All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet from ChaosRadioAustin.org, and dope, I just found out, not streaming from AntiWar.com slash radio, and I have to get that fixed for you, sorry about that, but anyway, yeah, ChaosRadioAustin.org if anybody wants to send the link to their buddy.
Thanks everybody for listening.
Now for those of you fans of Anti-War Radio, going back, you might remember Charles Goyette did two great interviews with a reporter for The Nation magazine by the name of Joshua Kors, and it was called How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits, a two-part special and a couple of really powerful interviews by Charles Goyette.
Well he has a new one in The Nation.
It's called How the VA Abandons Our Vets.
Welcome to the show, Joshua.
Good to be with you, Scott.
It's very good to talk to you, and now if we can go back to Specialist Town for a moment here.
If I remember right, basically the story was that some bombs had gone off near this guy, and although he hadn't lost an arm or anything, he had some concussion, pretty severe concussion and brain damage, and when he came home to America, they told him that he had a personality disorder, and that that personality disorder therefore disqualified him from getting medical attention for his physical injuries.
Is that basically what that article said?
I get that right?
That's the general gist.
He was knocked unconscious by a rocket while serving in Ramadi, Iraq, and following that explosion, he experienced deafness from the shockwaves, a lot of other physical symptoms that came with it, memory loss, all the things that one would associate with traumatic brain injury, and when he sought medical care and disability for those wounds, he was told that his deafness was caused by a pre-existing mental illness, personality disorder, and as a result of that, he was not eligible for the lifetime medical care, could not receive disability benefits, and in fact, because he could not serve anymore, he had to pay back his signing bonus so that on the day of his discharge, he was given a bill for quite a large chunk of money, several thousand dollars, and what made his case remarkable is that it was not unique to him in any way.
Over the last six years, tens of thousands of soldiers, 22,500, have been discharged with personality disorder, cheating those benefits, those veterans, out of their benefits, saving the military $12.5 billion in disability and medical care, and of course, Scott, you would think the absurdity of saying that deafness is caused by personality disorder.
In the 15 months that I worked on that story, I uncovered dozens of cases like his one soldier who scratched the lens of his eyeball while serving in Iraq.
They said that damage was caused by personality disorder.
In part two of that series, which ran in October, I spoke with military doctors who talked about being pressured by their superiors to purposely misdiagnose wounded soldiers.
One told the story of a soldier who came back with a chunk missing from his leg.
His superior pressured him to diagnose that as personality disorder.
Wow, now, okay, so you're right.
I almost interrupted you to say, did I hear you say deafness was caused by some mental illness or something?
I mean, I could understand how maybe Rush Limbaugh's mental illness made him go deaf or something, but we're talking about some regular guy who was in combat and had explosions go off next to his head, right?
That's right.
Okay, so I did hear you right there.
Boy, this just drives me crazy.
Let me follow up on town specifically, Specialist Town here.
Has this guy ever been done justice or is he still in just as bad a limbo as always here?
Since the article was published, things have gotten better for him.
The VA, which at first denied his claim, has done a reversal and decided to give him disability benefits.
The military still insists that personality disorder was the cause of his wounds.
In this most recent article, which was released this past week, How the VA Abandons Our Vets, I look at another block of veterans with related problems.
The soldier that you see on the cover there, Sergeant Juan Jimenez, was struck in the face by grenade shrapnel.
Like John Town, he earned the Purple Heart for his wounds, but when it came time to give him benefits, they said that his shrapnel wounds, they weren't related to his service.
They couldn't verify that these seizures and headaches that began after that blow to his head were caused by his service in Iraq, and as such, his claim was denied.
He and a large group of other wounded veterans got together and sued the federal government.
They took the VA to court in San Francisco Federal Court, and in their case, I was there for the trial in April.
Unbelievable.
You know, I'm always struck by, well, I'm sorry, this is my libertarian bent all over your radio interview here, but it seems like any private organization that treated anybody like this would be held accountable by the law.
What do you mean you gave him a Purple Heart and then you denied that's the cause of his injuries?
You're fired, you're sued, you're in trouble, and this guy gets his benefits.
