How Can We Help Our Vets?

Just yesterday I went through a lot of feelings because my father chose to join up in the Army as soon as he could after Pearl Harbor.

Now my Dad is the youngest of the family of 7, 5 boys and 2 girls.

He shouldn't have had to go to war at all.  But I'm certain that he wouldn't be the man he became without that service.  I'm also certain that I have failed him in his hopes for his son because I could never accomplish the same feats he had.

To date, my father has never given me a hard time, but perhaps that is something specific to the Greatest Generation.  Perhaps there was a greater good that required the ultimate sacrifice for so many in order to garner a peace for the world.  Perhaps even greater was the sacrifice of those who came back and had to try to learn how to live in a "normal" world.

Since WWII we have had Korea, Vietnam, Grenada (?), Panama, and then the closest thing to another World War with both Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time.

We didn't lose the same number of troops, but we increased the requirements to apply new technologies towards getting our wounded back into the world of mobility, and I actually applaud that, since most military technologies seem to find their ways down to civilians.

But I still find it unacceptable that we use war to devise new technologies and have done so for the past 45 years.  RoundUp?  Night vision glasses?  The development of more and better-guided bombs?

The reason I'm having a problem with getting this article going is because all that I've just brought up are problems with using war to advance technologies, and we have become a society that accepts the technology of new arms and legs as if they were, in fact, as good as the originals.

They are not.

We put these people into harm's way as if they were fodder for the beasts of war.  We have created 10s of thousands of physically, mentally impaired veterans and current soldiers whom are only going to be shucked off onto the public with new mandates to hire when the rest of us can't get hired.

This makes no sense.  We have at least 18 million people out of work and yet still we honestly owe these men and women an opportunity to make a living in a society that asked them to go die for them.  Who would have thought our circumstances would be so dire as to have to compete with our returning veterans for jobs?  Even some of our Vietnam veterans are competing with our new veterans.  And how would you feel if you knew you got a job whilst leaving a PTSD Iraq veteran out on the street?

We are at a crux in time when our requirements far exceed our abilities, and who gets the short sheet in this environment?  Certainly not the people who are running companies that make the new, better-guided bombs.

I damned sure don't want our veterans to become so much cannon fodder.  You can't be that highly trained and then become some type of drag on society.  These guys are the most highly trained thinkers we have produced in our military, perhaps even in our society in the past 15 years, and even if you don't like the military, you can't take that away from them.  We're talking about people able to make life and death decisions in an instant and most of they time they are correct.

We need people like this in good, American jobs.

Then again, we still have the millions of people who have become victims of another sort of misapplication of their talents, largely from not recognizing their experience, their seniority, their abilities, in just the same environment our servicemen are coming back into.

Do we really need to continue to allow this misapplication of good, qualified workers to exist in years of war or years of joblessness?  How is this good for the psyche of any American?

Now let me try to point this out in terms that most of us can understand.

The number of our troops that went and fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq numbered about 200,000 per year over close to 9 years.  In terms of the numbers that fought the wars, that is a lot, but no, 2, 3, 4, 7 tours of duty changes the equation.  Over the years 2.5 million have been on foreign soil.  Vietnam was about 5 million, but most were all one tour troops, not the same people over and over again.  I can't even come to terms with just how that would feel.

When people talk about the 1% fighting the wars, forget it.  It's more like .1%, and that might be too large to be a proper count.

The same people fought the wars time and time again over a period of 10 years in Afghanistan and now 8 years in Iraq.  The same people.  Time and time again.

So what I'm talking about is a lack of jobs, plenty of qualified or trainable people to do the jobs we no longer have impetus to create, who have worked all their lives and been left behind, and new, qualified and highly desirable returning vets who absolutely have the right to a good job.

In fact, this appears to me to be a situation where our powers that be are creating a new schism between the people so that we pay attention to the wrong things.

I don't know how else to equate this except in terms of manipulation and taking advantage of human frailties.  We have supposed that sending men off to war would be profitable, if one wishes to believe George W. Bush's statement to several South American leaders.  The only way to achieve economic growth was war.  If one can believe the words of a country's President to Oliver Stone then it brings forth new realizations of the inability of the Bush administration's ability to think.

For instance, we've spent $1 Trillion in these wars so far, which is, by far, a greater cost than all of WWII for the entire world.  The fallout of these wars will reach into a multiple of that, which means lost revenues across the planet.

