( Tomdispatch.com) – In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material? What I wanted to know was: How did he ever get accepted into the Air Force in the first place?

Teixeira seems to have leaked that secret information for online bragging rights rather than ideological reasons, so his transgression probably wouldn’t have fallen under the military’s newly reinforced regulations on extremist activities. After he was indicted, however, perturbing details about his behavior emerged, including his online searches for violent extremist events, an outsized interest in guns, and social media posts that an FBI affidavit called “troubling” and I’d call creepy.

Ideological zealotry is disruptive wherever it takes root, even if it never erupts into violence, but it’s particularly chilling inside the military. After all, servicemembers have access to weapons and the training to use them. Even more significant, a kind of quid pro quo exists between the military and civilians. Trust is paramount within the military and every service member is supposed to abide by a code of ethics, as well as by the Constitution, to which all of them swear an oath.

In theory, a democratic civil society invests its military with the authority to use force in its name in exchange for the principled conduct of its members. Military service is supposed to be a higher calling and soldiers better (or at least better behaving) people. So when active-duty personnel or veterans use violence against the system they’re sworn to protect, the sting of betrayal is especially sharp. 

Whoops!

In a photo of Teixeira in a neat dress uniform that accompanied media reports, he’s a bright-eyed kid with stick-out ears and a sweet half-smile. He looks young and promising, the kind of guy people offer thanks to when they see him in uniform at an airport. In reality, however, everything else about him was a red flag. 

The Washington Post found videos and chat logs that suggested he was getting ready for a race war. Former classmates told CNN that he had been obsessed with guns and war. He was suspended from high school for comments he made about Molotov cocktails. His first application for a gun license was denied, but he kept trying and was eventually approved, over time amassing a trove of handguns, rifles, shotguns, high-capacity weapons, and a gas mask, which he kept in a gun locker about two feet from his bed. 

Granted, some of this activity didn’t begin until he enlisted in 2019 and no one’s advocating that military recruiters make bedroom checks. Still, recruits are supposed to go through a careful vetting process. Family, friends, teachers, and classmates may be interviewed to assess a recruit’s character and fitness. Such background checks are designed to detect things like racist tattoos, drug use, gang affiliation, or arrest records, but are inevitably limited in what they can discover about young people without much life experience, including the teenage gamers the Air Force woos for their up-to-the-minute technical skills who may not prove to be the most level-headed crew — people, in fact, like Jack Teixeira.

Buy the Book

In his case in particular, the vetting of service members for handling the top-secret or sensitive-compartmentalized-information security clearances he received in 2022 is supposed to be particularly thorough. I was first faced with this reality when a government agent showed up at my door, flashed a badge, and asked me about a neighbor applying for a clearance. He inquired all too casually about whether I had noticed anything telling, like lots of liquor bottles in his trash. (That left me wondering how many people check their neighbor’s garbage.) 

Teixeira’s posts of classified material taken from the computers of the intelligence unit at the Cape Cod air base where he was stationed first appeared on Thug Shaker Central, a small, obscure chat group which appealed largely to teenage boys through adolescent humor, a fetishistic love of guns, and extreme bigotry. It was hosted on the gamer-centric platform Discord. At first, he posted transcribed documents, then began photographing hundreds more in his parents’ kitchen and started uploading copies of them filled with secret materials on the U.S., its allies, and its enemies. Someone at Thug Shaker began sharing those posts more widely and they made their way to Russian Telegram channels, Twitter, and beyond — and Teixeira was in big trouble.

Since he seems to have made no effort to hide who he was, no one could call him the world’s smartest criminal. He made it all too easy for the FBI to track him down. By then, Air Force officials had already admonished him for making suspicious searches of classified intelligence networks, but allowed him to stay in his job. That’s where the Justice Department charged him with the retention and transmission of classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917, which had already caught in its maw journalists, dissidents, whistleblowers (including Daniel Ellsberg, who, to the end of his life, wanted to challenge the act in court on First Amendment grounds), and most recently, another hoarder of classified documents, former President Donald Trump. 

In June, Teixeira pleaded not guilty on six counts, each carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Probably just as happy to let the civilians handle it, the Air Force removed the intelligence division from his unit, but it hasn’t yet brought charges against him.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a policy and procedure review to assess how bad Pentagon security really was. The results, made public on July 5th, gave the military a passing grade but, with a firm grasp of the obvious, recommended more careful monitoring of the online activities of personnel with security clearances.

Small Numbers, Outsized Impact

Rhetoric and regulations addressing extremism in the military date back to at least 1969 and have been tinkered with since, usually in response to hard-to-ignore events like the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan in 2009. In reaction to the material Chelsea Manning (who was anything but an extremist) leaked to WikiLeaks to reveal human-rights abuses connected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Department of Defense created a counter-insider threat program around 2014. Six years later, the Army revised its policies for the first time to face the potential role of social media in extremist activities.

Tracking and reporting on extremism in the military has not been without controversy, which tended to be of the let’s-not-air-our-dirty-laundry-in-public variety. In 1986 when, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center informed the Department of Defense (DoD) that active-duty Marines were participating in the Ku Klux Klan, the Pentagon responded that the “DoD does not prohibit personnel from joining such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan.” (It still doesn’t name or ban specific organizations in its regulations.) And when, in 2009, a Department of Homeland Security assessment warned of right-wing extremists recruiting veterans, conservative politicians and veterans groups killed the report which, they claimed, was insulting to veterans. 

Then came the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A striking number of participants proved to have military connections or histories — 13.4% to 17.5% of those charged, depending on who’s counting — and the Pentagon could no longer ignore the problem. Defense Secretary Austin ordered an unprecedented, day-long stand-down to educate all military personnel on extremist activity and then created the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group, or CEAWG, to come up with a plan for dealing with that anything-but-new reality.

It’s not possible to pin down the true scope of the phenomenon, but the Center for Strategic and International Studies found active-duty and reserve personnel were linked to 7 of the 110 terrorist attacks and plots the FBI investigated in 2020. That same year, the New York Times estimated that active-duty military personnel and veterans accounted for at least 25% of antigovernment militias. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League identified 117 active-duty service personnel and 11 reservists on a leaked membership list from the Oath Keepers, the far-right antigovernment militia prominently involved in January 6th events. CEAWG, on the other hand, claimed that, in 2021, there were fewer than 100 substantiated cases of military personnel involved in officially prohibited extremist activity in the past year.

While such reckonings suggest that just a small number of servicemembers are actively involved in extremist violence, even a relative few should be concerning for obvious reasons.

Report, Revise, Reconsider

Opportunities to identify and prevent extremism arise at three junctures: during recruitment, throughout the active-duty years, and in the discharge process when those transitioning back to civilian life may be especially susceptible to promises of camaraderie and ready action from extremist groups. As 2021 ended, the Pentagon’s working group reported that it had addressed such vulnerabilities by standardizing questionnaires, clarifying definitions, and — that old bureaucratic fallback — commissioning a new study. 

The revised rules included a long list of banned “extremist activities” and a long definition of what constitutes “active participation.” In addition to the obvious — violence, plans to overthrow the government, and the leaking of sensitive information — prohibited acts include liking, sharing, or retweeting online content that supports extremist activities or encouraging DoD personnel to disobey lawful orders with the intention of disrupting military activities.

Active participation includes organizing, leading, or simply attending a meeting of an extremist group and distributing its literature on or off base. Commanders may declare places off-limits where “counseling, encouraging, or inciting Service members to refuse to perform duty or to desert” occurs. That also sounds like it could apply to gatherings of antiwar groups like Veterans for Peace, where supporting war resisters is part of their mission. And therein lies the rub.

As in the past, the updates focus on activity, rather than speech, which is a good thing, but figuring out how to suppress extremism without turning into the thought police is challenging, particularly in light of the prominence of social media and the impossibility of monitoring everyone’s online activity. The result: regulations that are both too vague and too restrictive and a recipe for implementing the rules unfairly. 

In military culture, reporting is often equated with snitching and retaliation is common. Since it’s not practicable to draw bright lines between what’s allowed and what isn’t, that determination rests ultimately (and sometimes ominously) with commanders. The regulations urge them to balance First Amendment rights with “good order and discipline and national security.” In reality, however, such decisions too often fall prey to bias, distrust, self-interest, racial disparities, and a history of bad faith.

Then there’s the issue of paying for the extra work the rules require. The only relevant funding seems to be a puny $13.5 million for the insider-threat program. Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget that recently exited the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee makes it a “conservative priority” to defund the position of Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military. So anti-extremism may prove but one more victim of anti-diversity and, even without that, if money is a measure of commitment, the military’s commitment to fighting extremism is looking lukewarm at best.

