IAVA and Ad Council Launch National PSA Campaign for Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan

The Video:

IAVA and Ad Council Launch National PSA Campaign for Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan | With Video

Eating Sh*t (and drinking it, breathing it, coughing it, living in it…)

I’ve often wondered how many of the mysterious health problems that troops have emanate from living in the haze of burning waste that hangs over large concentrations of GIs.  An article in Army Times dug a little deeper into the pile: 

Burn pit at Balad raises health concerns – Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports – Army Times

An open-air “burn pit” at the largest U.S. base in Iraq may have exposed tens of thousands of troops, contractors and Iraqis to cancer-causing dioxins, poisons such as arsenic and carbon monoxide, and hazardous medical waste, documentation gathered by Military Times shows.

The billowing black plume from the burn pit at 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, the central logistics hub for U.S. forces in Iraq, wafts continually over living quarters and the base combat support hospital, sources say.

Apparently, they are now setting up real incinerators. We were working on leach fields for the Iraqi Army when I was at Camp Caldwell but we were burning our waste each day.

Balad’s average daily output of almost 250 tons of waste is three times higher than the average of 83 tons per day generated by the city of Juneau, Alaska, which has a comparable population.

In a memo dated Dec. 20, 2006, Air Force Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, former bioenvironmental flight commander for Joint Base Balad, wrote of the burn pit: “In my professional opinion, there is an acute health hazard for individuals. There is also the possibility for chronic health hazards associated with the smoke.”

Air Force bioenvironmental engineers are experts in occupational and environmental workplace hazards.

Most large U.S. installations in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, have burn pits. A report recently released by the Rand Corp. think tank concluded that the military has no standard operating procedure or training policy for making sure those pits are operated properly.

This is one of those things that I think most troops will put up with (for a while!) but after five years you’d think we’d have a better solution. I laughed when I got the three page memo on how to burn waste while I was there – now apparently someone needs a manual to get rid of it.

Money in Chairs

A motto of the Army has always been “hurry up and wait” but as I sit for now the second hour in a row of chairs with over 40 other people – I mostly see money (tax dollars) spiralling down the drain. I am waiting to renew a CAC (computer access card) for the third time this year. The chairs are full of Soldiers who definitely have better things to do, family members who wished they did, retirees who’ve already done it, and contractors who are paid a signifigant hourly wage as they sit and listen to the kids earn their ADHD meds. If I had to take a swag and average the hourly cost per person sitting here it would be around $14 or 15 per hour. So the cost to the government might be somewhere around five grand per hour. So, in just two or three days of waiting room time we could pay an extra employee to process faster and probably pay off the building cost of a bit more office space in a week or two. But – we always seem to count Soldier time as free.
And that doesn’t even go to stress or frustration or the effect on morale that such a grand waste of time can bring. This attitude bleeds into many parts of life – I learned long ago that Home Depot’s personnel budget was more important than my Saturday morning. Now I go elsewhere and they can keep their stuff.

Co-President? I Don’t Think So!

La Dame Ferrell pointed this out, from The New York Review of Books (to be published?) on November 20, 2008

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22060?email

The Co-President at Work  By David Bromwich

When George W. Bush testified before the 9/11 Commission, Dick Cheney was with him in the Oval Office. What was said there remains a secret, but throughout the double session, it appears, Cheney deferred to Bush. Aides to the President afterward explained that the two men had to sit together for people to see how fully Bush was in control. A likelier motive was the obvious one: they had long exercised joint command but neither knew exactly how much the other knew, or what the other would say in response to particular questions. Bush also brought Cheney for the reason that a witness under oath before a congressional committee may bring along his lawyer. He could not risk an answer that his adviser might prefer to correct. Yet Bush would scarcely have changed the public understanding of their relationship had he sent in Cheney alone. ‘When you’re talking to Dick Cheney,’ the President said in 2003, ‘you’re talking to me.’

As information does come out about possible infractions of the law, transgressions against the Constitution, or anything else; I’ll bet that we hear the excuse “he was isolated – his advisors betrayed him” over and over. BS! I say.  He’s the boss, was the boss, sought out and reinforced his role time and again.  If Cheney’s office was crazy then it was because the President allowed it to be so.  He is responsible. Others may be so too, but ultimately, the man who worked so hard to accrue so much executive power also shares responsibility and ultimately – culpability.

