukherjee, Jonas Salk, William L. Shirer, Tu Wei-ming, Toni Morrison, Joanne Ciulla, Ernesto Cortes, M.F.K. Fisher, Mary Ann Glendon, Leon Kass, and so many others who opened viewers to what my old friend and colleague Eric Sevareid once called "news of the mind."

Critics said these programs taught no one how to bake bread or build bridges. And they were right. Despite public television - not to mention symphony orchestras, municipal libraries, art museums, and public theaters - crime was still rampant, the divorce rate was soaring, corruption flourished, legislatures remained stubbornly profligate, corporations cooked their books, liberals were loose in the world doing the work of the devil, and you still couldn't get a good meal on the Metro to Washington. Why persist, some members of Congress wanted to know, when there are so many more urgent needs to be met and so many practical problems to be solved?

I did not have a tried-and-true answer for members of the committee. I could not hand them a ledger showing that ideas have consequences. I chose instead to tell them what they could have learned if they had been listening to the people who appeared in our broadcasts.

They would have heard the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston say: "All human beings have this burden in life to constantly figure out what's true, what's authentic, what's meaningful, what's dross, what's a hallucination, what's a figment, what's madness. We all need to figure out what is valuable, constantly. As a writer, all I am doing is posing the question in a way that people can see very clearly."

They would have heard Peter Sellars, the iconoclastic director of Shakespeare in a swimming pool and Mozart in the Bronx, explain that he wants "to put our society up next to these great masterpieces. Are we thinking big enough? Are we generous of spirit? What does our society look like, next to the greatest things a human being ever uttered?"

They would have heard Vartan Gregorian, then head of the New York Public Library, talk about how "in a big library, suddenly you feel humble. The whole of humanity is in front of you. It gives you a sense of cosmic relation, but at the same time a sense of isolation. You feel both pride and insignificance. Here it is, the human endeavor, human aspiration, human agony, human ecstasy, human bravura, human failures - all before you. And you look around and say, 'Oh, my God! I am not going to be able to know it all.'"

They would have heard the philosopher Martha Nussbaum confess that in one sense there is no message or moral in the ancient Greek dramatists - "simply the revelation of life as seen through the sufferer." But there is a value, she went on, in seeing "the complexity that's there, and seeing it honestly, without flinching, and without reducing it to some excessively simple theory." You begin then, she said, to realize that trying to wrest a good life from the world may lead to tragedy, but you still must try.

They would have heard the filmmaker David Puttnam tell how as a boy he sat through dozens of screenings of A Man for All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More's fatal defiance of Henry VIII: "It allowed me the enormous conceit of walking out of the cinema thinking, 'Yeah, I think I might have had my head cut off for the sake of a principle.' I know absolutely I wouldn't, and I probably never met anyone who would, but the cinema allowed me that conceit. It allowed me for one moment to feel that everything decent in me had come together."

And they would have heard Mike Rose talk about what it's like teaching disadvantaged older college students in California. He had recounted to me his battle with a street-wise grownup who was flogging her way through Macbeth. "What does Shakespeare have to do with me?" she would ask. But when she finally got through the play she said to Mike Rose: "You know, people always hold this stuff over you. They make you feel stupid. But now, I've read it. I can say, 'I, Olga, have read Shakespeare.' I won't tell you I like it, because I don't know if I do, or I don't. But I like knowing what it's about." And Mike Rose said: "The point is not that reading Shakespeare gave her overnight some new discriminating vision of good and evil. What she got was something more precious: a sense that she was not powerless and she was not dumb."

Some members of Congress got it. They realized that we were talking not only about how to improve our lives as individuals but how to nurture a flourishing democracy. Wouldn't we have been likely to deal more effectively and quickly with pollution if we had thought about where we fit in the long sweep of the Earth's story? Could we better tackle our spending priorities as a society if we were prepared to acknowledge and confront the pain of conflicting choices, which the ancient poets knew to be the incubus of agony and the crucible of wisdom? Might we better decide how to use our wealth and power if we have measured and tested ourselves against the greatest things a human being ever uttered? Are we not likely to be more wisely led by officials who have learned from history and literature that great nations die of too many lies?

Furthermore, if we nurtured the higher affections of our intuition - what has been called our "inner tutor" - might we be more resolute in sparing our children from the appalling accretion of violent entertainment that permeates American life - what Newsweek described as "the flood of mass-produced and mass-consumed violence that pours upon us, masquerading as amusement and threatening to erode the psychological and moral boundary between real life and make-believe?"