Consistently Inconsistent

Recently, the Center for New American Security, a D.C.-based think tank, damned the military’s efforts to address domestic violent extremism historically as being all too often “reactionary, sporadic, and inconsistent” when it comes to recognizing the problem to be solved, or even admitting there is one. Though harsh, it’s not an unfair assessment. 

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security research center at the University of Maryland, analyzed an extensive database of extremist activity in the U.S. called PIRUS and found that 628 Americans with military backgrounds were involved in such criminal activity from 1990 to March 2023. Almost all of them were male veterans, with Marines showing up in disproportionately large numbers (as they did among the January 6th arrestees). A slight majority of the cases considered involved violence and a large majority involved white supremacist militias. And here’s an intriguing fact that probably won’t surprise anyone who’s followed the U.S. military’s dismal war record in this century: extremists with a military background were less successful in carrying out violent attacks than those without it. 

Indeed, the extremist threat appears to be growing. A chart in a research brief looking at PIRUS data shows little blips for extremist cases in most years until the past six, including not only the (hopefully) unrepeatable 2021, but the years on either side of it. 

Activities that rise to the level of criminal conduct, however, tell only part of the story.

The RAND Corporation interviewed a large, demographically representative sample of veterans — mostly older, white, middle-class men who joined the military before 9/11 — to assess sympathy for extremist organizations and ideas. The researchers found no evidence that veterans support violent extremist groups or their ideologies more than the rest of the American public does. 

If you find that reassuring, however, think again. After all, according to the 2022 Yahoo! News/YouGov poll Rand used for comparison, a little more than a third of the U.S. population agrees with the Great Replacement Theory that “[a] group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.” Am I supposed to be comforted because only about 5% fewer veterans think that?

Then there’s the finding that almost 18% of the veterans surveyed who agree with one of four cited extremist ideologies also support violence as a means of political change. That finding is scary, too, because extremist groups can take advantage of such veterans’ support for political violence to recruit them for their often all-too-violent purposes. 

All of this leaves me very uneasy, both about what is being done and what should or even could be done. I worry about how much more extreme and violent this country has become in this century of failed wars. And I worry about anti-extremism policies sliding into prosecuting — and persecuting — people for disfavored beliefs, while immediate danger glides in from some unexpected source — like a 21-year-old techie, who, for reasons no one anticipated, pulled off one hell of a breach of national security right under the military’s nose.

Copyright 2023 Nan Levinson

Via Tomdispatch.com

And don’t forget that those figures include dead and wounded Americans, too. Most of us, however, have little awareness of any of this. If you live outside the archipelago of American military bases that extends across this country and the planet — an estimated 750 of them outside the U.S. on every continent except Antarctica — it’s easy enough not to meet stressed-out military service members and their families. It’s easy enough, in fact, not to grasp just how America’s wars of this century rippled out to touch military communities.

In recent times, those bases have become ever more difficult for the public to enter and often aren’t close to the cities where so many of us live. All of this means that, if you’re a civilian, the odds are you haven’t met the grieving spouses of the soldiers who never came home or the shaken children of the ones who did, forever changed, sometimes with amputated limbs or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I’m thinking of the ones with those far-off gazes and the pain they have to deal with in their heads, their limbs, their backs.

Personally, I find it overwhelmingly hard to write about such human-shaped holes in our disturbed world. That’s probably why the Costs of War Project has a 35-person (and counting) team of journalists, physicians, social scientists, and other experts to portion out the research and the pain that goes with it as they deal with the fact that the monumental death and injury counts they’ve produced are likely to be underestimates.

As I write this, my chest tightens and my breath gets short, reminding me that some realities are impossible to contemplate without a physical reaction. And I begin to understand why so many Americans, including those not in the military — an estimated 50 million in fact! — experience chronic pain. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is writing a stunning series of pieces reporting on what many in the public-health world term “diseases of despair” like depression, suicidality, and addiction. A significant portion of those Americans don’t have injuries that are detectable via X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, or the like. Often, pain is linked with major depression, other symptoms of PTSD, or anxiety. Something is happening in the minds of Americans that’s not easily traceable in the body because its causes may lie in our wider world. 

The Costs of War on the Homefront

Know one thing: in the U.S., so many of us do feel the painful results of our disastrous distant wars of this century, whether we know it or not. For instance, ever more Americans attend crumbling, understaffed schools, drive on roads in disrepair, and go to hospitals and health clinics (not just Veterans Administration ones with their seemingly endless waiting lists!) that don’t have enough doctors and mental-health therapists to meet our needs. Arguably, a major culprit is the war on terror. To take just one example, we could have fully staffed and equipped our whole healthcare system and made it significantly more pandemic resilient had we spent just a fraction of the $8 trillion or more this country put out for our foreign wars.   

And the sting of war on our society doesn’t end with decrepit infrastructure, but extends to civil liberties and human rights. For example, our police are armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry and other equipment provided by an overfed Pentagon and in this century have grown more aggressive towards unarmed people here at home.

And believe me, pain from American war-making is felt elsewhere, too, often all too directly in the dozens of countries around the world where the U.S. arms and trains militaries, continues to fight counterinsurgency wars, and runs prisons and intelligence operations. There are the air strikes and shootings, the father or brother who can no longer be the breadwinner because he was collateral damage in a drone strike, the millions of displaced and malnourished people — many of them mothers with children — in countries where Washington has supported authoritarian regimes in questionable counterinsurgency wars. 

Pain That Is Difficult to Trace

Given global events since those 9/11 attacks, it shouldn’t be surprising that pain is so frequently experienced by people in our military communities. Somewhere between 31% and 44% of active-duty American soldiers report chronic pain of some sort. That’s significantly higher than in the general population. And no surprise in this either: veterans are about 40% more likely to report chronic pain than non-veterans.

Chronic pain is, in fact, part of a category of neurological conditions that ranks as the fifth most common source of disability for service members treated at on-installation clinics and hospitals. Worse yet, military pain-related diagnoses have been growing. Back pain, neck pain, knee pain, migraines, and chest pain are becoming the norm.

Buy the Book

As a military spouse and a therapist who has treated many soldiers and veterans, I’ve all too often observed how such pain, while sometimes untraceable to a visible source, is all too real — real enough, in fact, to immobilize some soldiers, or even keep them from successfully stringing together sentences. (And while I’ve seldom found that commonly recommended medication treatments truly alleviate such pain in a sustainable way, I have watched it subside over time thanks to the sorts of things that also boost mental health — talk therapy, exercise, and deepening friendships.)

Of course, military communities aren’t the only places where such pain is commonplace. It’s also experienced all too often by poor Americans without college degrees, especially women and people of color — in other words, the most vulnerable slices of our American pie.

The portraits in Kristof’s pieces reveal some surprising findings about pain. First, the amount of pain you experience depends not just on the physical injury that may show up on an X-ray or CT scan or, in the case of soldiers, the wound you got, but on what you think and feel. Two-thirds of people with depression have unexplained chronic pain, for example. Doctors have even discovered that some people reporting knee pain have no discernable anatomical problem.

By the same token, the brain has a certain ability to heal or ameliorate pain. In some cases, through the use of “mirror therapy,” people have been able to ease pain from an amputated limb or “phantom limb” by looking repeatedly at the intact one and somehow creating the impression that they’re okay.

Some people, military or not, with chronic depression, anxiety, or PTSD symptoms like exaggerated startle reflexes or sleep problems experience greater sensitivity to pain if they get physically injured again. Their brains, it turns out, have been trained by trauma to believe something’s wrong with their bodies.

Common diagnoses that have seeped into household parlance tend to reinforce this notion for many. Medical categories like fibromyalgia and irritable bowel symptom make pain sound as though it’s related to something tangible, except that all too often, it’s “just” pain.

It’s hardly a surprise anymore that the go-to treatment for pain in America is opioids, and look where that’s left us — with an epidemic of addiction and deaths to the tune of tens of thousands of lives lost yearly. Somehow, that approach to dealing with pain brings me back to the way the U.S. fought “terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks — with our own brand of terror (war!) globally and, indeed, it not only proved all too addictive but so much more costly to us and so many others on this planet than the original blow.

The Phantom Limb of American Society

If this comparison seems kind of out there to you, that’s my point. The problems experienced by Americans in pain are often all too hard to pin down, because at least in part they derive from survival guilt at having watched fellow soldiers getting blown to pieces by improvised explosive devices, or your parents dying from Covid because their jobs as janitors didn’t allow them to quarantine, or intense loneliness in a pandemic that made high school a virtual solo performance for all too many students. And get this: you don’t even need to go through one of those nightmarish scenarios personally to be in pain. Just hearing about economic insecurity in our world can exacerbate whatever aches you have.

