Aaron Glantz sent a message to the members of "The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans."
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Subject: San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun Reviews of "The War Comes Home"
From Thursday's' San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.sfgate.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Farticle.cgi%3Ff%3D%2Fc%2Fa%2F2009%2F01%2F22
"Powerful ... The vets are victims not of some sinister plot, but of a government forced to cut back VA staffing and programs to pay for the very war that is disabling so many of them. Glantz shows that the problem stems ultimately from the way our society uses, then discards, its warriors."
From the Baltimore Sun:
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.sfgate.com%2Fcgi-bin%2Farticle.cgi%3Ff%3D%2Fc%2Fa%2F2009%2F01%2F22/DD5P156O3M.DTL
"[Glantz's] disturbing book describes a bureaucracy that mistrusts those it accepted into service and subjects them to long waits for benefits."
We are making progress! Help spread the word!
Aaron
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To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1010585994804
The War Comes Home
Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans
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By Aaron Glantz
University of California Press; 254 pages; $24.95
Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan
Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations
By Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz
Haymarket Books; 236 pages; $16 paperback
Get ready, America: The Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are starting to make their voices heard. Just as it took decades for us to learn the full extent of the damage wrought by the Vietnam War, we are just now starting to glimpse the hurt and suffering and enduring wounds created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With "The War Comes Home" and "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan," independent journalist Aaron Glantz puts himself at the forefront of those who are bringing this new generation of veterans into public view. Not only did Glantz spend several years in Iraq, covering the war and reporting on the lives of Iraqis, but he was deeply affected by the conflict to the point of suffering post-traumatic stress disorder when he returned.
What makes "The War Comes Home" such a powerful plea is that Glantz admits his initial bias against the vets - they were the ones who caused all the misery among the poor Afghans and Iraqis. But his eventual realization that both reporter and soldier are common victims of a government that wages such wars allowed him to identify with the vets and to empathize with their struggles.
Like the Vietnam vets, these vets return to face their own people who wish to put these unproductive wars behind them. One of the most poignant observations comes from Shad Meshad, a Vietnam veteran who spent decades counseling troubled vets. Meshad tells Glantz: "When I go through airports I see soldiers just sitting up against a wall - you may see hundreds of them in a large airport - just by themselves. No one goes up to them, that positive energy toward them is faded ... No one is spitting or shouting, but they're still left with the fact that they're responsible for what they did or didn't do and they're supposed to think about that alone."
Depression, suicide, homelessness, jail, PTSD - the statistics for the veterans are as staggering as they were for Vietnam vets. A 2008 Rand Corporation study claims that "at least 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, while another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury." It also claims that "a majority of the injured are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA."
The scandal over the horrible conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was the most dramatic manifestation of what is daily reality for most vets seeking treatment: A VA backlog of tens of thousands of claims, interminable waits to see a doctor and general bureaucratic apathy. In one of the more wrenching stories, Glantz relates how the parents of Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey watched helplessly as his mental health deteriorated after his return from Iraq - while the VA refused to treat him for PTSD because of his chronic drunkenness - until one day Lucey's father found him hanging dead from a garden hose tied to a beam in their cellar.
The vets are victims not of some sinister plot, but of a government forced to cut back VA staffing and programs to pay for the very war that is disabling so many of them. Glantz shows that the problem stems ultimately from the way our society uses, then discards, its warriors.
"Nobody really knows how to deprogram a soldier," Glantz quotes former Army instructor Karl Risinger. Even more to the point are the words of a veteran who spent 15 years homeless and in prison: "I needed to learn how to live again." The military, as Glantz points out, teaches well how to kill and how to survive in the most adverse and threatening circumstances, but not at all how to get a job, keep a family together, or live "life on life's terms."
The reader will get a concentrated, almost unbearable dose of soldiers' pain in "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan," a book that Glantz put together with the help of the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War. The book comprises selections of the testimony given by about 50 veterans at a four-day event staged by IVAW in Silver Spring, Md., in March. IVAW modeled its hearings on the Winter Soldier Investigation held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Detroit in 1971, whose goal had been to show that atrocities such as the My Lai massacre had not been freak occurrences perpetrated by a "few bad apples," but the product of official military policy. Similarly, IVAW wanted to show that "high-profile atrocities like the torture of prisoners inside Abu Ghraib and the massacre of twenty-four innocent civilians at Haditha were ... part of a pattern of increasingly bloody occupations."
The vets' words in "Winter Soldier" are at times so shocking that many Americans will not want to believe them. In fact, the public got no chance to assess the truthfulness of the testimony because most of the national media refused to cover the hearings. But all of the vets who testified were checked out ahead of time. Moreover, the terse, understated way that many of the vets related unthinkable horrors testified to the banality of these experiences.
Not all of the stories related in "Winter Soldier" are gruesome, and it may be hard sometimes to tell whether the shelling of a mosque, say, or the tearing apart of an old woman's house in the middle of the night were "atrocities" or simple military necessity. But in a way that is what the "Winter Soldier" hearings set out to show: that in this endless so-called war on terror, the "rules of engagement" eventually loosened to the point where American soldiers were told they could use lethal force against any Iraqi showing "hostile intent."
Like "The War Comes Home," "Winter Soldier" makes us feel the pain and despair endured by those who serve in a military stretched to the breaking point by stop-loss policies, multiple combat tours, and a war where the goals and the enemies keep shifting. But these books also make us admire the unbreakable idealism and hope of those men and women who still believe that by speaking out they can make things better both for themselves and for those who come after them.
"We were all good people," said Army scout Steven Casey. "We were just in a bad situation and we did what we had to do to get through."
Gerald Nicosia is the author of the Jack Kerouac biography "Memory Babe." E-mail him at books@sfchronicle.com.
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Congrats Aaron on your well received book and helping to point out the impossible VA claims system
Thursday, January 22, 2009
San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun Reviews of "The War Comes Home"