We know who the enemies of democracy are. In his Jefferson Lecture the late Cleanth Brooks of Yale identified them as the "bastard muses" propaganda, which pleads, sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause or issue at the expense of the total truth; sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality. To counter the "bastard muses," Brooks proposed cultivating the "true muses" of the moral imagination. Not only do these arm us to resist the little lies and fantasies of advertising, the official lies of power, and the ghoulish products of nightmarish minds, they open us to the lived experience of others - to the affirmations of a heightened consciousness - to empathy. So it is that when Lear cried out to Gloucester on the heath: "You see how this world goes...." Gloucester, who was blind, answered: "I see it feelingly."

Many years ago we produced a series called "Six Great Ideas" with the didactic, irascible but compelling philosopher and educator, Mortimer Adler-one hour each on liberty, equality and justice, truth, beauty, and goodness. From the deluge of mail I kept two letters that summed up the response. One came from Utah.

Dear Dr. Adler, I am writing in behalf of a group of construction workers (mostly, believe it or not, plumbers!) who have finally found a teacher worth listening to. While we cannot all agree whether or not we would hire you as an apprentice, we can all agree that we would love to listen to you during our lunch breaks. I am sure that it is just due to our well-known ignorance as tradesmen that not a single one of us had ever heard of you until one Sunday afternoon we were watching public television and Bill Moyers came on with Six Great Ideas. We listened intensely and soon became addicted and have been ever since. We never knew a world of ideas existed. The study of ideas has completely turned around our impression of education ... We have grown to love the ideas behind our country's composition, and since reading and discussing numerous of your books we have all become devout Constitutionalists. We thank you and we applaud you. We are certain that the praise of a few plumbers could hardly compare with the notoriety that you deserve from distinguished colleagues, but we salute you just the same. We may be plumbers during the day, but at lunch time and at night and on weekend, we are Philosophers at Large. God bless you."
The second letter came from Marion, Ohio - from the federal prison there. The writer said he had been a faithful viewer of the series, and he described it as "a truly joyous opportunity ... for an institutionalized intellectual. After several months in a cell, with nothing but a TV, it was salvation."

Salvation. Deliverance. Redemption.

I had to think about this a while before I realized what he meant. He was, after all, a lifer. How is it a man condemned to an institution for the remainder of his years finds salvation in a television program? And then one day I came across something Leo Strauss had written. The Greek word for vulgarity, Strauss said, is apeirokalia, the lack of experience in things beautiful. Wherever you are and however it arrives, a liberal education can liberate you from the coarseness and crudity of circumstances beyond your control.

As I watch and listen to our public discourse today, it seems to me we are all "institutionalized" in one form or another, locked away in our separate realities, our parochial loyalties, our fixed ways of seeing ourselves and others. For democracy to prosper it requires us to escape those bonds and join what John Dewey called "a life of free and enriching communion" - to become "We, the People." The late James W. Carey, one of our noted scholars of communication, wrote that the very concept of "public" could once be defined as "a group of strangers who gather to discuss the news." In early America the printing press generated a body of popular knowledge. Towns were small, and taverns, inns, coffeehouses, street corners, and the public greens - the commons - were places where people gathered to discuss what they were reading. These places of public communication "provided the underlying social fabric of the town and, when the Revolution began, made it possible to quickly gather militia companies, to form effective committees of correspondence and of inspection, and to organize and to manage mass town meetings."

The public was no fiction, Carey said. The public had no life, no social relationships, without news. The news was what activated conversation between strangers, and strangers were assumed to be capable of conversing about the news. In fact, the whole point of the press was not so much to disseminate fact as to assemble people. The press furnished materials for argument - "information," in the narrow sense - "but the value of the press was predicated on the existence of the public, not the reverse." The media's role was humble but serious, and that role was to take the public seriously.

It would be hard to argue that we do so today, except in isolated examples. Our public conversation is mediated by politicians who have mastered "sound bites" sculpted from polling data, by "pundits" whose credibility increases with the frequency of exposure despite being consistently wrong, and "experts" whose authority depends not on reason, evidence or logic but on ideology and affiliation. The public, J.R. Priestly observed, "has been transformed into a vast crowd, a permanent audience, waiting to be amused."

