All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is Diane Benson.
She is an Alaska politician, an inspirational speaker, video production consultant, published writer and dramatist.
She appeared in a couple of movies, Disney's White Fang, the award-winning Box of Daylight and the International Film Festival award-winning Sacagawea from 1989.
And she's running for Congress, an anti-war Democrat running for Congress in Alaska.
Welcome to the show, Diane.
Hi, thank you.
It's good to have you on the show here.
And I was reading, it's a pretty sad story, it looks like here, what put you in the position of running for Congress as an anti-war Democrat.
My understanding is that your son was injured fighting in Iraq in November 2005.
Why don't you tell us about that?
Well, my son had joined right after 9-11, and like a lot of them, he signed up and felt like it was something he had to do.
And I raised an independent young man, and I was not feeling very good about it.
But he went, and he served one tour for 12 months, and then he was out for a year.
And in that period of time, six months before he was redeployed, he was married.
And he was actually stop-lost, and he didn't expect to be going back, although we were nervous that stop-loss might kick in.
So we were thinking in those terms, and we were not expecting that he would have to, we were hoping he wouldn't go back.
Okay, explain to the audience what exactly stop-loss means.
Well, he had completed his four years in service.
And it's not that he was terribly naive or anything, he knew that he might be called back up.
You know, it was reasonable to think that he could get out.
Stop-loss means stopping the loss of troops, essentially.
In other words, they want to maintain, quote-unquote, troop cohesion.
So does that mean that he was in the ready reserve then?
His main time was up, but he was still in the ready reserve, or it's different than that?
It's different than that.
It can be different.
It can be that, and it can also be that when you are coming upon your completion date, having served his four years in this instance, his completion date was October 31st, 2005, and he was informed 60 days out, which is how you stop the loss of troops, 60 days out, notified that he would be redeployed.
So basically, this is the fine print in his contract, says, when your time is up, we still have you for a little bit while longer if we need you.
That's absolutely correct.
And so that's how he ended up going back, and he was expected to be, he was deployed, I think, for, well, he would have been kept in the service for another 18 months, I believe.
And 13 days after his completion date, an IED, remotely detonated IED, was, well, it took his legs, and he suffered other injuries, and they did not expect him to survive when they were out in the field, but there was certainly a lot of activity and hope that he would, and he did.
His story is really something, because like so many of them, really, and that's the unfortunate side of this, is that it isn't just my family, it's a lot of families right now.
You know, we don't think about how many are wounded in so many ways.
The amputations are one thing, the head traumas, the paralyzation, you know, being paralyzed, and the numerous other things.
We flew as a family over to Germany to see, to be with my son, because, and you know, it was, as a matter of fact, it was the Veterans for Peace people, I don't know who, I'm trying to remember who exactly, but they stepped forward to provide us the miles to get us to D.C. as parents, so that while DOD was making certain arrangements, we were already in D.C. so that we could get right to Germany to be with my son.
The only way DOD would arrange to have you go to Germany, as they did in our case, as we were told, was if they thought the soldier wouldn't make it, and obviously this was the, for me, the hardest thing of my life, and that's saying a lot, and it's, you know, to see your son, or your child, and the condition that my son was in is nothing I would wish on any parent, to be honest, and, you know, people often say, well, he was out there, he was doing what he was supposed to do, and this is what he signed up for.
Those are the words, however, that can kind of push my buttons, this is what he signed up for.
Actually, no, it wasn't.
He signed up for four years, and, you know, we fully expected, he was already planning on going to school and doing those other things come January.
What's really frustrating about this, from the soldiers that I talked to, and to families that I talked to, and for us, is that this wouldn't be happening if all these people who were so gung-ho for this war actually stood up to sign up, and, you know, you don't extend troops because you have so many troops to draw from.
You extend troops and stop-loss troops because you have no other resources.
Right, so you have anti-war soldiers who are going to fight a war they don't believe in, while people who have mongered this war are still sitting at home in their air conditioning.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
And now, when you talk also about, you know, what he signed up for, you know, I really don't know how things go in your family, but I would have to assume that your son is just like a good 99-something percent of the people who signed up to serve in the American military, and that is, they signed up to defend this country.