Somebody bang a hammer on a bench.
What the hell is going on here?
It was a weird case that really exemplified the larger problem.
Not only did they give him a Purple Heart to acknowledge his wartime wounds, but he actually had a seizure while at the VA, and the VA doctor gave him seizure medication, but the Rater, which decides just how disabled you are and just how large your check will be, decided there wasn't enough evidence to prove that he has seizures, and as such, his claim was denied.
Amazing.
Well, now, one of the things here that I like to focus on, too, is something that George Carlin talked about back, I guess, when I was 14 years old or something, I saw this bit that he did about the corruption of language and how there used to be this condition called shell shock, and that was in World War I, and the words hurt, shell shock, and then after that, they changed it to battle fatigue, and then operational exhaustion and then finally post-traumatic stress disorder, and now it has a hyphen and an acronym and all these things, and all the pain is buried under jargon, and in fact, besides the physical injuries that we're discussing here, we really have enormous numbers.
I have no idea even what the numbers are in the tens of thousands and what the percentage is.
Maybe you can help of the people who are severely traumatized by the things that they've had to do over there.
Well, the RAND Corporation, in a recent study, estimated that 300,000 soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are coming back with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and that 320,000 are coming back brain damaged with traumatic brain injury.
I'm so glad you mentioned that Carlin bit.
I had an interview with Fox News a few days ago in Utah, and the host and I were talking about that very same thing, that as the language gets farther and farther from the truth, the obscurity becomes further and further, and I don't think most people even realize what PTSD is.
You can imagine that the brain, like a car motor, being left on for 12, 15 months at a time, it's critical to have that high state of alert because it keeps you from being shot, but when you come back and the motor has been on for that long, the parts begin to break down.
The nerve cells begin to fire when they're not supposed to, and that creates panic, flashbacks, nightmares, to the point where soldiers don't want to go to sleep.
I think listeners would only have to ask themselves how many months they would go without sleep before they finally decided, you know what, that's enough, I'm going to kill myself.
Well, and that's the other thing, the suicide rates are incredible, and I'm sorry because I don't have the footnotes, but when I talked to Dar Jamal last week, he talked about how already, already, the number of suicides of Iraq war veterans is higher than the number killed in action.
That's right, more soldiers are dying at home.
CBS News, Armin Katayan did a fantastic report about this last year, and he found out that the suicide rate is 120 a week, 17 a day.
And that was actually one of the key features of this lawsuit.
You spoke a moment ago about accountability.
That's exactly what this suit was about.
VA officials, for the very first time, up on the stand, under oath, trying to explain why the suicide rates were so high, why obviously wounded veterans, like Sergeant Jimenez, were being denied care, and why there was such a delay in the system, why soldiers were facing a wait list 650,000 veterans long.
It's just incredible.
You know, I would, I don't know, but I would guess that maybe if they just would pay these guys a lot more money, and let them find their own means of getting care instead of going to the VA, that the marketplace would find that there are guys who need help here, we need to put something together to do it, and would respond in a way quicker, more efficiently, and better than what the government is doing.
They don't care.
They obviously don't care.
Well, I don't think that's the case at all.
I think everyone involved in this, politically left and right, the VA and the veterans group, they all care.
It's just a matter of who's going to control the system, who's going to control the money.
Dr. Ira Katz, top mental health official at the VA, said that the reason they want to have what the veterans groups would claim a monopoly on veterans care is that they have a paternal interest in doing it right.
Many of the veterans groups have suggested exactly the solution that you just presented, giving soldiers, say, a hero card, where they can go to any medical officer across the country, outside the VA, and get care from their local doctor and medical official.
Right now, the VA is vehemently opposing that.
And also, to get back to those suicides for a moment, they've been disputing, before Congress, that CBS study that 6,250 suicides occurred in 2005 alone, 120 a week, 18 suicides a day.
Ira Katz, one of the top officials at the VA, went before the House Veterans Affairs Committee and said that number is flatly wrong.
But what was aired during this lawsuit in San Francisco is internal emails he wrote days after his testimony, saying those numbers are exactly correct.
That email was titled, Not for the CBS News Interview Release.