The cost of making a few Trillion Dollars worth of mistakes cannot be without costs across the planet.

When the Petronis Towers in Jakarta were built, they took almost the entire output of the world in steel products.  This is how small the world has become, but in our political environments, we seem to think that each country has the answers.

I've said this before, but I'll keep banging on it until people start to understand.

You don't present global solutions to local problems.  Conversely, local solutions may apply in some way to global problems, but not on the necessary scale.

When we send young men and women out to fight, we are not only adversely affecting our own environment by their deployment and possible loss, but those of whom they fight against.

The concepts of war in a global environment then becomes a local law enforcement problem, not the stuff of nations colliding 60 years ago.

Globalization does present a new version of what the world is, and therefore also provides for a lot of good in terms of the melding of people throughout the world, but also in terms of disallowing wars for resources, because the truth be spoken, we only have the resources of the world.

If control of a resource is the goal of a war, then the war cannot and should not be instituted much less sustained, because these resources have become a commodity available to the global environment.

If one building project in Jakarta can legally purchase most of the steel produced in a year, then Globalization has already occurred and our legislators are acting as if the United States is the biggest, strongest, richest Country in the World, almost all of which is false.

It is the mark of a failing empire to fall back on force to accomplish its mission, particularly if its mission is to continue its empire.

There can be no empire in a globalized world unless it is a world depressed by empire.  War, terrorism, even simple greed can, and should not, even be a topic for discussion in a truly globalized world.  The concepts are antiquated, the methods proven to produce unintended results, and are a pox on our ability to provide for just our own children, much less the continued growth of the global economy.

Now I know I started talking about how we can help our returning Vets, and I have not gotten off on a tangent because I am striving to show you that our previous decisions have created a situation where a world wide loss of economic growth and stability ultimately ends up further complicating the lives of the people who volunteered to serve our country.

So, how do you determine which Vets get preferential treatment by law in being hired over another?  Is a freshly returning Vet any more valued than our Vets from other wars?  Those of us from the Vietnam era are pretty much screwed one way or the other, but how about the Gulf War Vets?

Grenada?  Panama?  The Drug Wars?  Even with our "formal" theaters of war, how will our troops in other countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia fare?  All Vets aren't created equal when it comes to getting a job.  Believe me, I know.

Then again, with probably 25 Million people out of work, why should at most 500,000 get preferential treatment when others have put 25 or 30 years into work and get their retirement and benefits ripped from their deserving fingers.

Where is the validity of our promises to our people?  If we cannot believe the promises or have to parse out the level of validity of our promises to our own people, then we have made empty promises.

If the world views these empty promises for what they are, then we have failed on a number of other fronts too.

Now I'm only trying to cover the promise to employ Vets first, but obviously the topic keeps spreading out because of the implications of a number of policies, both old and new.

For instance, in a global environment, regardless of which country a company is from, isn't it better to build in the country of sale than to build in the country of origin?  This precludes the use of tremendous amounts of oil to transport fully assembled cars to a country across the world in ships.

The problem with the Bush administration was that it chose to make one last grasp effort at some level of empire, undoubtedly base on projections of peak oil, and they created a war in Iraq to support their efforts.

But Globalization had already negated the reasons behind the Neo-Cons idea of globalization through empire.  They just weren't smart enough to recognize that they way too late.

However, they chose to put our troops into the position of defending America on foreign soil through lies.  The Bush administration, along with the American people, thought that resources were still a viable reason for war.  I've often heard that America was supposed to bring back oil from Iraq on C-Span call-ins.

And because of this, I believe that returning Vets should have first dibs on new jobs, but not because of the reason you might think.  The reason I believe so is that they went and did the job, and Americans at home didn't do theirs.

We either believed the lies, or wholly bought into the concept that terrorism is a reason for war.  Terrorism always comes about with just a few people (in comparison to the world's population), but it becomes a reason to use techniques developed over centuries of creating an environment for war.

So yes, we owe our returning Vets jobs.  But we owe all our Vets jobs, and no less, all of our people who are out of work, along with the new graduates looking for work.

And we owe the world both an apology and a pledge to work towards the betterment of the people of the world, for no government has power without the assent of their people, and no world can survive in constant turmoil.

But we owe our people and our Vets an apology for putting them to a test they could not assess, nor was worth the requirements placed upon them.

And I write this as the Past Eastern District Commander of AmVets for the state of Virginia, who has dealt with returning Vets for a number of years.