Our soldiers are not meat

Posted by Philip Barron at 11:06 AM on March 5, 2007.

It is increasingly difficult to consider the Army's refusal to reopen the investigation of the suspicious death of Pfc. Lavena Johnson in Iraq - a death whose circumstances belie official claims of suicide - without considering a wider range of insulting treatment toward the nation's soldiers and their families. I'm not talking solely about facts behind fatalities brought reluctantly to light, as in the infamous case of Cpl. Pat Tillman, but a broader pattern of dishonor and dismissal toward those who serve and sacrifice.

All too often, the remains of fallen soldiers are shipped home to their familes like common freight, finally delivered in the cargo holds of commercial jetliners and carted by baggage handlers. Fifty-nine thousand survivors of service members who died on active duty or of service-connected disabilities while retired are subject to a Catch-22 style "offset" between compensation plans that actually costs them benefits: money first promised them, then taken away. The Army drastically reduces the number of disability retirement ratings allowed, even as the total number of Iraq War wounded and injured has risen above 15,000.

The past month has seen this pattern of dishonor raised to outrageous levels as Dana Priest of the Washington Post exposed the shocking treatment of patients at Walter Reed - a facility that has long been the symbol of our commitment to injured soldiers. The hollowness of that commitment now stands revealed as a nationwide pattern of neglect in military health care becomes apparent.

Every day, generals and politicians and pundits all compete to be the first and loudest to proclaim their pride in American soldiers. We are told that the troops represent the best that our nation has to offer. For all those proclamations, however, the sad truth is that we often treat those same troops - and their families - as though they were disposable.

You can't have it both ways.

They're not mercenaries, as some would have us believe. They're not, as former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld put it: fungible. They're not interchangeable faceless parts of a machine that eats money and spits out death and destruction. [...]

Every time they go, they leave behind spouses and children who must make do without dad or mom for a year at a time. They leave behind families who have to live with the terrible fear that a military sedan could pull into their driveway any day, carrying a chaplain and an officer and news that will break their hearts and destroy their lives.

Rumsfeld famously opined that "you go to war with the Army you have." What he failed to say - perhaps it didn't occur to him - was that you must honor the Army you have. Talk of honor is cheap. It's how you treat soldiers, in life or in death, that matters. It's how you treat their families that matters.

The media spotlight is currently on Walter Reed, for as long as that lasts. Meanwhile, the family of Pfc. LaVena Johnson awaits even a fraction of this kind of attention, and just enough light with which to discover what really happened to their daughter in Iraq.

Help them discover the truth by signing a petition to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees.

Tagged as: iraq, lavena johnson, walter reed

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.