And it started with the word, shhh!
S-H-H!
As in, keep it quiet.
Wow, I don't remember that being on the front page of the Washington Post.
Did I miss that?
It got some press, but not as much as perhaps it could have.
It was certainly a highlighted feature of my article.
I think you really have to understand the context to understand the deeper meaning of an email like that.
He asked his press agent at the VA whether this was something they should handle internally before someone on the outside stumbles upon it.
And one can see why they would want to keep this information quiet.
It's quite embarrassing.
And many of the officials who took the stand did talk about their embarrassment at the way the system has been faltering under the pressure.
But what made their testimony a touch, well, certainly you could say insidious in the words of the many angry veterans who were there, was the way in which they're presenting their public image.
Just like you said, it hasn't been on the cover of the Washington Post.
And as such, they've been able to present the public relations front that they want to.
A key feature of that is statistics.
That six months is the time it takes for veterans to come and get their claims handled.
I'm sure many in your audience would find even that shocking, that veterans coming back wounded, needing immediate care, would have to wait up to six months for their claims to be handled.
But Scott, the testimony revealed that even those numbers were highly twisted.
It turns out the way they handle a resolved case can be anything from the soldier getting his claim resolved, you know, with benefits, to him committing suicide.
Suicide, death is considered a resolved case.
You can imagine a situation where a veteran comes back in need of care, waits three and four months, and finally after not receiving it, commits suicide.
And to friends and family, it might seem like a veteran like that was failed by the VA.
But for VA statistical purposes, that's actually a feather in their cap, because a four month long resolved case actually shortens their six month average.
You know, America now is like that movie Brazil, that Terry Gilliam flick.
They confuse buttle with tuttle.
Anyway, it's just crazy.
And you know what?
I'm really glad that you called me out and corrected me when I said they don't care.
Because of course, they is a whole lot of different people.
I don't know, uncounted numbers of people are included in that they I threw around so carelessly.
And really, care isn't the question.
The question really is the structure of the thing, the incentives.
Do the generals have the incentive to make sure that everything is as good as it can possibly be?
Or do they have the incentive to bury the truth that in fact, young men come home from more broken and suicidal, and that it ain't glorious, and it ain't wonderful.
And it ain't a good reason that a young man ought to leave high school right now and go sign himself up either.
And so their incentive is not to take care of this.
It doesn't matter whether they're the nicest, most caring general ever.
Any large organization is going to have a variety of views.
There were officials at the trial who stood up, one particularly, who, when discussing the money and the suicides, how much money it would take to actually take care of these soldiers in a comprehensive way, said we needed to have a unique view of just what financial and personal success means when it comes to how much money we're going to spend.
I've spoken to across the country heads of healthcare systems in Houston and Ohio.
Those are folks who are trying to pioneer programs on their own.
One I spoke to recently has set up a family counseling type operation where soldiers, veterans can come in with their family to try to get a group approach to things.
Often, as you know, drug addiction, divorce, and family violence occurs in the wake of these injuries.
They're looking to take care of that.
The problem is they're just not widespread.
You have one or two programs across the country.
And the VA had a plan several years ago to make programs like this widespread across the country.
In fact, Dr. Frances Murphy, one of the top members of the VA who drafted this plan, she was intent on bringing these changes to every VA.
But a few years ago when she spoke out at a public forum in D.C. and said even though they have the plans for the change, right now they're not being implemented.
That created a true uproar in the VA.
Days later, she was fired and replaced in the public spotlight by Dr. Ira Katz, the man who wrote those emails saying keep the suicide figures quiet.
Right.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about her.
And I guess that really is just sort of a textbook case of the way that kind of thing works.
Wow, so these numbers are just really hard for me to get my head around.
I mean, it really sounds like, well, I don't know, how many soldiers have served in Iraq?
A couple of million overall?
I think it's about 1.5 million right now.
About one and a half million.
And so almost a third of those guys are coming back pretty wrecked from this, either physically or mentally, or it's higher than that even?
I think over the coming years, we're going to see more and more veterans seeking treatment.
Many of the veterans' groups feel that the VA has grossly underestimated just how many veterans are going to need care.
