There's No Quick Fix for Veterans

MAGGIE MARTIN

Huffington Post Posted: 04/13/11 08:25 PM ET

It has been nearly five years since I left the Army and still my time in the service is fresh in my mind. I think about my deployments every single day without fail. I have friends and family, responsibilities and passions that keep me moving, but the time I spent in the Army and in Iraq are what continue to define me.
Many current and former service members feel the same way. The act of participating in war casts a shadow over everything else in life. Facing high stress and danger for so long makes it tremendously difficult to leave the military and rejoin civilian society. Day-to-day concerns seem trivial compared to the life or death urgency of military situations. When I first came home, I would become furious at how easily everyone in this country can carry on virtually ignoring the fact that we are at war.
I worked as a server as I used my GI Bill benefits to earn a bachelor's degree in English Communication, but after graduating with honors, I could not find a job in my field. After a year of looking for meaningful employment, I enrolled in graduate school largely out of fear that my degree would become obsolete before I could even get a shot at any real work experience. The fact that women veterans are among the highest unemployed populations leaves me with questions about whether my service is continuing to hurt me in ways I cannot even see.  Read more


Maggie Martin served as a Sergeant in the US Army Signal Corps, and she served two tours in Iraq.  She is an organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War's Operation Recovery Campaign and the Warrior Writers project.  Maggie is presently a graduate student at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan, and her poetry has been published in Fellowship Magazine.

Military in Schools in the United States

The Broken Rifle - Newsletter of War Resisters' International [No. 88, March 2011]

24 Mar 2011 — warresisters

• Oskar Castro

Every year in the United States, millions of young people are faced with the difficult challenge of figuring out what to do with their lives after they graduate from high school. For various reasons, many of them end up considering joining the US Armed Forces, but the commonality among all of those who enlist and those who don’t enlist is that they are all regularly bombarded with military recruitment propaganda pretty much from the time they are born. Whether it is on their television, their computer, at the toy store, or in their classroom, the pitch to embrace the military is everywhere.

The end of World War II saw the United States emerge as a military powerhouse due to the significant role it played in the defeat of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. Then the Cold War materialised which meant that the perceived threat of communism by way of the powerful Soviet Union had to be met with a show of incredible force. The military propaganda machine ratcheted up and the once neutral nation was now a militaristic monstrosity with an ever-growing military industrial complex benefiting from the fear.  Read more . . .

The Cost of Our Wars

TomDispatch.com
Posted by William Astore at 4:10pm, February 20, 2011.

On Listening to Our Troops
By William J. Astore

“Support our troops” is an unconditional American mantra.  We’re told to celebrate them as warrior-liberators, as heroes, as the finest fighters the world has ever known. They’re to be put on a pedestal or plinth, holding a rifle and a flag, icons to American toughness and goodness.

What we’re not told to do is listen to them.

Today, I’d like to suggest six vows we should make when it comes to those troops:

Vow #1: Let’s start listening to them.  And when we do -- when we begin to recognize them in all their frailty and complexity, their vulnerabilities and imperfections -- we’ll realize that they’re as restless and conflicted about our wars as many of us are.

How do I know?  I’ve had the privilege of reading hundreds of emails from today’s (and yesterday’s) troops sent to me in response to articles I’ve written for TomDispatch.com.  From these I’ve selected a handful of passages to share with you: voices that resonated with me, words that often got me right in the gut.

Consider this passage from an Army national guardsman, a non-commissioned officer who answered his country’s call and deployed to Iraq:

“I am… on my second tour of Iraq.  My unit… has been plagued by suicides and psychiatric problems.  Our guards-men even prior to deployment come from compromised social and economic environments, leaving them very susceptible [to military recruiters].  Many of our soldiers are almost forced into volunteering for multiple tours due to the lack of economic opportunity and the cold fact that there is no other way to support their families...

“I have seen blatant corruption among the [private] contractors [in Iraq] and even cases of outright human trafficking and forced prostitution among female third country nationals… My hope is that the U.S. can withdraw from this senseless war… This war has bankrupted the U.S. and caused untold suffering among U.S. Forces and women.”

When we praise our troops as volunteers in our “All-Volunteer Military,” how many of us consider that significant numbers of them are not truly volunteers?  Rarely do we face the fact that our country has been running a poverty draft, sweeping up the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, with an emphasis on the rural working class, and sending them halfway across the world into harm’s way.

Which leads to my second vow:

Vow #2: Let’s stop consoling ourselves with the myth that all our troops are volunteers -- a myth which leads most Americans to pay remarkably little attention to and take no responsibility for the wars our “volunteers” are fighting.

Read more

Young Filmmakers Decry the Trillion-Dollar Cost of Two Dumb Wars

Derrick Crowe

Political Director, Brave New Foundation

Posted: February 10, 2011 11:53 AM

What would you do with $1 trillion? Unfortunately, one of Washington, D.C.'s answers over the last decade has been, "waste it on two wars that make us less safe and cause deep suffering at home and abroad." The true costs of those bad decisions will be paid by today's youth, since policymakers failed to raise the revenue to pay for it when they started the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. But, nobody in D.C. asked the young people what they'd do with that money. So, next week, some of those youth are going to Washington to tell them in person.

Late last year, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Priorities Project sponsored a youth film-making contest called, "If I Had A Trillion Dollars." Entrants had to be age 13-23 and had to produce a video around one to three minutes in length addressing the $1 trillion cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. In January, the panel of judged picked two winners, both of which are embedded below, to receive the first place prize: $500 and a trip to Washington, D.C. to screen their film for Members of Congress, the Obama Administration and the press.
Briseida Montiel
"If I Had A Trillion Dollars"

You can see the other winners and honorable mentions at AFSC's website. All of the submissions can be viewed on the If I Had a Trillion Dollars YouTube channel.
Read more