What kind of "public intellectual" survives in such an environment? Turn on the television and you're likely to see them talking about the war in Iraq, for which they were cheerleaders, or the upcoming presidential race - still a year away. Notice where they sit - in a Times Square studio or a media stage in Washington, their messages beamed across the public airwaves courtesy of huge media conglomerates whose intent is not the informing of citizens but the maximizing of profit through the delivery to advertisers of mass audiences addicted to consumerism.

How forlorn a figure Socrates of Athens would be in this environment. Arguably the first public intellectual, proclaimed by the oracle of Delphi as the wisest of men, Socrates went about Athens on a divine mandate of self-reflection, some celestial spark glowing in his breast, some voice whispering in his head that only he could hear. Led by this voice he went to the wise men and great poets and master technicians of the city to cross-examine them, casting doubt on their knowledge by exposing their received opinions and unexamined assumptions, the deep-seated corruption of thought which leads to grave moral danger; or sometimes simply pointing to the common failing of so many experts: that of mistaking their expertise in one subject or practice for universal wisdom about the human condition.

Exposing the ignorance of the leaders was Socrates' way of helping the "cause of God," as he explained when he was put on trial. He reasoned thus from his interviews with them that the wisest of men - as the oracle, remember, described Socrates to be - is the one who is most conscious of his own ignorance, most aware of the limits of knowledge which are introduced by our limited methods of obtaining knowledge. Meletus, the main accuser featured in Socrates' Apology (as told by Plato), was a young religious fanatic who charged Socrates with believing in deities of his own invention rather than the gods recognized by the state. Scholars now believe that Meletus was simply a "front man" for political interests, put forward to stir the public against the philosopher-a forerunner of modern punditry, or maybe something quite like today's political fundamentalism.

I sadly think of [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell addressing the United Nations in February 2003, with his artist's renderings of those trailers that were supposed to be mobile biological warfare factories; and I think of all the rest of the cooked intelligence that sold so many of our public intellectuals on invading Iraq. It was too crude to even qualify as false wisdom on the Socratic model, really, but the resulting disaster - as great a blunder as Vietnam to which many of the same mistakes could be assigned-would result from relying on the knowledge of self-interested experts and deluded leaders. When they sentenced Socrates to death, he reminded them that they were proving how groundless knowledge made it impossible to escape from doing wrong. Succumbing to wishful thinking that leads to disastrous self-delusion, he pointed out, is the only real death. "When I leave this court," he said of his jurors, "I will go away condemned by you to death." But his accusers, he told them, "will go away convicted by truth herself...."

The Hebrew prophet was another kind of public intellectual, one who was also condemned and persecuted by the political elites he addressed. A century before Socrates, one of those prophets-Jeremiah-came from a small village into Jerusalem to preach repentance to a faithless Israel, with its houses full of treachery, and its rich kings and princes who gave no justice to the poor widow and the fatherless child.

And of course, near the end of his life, Jesus of Nazareth also went to Jerusalem, to preach the same message in an even more dangerous public way, confronting the ruling elites before great crowds on the Temple grounds. When he predicted their imminent destruction in his parable about the wicked tenants who hoarded the fruits of creation, his fate was sealed.

Jesus would not be crucified today. The prophets would not be stoned. Socrates would not drink the hemlock. They would instead be banned from the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages by the sentries of establishment thinking who guard against dissent with the one weapon of mass destruction most cleverly designed to obliterate democracy - the rubber stamp.

A stock broker who makes bad picks doesn't last too long. A baseball player in an extended slump gets traded. A worker made redundant by cheaper labor abroad or by a new machine - well, she's done for, too. But four years after the invasion of Iraq - the greatest blunder in foreign policy since Vietnam - the public apologists and advocates of the war flourish in the media, while the costs of their delusions accrue in body counts and lost treasure. A public that detests the war is relegated to the bleachers, fated to watch from afar the playing out by political and media elites of a game that has been rigged.

Yet the salvation of democracy requires a public aroused by the knowledge of what is being done to them in their name. Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means - what it bestows on us - the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. "I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being." So spoke Woodrow Wilson, the namesake of your foundation and, I would suggest, still your guiding spirit.

The only PhD ever to reach the White House was a public intellectual and genuine reformer who understood what a major battleground higher education was. He learned what the political struggle was about while a professor and later the president of Princeton, where he lost his share of institutional battles with wealthy alumni who largely controlled the university's development, and the nation beyond.

