How We Could Do More For Our Vets

We need to go into debt to pay our debt to U.S. veterans to make sure they get the care and services we owe them

I spent several hours on Memorial Day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. There is nothing notable or exceptional about my presence. I was too young to serve, and no name close to me is there for the etching, tears, or swollen sense of loss. Two cousins of mine (their sense of modesty seeks anonymity) served and came home alive and whole. One served two tours in Vietnam—the second as an artillery officer. He remained in the Army as part of the generation of junior officers who dedicated their post-Vietnam careers to improving the tattered, demoralized, and generally ill-disciplined fighting force that emerged from Southeast Asia. He retired as a colonel after tours in Germany and South Korea, among other places, and several years as an artillery instructor at what is now Joint Base Lewis-McCord.

My cousin suffers from Parkinson's and has for almost 20 years. His care, of course, is covered, and the costs rise as his condition deteriorates. It's a slow decline, as anyone who has witnessed Parkinson's can attest. But my cousin is as brave and heroic to me as he was when I was a child. Back then, I helped my mother tape water-tight (or so we hoped) care packages headed for impossibly distant Vietnam. I thought about my cousins at the wall. I thought about their needs and how, in the main, they are being met. read more>>>

"If military action is worth our troops’ blood, it should be worth our treasure, too — not just in the abstract, but in the form of a specific ante by every American." -Andrew Rosenthal 10 Feb. 2013

The WWII Generation, the Greatest Generation, Sacrificed for the Nation and those it sent to fight, during and after! Since the Forgotten War, Korea, and the decades and other wars of, the only ones Sacrificing are those serving and their families, while the country under funds the Veterans Administration while ignoring many of the issues of those who served in it's wars! Leaving the costs and damaged policies to the generations to come, deficits are borrowed money with interest rates attached, while bringing on more failed policies and long occupations to those generations and for the next ones to deal with the results of!

Rachel Maddow: "We got a huge round of tax cuts in this country a few weeks before 9/11. Once 9/11 happened and we invaded Afghanistan, we kept the tax cuts anyway. How did we think we were going to pay for that war? Did we think it was free?"

"Then, when we started a second simultaneous war in another country, we gave ourselves a second huge round of tax cuts. After that second war started. The wars, I guess, we thought would be free, don`t worry about it, civilians. Go about your business." 23 May 2013

These recent two wars, while abandoning quickly why we even sent our military into that region, the country was told to go shopping. And since the only Government Branch, and it's Cabinet, doing what they can are the present Executive Branch using what resources they can from within and arm twisting some in the private sector while being falsely condemned by those doing nothing!