Danger Room from Wired.com

I’m quoted at the Danger Room:  Iraq, Afghanistan MIA in New Military Ad Campaign | Danger Room from Wired.com

Iraq vet Perry Jeffries thinks the effort is a little misguided. “Although one would have to be an idiot to not think of combat / Iraq / Afghanistan, they should address it upfront, to counter the… ‘I just joined for college money’ argument,” he tells DANGER ROOM.

It’s Coming – Vets Compete for Shelters and Treatment

Anna Sussman highlights the continuing and yet-to-come homelessness problem for Vets.  She tells the story of three Vets with differing situations, including the mother of two children.  I think that she is fair both to the Vets and to the government, which is struggling to stay ahead of the problem.  One shelter is full but :

But by all accounts, the VA is far better prepared this time than it ever has been in the past. With an understanding that the looming homeless crisis is best treated as a mental health issue, it has hired 17,000 mental health workers, making it the largest mental health program in the country.

But with some 2 million active service members still fighting and undergoing the trauma of war, Moss wonders if any amount of preparation by the VA can address the fundamental problem of readjustment.

And that is a big part of the problem to come – a huge number of Veterans that will one day be at the VA’s door.  They are working hard to cope now and the Congress has been good about pushing resources forward.  But with most Veterans of the new wars still in the Armed Services, the ones that are reporting to the VA now are like little ripples compared to the tsunami headed their way. 

There is already a struggle for mental health resources in the U.S.  In some places DoD and the VA are actually competing with each other for personnel.  And we are not even talking about the families and communities of Veterans left out because of Reserve and National Guard deployments.  Organizations like Mental Health America and the groups behind the Veterans Mental Health Outreach Act are trying hard but there is a lot to be done.  You should read the whole article here: Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans join the homeless . 

IAVA is using Veterans Week to highlight one place that families can look for solutions and resources. It is called Support Your Vet and will go live soon but more remains to be done.  Our government and all of us – the citizenry – must understand that one of the costs of war is the effect on the men and women conducting it. That cost should be figured in and paid up front and not left for the end, when the troops have to compete for the scraps.

Shoulda Paid Attenshun’

It seems that the Air Force just can’t catch a break but maybe Mr. Gates’ standards-driven expectations are just catching up to them.   Here’s some accountability on a senior leader…

SEOUL – The commander of a U.S. fighter wing in Korea will soon be replaced as the outgoing commander of the Air Force unit has been relieved of his duties for poor performance.

Col. Bryan Bearden, the commander of the 8th Fighter Wing based in the southwestern city of Gunsan, was relieved of his duties as of Nov. 10, the Air Force unit said in a report posted on its Web site.

“Col. Bryan Bearden was relieved of command by Gen. Howie Chandler, commander of Pacific Air Forces,” it said, adding the decision was driven “solely by duty performance factors.”

AF Commander Relieved of Duty in Korea

CQ Politics | CIA Wants Obama to ‘Have Its Back’ When Things Go Wrong

I like Cressey but I think that he might be missing the point here.  “Got your back” should not cover straight-up crime and worthless outrages against society, like torture.

From  CQ Politics | CIA Wants Obama to ‘Have Its Back’ When Things Go Wrong

“What the intelligence community is afraid of more than anything is the game of ‘Gotcha,’” Cressey said. “Which is, if they make a mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, the White House doesn’t support them, they’re left out to dry, and Congress crushes them. And then you get into that risk-averse mentality, which we saw for awhile. So that is what they want. They want support, so they know that the president is going to be behind them. But also that he’s going to lead them.”

No one should get a free ride on that and I think it needs to be pulled out by the roots.  Whoever did it, authorized it, turned a blind-eye to it should be grabbed up, stood in the dock, and have a fair and public hearing.  At this point, it’s not like the whole world doesn’t know we did it (torture and rendition).  Pretty much only the American public is ignorant to even some of the specifics by now and there are very few real “secrets” or “protected methods” left unreported on. This whole thing smells like a demand for immunity for sadistic crimes.  If an agent is so broken that they feel these methods are legit then we don’t need to have them walking around with a sense of impunity. They need to be off the street and off the case.

Phantom Thunder

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>CTVS Memorial Ceremony

From the Air:

Say Your Status for the President