This makes me wonder what it was like for so many to watch the recent coverage of Congress reaching the precipice over whether to raise the debt ceiling so that the government could pay its bills. How did it affect already struggling people to contemplate imminent economic catastrophe in the form of potentially soaring interest rates, inflation, job loss, and potential cutoffs in social services like healthcare? As a therapist who relies heavily on state-funded health insurance for my income and whose spouse is a soon-to-be veteran, I can’t help but scoff at congressional representatives who claim to be supporting our military by insisting on raising already astronomic Pentagon funding yet higher, while trying to gut the very systems that would let even a family as privileged as mine make ends meet once a soldier finishes his or her service.

Now look a little farther out if you want to be anxious. Most Americans don’t realize that our forever wars have been funded almost entirely by borrowing. A fundamental reason why we have to talk about a debt ceiling and continue to borrow ever more money to pay bills like those due for Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps is war. One key reason why we need to worry at all about making college graduates start paying their exorbitant loans back again is… yes, our debts from war-making. Notice a theme here?

Of course, war means that the remedies for pain that have proven to be most effective in the long run are not as available to those who experience the most pain. Exercise, certain types of talk therapy, and community are key and yet can be all too sparsely available to those working multiple jobs and struggling to pay their bills, not to mention those being shipped from base to base amid the grinding pace of military life.

In the meantime, military families and veterans are left to pay the costs of war directly via just about every kind of stress and distress imaginable. I remember someone I knew at one military post. A person of color and a veteran of the Vietnam war, he’d often be outside his house in the early mornings and evenings, smoking weed in order to alleviate leg pain that was untraceable to any particular injury. What he did talk about frequently were his painful memories of shooting at rural, dark-skinned villagers in Vietnam who resembled his own farmworker family in the U.S. when he was growing up. Trauma and pain were his frequent travel companions and yet the source of his pain remained unidentifiable in his small, fit body.  

As then-President Donald Trump had banned or suspended the entry of people from eight different majority Muslim nations (as well as other refugees) to this country, I knew life wasn’t easy for him. He was, after all, often mistaken for a Muslim, called racial slurs, and told by passersby to go back where he came from. And even so many years later, that veteran and all too many soldiers like him may still not find a healthy part of our country to look at in order to convince themselves that life indeed will be okay.

Yes, there are all too many sick parts of our land, including a shaky social safety net, the hate and violence that continue to spread, and the long lines to get anywhere near a doctor or therapist. Contemplating all of this can be like gazing at a phantom limb that still smarts, even as so many of the original injuries — from 9/11 to our disastrous military response to it — seem all too forgettable to so many of us. Sad to say, but it’s vital that we remember the costs of war not only for ourselves but for those millions of people out there who experienced the — in every sense — wounds we inflicted in the name of an injured America in our nightmarish war on terror. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if we do it again.

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

And here’s something to add to that reality: even though many more soldiers survive, they do so with ever more injuries of various sorts — conditions that the Veterans Affairs (VA) and military doctors euphemistically call polytrauma. For some of this, you can thank ever-more-sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other gems of modern warfare like “smart” suicide bombs that can burn, blind, deafen, or mutilate soldier’s bodies, while traumatizing their brains in myriad ways, some of which will not be evident until months or years later.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s wartime casualty count provides just a glimpse of this disparity between injuries and deaths — about eight wounded for every one killed, according to its figures — because it totes up only those troops and contractors whose deaths and wounds can be traced back to their time in war zones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. The Pentagon doesn’t include in its tallies those whose injuries either happened or only became apparent off the battlefields of America’s wars, who, for instance, suffer from breathing problems thanks to the toxic burn pits the Pentagon established to dispose of garbage in Iraq or from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain. After all, the suicide rate of veterans is 1.5 times higher than that of the general population.

Such casualty criteria suggest that the U.S. government has many more veterans of its post-9/11 wars to care for than it has ever acknowledged. Those would also include people who have never seen combat but lived through the relentless pace and pressure of deployments or even simply the brutal hazing in many commands in today’s overstretched military.

In short, America’s veterans need all the help they can get and, as yet, there’s no evidence it’s coming their way.

All told today, more than 40% of post-9/11 veterans have some sort of officially recognized disability — compared with less than 25% of those from prior wars. That number is expected to rise to 54% over the course of the next 30 years. Those veterans are also using VA medical services at unprecedented rates, yet they often need to wait weeks to access much-needed care.

The Personal Battles We Don’t See

As a military spouse of 10 years, a clinical social worker serving veterans and active-duty military families, and a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I’ve spoken to hundreds of veterans and active-duty service members over the years. They regularly describe gaps in the kind of medical care and social support they so desperately need. Often, private charities fill in where state assistance is lacking.

Among the examples I’ve encountered would be the Air Force Reserve officer who relied on donations and food banks to feed his family; the former Marine infantryman who found a physical therapist for his never-ending back pain and mobility issues thanks only to a chance encounter at a farmer’s market; and the Navy ensign, less than honorably discharged with “bad papers,” who got treatment only through a local Alcoholics Anonymous group. And just beyond the frame of such (relatively) happy endings lie significant holes in government support for the health of our veterans.  

Buy the Book

Also common in military communities are the family members and loved ones who leave their jobs to travel with wounded or ill service members to find help or devote enormous amounts of time to assisting with their daily care. Consider, for instance, the single mother who left her two younger children on their own in California so that she could be with her war-injured son while he recovered at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland. Think of the kids who watch television and play video games all afternoon, because their mother needs to drive their war-traumatized father to appointments. Caregivers like them sacrifice more than they should for their loved ones and their country. In return, they are offered next to no recognition, nor even protection from the violence that is not uncommon in such military families.

In most prior major wars, the draft helped ensure the presence of more support personnel for active-duty troops and veterans, while more Americans then knew someone who had served. Twenty-first-century America has settled for a society characterized by less knowledge of — and support for — its veteran community. Civilians (mostly women, of course) often pick up the slack, even as they are expected (along with their husbands) to smoothly reintegrate into civilian life after serving in the armed forces.

The VA Caregiver Program

The government is not entirely indifferent to the plight of family members who give up their livelihoods to care for our wounded. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that set in motion the VA Caregiver Program, a series of supports for families already dealing with the most injured or ill post-9/11 veterans. The program includes a stipend, travel reimbursement, special healthcare services, and training for these caregivers. Over time, it was expanded for veterans of other eras and their loved ones, while the criteria for being a paid caregiver came to include anyone living with a veteran full-time. The establishment of that Caregiver Program crucially recognized the family as an integral part of the echelons of private contractors brought in to support the War on Terror, even if wives, mothers, and relatives were not nearly as handsomely paid as their defense contractor peers.

Unfortunately, good things only last so long! In late 2021, the VA announced that it would conduct an audit of the nearly 20,000 families of post-9/11 veterans receiving stipends and services under the program, based on a new more stringent set of requirements. Those rules stipulated that veterans whose loved ones were enrolled be totally unable to perform at least one of the “tasks of daily living” like getting dressed, bathing, eating, or simply moving around.

While the VA initially projected that about a third of the “legacy” families previously covered by the program would lose their benefits in the new care environment, it soon became clear that many more — nearly 90% of those reviewed — might be found ineligible. After a series of court challenges and interventions by veterans’ groups, the Caregiver Program suspended its audit in early 2022 and agreed to reexamine its rulemaking.

This February, however, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal brought by advocates for veterans challenging the absence of caregiver input in the review process and a lack of attention to the particularities of what each veteran actually needs. In the meantime, as with so many other aspects of military life, all too many veterans and their families who have relied on this support see their futures hanging by a thread.

The War on Terror’s Lasting Human Costs

We Americans tend to look the other way when the government places a relatively small number of us in harm’s way — though we were talking about 170,000 American troops in Iraq alone in 2007! Today, most of us undoubtedly think the War on Terror is over. When President George W. Bush’s administration first received congressional authorization to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, essentially obtaining blank checks for years to come, generations of Americans, many from lower-income and minority communities, were consigned to endless fighting and — no kidding! — hundreds of thousands of them to futures of injury and social isolation.

Lack of support for such future veterans was seeded into the process from the outset, since the Bush administration never set aside money to cover the long-term expenses of caring for them, nor did Congress ever fully account for such future costs that could, in the end, reach – a Costs of War Project estimate — $2.2 trillion. It’s not clear where that money will come from, let alone how we’ll recruit and train enough healthcare providers and support staff for a pandemic-ravaged medical system.

As a military spouse and mental healthcare provider myself, I face the apathy of our government on a regular basis. My spouse is about to end 20 years in the military and, with some trepidation, I anticipate the long wait times and bureaucratic red tape that I know all too well have been faced by so many others in his position.

My experiences as a therapist do little to counter such realities. More than three months ago, I called the provider services department of the VA’s Community Care Network. It contracts with non-military healthcare givers so that veterans can seek services outside of VA facilities if they choose to do so. After the representative I spoke with confirmed that there was a need for more mental health providers in my region, she took down my name and contact information, telling me that someone would call back to do an “intake” interview with me within 10 days.