In his forgotten political testament The New Freedom (1913), Wilson took up something of the ancient, critical task of the public intellectual, a fact all the more remarkable in that he was president at the time. Louis Brandeis, the people's lawyer, was his inspiration and the source of this vision, but Wilson stood for it, right there at the center of power. "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of the great interests which now dominate our development." "No matter that there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States. They are going to own it if they can." But "there is no salvation," he said, "in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance." From his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate tax, tariff reform, and a resolute spirit "to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts."

Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand: "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak." That was true in 1800, it was true in 1860, in 1892, in 1912, and 1932; it was true in 1964, and it is true today. We have often been pressed to the limit, the promise of the Declaration and the ideals of the Gettysburg Address ignored or trampled upon and our common interests brought low. But every time there came a great wave of reform, and I believe one is coming again, helped along by the bright young people this foundation is nurturing.

We cannot build a political consensus or a nation across the vast social divides that mark our country today. Consensus arises from bridging that divide and making society whole again, the fruits of freedom and prosperity made available to the least among us. What we have to determine now, as Wilson said in his day, "is whether we are big enough ... whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven't had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance, in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our delegated authority."

As we face that challenge even today, a story about Helen Keller is worth remembering. Toward the end of her career, as she was speaking at a Midwestern college, a student asked: "Miss Keller, is there anything that could have been worse than losing your sight?" Helen Keller replied: "Yes, I could have lost my vision."

--------

Bill Moyers is chairman of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy andan independent journalist with his own production company. On February 7, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation presented Judith and Bill Moyers the first Frank E. Taplin, Jr. Public Intellectual Award for "extraordinary contributions to public cultural, civic and intellectual life." This is an excerpt of his remarks.

-------

"NEWS WAR"

Tuesday on FRONTLINE (PBS)
The Press's "Perfect Storm"

More than a year ago, FRONTLINE began a special project on the news business. Our initial question sounded simple. We wanted to know: what's happening to the news? It's a question that concerns those of us who have spent a lifetime in journalism (like myself) and, more importantly, many of you who have written over the years about FRONTLINE's reporting and the reporting of our colleagues in the national press, print and broadcast.
Beginning this Tuesday night, the answers to our question will unfold in four separate broadcasts over the next two months. For a listing, preview video and dates of all four programs, Visit Here

And, express your opinion about this program

Live Online Discussion on Washingtonpost.com ...
Producer Raney Aronson-Rath will be online this Wednesday, Feb. 14, at 11am ET, to discuss "News War."
For details, see:
Washington Post

The Dixie Chicks - I Hope

Dixie Chicks - Not Ready to Make Nice

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED:

Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild

On Watch; Newsletter of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild

The Task Force has established several priorities for its work in 2007. If you can help with research, writing, speaking, organizing, counseling or litigating in any of these areas, please contact the MLTF.

The priorities are:

*Supporting the rights of those resisting the military, including individual resistance and other dissent, such as petitions, coffeehouses, etc. We welcome the addition of more coffeehouses located at bases stateside.

*Creating programs to address the medical and psychiatric damage of the wars, including assisting the development of a veterans movement as well as challenging the system that hides this damage.

*Supporting our women's military rights project, which will challenge sexual harassment and sexual assault in the military.

*Supporting counter-recruitment and anti-militarism work in schools and communities.

Please call Marti Hiken at 415-566-3732 or Kathleen Gilberd at 619-234-1883 to help.

The Great Baghdad Surge

“They Were All Dry Holes”
As U.S. And Collaborator Commands Fight Each Other, Troops In The Field Find Nothing Much

Feb 9 By RYAN LENZ, Associated Press Writer

Iraqi commanders are urging the Americans to go after Sunni targets as the first focus of the military push to secure Baghdad, displaying a sectarian tilt that is delaying full implementation of the plan to drive gunmen from the streets, U.S. officers say.

American officers, interviewed at the sprawling Camp Victory base at the western edge of the capital, also acknowledge they are finding little in their initial searches of Baghdad neighborhoods — suggesting either they received faulty intelligence or that the massive publicity that preceded the operation gave militants time to slip away.

The chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said Wednesday that the much-anticipated Baghdad security operation was under way.

U.S. officers told The Associated Press that the delays in implementing the plan were in part a result of disagreements between American and Iraqi commanders about what neighborhoods should be cleared first.

During joint planning sessions, the Iraqis have been urging U.S. officials to focus on neighborhoods believed to harbor Sunni insurgents, according to officers familiar with the discussions. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is sensitive.

