Oh, the inhumanity


It is said that you can judge a country's humanity by how it treats it veterans. I guess that places us somewhere between the bone-wielding primates in "2001 Space Odyssey" and the Visigoths. The military hospital, Walter Reed, and the Veterans Administration are a plague upon our house. Billeting the war-wounded in conditions that include rats, molding walls, and water leaks is horrifying enough--to find out that the present adminstration tried to cut the budget of the already overwhelmed Veterans Administration last fiscal period is just inconceivable. There are over 24,000 wounded from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and because "we" didn't plan for this amount of wounded passing through the system, it somehow becomes a "tragic mistake" rather than a idiotic miscalculation on our government's part. You can dress this ugly up in any sematics that you want, but it is sheer callousness. Both the adminstration and the legistrative branch deserve a prolonged vacation in Fallujah. You can't convince me that veterans and/or their families didn't complain to their respective congressmen, or didn't write letters to the administration.

And I haven't even discussed the Iraqi hospitals, and our government's blatant refusal to give anything but nominal help. Non-profit organizations have extended more of a hand.

The shame, the shame. If my grandfather, who fought in the trenches of WWI, was alive, he would be horrified. He received better care, in 1920, for exposure to mustard gas, than our veterans receive presently.

Good luck with that recruiting for a "Volunteer Army" after this fiasco. As if the war, itself, wasn't bad enough.