"Grateful" nation presents flag. What more do you want?

Linked from
The Sword & The Pen - http://theswordandthepen.blogspot.com/

Family's Sole Surviving Son Denied GI BenefitsFRESNO (AP) ― Army Spc. Jason Hubbard was forced to leave the combat zone after his two brothers died in the Iraq war, but once at home the soldier faced another battle: The military cut off his family's health care, stopped his G.I. educational subsidies and wanted him to repay his sign-up bonus.

It wasn't until Hubbard petitioned his local Congressman that he was able to restore some of his benefits.

Now that Congressman, Rep. Devin Nunes, plans to join three other lawmakers in introducing a bill Wednesday that would ensure basic benefits to all soldiers who are discharged under the sole survivor policy. The rule is a holdover from World War II meant to protect the rights of service people who have lost a family member to war.

"I felt as if in some ways I was being punished for leaving even though it was under these difficult circumstances," Hubbard told The Associated Press Tuesday. "The situation that happened to me is not a one-time thing. It's going to happen to other people, and to have a law in place is going to ease their tragedy in some way."

Hubbard, 33, and his youngest brother, Nathan, enlisted while they were still grieving for their brother, Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Hubbard, who was 22 when he was killed in a 2004 bomb explosion in Ramadi.

At their request, the pair were assigned to the same unit, the 3rd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, and deployed to Iraq the next year.

In August, 21-year-old Cpl. Nathan died when his Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Kirkuk. Jason was part of the team assigned to remove his comrades' bodies from the wreckage.

Hubbard accompanied his little brother's body on a military aircraft to Kuwait, then on to California. He kept steady during Nathan's burial at Clovis Cemetery, standing in dress uniform between his younger brothers' graves as hundreds sobbed in the heat.

But Hubbard broke his silence when he found his wife, pregnant with their second child, had been cut off from the transitional health care the family needed to ease back to civilian life after he was discharged in October.
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http://cbs13.com/local/sole.survivor.benefits.2.700663.html

Two flags for this family and forced the other surviving son to return home. A "grateful" nation presented the flags to the family and then told the last son he owed them. Spc. Jason Hubbard was told he owed the government money, but apparently as you read the rest of this article, Jason was not alone.

Why? Why do they keep doing this? Wasn't it bad enough that so many were dishonorably discharged when they were carrying the wound of PTSD? They got away with it and would still be getting away with it if some intrepid reporters didn't step up and do some digging. To this day, we still don't know what has been done with the over 20,000 veterans this was done to in order to correct this injustice. We may never know how far reaching their suffering went. Did they families fall apart? Did they end up homeless? Did they end up committing suicide because they were betrayed by the same nation they vowed to defend with their lives? Why does any of this take the actions of reporters instead of the government just knowing they need to do the right thing for those who serve?

Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington