Bush Keeps Screwing The Troops

The New York Times has today's must read story about the treatment of American soldiers who have suffered a traumatic brain injury while in Iraq. Here's one snippet:

“The hospital continually told me that Jarod was not making adequate progress and that the next step was a nursing home,” Ms. Behee said. “I just felt that it was unfair for them to throw in the towel on him. I said, ‘We’re out of here.’ ”

Because Ms. Behee had successfully resisted the Army’s efforts to retire her husband into the V.A. health care system, his military insurance policy, it turned out, covered private care. So she moved him to a community rehabilitation center, Casa Colina, near her parents’ home in Southern California in late 2005.

Three months later, Sergeant Behee was walking unassisted and abandoned his government-provided wheelchair. Now 28, he works as a volunteer in the center’s outpatient gym, wiping down equipment and handing out towels. It is not the police job that he aspired to; his cognitive impairments are serious. But it is not a nursing home, either.

The whole piece deserves reading. We cannot leave these soldiers to the insufficient care they are receiving from a VA system unprepared to deal with this level of TBIs. We, as a country, must do more to help their families who - as the article shows - are making heroic efforts caring for their loved ones.

The Bushies, of course, failed to foresee this strain on the VA system. Whats next with these incompetents? Deploying injured soldiers?

Wait a minute! They are fucking deploying the injured. Salon has this:

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.