They think, they believe that whatever orders they're given are going to be for the purposes of defending America, not starting an aggressive war that has nothing to do with repelling the attacks or punishing those who attack this country on 9-11.
Well, that's exactly it.
My son, when he signed up, he fully expected to go after Osama Bin Laden, and you know, it was a useful bravado and all.
That's exactly what they expected, and I talked to so many when I was at Fort Benning about why they signed up.
I was just curious.
You know, it's all new to me.
I was not that familiar with the military life until my son got involved.
I have members of my family who have served, served in Vietnam in World War II and so on, but this was, this was different in that, of course, it was my child, and the impact on the family is really great.
I've learned that, but he signed up fully intending to go to, thinking he was going to Afghanistan eventually, and that's what he really believed from the get-go.
It was a real surprise to so many of them when the shift was to turn to Iraq, and that, I just can't even, it's one of those things that sometimes, as a family member, I think we still have, I know in my case, we still have nightmares over, to go through that kind of thing.
It's kind of never-ending.
You talked about the very high numbers.
I guess it's tens of thousands, we don't really know, somewhere between 20, 30 or 50,000 wounded soldiers from this war.
We know medical technology is so much more advanced now compared to, say, Vietnam, for example.
The casualty rates per injury are way, way down, but what that really means, though, is we have people like your son who lost his legs, who pretty much in any other war would have died right there on the battlefield, probably, who is staying alive, and people with severe brain injuries, the kinds of injuries that would have killed them in past wars, and there are tens of thousands of these guys who are all very dependent.
On this side of the microphone, I've heard a lot of horror stories about how well these soldiers are being treated or how poorly they're being treated by the Veterans Administration in seeking medical care and that kind of thing.
Has that been an issue for your family?
Well, you know, it wasn't for a while, but now it is, and yes, it is.
One of the things that frustrates me about the way this is being handled from a policy level is that they are essentially directed into the public entitlement program, and I find that a very peculiar thing, and I'll tell you why.
It's very peculiar to me that we have the Veterans Administration, which should be fully funded to take care of our soldiers, and I'm using soldiers generically, I mean all those in the armed forces, and the problem is, in my mind, is that we're shifting some of that responsibility onto public entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and then we don't, you know, and then as a country or a society, we complain a lot about the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, but we're also putting a lot of strain on those services by shifting our veterans into that arena, and I just find it ironic that some of the same people can talk about support our troops, you know, but don't want to pay for it.
Don't want to pay for the support.
Don't want to pay to make sure that their needs are met, that when they've given this cost to this, you know, paid the price for this country, the country in turn is not wanting to, even though they believe that they are supporting with the, you know, maybe the Chinese made yellow ribbon stuck, magnet stuck to the Humvee or whatever, that's not enough support for the troops, frankly.
It's a matter of being up front and really meaning it.
If you mean to support them, then by golly, make sure that all those, the Veterans Administration is fully funded.
Make sure that we have their needs met, because frankly, this is the cost of war, and that's the part that's so often forgotten.
Guess what?
This is what it costs.
It costs arms and legs and eyes, and it costs a lot of money to maintain the well-being for these people for the rest of their lives.
It costs money to take care of these families, so it's like you better think twice if you really want to send people out to war, then be prepared to pay the price, and be prepared to step up too.
It sounds like they're almost just...
I say this to those people who want to have war, be prepared, and be willing to do this.
Be willing to make a sacrifice, because right now, if you don't want to fund Medicare and Medicaid and other public entitlement programs, you're negatively affecting military families.
Well, yeah, that sounds like a double gotcha.
That makes it harder for anybody to oppose any of those welfare state programs on one hand, and on the other hand, it helps hide the numbers of the real cost of war.
If we had to look at the VA's budget every year for what it really should be, it would be much higher, but they're getting away with it by hiding these costs inside these other programs.
