Congress: "Screw the troops!"

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:40 PM on August 22, 2006.

It's hard to imagine a story that illustrates more clearly than this one that "support the troops" really means "support the lawmakers who send other people's kids off to get mangled in their misguided wars of choice."

USA Today:

Congress appears ready to slash funding for the research and treatment of brain injuries caused by bomb blasts, an injury that military scientists describe as a signature wound of the Iraq war.

House and Senate versions of the 2007 Defense appropriation bill contain $7 million for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center -- half of what the center received last fiscal year.

Proponents of increased funding say they are shocked to see cuts in the treatment of bomb blast injuries in the midst of a war.

"I find it basically unpardonable that Congress is not going to provide funds to take care of our soldiers and sailors who put their lives on the line for their country," says Martin Foil, a member of the center's board of directors. "It blows my imagination."

The Brain Injury Center, devoted to treating and understanding war-related brain injuries, has received more money each year of the war -- from $6.5 million in fiscal 2001 to $14 million last year. Spokespersons for the appropriations committees in both chambers say cuts were due to a tight budget this year.

"Honestly, they would have loved to have funded it, but there were just so many priorities," says Jenny Manley, spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee.

There are many priorities, yes, and high among them during this Congress -- the highest, it seems, is cutting taxes on investment income. That, and pouring tons of cash into shiny new weapons systems.

The Center requested $19 million dollars -- a drop in the freakin' bucket. Next year, we're projected to spend over $84 billion on new weapons. We'll spend ten times that $19 mil for "Star Wars" ballistic missile defense alone -- a program with almost no chance of ever working and designed to counter one of the least likely post-Cold War threats.

George Zitnay, co-founder of the center, testified before a Senate subcommittee in May that body armor saves troops caught in blasts but leaves many with brain damage. "Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism," he testified.

A couple of months back, this Newsweek story caught my eye:

Sam Reyes remembers nothing of the suicide bomb attack on a highway outside Fallujah that nearly killed him on the morning of Sept. 6, 2004.[…]

Although his physical wounds have largely healed--save for scattered scars across his forehead and his sense of taste, which has yet to return--the bomb blast left Reyes, now 21, with a less visible, but devastating injury to his brain. Like many Iraq vets who survive the concussive force of an improvised explosive device, or IED, Reyes is now sometimes unable to recognize his friends or family, to recall what he just read or heard, to concentrate or to read faster than the average second-grader. […]

Like more than 1,700 military personnel wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, Marine Cpl. Samuel Reyes Jr. is suffering from traumatic brain injury, known in military jargon as TBI, which leaves survivors unable to perform the most basic cognitive functions. According to officials at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, TBI affects more than 25 percent of bomb-blast survivors like Sam Reyes, making it the signature injury of the Iraq war... The increasing number of TBI survivors and the vexing limitations they face has become an enormous challenge for both military medicine and for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will treat these survivors for life...

The diffuse but debilitating symptoms of traumatic brain injury--which sometimes are not apparent until months after the bomb blast--can leave veterans with festering psychological problems and anger that often lead to failed relationships and careers, substance-abuse problems and the inability to adapt to civilian life. Many TBI patients, like Reyes, are also suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), a psychological condition affecting many combat veterans and other trauma survivors that is marked by flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety and irritability. The combination of TBI and PTSD, says the VA's Zeiner, "is pretty deadly." Reyes suffered damage to the frontal lobe of his brain, the area that helps a person calm himself after a stressful or frightening experience and where problem-solving takes place. When Reyes becomes anxious, he quickly escalates to a state of agitation. It's not uncommon, says Zeiner, for those suffering from TBI and PTSD to "either drink themselves into a stupor," in an effort to self-medicate, or to become agoraphobic, afraid to go out where they may have to contend with overwhelming stimuli.

A very close friend of mine was shot in the head during a robbery in New York years ago. He had an agonizing journey back to relative normalcy, although he says he'll never be the same. He had a really excellent support system, but he drank and drugged himself into a stupor for a while and came perilously close to taking his own life several times (he's now an activist for victims of traumatic brain injuries). I can't imagine what some of these young men and women will go through without the kind of intensive care and help he got. It's a travesty, and that spokesflack for the Appropriations Committee should have to tell these people and their families face-to-face that it was just a matter of "priorities" that kept Congress from fully funding a modestly priced program to help vets get through it.

And it's not just vets who suffer from TBIs -- the USA Today article cited research by the Brain Injury Center showing that 10 percent of all Iraq vets and 20 percent of front-line troops -- one in five -- suffer concussions during combat tours. Their preliminary research shows "Many experience headaches, disturbed sleep, memory loss and behavior issues after coming home…"

It's only preliminary research because brain trauma specialists "urged the Pentagon to screen all troops returning from Iraq in order to treat symptoms and create a database of brain injury victims" but the Pentagon balked, saying that "more research is needed."

But what they're really frightened of is the public getting a sense of how many soldiers come back from these "low-casualty" wars with debilitating injuries that they'll carry for life. In the first Gulf War, there were 147 U.S. combat deaths. But less than a decade later, in 2000, 325,000 Gulf war vets were receiving disability payments -- 56 percent of those that served. Nobody knows whether that's from depleted uranium or any of a dozen other toxic elements on the modern battlefield, but these "clean" wars have a huge cost for those that fight them. (And even for their kids; a study of 15,000 Gulf War vets in the Annals of Epidemiology found that they "were 1.8 (fathers) to 2.8 (mothers) times as likely [as the populatiom as a whole] to report having children with birth defects…")

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.