You know, to get back to the numbers a moment ago, that six-month figure still sticks in my mind because it is true that veterans' claims are handled in an average of six months, but as it turns out, that's actually only the first step in the process.
If a veteran appeals his claim, thinks that it wasn't appropriately decided the first time, as 32,000 veterans did appeal in 2007, well, the average appeals time resolution is three and a half years.
That's in addition to the six months they've already waited for their initial claim to be handled.
Wow, unforgivable.
You know, it seems like, speaking of incentives and that kind of thing, it seems like the congressman at least, if not President Bush and the rest of those guys, would be trying to make political hay out of this.
I'm the guy who wants to take care of our wounded veterans more than anybody else, and you know, they have their spinmeisters and they can try to play down the whole war-isn't-really-that-glorious-after-all aspect and still be the heroes of the soldiers.
And yet, that would play politically great, wouldn't it?
And yet, they don't do that.
I know Secretary Gates actually fired that one general, which was pretty unprecedented over the Walter Reed scandal, but other than that, it doesn't seem like the civilian politicians in charge are really trying very hard to exploit this, even for their own benefit.
You know, it's a weird situation.
I think in a case like this, I actually have to point the finger at the media.
This is something I've spoken to many journalism groups about.
There are officials in Washington who are working day and night to solve these problems.
I think of conservative Senator Kit Bond of Missouri.
He's been at the forefront of this issue, and in fact, a lot of veterans have learned that when their local officials can't help them out, they can go to Senator Bond's office for help.
Barack Obama has worked hand in hand with him in trying to get, first, those fraudulent personality disorder discharges stopped, and then later to handle these issues with the veterans, but the media really hasn't asked that question.
I keep waiting for a journalist at one of the press conferences to say, Senator Obama, tell me about your bill, S1817, which would halt the fraudulent personality disorder discharges.
Nobody's really asked that question, and so those issues really aren't being brought into the spotlight.
Well, I guess they just don't want to admit that they read it from you and the nation first and it's not their scoop, or what?
It's a good story!
I'm not sure why that would be.
Yeah, I mean, I'm stuck on this incentive thing.
If I'm a reporter, hell, I'm a nobody radio host, and it's an important story to me, it seems like it would be an important story to them.
What's the problem?
I think the center of everyone's attention at this point shouldn't be who's putting focus on it, or who is getting the blame for the different issues.
It's just simply spotlighting the way the system is set up right now.
I'll give you another good example.
I don't think most Americans realize that when veterans come home from Iraq, before they can get benefits for their wounds, first they have to prove that their wounds came from war.
Sergeant Jimenez is a great case.
You would think that immediately after getting the Purple Heart, he would be given benefits, but he actually had to make a case in front of the VA that he was wounded, even though he still has shrapnel embedded in his skin.
This proof system has proved very controversial for many veterans groups, especially when the veterans learn that it's really not just a small step of paperwork.
Jimenez himself has been working three years to get his wounds recognized, and he's still having a fight with the VA.
The VA spokeswoman, Carrie Childress, spoke to me about this issue in San Francisco, and she said that trusting the veterans without any kind of checks and balance system would just be a bad option, first for the taxpayer, who would have to take care of fraudulent claims, but also the trust issue.
She said a lot of these soldiers, either they're going to the jail or to the military, and those really aren't the guys that you would want to trust first and foremost to accurately report their wounds.
In fact, I will tell you this, Scott.
One of the moments that actually shocked me was to see how much that suspicion aspect is part of the system itself.
Up on the board for everyone in the courtroom to see, they put a page from the VA manual, which urges VA doctors not to trust soldiers when they report their wounds, especially when it comes to psychological illnesses like PTSD.
As the VA manual said, PTSD is relatively easy to fake.
All right, I'm sorry.
I gotta go back to at least the guy who wrote that doesn't care, or he's got a real twisted view.
And you know what?
I guess it's true, right, that a lot of guys in the military had the choice of either going to jail.
I heard an anecdote about a friend of a friend just the other day who was either going to go to jail for five years or the army for two.
He chose the army for two.