And, you know, the other thing too is that we need to talk about this more, not just about the cost of war literally, which to me is very much on my mind every single day, but we need to talk about these policies and these means by which DOD is able to make these decisions like on stop-loss.
We need to have that conversation.
I was so pleased to see that the film came out that I made a call out to people in my campaign to go see the film, and so that's something we did as a campaign office last Friday.
We went to see Stop-Loss, which was a bit painful for me, because it was so authentic.
It wasn't.
I haven't seen it yet.
I spent three and a half months at Walter Reed Army Medical and so instantly recognized the Walter Reed scenes, you know, and to have a real amputee in the film is another thing too.
Well, you know, you mentioned at the beginning of the interview that your son had suffered other injuries besides the amputations.
What was that, besides the legs?
He lost both of his legs, one AK, one BK.
He was severely burned on his back.
His hand had been blown apart.
They managed to sew one finger back on, and the other one was lost.
He had multiple shrapnel wounds.
He today is, however, I'm very proud of him.
He is my son, and he hand-cycled the New York Marathon.
He's done a lot of stuff.
There's going to be an episode with him on Miami Ink, which is a tattoo show on April 24th, you know, where he shares something of his story.
I think that would be worth something for people to watch, and he's in school, you know, and him and his wife, he's got the wonderful support of his wife, so he's ahead of the game compared to a lot of others who don't have maybe family who can't make it out to Walter Reed because they don't have the means and the money and are able to leave their jobs to be out there, and that's talking about the Walter Reed part of it all, part of the recovery.
My son and his wife live in Texas now.
Well, good.
Well, we're happy to have him here.
You mentioned on your website that he has been skiing on this mono-ski thing.
He's hauling ass down mountains, your double amputee son.
Yes.
That's really impressive.
That's persevering in the face of adversity.
Well, you know, he actually did it five, his first trip down a mountain was five and a half months after he was injured, which is remarkable.
Oh, he wasn't even a skier before that?
Well, he was before he joined the service.
Oh, I see.
A little bit of a skier.
He was mostly snowboarding.
But still, five months, just five months after suffering these injuries, he was up there next spring, huh?
Yes, he was, and that's what inspired me.
I was so inspired when I saw the picture running around on the internet of him coming down the mountain that I thought, you know, and I'm looking at a guy who has been our representative in this state for decades, literally, since 1973, and he got in by special election, doesn't have any kind of investment in this war, is certainly not having any personal involvement with the cost of this war, i.e., as in having any family member serving, and is voting for this war, and is not even bothering to go visit our wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical, which is only a half an hour away from the Capitol.
Yeah, didn't he say on your website, too, that he promised he would go, but then he didn't?
That's correct.
Well, let me ask you about this.
I know in 2006, there were anti-war Democrats running all over this country, and Rahm Emanuel and the guys at the Democratic Leadership Council did everything they could to undercut all the hardcore anti-war Democrats in support of the pro-war Democrats, who uniformly lost.
It was only the anti-war Democrats that won in 2006.
All the pro-war Democrats that the DLC put in there lost their races, and I just wonder whether you're getting any support from the Democratic Party establishment on this.
I wasn't aware of all that, but no, not at this time.
Well, maybe it's because you've taken a principled stand.
You need to just add a little bit of wishy-washiness to what you have to say, I guess.
Well, in all fairness, one, I did not get any support in 2006, and I took over 40% of the vote against an incumbent who was getting over 75% of the vote himself, so what I did was really remarkable on a shoestring budget and a grassroots campaign.
It surprised everyone, pundits were stumbling over themselves when the numbers came in to see how well I had done.
You know, it's doing what's right.
You know, sometimes you just got to stand up.
You just have to stand up and tell the truth, regardless of what the odds look like, and reach out to people and create something else besides the same old status quo.
We need more voices that talk truly about hope, that give hope just by the words they have to say, that we need more people who stand up and really ask for some sanity and humanity in Congress, and who ask the tough questions, but do it so that maybe we can all start working together to end this insanity and build a better country.
Why not?