More than 100 days and three follow-up phone calls later, I’m still waiting. So is a colleague I know with decades of experience navigating America’s labyrinthine mental-health insurance system. Most major insurance companies do have standardized online forms that can digitally accept “intakes” from credential providers. (Indeed, all that is necessary is less than a page-worth of demographic and tax-related information.) No such entry point exists in my regional VA system — and mind you, I live just a stone’s throw from the Pentagon.

For every VA staff member keeping a seat warm who stands between veterans and those qualified to provide for their care, there is at least one untrained, stressed-out family member forced to work at little or no cost. Believe me, it’s difficult to witness the stress of a loved one facing a momentous transition, while knowing that the policymakers once so prepared to place them in harm’s way are now remarkably unprepared to care for them when they are no longer of direct use.

United We Fall?

You’d like to think — wouldn’t you? — that people are what Americans most want to invest in to secure a livable future for our country, let alone humanity as a whole. Again and again, facing needs ranging from healthcare to hunger to unfettered environmental degradation wrought by our own military and government, our congressional representatives seem ready to commit to little more than ever greater weapons production on a multi-year basis.

Lack of support for veterans is but part of this larger social vacuum. In my family, at least, a fear of far worse lurks all too close at hand (including that our country might end up in a future apocalyptic nuclear tit-for-tat with Vladimir Putin’s maniacal Russian government). Even without such futuristic horror, the living conditions of the vulnerable among us who have survived our own nightmarish wars should serve as a warning that, if we continue to be so unprepared to care for those who tried to serve us, not much worth fighting for will remain.

My spouse and I like to torture ourselves weekly by watching the apocalyptic sci-fi television series The Last of Us in which pandemic-stricken zombies and violence by our own troops reduce this country to a series of military-led quarantine zones reserved for a privileged few. In one scene, a general in charge of one of those zones warns an unruly teenage recruit that her best bet for a decent existence is to become an officer in his government. Spoiler alert: she ends up getting kidnapped by resistance fighters who try to use her to find a cure for the pandemic virus circulating in that world. In the end, she buys into the dream of a decent future made possible by science and acts on it herself. You’ll have to watch to find out more, but her caring decision to pursue what’s best for us all left my spouse and me feeling remarkably upbeat in such a downbeat world.

I suspect that if we do want a better world, the rest of us will have to act like that young heroine who risks life and limb for the good of us all. My version of that dream would start with urging our government to do everything possible to ensure that we invest more in human beings instead of the next round of weaponry, including the world-ending variety of them.  

A recent New York Times op-ed marveled that Americans today don’t seem to fear nuclear weapons as they once did, even though we fear so many other things from viruses to disinformation to climate change. Paradoxically, I suspect that such an oversight is caused, at least in part, by this country’s seemingly never-ending commitment to funding an ever-vaster military and its weaponry instead of education, healthcare, infrastructure, and jobs, not to speak of the veterans we dispatched into that nightmarish war on terror without making a commitment to truly support them.

Isn’t it time that we begin pushing our congressional representatives (small hope, sadly enough!) to set in motion policies that would uplift us all, including those veterans, instead of pouring yet more staggering sums into a military that’s only sent so many of us to hell and back in this century?

Copyright 2023 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

[Denton-Borhaug will give a version of this talk virtually to Veterans for Peace Chapter 102 at a Reclaim Armistice Day meeting at the Milwaukee City Hall Rotunda this Veteran’s Day.]

Dear Veterans,

( Tomdispatch.com) – I’m a civilian who, like many Americans, has strong ties to the U.S. Armed Forces. I never considered enlisting, but my father, uncles, cousins, and nephews did. As a child I baked cookies to send with letters to my cousin Steven who was serving in Vietnam. My family tree includes soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. Some years before my father died, he shared with me his experience of being drafted during the Korean War and, while on leave, traveling to Hiroshima, Japan. There, just a few short years after an American atomic bomb had devastated that city as World War II ended, he was haunted by seeing the dark shadows of the dead cast onto concrete by the nuclear blast.

As Americans, all of us are, in some sense, linked to the violence of war. But most of us have very little understanding of what it means to be touched by war. Still, since the events of September 11, 2001, as a scholar of religion, I’ve been trying to understand what I’ve come to call “U.S. war-culture.” For it was in the months after those terrible attacks more than 20 years ago that I awoke to the depth of our culture of war and our society’s pervasive militarization. Eventually, I saw how important truths about our country were concealed when we made the violence of war into something sacred. And most important of all, while trying to come to grips with this dissonant reality, I started listening to you, the veterans of our recent wars, and simply couldn’t stop.

Dismantling the Lies About and Justifications for Our Wars

The only proper response to 9/11, our political leaders assured us then, was war and nothing but war — “a necessary sacrifice,” a phrase they endlessly repeated. In the years that followed, in speeches and public spectacles, one particular image surfaced again and again. The lives — and especially injuries and deaths — of American soldiers were incessantly linked to the injuries inflicted on Jesus of Nazareth, and to his death on the cross. President George W. Bush, for example, milked this imagery in 2008:

This weekend, families across America are coming together to celebrate Easter… During this special and holy time of year, millions of Americans pause to remember a sacrifice that transcended the grave and redeemed the world… On Easter we hold in our hearts those who will be spending this holiday far from home — our troops… I deeply appreciate the sacrifice that they and their families are making… On Easter, we especially remember those who have given their lives for the cause of freedom. These brave individuals have lived out the words of the Gospel, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” [John 15:13 ]

The abusive exploitation of religion to bless violence covered the reality of war’s hideous destructiveness with a sacred sheen. And this justification for what quickly became known as the Global War on Terror troubled me, leaving me with many questions. I wondered: Is it true that we demonstrate what we most value in life by dyingfor it?

What about living for what we value most?

Biblical stories about the suffering and death of the distinctly nonviolent Jesus of Nazareth were shamelessly manipulated in those years to sacralize our wars and the religious among us largely failed to question such bizarre connections. Eventually, I began to understand that war cultures are by their nature death cults. The depth of the militarization of this country and the harshness of its wars abroad were concealed by converting death into something sacred. Meanwhile, the deaths of Afghans, Iraqis, and so many others in such conflicts were generally ignored. Tragically, religion proved an all-too-useful resource for such moral exploitation.

We civilians deceive ourselves by insisting that we’re a peaceful nation desiring the well-being of all peoples. In reality, the United States has built an empire of military bases (more than 750 at last count) on every continent but Antarctica. Our political leaders annually approve a military budget that’s apocalyptically high (and may reach a trillion dollars a year before the end of this decade). We spend more on our military than the next nine nations combined to finance the violence of war.

Our political leaders and many citizens insist that having such a staggering infrastructure of war is the only way Americans will be secure, while claiming that we’re anything but a warring people. Analysts of war-culture know better. As peace and conflict studies scholar Marc Pilisuk puts it: “Wars are products of a social order that plans for them and then accepts this planning as natural.”

Learning War Is Like Ingesting Poison

I’ve personally witnessed the confusion and conflicted responses of many veterans to this mystifying distortion of reality. How painful and destabilizing it must be to return from your military deployment to a society that insists on crassly celebrating and glorifying war, while so many of you had no choice but to absorb the terrible knowledge of what an atrocity it is. “War damages all who wage it,” chaplain Michael Lapsley wrote. “The United States has been infected by endless war.” Veterans viscerally carry the violence of war in their bodies. It’s as if you became “sin-eaters” who had to swallow the evil of the conflicts the United States waged in these years and then live with their consequences inside you.

Worse yet, most Americans refuse to face our national reality. Instead, they twist such truths into something else entirely. They distance themselves from you by labeling you “heroes” and the “spine of the nation.” They call war’s work of death the epitome of citizenship. They don’t want to know how often and how deeply you were afraid; how conflicted you were about life-and-death decisions you had to make when no good choice was available. They don’t want to hear, as one veteran said recently in my presence, that too often your lives “were dealt with carelessly.”

Buy the Book

They also don’t want to hear about the military training that shaped you to deal carelessly with the lives of others, both combatants and civilians. Those are inconvenient details that get in the way of a national adulation of war (in a draft-less country where 99% of all citizens remain civilians). After all, war fever means good business for the weapons makers of the military-industrial complex. As Pentagon expert William Hartung recently put it, “The Biden administration has continued to arm reckless, repressive regimes” globally, while its military support for Ukraine lacks any diplomatic strategy for ending that war, instead “enabling a long, grinding conflict that will both vastly increase the humanitarian suffering in Ukraine and risk escalation to direct U.S.-Russian confrontation.”

