Dana Priest and Anne Hull, the Washington Post reporters who exposed the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed, are now exposing the disastrous mental health treatment provided to the soldiers returning from Iraq. In short, one more time, we see glaring evidence that George Bush and his government do not support our troops.
The writers spotlight a returning vet, Jeans Cruz, who sought medical treatment from the Veterans Affairs was told he could not get that treatment, in part, because he hadn't served in combat:
None of that seemed to matter when his case reached VA disability evaluators. They turned him down flat, ruling that he deserved no compensation because his psychological problems existed before he joined the Army. They also said that Cruz had not proved he was ever in combat. "The available evidence is insufficient to confirm that you actually engaged in combat," his rejection letter stated.
Yet abundant evidence of his year in combat with the 4th Infantry Division covers his family's living-room wall. The Army Commendation Medal With Valor for "meritorious actions . . . during strategic combat operations" to capture Hussein hangs not far from the combat spurs awarded for his work with the 10th Cavalry "Eye Deep" scouts, attached to an elite unit that caught the Iraqi leader on Dec. 13, 2003, at Ad Dawr.
Unfortunately, Cruz is not alone. The problems are rampant:
Jeans Cruz and his contemporaries in the military were never supposed to suffer in the shadows the way veterans of the last long, controversial war did. One of the bitter legacies of Vietnam was the inadequate treatment of troops when they came back. Tens of thousands endured psychological disorders in silence, and too many ended up homeless, alcoholic, drug-addicted, imprisoned or dead before the government acknowledged their conditions and in 1980 officially recognized PTSD as a medical diagnosis.
Yet nearly three decades later, the government still has not mastered the basics: how best to detect the disorder, the most effective ways to treat it, and the fairest means of compensating young men and women who served their country and returned unable to lead normal lives.
Cruz's case illustrates these broader problems at a time when the number of suffering veterans is the largest and fastest-growing in decades, and when many of them are back at home with no monitoring or care. Between 1999 and 2004, VA disability pay for PTSD among veterans jumped 150 percent, to $4.2 billion.
This week, the U.S. House actually increased spending for mental health because, of course, Bush's budget didn't deliver:
This bill provides $600 million more than the President’s request for mental health, PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury and makes five polytrauma centers and three Centers of Excellence for Mental Health and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) fully operational this year to care for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, including those with TBI.
Just because Bush and his GOP flunkies says they support the troop doesn't mean it's true. In fact, one more time, we see it's not true. What's worse is that Bush has known about these problems for a while now, and still refuses to fix them.