So it's not that that's a whole untruth.
But on the other hand, come on, these guys are coming back from Iraq.
Boy, it just seems so strange that somebody's boss doesn't come in there and fix that and take that page out of the manual.
That's not right.
Let these doctors use their own judgment.
They're professionals for crying out loud.
Well, first of all, I think in large part that jail or the military option is something of yesteryear.
I know that a lot of soldiers are getting waivers for past crimes, felony waivers, they're called.
But what the veterans groups say is that even if there are some bad apples who are claiming fraudulent illnesses, the larger proof system hampers even the most honorable vets.
And sometimes it goes to extremes.
In several cases, you'd have veterans who weren't able to convincingly prove their case with the paperwork.
And so they're asked to bring in witnesses to prove that they were wounded.
We're talking about battlefield witnesses, buddy statements, they're called.
Someone to say, yes, I was there during the rocket attack.
I saw Sergeant Jimenez get wounded.
And, you know, I can vouch for the veracity of his illness.
Well, what if the others who were there for the IED blast or the rocket attack were killed in the attack?
Now the veteran has no witnesses.
Well, it sounds like it's really almost beyond a reasonable doubt they have to prove it.
It's not even just, OK, show us something so that we'll believe you and then we'll go from there.
Well, the system as set up on paper is to always give the benefit of the doubt to the veteran.
It's just a matter of how much that's playing out in practice.
And there's even a hurdle before that, which is simply applying for benefits.
Veterans coming back to apply, they have to go through a 26 page application, which asks for financial and medical and military records, along with tax information.
And U.S. law bars soldiers from hiring lawyers to fill out those papers for them.
Now, I have to tell you, as someone with an Ivy League degree, I was sitting through this court hearing and reading through these application documents.
And a lot of it was gibberish to me how a veteran with brain damage could come back and wade through these papers.
That is really anybody's guess.
And that's why so many of these veterans are coming back.
The severely wounded ones are seeing that stack of paper they have to go through to get their benefits.
And they say, oh, forget it.
I'm just simply not going to file for disability benefits.
You know, I don't think I've ever heard of anything where someone is forbidden from having a lawyer look at their paperwork or help them fill it out.
Have you ever heard of any other situation other than this?
I mean, seriously, that's the first time I've ever heard of that in any context in my entire life.
It's an old law.
It actually goes back to the Lincoln administration.
President Lincoln was concerned that the veterans coming back from the Civil War would be taken advantage of by greedy lawyers.
And so what he did was cap the pay for lawyers at ten dollars.
You can imagine how many lawyers are stepping forward to take a veteran's cases when they can collect at most ten dollars.
Now, I should add to that that the law is changing and many veterans see this as a truly good sign.
Right now, veterans can hire lawyers at later stages of the process.
That's due to a law that President Bush signed last year.
And right now, there is a bill that swept through the House without a single vote of opposition.
And right now, Senator Clinton and Senator Schumer are putting through the Senate to ease the system so that obviously wounded soldiers like Sergeant Jimenez could get immediate benefits without having to prove their illnesses.
Now, of course, there's a time factor here.
You know, we're speaking on a Tuesday.
The final days of the Congress are coming at the end of this week.
And as you know, if the bill doesn't get passed, it dies.
They have to start again from scratch with the new Congress in January.
Yeah, and they're all distracted by all the financial everything.
Does it look like, do you know about the schedule on the calendar or anything?
You know, I spoke with Representative John Hall's office yesterday.
He's the one who wrote this original bill.
It's H.R.
5892, the Application Modernization Act.
And they were uncertain.
It's their top priority.
And they're certainly working to raise awareness.
But John Hall is a freshman congressman.
And even with the help of Senator Clinton and Senator Schumer, they're not sure if they can beat the deadline.
There are a lot of different congressmen who are racing to push their bills in the waning days.
And as you said, the focus right now is all on the stock market.
Yeah, everybody's in the middle of an entirely different emergency here.
Now, one thing I wanted to bring up, too, and I don't know how much you know about it.
I bet you it's a lot.
If I had to guess, it's the Iraq veterans against the war.
And I know that they have support groups.