Such complexities involving alternatives to Washington’s war-making urges are, of course, not part of the national conversation on Veterans Day. Instead, we are promised that war and this country’s warriors will somehow redeem us as a nation. The unimaginable losses to families, communities, infrastructure, and culture in the lands where such conflicts have been fought in this century are invisible to most citizens, while typical Veterans Day commemorations recast you as messianic redemptive figures who “have paid the price for our freedom.”

But to convert war-making into something sacred means fashioning a deceitful myth. Violence is not a harmless tool. It’s not a coat that a person wears and takes off without consequences. Violence instead brutalizes human beings to their core; chains people to the forces of dehumanization; and, over time, eats away at you like acid dripping into your very soul. That same dehumanization also undermines democracy, something you would never know from the way the United States glorifies its wars as foundational to what it means to be an American.

Silencing and Commodifying Veterans

Meanwhile, citizens rush to “thank you for your service.” You’re allowed to board airplanes first and given discounts at the nation’s amusement parks. Veterans Day only exacerbates your sickening commodification, as all those big box stores, other corporations, and financial institutions use you to try to increase their profits (like the bank in my town last year with its newspaper ad: “Freedom isn’t Free: Veterans Paid Our Way. Thank you. Embassy Bank”).

These dynamics silence the truths you carry within you. I’ve heard you say that you often find it impossible to tell the rest of us, even family members, what really happened. You struggle with feelings of alienation from civilian culture, unable to express your anger or describe your struggles with deep-seated shame, guilt, resentment, and disgust.

Your military service often left you with debilitating physical and psychological injuries and even deeper “moral injuries.” Veteran and author Michael Yandell struggles to describe this ruinous self-disintegration, writing “I despaired of myself, and of the very world.” Borne out of the crushing suffering that is the world of war, some of you experienced moral pain that grew to an intolerable level. There was no longer any world left that you could trust or believe in, no values anywhere, anymore. And yet, you represent such a small percentage of the population — less than 1% of us join the military — while disproportionately shouldering such a painful legacy from the last 20 years of American war-making across significant parts of the planet.

More often than not, the invisible wounds of returning veterans are shrouded in silence. For some of you, unbearable pain led to disastrous consequences, including self-harm, loss of relationships, isolation, and self-destructive risk-taking. At least one in three female members of the armed forces has experienced sexual assault or harassment from fellow service members. More than 17 of you veterans take your own lives every day. And you live with all of this, while so much of the rest of the nation fails to muster the will to see you, hear you, or face honestly the American addiction to war.

The truths about war that you might tell us are generally rejected and invalidated, cementing you into a heavy block of silence. Military chaplain Sean Levine describes how the U.S. must “deny the trauma of its warriors lest that trauma radically redefine our understanding of war.” He continues, “Blind patriotism has done inestimable damage to the souls of thousands of our returning warriors.”

If we civilians paid attention to your honesty, we would find ourselves slammed headlong into a conflict with a national culture that glorifies war, conceals the political and material interests of the titans of weaponry and war production, and successfully distracts us from the depth of its destruction. We civilians are complicit and so lurch away from facing the inevitable revulsion, sorrow, mourning, and guilt that always accompany the reality of war.

An Alternative for Veterans Day

Honestly, the only way forward is for you to tell — and us to compassionately take in — the unadulterated stories of war. One Vietnam veteran vividly described what war did to him this way:

I went to war when I was a little over twenty — not a child, but not yet an adult. When I arrived at the Cleveland airport after my tour of duty in Vietnam, I just sat down paralyzed with befuddled emotions. I didn’t even call my parents to tell them I was home. I was afraid my family would expect to see the person I was, and not accept the person I had become; that they would not forgive me for what I had done and not done in Vietnam. How could they when I couldn’t forgive myself? Like some toxic virus morphing in a Petri dish, the war infected my moral DNA. I came home no longer thinking with the same mind, seeing with the same eyes, hearing with the same ears.

When you speak out and tell truths this way, you exemplify the epitome of citizenship, as well as courage, vulnerability, and a commitment to hope. Such revelations show that the light of your conscience wasn’t quashed by war. Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Buddhist international peace activist, pointed the way forward for veterans and the rest of us alike when he wrote:

Veterans are the light at the tip of the candle, illuminating the way for the whole nation. If veterans can achieve awareness, transformation, understanding, and peace, they can share with the rest of society the realities of war.

The resulting trauma from war’s inevitable dehumanization is not yours alone. War-culture in this country leaves us with a residual collective trauma that weighs us all down and is only made worse by a national blindness to it.

As a civilian on Veterans Day, I hope to support the creation of spaces where your voices resoundingly are heard, and your faces seen. Together, we must determine how best to do the work of rehumanizing our world. Jack Saul, from the International Trauma Studies Program, reminds us that listening is “deeply humanizing” because it generates the healing power of empathy. Compassionate listening spaces “strengthen our connections to others and ourselves, and ultimately make society better.”

This Veterans Day I’m taking part in a “Community Healing Ceremony” through the Moral Injury Program in Philadelphia where I and other civilians will witness the strength of veterans offering testimony about the evil of war in their lives. Hearing your words will clarify my own understanding, vision, and resolve. Listening can be transformative, helping tear down the deceitful myths of war-culture, while building honesty and a willingness to see our world as it is.

Let me finish by thanking you, the veterans of our wars, for your truth-telling. Your contribution is invaluable in this embattled world of ours.

Copyright 2022 Kelly Denton-Borhaug

Via Tomdispatch.com

During a 13-month stint in Iraq that began in 2006, Heath Robinson served as a medic with the Ohio National Guard. Like thousands of others soldiers stationed there, he was routinely exposed to toxic smoke emanating from what are known as burn pits.

Located near military bases, some of these pits were nearly as large as three city blocks and were used by the military to incinerate chemical weapons, computer hardware, human remains, medical waste, asbestos, pesticides, paint cans, fuels, rubber and other materials.

A decade after his deployment, Robinson was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. He was unable to prove that his cancer was caused by the exposure to the poisonous fumes from the burn pits, and the Veterans Administration denied him health care benefits associated with his disease.

In May 2020, Robinson died from his illness, leaving behind a widow and an 8-year-old daughter. He was 39 years old.

Robinson was not the only serviceman denied benefits for burn pit exposure-related diseases by the Veterans Administration. Between 2007 and 2020, nearly 80% of those claims were denied. Of the 12,582 claims for these benefits during that time period, only 2,828 were approved, according to the Veterans Administration.

The denial of services is expected to come to an abrupt halt now that President Joe Biden on Aug. 10, 2022, signed into law
legislation that will require the Veterans Administration to provide health services to soldiers suffering from more than 20 diseases associated with burn pits, including several forms of cancer and lung disease.

Officially called “The Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022,” the law is known as the PACT Act. It also requires the Veterans Administration to expand health care to veterans exposed to toxic chemicals during service in Vietnam, the Gulf War and global war on terrorism.

Most important, the PACT Act removes the burden of proof and gives veterans the benefit of doubt at a time of desperate need.

The GOP backlash

For the past 12 years, I have been doing oral history interviews with veterans from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In our research for our book “Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in Modern American History,” historian John M. Kinder and I uncovered a long record of rights and benefits denied to military veterans between 1900 and 2020.

For a moment, the PACT Act looked like it was about to be defeated.

The Senate had approved the bill on June 16, 2022, but during a second vote over a minor technicality, Republican senators blocked its passage less than two weeks later. Some claimed the legislation, estimated to cost US$285 billion, created a “slush fund” of billions of dollars.

In a video that went viral on social media, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was seen congratulating his GOP colleagues with fist bumps after they sank the bill.

The bill’s defeat drew instant outrage.

Nearly 60 veterans organizations spoke out in support of the PACT Act. At least 15 veterans camped out on the steps of the Capitol.

They protested the denial of care to veterans and talked about the rates of suicide, incarceration and invisible wounds such as post-traumatic stress disorder, affecting more than 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.

Comedian and veterans activist Jon Stewart stood outside the Capitol on July 28 and condemned the actions of the GOP senators.

“I’m used to the hypocrisy,” Stewart said, “but I’m not used to the cruelty.”

Less than a week after Senate Republicans rejected the PACT act, the legislation passed 86-11 on Aug. 2, 2022, without revisions – and was sent to Biden for his signature.

“Toxic smoke, thick with poison spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops,” Biden said after signing the bill. “When they came home, many of the fittest and best warriors that we sent to war were not the same. Headaches, numbness, dizziness, cancer.”

The burden of proof

The callous disregard of veterans is a shameful and overlooked tradition in American history.

In my research, I found that the denial of medical care to veterans suffering from diseases acquired during their service – and the fight to acquire it – is nothing new.

During the Spanish American War, for instance, where U.S. soldiers fought in both Cuba and the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, more than 5,000 U.S. troops died from diseases likely associated with typhoid and malaria. Of the 171,000 personnel who served abroad in that war, 20,700 contracted typhoid alone and more than 1,500 died.

