Blogs by Mr. Ed
Veteran Chronicles, Chapter 6
12/5/2004 5:39:23 AM
Armor Plating, Troop Blogging, Health Insurance
For the deadly reality of war, our valiant troops should be provided with the best protective armor and equipment made; but, unfortunately, the question still remains; where is it?
For months now, entire units in Iraq have gone begging for the most basic steel plates needed to armor their Humvees against the deadly roadside blasts and attacks they encounter daily.
Families of these soldiers have even offered to buy these steel plates themselves; but they have been continuously rejected by military commanders who keep promising that the army will provide better equipment for our troops soon.
But soon never seems to come, and our soldiers have been literally reduced to scavenging scrap pieces of sheet metal and sand bags to provide some makeshift protection on their daily convoys.
The Pentagon has said that it has plans to retrofit some 4,400 troop trucks in Iraq with armor kits; but as of October, it had provided only about 800 of these kits.
As the mother of one soldier put it, "If we're one of the richest nations in the world, our soldiers shouldn't be sent out looking like the Beverly Hillbillies."
The Pentagon now says it hopes to have all Troop Humvees in Iraq armored by April 2005.
Soldier Blogs
Military officials are cracking down on blogs written by soldiers and Marines in Iraq, saying some of them reveal sensitive information. Critics say this is an attempt to suppress unflattering truths about the U.S. occupation.
One blogger in Iraq says he began his blog just to help combat boredom. "I'm just writing about my experiences," the soldier says. "I'm pretty much putting my diary on the Internet - that's all it is."
A military spokesman said these soldier blogs now have to be reviewed by a platoon sergeant and by a superior officer since the popularity of blogging has increased the chance that soldiers may inadvertently give away classified information.
But some critics worry that military officials are trying to muffle dissent from troops in the field.
"I really think it has much less to do with operational security and classified secrets and more to do with American politics and how the war is seen by a public that is getting increasingly shaky about the overall venture," says a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
(The Brookings Institution, one of Washington's oldest think tanks, is an independent, nonpartisan organization devoted to research, analysis, and public education, with an emphasis on economics, foreign policy, governance, and metropolitan policy.)
Health Insurance
A recent study completed at Harvard University has found that almost 1.7 million veterans of all wars lack adequate health insurance, an increase of 13 percent since 2000.
More than one in three vets under the age of 25 have no health insurance at all.
"It's particularly offensive to send people off to war and not take care of them when they come home," says Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study.
The Veterans Administration contends the number of veterans without healthcare coverage is far smaller.
VA Spokeswoman Cynthia Church says 60 percent of those uninsured veterans would be eligible for care if they simply enrolled in the VA system.
The study's authors dispute that, noting: many of these veterans have incomes higher than $26,000, which is the VA income cap to receive these benefits; they live in areas where there are no VA facilities; or they are unable to receive care due to long VA medical center waiting lists.
Church charges that the study's authors are using the issue of uninsured vets to further a political agenda of creating a national health-insurance system.
Many veteran activists discount that. "This is not a political issue; it's a soldier issue," says Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center.
A Gulf War veteran, Steve retired from active duty in October 2001, applied for benefits with the VA in 2002, and has yet to be enrolled in the VA healthcare system.
"What often happens in Washington is that these important programs get turned into political footballs to get kicked around," he says. "Then the issue doesn't get the national attention it deserves."
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