And in fact, I'm sorry, I'm trying to remember the name of the gentleman I spoke to from the IVAW not long ago, who explained that they absolutely and completely separate all of their politics and all of their policy, everything from their support groups for wounded and or, you know, mental problem, any kind of any, any soldier wants to come back and hang out with other soldiers who can understand what he's going through, and not to argue about politics to talk about their own, you know, personal grief and challenges and whatever, they can go to the Iraq veterans against the war all across this country.
That's right.
There are veterans groups popping up all across the country that have kind of filled in, you could say, where there were shortcomings of the VA.
A lot of these veterans, they get their most healing treatment by group therapy, and the internet with Iraq veterans against the war, or Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of America, or the group that filed this lawsuit, veterans for common sense.
They've been able to connect Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with fellow vets, who can share their experiences, talk about what they've gone through and what they're going through now, and the sense kind of get a group therapy by phone.
A lot of the meetups are Iraq vets as well.
So there is that kind of treatment, I think, for media awareness, better than a group like Iraq veterans against the war, which I think, to a lot of folks sounds shrill, is stuff like winter soldier, you're familiar with the event in DC, where Iraq veterans of all political stripes came forward, simply to explain what they've been through, and what they're going through now with their struggles with the VA.
To hear the experience of soldiers, I think, is the most important thing.
Paul Rykoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of America, IAVA, put it best, he said, his organization is not soldiers for the war, or against the war.
It's the voice of soldiers.
Yeah, well, it makes me sad that Colonel Hackworth is dead.
And of course, it was the agent blue poison that they sprayed on him in Vietnam that eventually killed him.
But that was Hackworth's job.
He was the man who stood on behalf of the enlisted men against their officers, trying to protect them from the politicians and the officer corps who treat them like so much garbage to be tossed out.
There are older veterans groups that have been doing that too, like Veterans United for Truth, John Handy, the executive director there, was a joining member in this lawsuit suing the VA.
And a lot of those Vietnam veterans, I have to say, they showed up in court, and they have a truly selfless attitude.
The one I've spoke to, each of them have said to me, they're not in this for them.
They want to see the system slim down and speed it up for this coming batch of veterans.
A lot of them, you can almost hear in the tone of their voice, they've almost given up on themselves and their fellow soldiers.
It's just they don't want to see this same mistake happen with this coming batch of soldiers.
And as I mentioned, I don't think that coming batch of soldiers really has reached its apex yet.
We're going to see a tidal wave in the coming years of veterans who maybe thought they could come back and handle their stuff, but ended up having problems that they just couldn't deal with.
Well, you know, I did an interview a long time ago with an Iraq veteran who talked about how he was all right.
Actually, the VA had taken pretty good care of him.
He had got in really good somehow, and they were doing a pretty good job for him, he said.
But he knew a bunch of his guys in his unit who they filled out a questionnaire before they left Iraq that asked them if they were having any nightmares or any kind of symptoms of the shell shock.
And if they said no in the questionnaire, no, I'm fine.
That's all right.
And then they come home.
And after they come home, they really start feeling and it kicks in later on.
They start having nightmares and flashbacks, etc.
The Veterans Administration just turns right on him and says, sorry, pal, you already said here that you're fine.
And using that as an excuse to get the logistics of this truly are remarkable.
When these Iraq veterans come home, they are given this questionnaire, as you said, basically to say, are you okay?
Are you going to hurt yourself?
Are you going to hurt your family?
And a lot of these guys simply want to get home after their long deployment, they just want to be back with their family.
And so they answer no, even if they have some doubts that maybe they do indeed need treatment.
It's as you said, only later that a lot of that the majority of these guys come back and say, you know, I do need treatment now, then they have to go through the process of applying, getting an appointment.
And often getting to the VA is a journey in itself, not just in admitting that they need treatment, but also for many of these rural veterans having to travel the great distances to those VA centers.
That was something that Francis Murphy, the doctor who co-wrote that plan for change, the one who was fired after speaking out in DC, that was something that she was keenly aware of.
She said for a lot of these guys who are in rural areas, to get access to the mental health treatment, it's simply not a practical option, they have to travel so far.