But one Iraqi general, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged there were differences between U.S. and Iraqi planners on the best way to conduct the operation, with each side insisting on the final say.

The Iraqi said his colleagues have the feeling the Americans "don’t trust us."

The U.S. officers said they had no intention of knuckling under to the Iraqi demands and were confident the Iraqis would come around in the end. But the dispute has resulted in delays, they said. [The nerve of those Iraqis. If they don’t like it, why don’t they go back where they came from?]

Those differences have also held up a final decision how to carve up the city into the nine zones and where to deploy Iraqi units that are being sent in for the operation, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

Iraqi commanders are supposed to send about 8,000 mostly Shiite and Kurdish troops into the city from southern and northern Iraq.

Although Iraqi units have been arriving on schedule, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week that they were coming with only 55 to 65 percent of their intended troops.

This week, a joint U.S.-Iraqi force swept through Shaab, a largely Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad where militiamen clashed with American soldiers last year.

The search was the largest so far since the new operation began.
But the troops managed to capture only 16 suspects and seize three Kalashnikov rifles in a neighborhood that intelligence said was a hotbed of bomb-makers.

"I don’t know if it’s bad information, bad intelligence, of if they knew we were coming and left," said Capt. Isaac Torres of the Army’s 3rd Brigade Stryker Combat Team.

"They were all dry holes."

Famous Last Words
A U.S.-Iraqi offensive against militants in Baghdad will begin within days and take place on a scale never seen during four years of war. Washington Times, February 5, 2007

“Maybe We Will Be Greeted With Flowers....

When We Stop Handing Out Destruction, Death, And Deflated Waste”

Feb. 07, 2007 By Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

On a hot summer morning in 2004, Garett Reppenhagen dragged himself out of his cot at a rudimentary Army base, 40 miles north of Baghdad, for a briefing on the day’s combat mission.

His battalion of the 1st Infantry Division was holed up in an abandoned warehouse and sleeping in steel trailers with sandbags stacked in the windows. They were stationed on the outskirts of Baquba, a city rife with insurgents in the violent Sunni Triangle. As the soldiers gathered around their Humvees, Reppenhagen, a scout and sniper, figured he knew what his lieutenant was going to say.

There had probably been another roadside bomb nearby. That meant Reppenhagen and his platoon, acting on intelligence that might be good or bad, would drive their Humvees into a nearby neighborhood, seal off entire town blocks, search houses and round up a bunch of men who might or might not have some tie to the insurgency.

What the lieutenant told them, however, had nothing to do with the enemy.

They were going to hand out soccer balls to Iraqi kids in the surrounding villages. Reppenhagen was surprised. "You do so much crappy shit over there that when you get a mission to actually help people, it’s encouraging," he said.

Reppenhagen, now 31, has certainly seen his share of crappy missions.

During his 2004 duty in the Sunni Triangle, he was sent on countless raids. On nighttime patrols, when a muzzle flash appeared from a darkened building, he and his platoon would respond with the full force of .50-caliber machine guns mounted atop Humvees until the ammunition was spent -- even if that meant leveling a nearby building.

If an insurgent was thought to be hiding in a house, they’d call in a tank to blow it up rather than do a risky search on foot.

As a member of a six-man sniper team, Reppenhagen was ordered to track down and kill insurgents in extremely dangerous areas. At other times, he and his battalion would cordon off streets, kick in doors on squat cement houses, and detain men 18 and over for minor offenses like being in a house other than their own or failing to show proper ID.

"Half of the time, we got the wrong damn house," Reppenhagen said.

At least handing out soccer balls, he thought, was one thing the Army could do right.

At Forward Operating Base Scunion, the camp’s official name, the lieutenant told Reppenhagen and company to pick up the load of balls from Forward Operating Base Warhorse, which was close by. They would then drive around the towns of Al-Hadid,
Hib Hib and Kahlis and hand them out to the kids who often ran beside the Army Humvees and called out for candy, water or money.

Of course, there was an ulterior motive to the kindly gesture, as it behooved the Army to earn the sympathies of local Iraqis, who could aid them in the search for insurgents. The operation could be seen, in the parlance of the Army counterinsurgency manual, as maintaining "moral legitimacy" with the Iraqis.

After all, nothing is more popular in Iraq than soccer. "There are soccer fields everywhere," Reppenhagen said. "Mostly it is just dirt lots. They don’t have goal posts and so use stumps. Sometimes the kids play in the street. I swear, all they do all day long is play soccer."

