What benefits soldiers will benefit all of us

What benefits soldiers will benefit all of us
By MITCH ALBOM
Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:17 AM CDT


It was my uncle, your grandfather, his best friend. It was your dad or his neighbor or his brother-in-law. They were soldiers in World War II, and when they finished serving their country, they came home to a grateful embrace - not just words, but action.

There was something called the GI Bill, passed in 1944, and it quite literally changed the face of America. It paid for returning soldiers to study at trade schools, colleges, universities - even medical and law schools.

Paid in full.

Nearly 8 million soldiers had participated by the time the original bill expired in 1956. Men who otherwise might never have gotten a higher education did so - and improved the lives of their families as a result. It was a seeding of American society, a leg up for those who stood up. It made sense. It was humane.

Today, a new bill is being proposed, one that would essentially do for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan what we did for those in World War II. A new, expanded GI Bill. It has bipartisan support from senators and congressmen. But not from the White House.

The same White House that features a president and vice president who never saw combat, the same White House that throws around the phrase “support our troops” to serve its purposes, thinks this bill is too expensive. It costs $2 billion to $4 billion a year. Too expensive?

“That’s what we’re spending in a few days in Iraq,” said Patrick Campbell, who served in Baghdad, saw several of his fellow soldiers killed and is now legislative director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “This is a travesty. If we don’t invest in this, instead of having the next Greatest Generation, we’re going to have a generation of veterans who came home and just got lost in the system.”

Amen. The Bush administration should be ashamed for opposing this. Forget bumper stickers or mantras on talk radio. You want to prove you support the troops? Tell your lawmakers to invest our tax dollars not just in steel and metal, but in human potential.

go here for more
http://bgdailynews.com/articles/2008/05/15/opinion/commentary/comment2.txt

Virtually throughout the entire Bush presidency, he made countless speeches on the fact we must support the troops, yet he is the first one to deny them what they need.

Fully funding the VA is too expensive. Funding the GI Bill is too expensive. Building VA hospitals and Veteran's Centers is too expensive. On and on the list goes at the same time he makes more speeches about supporting the troops and how valuable the military families are. It appears that the end of supporting the troops comes when they come home and the value of the military families is only valuable when he wants their votes.

Bush fought against the pay raises. He didn't seem to value any of them when the families were and still are on food stamps. He has fought against everything that provides for the troops he screams at us to support. When it came to accountability, it was duck, dodge and cover up for all he lacked. Appreciation was limited to a speech given in front of them and behind their backs he tried to end any talk of spending money to care for them. Grateful ended when he discovered there was a loophole in the enlistment papers and he could keep them longer than they agreed to do by sending them back under stop loss. When the casualties began to rise, he discovered that if he lowered the standard requirements for enlisting, ranging from lacking education, to gang members, to felony records and drug convictions, it was no longer necessary to have moral standards as long as he got the numbers of boots on the ground. Nothing else mattered.

When it came time for him to order extended tours of duty, the view of detrimental conditions, were considered too trivial to matter and rest time was reduced as well.

Every time we read of the Democratic attempts to undo the harm being done, there is Bush and the GOP standing in the way of doing anything worthy of the same troops they claim to support. When it comes to the men and women who serve, they are last on the to do list until they need their votes and faces behind them during speeches. If you doubt any of this, just look up their voting records and the bills they introduced at a time when the troops needed action for their sake, the GOP had better things to do with their time.

Just one more case to my point.

Congress backs higher pay raise than Bush

Lawmakers clearly don’t share the Bush administration’s view that bigger military pay raises are a waste of money.
Read More