Historian Barbara Gannon writes about how these veterans fought, during the Great Depression era, for acknowledgment of their service-connected disabilities.

The Economy Act of 1933 cut the pensions of hundreds of thousands of veterans, including 74,000 disabled Spanish American War veterans and 387,000 World War I veterans, prompting many to commit suicide.

In that moment, veterans learned an important lesson about uniting across multiple generations to receive care.

Long before the official recognition of PTSD in 1980, veterans quietly suffered with uncompensated disabilities related to combat stress known as shell shock for much of their post-military lives.

Most recently, Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange and other chemical herbicides that were used to defoliate dense jungles in Vietnam have fought for Veterans Administration benefits and health care since 1977. One such benefit was monthly compensation if a veteran was unable to work as a result of their illness acquired from their service.

In 1979, Congress ordered the Veterans Administration to investigate the carcinogenic effects of dioxins, a major ingredient in Agent Orange and other defoliants used in Vietnam, according to the Congressional Research Service. But nearly a decade later, neither the Veterans Administration nor the Centers for Disease Control could prove a connection between Agent Orange and sick veterans.

The lack of scientific consensus delayed treatment to sick Vietnam veterans. Veterans were required to prove a direct exposure to Agent Orange, and when they couldn’t, most were denied disability claims.

At the urging of the Vietnam Veterans of America, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act in 1991, requiring the Veterans Administration to provide care for certain diseases associated with exposure to dioxins such as those found in Agent Orange.

But even then, Vietnam veterans still had to prove they served in-country, and many could not, thus disqualifying thousands of vets exposed to Agent Orange who had never set foot in Vietnam.

Finally, in 2019, Congress passed the Blue Water Vietnam Veterans Act of 2019, extending Veterans Administration benefits to 90,000 “Blue Water Navy veterans” exposed to Agent Orange on ships off the coast of Vietnam.

An endless fight

The PACT Act brought together a groundswell of veterans from multiple generations in support of expanded health care and disability benefits for veterans.

What seemed to be a spontaneous backlash against GOP senators had, in fact, been decades in the making.

On Capitol Hill, representatives from the Vietnam Veterans of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans joined forces with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to support the PACT Act, which was first introduced in June 2021.

Given the long history of denial, Biden was not understating the importance of the PACT Act.

“This is the most significant law our nation has ever passed to help millions of veterans who were exposed to toxic substances during their military services,” Biden said.

Jason A. Higgins, Post-doctoral fellow in digital humanities, Virginia Tech

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

by Isaac Arnsdorf | –

( ProPublica) – Former President Donald Trump empowered associates from his private club to pursue a plan for the Department of Veterans Affairs to monetize patient data, according to documents newly released by congressional investigators.

As ProPublica first reported in 2018, a trio based at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort weighed in on policy and personnel decisions for the federal government’s second-largest agency, despite lacking any experience in the U.S. government or military.

While previous reporting showed the trio had a hand in budgeting and contracting, their interest in turning patient data into a revenue stream was not previously known. The VA provides medical care to more than 9 million veterans at more than 1,000 facilities across the country.

“Patient data is, in my opinion, the most valuable assets [sic] the VA has,” a consultant said in a June 2017 email released Monday by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. “It can be leveraged into hundreds of millions in revenue” by selling access to major companies, he said.

The consultant, Terry Fadem, ran a private nonprofit for Bruce Moskowitz, a West Palm Beach, Florida, physician who was one of the three Trump associates given sweeping influence over the VA, known to officials as “the Mar-a-Lago crowd.”

In response to Fadem’s email, Moskowitz told then-VA Secretary David Shulkin that he had discussed the plan with interested companies including Johnson & Johnson, CVS and Apple. Shulkin replied that he liked the idea, according to the documents.

Senior officials scrambled to hire Fadem as a contractor, the emails show, but it’s not clear whether his contract was awarded. “I am working on trying to understand why and where [h]is contract is stuck,” Poonam Alaigh, then the agency’s top health official, said in a June 2017 email. “I agree, having him on board as soon as possible will be critical.”

The documents do not show what became of the plan or whether the VA ever sold access to patient data. Nor do the records include evidence that Moskowitz or the other Mar-a-Lago associates were in a position to profit personally.

A spokesman for the trio said as far as they know Fadem was not hired and the VA never acted on the licensing idea. “We were asked repeatedly by former Secretary Shulkin and his senior staff, as well as by the President, to assist the VA and that is what we sought to do, period,” the three said in a statement.

Shulkin, Alaigh, Trump’s office, the VA, Johnson & Johnson, CVS and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Fadem died in 2019.

The latest revelation helps complete the picture of the Mar-a-Lago triumvirate’s extensive influence over Trump’s agenda for veterans, a signature issue in his 2016 campaign. ProPublica’s revelations about the men’s day-to-day involvement prompted investigations by congressional committees and the Government Accountability Office, as well as a court challenge.

House Oversight Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman Mark Takano, D-Calif., said in a statement on Monday that the documents show “the secret role the trio played in developing VA initiatives and programs, including a ‘hugely profitable’ plan to monetize veterans’ medical records.”

“Ike Perlmutter, Marc Sherman, and Dr. Bruce Moskowitz, bolstered by their connection to President Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club, violated the law and sought to exert improper influence over government officials to further their own personal interests,” the chairs said.

Perlmutter, Sherman and Moskowitz have previously said that they obtained no personal benefits, had no official role and exercised no formal authority.

But the newly released documents show that they did view themselves as an official advisory committee — and disregarded repeated warnings that they needed to comply with a Watergate-era transparency law.

“As the President asked, we can now formally create an official committee,” Perlmutter, the group’s leader and chairman of Marvel Entertainment, wrote in a February 2017 email after a meeting with Trump. Perlmutter is a Mar-a-Lago member and one of Trump’s biggest political donors.

Perlmutter went so far as to rebuke White House staff for holding discussions without him.

“I am shocked and extremely disappointed with the manner in which you have engaged in individual communications with Apple — and intentionally excluded our broader team of subject matter experts,” Perlmutter said in a March 2017 email to White House aides. “I understand that these backdoor discussions have apparently been occurring almost daily for weeks, and you have not told anyone and refuse to return phone calls and emails.”

Official advisory committees are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The 1972 law, known as FACA, requires federal agencies to inform the public when they consult outside experts.

Administration officials repeatedly told the Mar-a-Lago trio that they would have to comply with the law. The law compels advisory committees to represent a range of views and disclose their activities to the public.

“It appears FACA may be implicated,” a VA lawyer said in a January 2017 email that Shulkin shared with Moskowitz.

That April, White House aide Reed Cordish told Perlmutter directly, “You will need to form a FACA group.”

But Perlmutter demurred, replying, “We have been advised that FACA does not apply because we are not a formal group in any way.”

Instead, the group took efforts to conceal its activities, documents show. “We are still unsure what can be put in emails and what to discuss verbally,” Moskowitz wrote to Shulkin in February 2017.

The group’s spokesman maintained they weren’t a formal committee and said complying with FACA was the agency’s responsibility.

In March 2021, a federal appeals court in Washington held that a liberal veterans group could proceed with a lawsuit to enforce FACA’s disclosure requirements around the Mar-a-Lago trio.

Isaac Arnsdorf covers national politics. His reporting on President Trump’s agenda for veterans won the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award and the National Press Club’s Sandy Hume Award, and was an honorable mention for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. Before joining ProPublica in 2017, he covered lobbying and campaign finance at Politico. He previously worked for Bloomberg News.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

( Tomdispatch.com) – By the end of this year, the White House will reportedly have finally brought home a third of the 7,500 troops still stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq (against the advice of President Trump’s own military leaders). While there have been stories galore about the global security implications of this plan, there has been almost no discussion at all about where those 2,700 or so troops who have served in this country’s endless wars will settle once their feet touch U.S. soil (assuming, that is, that they aren’t just moved to less controversial garrisons elsewhere in the Greater Middle East), no less who’s likely to provide them with badly needed financial, logistical, and emotional support as they age.

When it comes to honoring active-duty troops and veterans of this country’s forever wars, we Americans have proven big on symbolic gestures, but small on action. Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s organization, Joining Forces, was a short-lived but notable exception: its advocacy and awareness-raising led dozens of companies to commit to hiring more veterans. Unfortunately, those efforts proved limited in scope and didn’t last long.

Zoom out to the rest of America and you’ll find yellow-ribbon bumper stickers on gas-guzzling SUVs galore; tons of “support our troops” Facebook memes on both Veterans Day and Memorial Day regularly featuring (at least before the pandemic struck big time) young, attractive heterosexual families hugging at reunions; and there is invariably a chorus of “thank you for your service” when a veteran or active-duty soldier appears in public.