And there's just not a wide enough range of options for them.
Well, you know, I'm usually not one to advocate the government doing anything for to anyone, but if anything, they owe these soldiers the absolute best care that they can provide for what they've asked them to put on the line for this thing, whether people support the war or not is completely besides the point on that.
And so you say it's sailed through the House, and it's in the Senate now.
And basically what people need to do is, if they think that there's even the slightest chance they can get their senator to pay attention, they need to call those offices right now before Congress lets out.
You know, if people supported, that would be a good way to go.
This is really the last chance.
And then it starts again.
And of course, Representative John Hall, who spearheaded this campaign, you know, I think people in his office are holding their breath to make sure that he does get reelected.
If not, the fight will have to begin again with a new batch of congressmen, hopefully, who feel the same way.
And you know, I just thought of one more thing, too.
You said it sailed through the House 100%, right?
That's right, without a single vote of nay.
Okay, now people could also perhaps call their congressman and say, please go down the hall and talk to our state senator and let him know.
And maybe people have easier access to their House representatives than their senators, but maybe they can, maybe this is important enough to their congressman, there's a chance that it's important enough to their congressman that they can take 10 minutes to go and talk to their state senators about it, right?
That might be a really good option.
Okay, now there's one more thing.
We're already over time, and I'm sorry I gotta let you go, but I wanted you to emphasize one more time, who are the people who have organized this thing where these guys can all talk on the phone even and do their groups kind of in conference call?
Because that sounded to me like, you know, this day and age with everybody's BlackBerry and everybody's traveling around all the time and far distances, people can still make close personal connections with people far away, and that sounds like the kind of thing that could really, really be helpful to a lot of these guys.
There are several great communities for veterans coming back who need to reach out to fellow vets.
Paul Rykoff's Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America in New York is a great one, iava.org.
Paul Sullivan, the Executive Director of Veterans for Common Sense, he can be reached at veteransforcommonsense.org.
And, you know, if veterans want to get together with others who oppose the war, as you mentioned, there's Iraq Veterans Against the War.
There really are a host of options, and that would be the best way to begin to search for resources as well.
All right.
Everybody, that's Joshua Kors from The Nation Magazine, previously author of, I'm sorry, I forgot the name, What They Did to Specialist Town's Benefits.
What was it again?
I'm sorry.
Thanks for Nothing, How Specialist Town Won a Purple Heart and Lost His Benefit.
There you go.
And now the new one is How the VA Abandons Our Vets.
Thank you very much, first of all, for your devotion to covering this topic, and secondly, for your time on the show today, sir.
Thanks, Scott.
You know, listeners should also know, they can get a lot more information on my website, joshuakors.com, K-O-R-S.
Great.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I forgot to mention that.
That's joshuakors.com.
All right.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, folks.
That's Anti-War Radio for today.
Here's that Carlin clip for you.
And we'll be back here tomorrow, 11 to 1 Texas time for Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 in Austin.
I don't like words that hide the truth.
I don't like words that conceal reality.
I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language.
And American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality.
Americans have trouble facing the truth.
So they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.
And it gets worse with every generation.
For some reason, it just keeps getting worse.
I'll give you an example of that.
There's a condition in combat.
Most people know about it.
It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum, can't take any more input.
The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap.
In the First World War, that condition was called shell shock.
Simple, honest, direct language, two syllables, shell shock.
Almost sounds like the guns themselves.
That was 70 years ago.
Then a whole generation went by.
And the Second World War came along.
And the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue.
Four syllables now.
It takes a little longer to say.
Doesn't seem to hurt as much.
Fatigue is a nicer word than shock.
Shell shock, battle fatigue.
Then we had the war in Korea, 1950.
Madison Avenue was riding high by that time.
And the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion.
Hey, we're up to eight syllables now.
And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase.
It's totally sterile now.
Operational exhaustion.
Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Then, of course, came the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about 16 or 17 years.
And thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen.
And the pain is completely buried under jargon.
Post-traumatic stress disorder.
I'll bet you, if we'd have still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.
I'll bet you that.
I'll bet you that.