Well, I really appreciate that point of view, and if I may get on my soapbox here for a minute in the middle of your interview, I would just like to point out that in our constitutional system in terms of the power of the people to get things the way they want or stop things that they don't want, all the power is in the House of Representatives.
That's what it's all about.
There are 435 little bitty districts all across this country.
Right now, for some inexplicable reason, they have a 98% re-election rate, I guess winner take all districts and gerrymandering and so forth.
But if the people of this country really want to make a difference, they can actually turn out and elect their neighbor to the House of Representatives and make that difference.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
You don't really get to choose your senator.
You sure as hell don't get to choose the president, but you can choose your congressman or woman in this case.
That's absolutely right.
That's the way I see it.
It sort of is always kind of sad to me to see all the attention and energy diverted to the presidential race, where it's our vote versus 60 million people or something.
Boy, you talk about a house race in Alaska, a few dedicated activists could make this thing happen.
You know, that's absolutely true, and it's not like I'm some kind of nut job, really.
Maybe it's nuts to run for office, but to have a viable candidate who's sharing some common sense, I mean, I think the voters need to leap on that.
We don't see it enough, quite frankly.
Well, speaking of how nutty you are, what's your position on the war on terrorism overall?
Do you want to bring the troops home from Iraq, I assume?
What about the rest of it?
I mean, we have a proxy war going on in Somalia right now.
We have an occupation in Afghanistan.
Military solutions to a lot of these issues is, I think, should not be the first choice.
It's not to say that we don't use our militaries, just that let's use them more wisely and put a premium on diplomatic efforts and humanitarian efforts, and I think we can do that.
Part of our challenge, I think, is the global economy and the state of our economy right now.
That is the challenge and the quickly emerging challenge that we have.
With what we owe China and the situation that we're in with just the global environmental issues right now, my gosh, it's almost like why should anybody run for office given this kind of climate?
It looks almost hopeless, but I don't believe that it is.
I think we always have to look towards better solutions, and when it comes to dealing with terrorism, we would probably do well to limit the politicizing on those issues and really focus on what the true issues are, securing our borders, for one, not confusing it with immigration because they're separate issues.
When we go in cahoots with certain Middle Eastern corporations, we're confusing the voters.
It's definitely confusing the voters.
What are our true priorities?
I think the government, certain members of the government have varied ideas on what that means to take care of our citizens, so part of the challenge, I think, as representatives is to decide what are those priorities.
There's some really good people in Congress right now that I would like to work with and can't wait to work with to work on exactly these kind of things.
Obviously, the purse strings is one of the issues, the primary mechanism for Congress to work with, but terrorism is a big subject in one sense, and I think we have to be a lot more thoughtful because we're spending so much and we're not spending it wisely, and that includes the way we utilize our military.
Okay, now let me see if I can give you the test that John McCain always fails.
Can you tell me the difference between Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda?
Well, my goodness, probably not, except that I don't confuse the two.
And the thing about Al-Qaeda is that if we left, there'd probably be a lot less of an issue in Iraq, and Hezbollah is not an issue in Iraq.
All right, well, at least you got that right.
That's better than the Republican nominee for President of the United States, so that's pretty good.
It's better than Sylvester Reyes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, too, so I'll give you credit.
You get half points at least.
All right.
And I'm sad to say that I haven't, the attention I've spent on Iraq has, I have to confess, has been much greater than the attention I've paid to other Middle Eastern issues, which haven't been discussed a whole lot in Alaska, because up here we are also dealing with intense economic issues around oil, gas, and other mineral extraction issues.
So I apologize for not being up on that.
Well, you still have time.
Yes, I do.
Just read Antiwar.com every morning, and it won't take you long to catch up.
Yes.
I'm bringing on new advisers, too, one on the Middle East, so I feel very good about that.
Okay, that's good.
Well, best of luck to you.
I really appreciate your time today, everybody.
That's Diane Benson.
She's an antiwar Democrat running for Congress in Alaska.
The website is BensonForCongress.com.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Oh, thank you.