In practical terms, though, this adds up to nothing. Bumper stickers don’t watch soldiers’ kids while they’re gone, nor do they transport those troops to competent, affordable specialists to meet their health and vocational needs when they return from battle. Memes don’t power vets through decades of rehabilitation from traumatic brain injuries, limbs blown off by homemade explosives, depression, anxiety, and grief for comrades lost.

I’m the spouse of a U.S. naval officer. My husband has served on two different submarines and in three military policymaking positions over the course of our decade together. We’ve had to move around the country four times (an exceedingly modest number compared with most military families we know). We have dual incomes, as well as extended family and friends with the means to support us with care for our two young children and help us with the extra expenses when that uprooting moment arrives every two or three years. We have self-advocacy skills and the resources necessary to find the best possible health providers to help us weather the strain that goes with the relentless pace of post-9/11 military life.

And yet I feel I can speak for other military families who have so much less for one reason: I’ve dedicated much of my career to research and advocacy on behalf of people affected by the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’ve focused my attention, in particular, on the vast loss of life, both abroad and at home, caused by those wars, on decimated and depleted healthcare systems (including our own), and on the burdens borne by the families of soldiers who have to struggle to deal with the needs of those who return.

Troops from our current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and Africa are, in certain ways, unique compared to earlier generations of American military personnel. More than half of them have deployed more than once to those battle zones — often numerous times. Over a million of them now have disability claims with the Veterans Affairs Department and far more disabled veterans than in the past have chronic injuries and illnesses that they will live with, not die from. Among troops like my spouse who, as a naval officer, has never deployed to Iraqi or Afghan soil, days have grown longer and more stressful due to a distinctly overstretched military that often lacks the up-to-date equipment to work safely.

And mind you, the costs of caring for the soldiers who have been deployed in our never-ending wars won’t peak for another 30 to 40 years, as they age, and the government isn’t faintly ready to meet the expenses that will be involved.

Homecoming

And mind you, the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs are even less prepared to care for the families of their troops and veterans, those most likely to be tasked with their round-the-clock care.

Among the many grim possibilities from my own experience and the stories I’ve been told as an advocate over the years by military veterans, military spouses, and military children, let me try to paint just one picture of what it’s like when a member of that military returns home from deployment: Imagine your spouse suddenly walking through the door after months away. His face is a greenish hue from fatigue and fear. He may tell you some horror story about some set of incidents that occurred while he was deployed and indicate that he fears, given his state, he might even be out of a job soon. You think about the work you cut back on in the months since he left because you couldn’t handle the 24/7 demands of caring for confused children who had stopped sleeping. What will you do to support the family if his worst fears come to pass?

You need to remind him that, while he’s been rattling on, there are children present whom he has yet to greet. He hugs them now, his face a combination of love and lack-of-recognition (given how they’ve grown in the months since he’s been gone). The kids’ facial expressions are a mirror image of his.

You do your best to catch him up on the changes that have taken place in his absence: the kids’ latest developments, your new work schedule, the need for more childcare support, and the problems of your extended family (including the terminal illness of a family member).

Family or friends want to swoop in and take the kids so the two of you can get away, yet after months of his silence, you’re feeling too confused to want that yet. What’s more, your own hard-earned role as head of the household is suddenly about to be subsumed by his needs. (After all, he’s used to telling others what to do.)

You try to call other spouses who were your lifeline while all your husbands were deployed together, but they’re as stressed out and preoccupied as you are. Even the other commanders’ wives are, like you, up far too often at night as their spouses accept calls about drunk driving, partner violence, suicide threats, and child abuse within the stressed-out command.

Your unnerved husband is helping deal with such events, counseling those still on duty, and you’re counseling him. One night, he tells you that part of the reason for his stress is the things he was asked to do by his war-traumatized commander while he was deployed. These stories keep you awake at night.

You suggest he see a mental health professional. After all, the base has licensed psychologists and psychiatrists on staff, ready to help. He reminds you that the decision to seek care is not private in the military and the stigma among those handling his promotions could cost him his career.

So you look for mental-health assistance yourself to deal with the stress and grief over your changed relationship with your spouse. The lone practitioner within 45 miles who accepts military insurance tells you that, to receive care, you must sign a contract accepting that you can be hospitalized at his discretion “because military spouses go psychotic during their husband’s deployments.” You walk away.

Childcare support of some kind is needed more than ever now that your spouse is in such distress. Because you moved posts recently by military order, the Navy tells you that you’re at the back of the local line for financial childcare assistance. You’re in your own hell on earth and in that you’re typical of so many other military spouses.

Perspectives on Service From a Coastal Elite

And you also turn your gaze to the citizenry of this country that, in the world of the “All Volunteer” military, generally ignores us. Before I became a military spouse, I grew up in an affluent part of New Jersey. I remember how war veterans were ignored or even mocked (including by me). In the 1990s, I used to vacation at the Jersey shore and sometimes, from the front porch of our house, my family and I would catch a glimpse of a middle-aged man in military uniform, marching like a metronome up and down the island’s main boulevard. The glazed, far-off look on his face with its telltale ruddiness signaled, I know now, someone who probably drank too much, too often. Back then, we would just refer to him as “the soldier” when he passed and laugh at him, once safely out of earshot.

Of course, he was undoubtedly suffering from some form of mental illness without the sort of care that might have helped him make sense of things. My family and I had no idea that it was normal for war-traumatized soldiers to have difficulty distinguishing the past from the present, that it wouldn’t have been strange for him to see lines of summertime beach traffic and think “convoy” or hear a car engine backfire and think “sniper!”

Later, when I was living in San Francisco, a friend who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development told me about a veteran of the Afghan War, on leave between deployments, who called their office to request that a military tent village be set up in a popular city park to house homeless and mentally ill veterans like himself. My friend and I laughed about that over drinks, imagining the eyesore of an instant military base suddenly arising in the middle of a popular San Francisco tourist destination.

Some 15 years later, I think: how appropriate it would have been to remind Americans having fun of just what they were invariably missing — their military and the forever wars that go with them that all of us pay for endlessly but ignore. Maybe it finally is time to create spaces meant for U.S. troops and veterans right in the middle of everything.

A Task List

President-elect Biden, I’m hoping against hope that you’ll read these thoughts of mine and take steps to support such priorities when you take office, so that our soldiers and our veterans don’t find themselves in ever deeper holes as their service ends:

1. Give those who serve and military veterans, as well as their families, real choices about where to go to get healthcare, whether primary care, physical therapy, specialized surgery, psychological therapy, or dental care. The Veterans Choice Program, first rolled out in 2014, should have been a decent start in expanding that sort of access, but in practice few providers have received authorization to participate because of low reimbursement rates and excessive wait times for approval and reimbursement. Anything your administration could do, including ensuring that there’s just one less form to fill out or a few more dollars in reimbursement, would make a difference.

2. Sponsor large-scale studies on the health of military spouses and children. Evidence of the effects of military life on such families is scattered at best, but doesn’t look good, particularly during and immediately after deployments. The needs of spouses and children who deal with veterans for healthcare, vocational training, and protection from family violence appear high and badly unmet.

3. Advocate making training on the issues faced by our troops and their families central to continuing education requirements among healthcare providers and the staff supporting them, especially the military insurance contractors who are the gatekeepers to care. Urge such providers to place veterans and their families first in line. Make sure therapists, including those focused on children and adolescents, know about the special challenges faced by military kids after parents return. Fund and support off-base family therapy for soldiers and their families, since Department of Defense therapists too often prioritize the needs of the soldier or of the mission above the needs of the family.

4. Teach everyone to stop “thanking” the troops for their service, which effectively ends any conversation instead of beginning one. Teach them instead to ask about what service in the U.S. military in the forever-war era is really like. Believe me, that would start a conversation that wouldn’t end soon.

5. Remove needless barriers to military families receiving childcare, whether they’re active duty and awaiting their next assignment or settling for good in communities where they’ll begin their lives as civilians.

Nothing About Us Without Us

In all such things, take your cues from soldiers, veterans, and their families. Nationally, what about creating a presidential commission that represents such groups in equal measure and in as diverse a way as possible? Let it investigate violations of the rights of military personnel and their families when it comes to health and safety in military commands and on bases across the country and around the world.

Often when I talk about changes like these, I’m met with skeptical looks from family members andfriends. Where will we get the money for such changes, since we’re already reimbursing providers at higher rates for accepting military insurance?

The striking thing is that there’s no ceiling when it comes to putting money into disastrous weapons systems, the U.S. nuclear arsenal, or the Pentagon generally. But when it comes to putting money into us, it’s another matter entirely.