It wasn’t clear who came up with the idea to win over Iraqis with soccer balls.
A March 2004 press report from the Pentagon describes a unit of the 1st Armored Division handing out soccer balls in the Karadah district of Baghdad. "The children were thrilled to receive new soccer balls as soldiers tossed the balls to the boys and girls," the report said.

In a December 2004 release, Kiowa helicopter pilots with the 1st Cavalry Division are described tossing soccer balls to grateful kids in an operation aptly dubbed "Operation Soccer Ball."

Spc. Thom Cassidy, who worked in the logistics shop in Reppenhagen’s battalion, recalled that giving out soccer balls to the kids around Baquba was passed down from higher command to a battalion colonel at the base.

In any event, Cassidy said, "this was a very, very Army idea. This was the prototypical Army idea."

At Forward Operating Base Warhorse, Reppenhagen and his fellow soldiers encountered a five-ton truck stacked with large cardboard boxes. They began to unload the truck and open the boxes. There were maybe 50 soccer balls in each box.

But the balls had not been inflated. They were all flat. Reppenhagen scoured the boxes. No pumps. What was worse, nobody had bothered to pack the needles to inflate the balls.

Resourceful soldiers that they were, the men carried some of the balls to mechanics in the motor pool. "They tried to pump them up with tire pumps," Reppenhagen said. But the mechanics had the equipment to inflate Humvee tires, not soccer balls.
Frustrated, the soldiers asked their commanding officers what to do.

None were sure. They kept calling their own superiors.

Cassidy suggested that they order pumps and needles, which would arrive in about two weeks.

The battalion colonel quickly tired of the whole discussion and said he wasn’t about to requisition soccer ball pumps.

"He decided this was a waste of time," Cassidy said. "His thought was, ‘Iraqis should be grateful.’ Not, ‘They will be grateful’ -- ‘They should be.’"

Finally, the lieutenant commanded the troops to deliver the balls to the children. "He was pretty much like, ‘Shut up and hand out these soccer balls,’" Reppenhagen said.

It seemed crazy. "We were so pissed," said Reppenhagen. But orders are orders.
When you are told to hand out flat soccer balls, you hand out flat soccer balls.
So the soldiers who served in 2nd Battalion, 63rd Armored Regiment piled the flat soccer balls into their Humvees. Driving through the Sunni Triangle’s war-torn towns, they tossed the deflated balls to children, who crowded the sides of the roads, running beside the canals and lush greenery that lined the banks of the Diyala River.

"Kids were swarming us," Reppenhagen said. "We went to a couple of schools and delivered stacks of them. Everybody we saw got a flat soccer ball."
Which, of course, the kids quickly figured out.

Pretty soon, Reppenhagen recalled, "They were like, ‘What are you doing? What are we supposed to do with this?"

When the Humvees began to retrace their route back to the base, the futility of the operation was becoming painfully clear. "Kids were wearing these soccer balls as hats," Reppenhagen said. "They were kicking them around. They were in trees. They were floating in canals. They were everywhere. There were so many soccer balls."

Today, Reppenhagen still cringes when he recalls the soccer ball operation, which to him says so much about the entire U.S. occupation in Iraq.

He recently left his job at Veterans for America, a veterans’ advocacy group, and currently serves on the board of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

A spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division, Lt. Col. Christian T. Kubik, said Reppenhagen’s battalion commander does not recall the soccer ball operation. In an e-mail, he took issue with the characterization of soldiers blindly following orders when they handed out the deflated balls.

"America is filled with veterans who know that this comic view of soldiers dumbly following orders is completely without basis and almost laughable in its propagation of stereotype," Kubik wrote. "Soldiers are Americans, not automatons." He added: "To focus on the air in the balls, or lack thereof, undermines the American spirit of generosity and completely misses the point of giving."

Reppenhagen said he certainly knows what he and his platoon got when they drove to the base: The Iraqi kids were expressing their hearts and minds with rocks and stones.

"On the way back, kids were throwing rocks at us," he said. "I assumed it was because we gave them deflated soccer balls.
Maybe if we had given them inflated soccer balls, they would have been out playing soccer."

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$12 Billion Went Missing In Baghdad:
“This Was Happening When American Soldiers And Marines Were Going Without Properly Armored Vehicles, Without Lifesaving Body Armor And Even Without Some Of The Weapons They Needed”