How about, as a start, cutting down on waste and fraud? Money that could have done us some good has disappeared into gas stations in the middle of nowhere and other corrupt construction projects in our distant war zones. Tens of millions of dollars or more have been lost to waste and fraud in some of those unfinished foreign reconstruction projects. As economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier has pointed out, U.S. federal defense spending accounts for more than half of all of our government’s discretionary spending, with piles of taxpayer dollars going to expensive contractors who provide services like cleaning, meals, and security guards on bases in those same war zones. Instead of spending $100 more on a single bag of laundry in Iraq, how about spending it on a therapy session for a veteran struggling with postwar trauma here at home?

It’s long past time to end America’s fruitless post-9/11 wars. But if we don’t start re-examining our basic priorities, bringing our troops “home” will just create a new crisis, involving what, in the long run, will be millions of sick, grieving, and injured Americans who will lack the safety net of adequate healthcare.

Please remember, President-elect Biden: war, even failed war, shouldn’t be about sacrifice by the military alone but by all of us.

Andrea Mazzarino, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at a Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency. She is the co-editor of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

I suspect that yesterday’s news will have caused Trump’s standing with the military to plummet further.

A new opinion poll from the Military Times earlier this week reported that Trump’s favorability rating among US military personnel had fallen to only 38 percent. It had been 42 percent last year this time, and stood at 46 when he was first inaugurated. I made a little chart (read right to left) to show the shrinking blue approval and the ever heightening orange disapproval.

I don’t show it here, but the new poll actually found that 42 percent strongly disapprove of Trump, so the fifty percent disapproval is mostly hard disapproval.

Biden wins the military vote 41 to 37 if the election were held today, according to the projections in this poll.

Trump won the military vote 2 to 1 against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The bias of the military toward Republicans is not an eternal fact of life. I wrote way back in 2004,

“…let us take the officers in our military services, who have grown increasingly rightwing in the past thirty years. Polling data show that in 1976 only one third of military officers said they were Republicans. By 1996 two-thirds of officers identified with the GOP, and only ten percent were Democrats. This development is truly worrisome. Would President Bush have been so successful in pushing his joint chiefs of staff to put away their objections to an Iraq campaign last summer if he knew two thirds of his officers had voted against him? Did not the open contempt many in the armed services expressed for Bill Clinton weaken our democracy?”

Back in 1994, the execrable Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina warned President Bill Clinton that he “better watch out” for his safety if he were to visit one of the then six military bases in that state.

It is kind of cute that many Republicans a quarter a century ago were embarrassed by Helms’ outburst and were afraid this sort of talk would make them look like extremists. That was before the GOP became the bastard child of Frankenstein’s monster and Medusa.

I call Helms execrable for many reasons. One is that Camel brand cigarettes put advertisements at the back of Thai school notebooks, trying to hook K-12 students on cancer-causing tobacco. When the Thai government intervened to stop the ads, Helms threatened Bangkok with US sanctions.

But I digress.

That Trump may be reversing the long-term trend toward a Republican military is heartening, and the revulsion in the officer corps is even greater than among enlisted men.

Some 59 percent of officers have a poor opinion of Trump, and 50 percent have a very, very, very poor opinion of him. That statistic tracks with his unfavorability rating among the general public.

Why the military dislikes Trump so much is not hard to guess. Many in the military really hated his decision in October of last year to pull US troops from the Kurdish regions of Syria and then to feed to Turkey’s megalomaniacal Tayyip Erdogan the Syrian Kurds that had been US allies against ISIL and fought side by side with US special forces to Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan.

Likewise, when Trump erratically just blew away the Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport on Jan. 3, the Iranians struck back at Iraqi bases hosting US troops with missiles, something CIA director Gina Haspel had predicted to Trump.

The missile strikes caused concussions for about 100 US service personnel. Concussions can be severe and can have severe health consequences. Trump dismissed these injuries as “light,” clearly because he was afraid people would blame him for provoking the Iranian strikes.

The US military is well trained in geopolitics, strategy and logistics, and considers China and Russia much, much greater challenges than they do dinky Iran. Trump does not share their priorities.

As for his increases in the military budget, that is mostly corporate welfare for the arms firms. US military personnel are still poorly paid under Trump, just as they have been all along. But, as Trump obviously does not understand, a lot of people in the military aren’t all about money.

Goldberg’s sources told him that Trump asked of World War I, “Who were the good guys in this war?”

He added that Trump said of the cemetery visit, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”

He later called the more than 1,800 marines killed at Belleau Wood “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.

Social media is aflame with Marines and relatives and friends of Marines reacting angrily to the revelations. Belleau Woods or in French Bois Belleau is a storied battle in the history of the Marine Corps.

Being a historian, I thought I would underline its importance with a couple of accounts. One is from interviews with a veteran who had fought there. The second is by a war correspondent who saw the first day of the campaign with his own eyes.

Col. Michael C. Howard of the US Marine Corps wrote,

“On 27 May 1918, German Gen. Erich F. W. Ludendorff, bolstered by the massive flux of troops from the Eastern Front where Russia had been knocked out of the war by revolution, launched a devastating offensive.”

He explained that the Germans reached the outskirts of Paris in only four days.

Gen. John Pershing had been pressed to just put the US Marines under French command, but insisted on them retaining their independence. The US Marines stopped the German advance and then went on the offensive against them on June 6, 1918.

Howard explains,

“More Marines were killed in action and wounded this first day (1,087) than in all previous Marine Corps engagements combined.”

That June, the Germans deployed mustard gas against the Marines, with devastating health effects for those who survived. Howard briefly tells the story of Cecil Key, who was blinded and suffered burns from mustard gas, but eventually recovered his sight and lived into the 1990s.

In the article, “MARINES CONTINUE DRIVING ENEMY BACK,” The Associated Press reported on June 7 about the Marines’ offensive on the previous day, the costliest for the Corps up until that point in history.

“The one point where the objective was not reached was on the right of the attack in the Belleau Wood. The fiercest fighting was continuing there . . .”

“The marines in their forward sweep took strong ground on either side of Belleau Wood and cleared out the ravine south of Torcy, which linked up the line with Hill 142, which was taken yesterday morning. This gave them a strong and dominating position for a continuation of their attack. Their total advance was approximately two miles on a three-mile front.”

The captured German soldiers displayed poor morale, saying they were glad to be out of the fighting. But they had nevertheless fought determinedly, AP reported:

“the marines dashed into them yelling like Indians and plying bayonet and rifle. One marine who was taking back a prisoner ran into two German officers and 10 men. He tackled them single-handed with his rifle and bayonet, killed both the officers and wounded seven of the men . . .”

“The marines advancing in the Belleau Wood region went forward in four waves in open formation. The men in the first wave were for the most part armed with rifles and bombs, while the rear waves were equipped with automatic rifles. With them came squads of machine gunners lugging their collapsible guns. They crossed the open space and toiled up the slope bent over like gnomes. The trenches the marines passed over were clearly visible from below but they hardly deserved the name, for they were simply lines of little holes, big enough to hold a man, while barbed wire was lacking. There was some, however, interlaced among the trees of Belleau Wood but the marines pushed their way through it . . .”

“On all sides the guns were flashing, some of them stationed right in the field, while others were hidden in the woods. Looking down into the valley only a mile away, the village of Busseires could be seen on fire. As the correspondent watched the scene the clouds of white shrapnel smoke over the village of Torcy also became brownish and flames appeared in that town.

The artillery fire that preceded the attack lasted an hour and was of especial intensity for five minutes preceding the time when the marines went over the top . . .

It appears that the marines in going in forestalled an attack the Germans had planned . . .”

This was only the beginning. As with most battles in that horrible war, the campaign ground on for months. It wasn’t until October 29 that American newspapers proclaimed that the Marines had all of Belleau Woods (“for the sixth time”). The New York Times headline on Nov. 2 was, “TIME BOMBS LEFT TO KILL AMERICANS: Infernal Machines Ingenious, Some Exploding Long After Germans Have Gone.” The improvised explosive devices or IEDs in Iraq were not exactly a new technology.

Goldberg quotes a general close to former chief of staff John Kelly, who said that Kelly became convinced that Trump could not understand actions that were not transactional. People who lose their lives fighting for others are in his lexicon “losers.” Non-losers are out for themselves and get rich, apparently.

The White House is denying Goldberg’s story. But Goldberg was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and a defender of far-right Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, so he isn’t exactly a bleeding heart liberal. If even he is pursuing leads on a story that reflects so badly on Trump, it is because the story is true.

Long-time readers know that my father served for two decades in US army, mostly in the Signal Corps, and I grew up on military bases. GIs were my friends and mentors. They were in a potentially dangerous occupation, and their eyes were open. They were successors of Cecil Key at Belleau Woods, who suffered mustard gas burns there for his country. The only one short-changed is Trump, who cannot imagine self-sacrifice for a cause greater than oneself. It is a stain on the escutcheon of the presidency that Trump occupies that position.

——-

Bonus video:

Images from the era of the Battle of Belleau Woods, 1918