by Chaplain Kathie
Reading about young veterans ending up behind bars or waiting for trials is nothing new. This has been happening in the news since Vietnam. Changing attitudes back then was impossible in the face of draft pulling in all types of men/teenagers and sending them across the world. When they all came home it was easy to ignore them, hope they would go away or just fade back into just another face in the crowd. Thinking of any of them as "heroes" never entered into the minds of most. Perhaps it's because we knew a lot of them did not go willingly answering a call to serve? I don't know for sure. There are too many things people do I will never understand.
We ignored the Vietnam veterans because it was easy to do it. The media, well, they reported on a "crazy" Vietnam vet doing something stupid, using drugs, getting caught drunk driving or being locked up over a domestic dispute. As for the rest of them, no one seemed to care much at all.
Over the years things began to change but too slowly while veterans guilty of actions caused by what they went through in combat ended up behind bars or living on the streets as homeless veterans abandoned by justice and society.
Fast forward to another time in our history with two wars going on, one more in between now and Vietnam, the Gulf War, and we suddenly find ourselves out of the twilight zone. Veterans are now someone to be honored, and hallelujah for that! There has been such a turn around in the minds of this nation's citizens that now there are not only phony Vietnam veterans, there are phony heroes as well, claiming they were there and they killed off a lot of the enemy, wearing medals they didn't earn as if they could gain from what others did. Flashback to the 70's and the 80's when Vietnam veterans were made to feel ashamed of having medals for their valor and actual events they were really there for. What a twist between now and then!
While we rightly talk about the tribulations the Afghanistan and Iraq veterans are faced with, I am pleading with you right here and right now, the same way I always do, to not forget the Vietnam veterans still waiting for the same kind of justice we are now finally providing for the newer veterans. They have not spent a few years behind bars due to PTSD ignored. They have spent decades waiting.
They came home with the same wounds the newer veterans have but they did not have the support of the American people behind them. We cannot forget about the "disappeared" veterans of Vietnam any more than we can forget about the veterans of today's combat operations.
Some read these stories and think they must deserve to be behind bars, but that is from the people who cannot hear what is behind it all.
The Tragedy of Our 'Disappeared' Veterans
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted August 12, 2009.
How the justice system has been manipulated to put astonishing numbers of vets with PTSD and other psychiatric injuries behind bars.
Wayne McMahon was busted on gun charges six months after he got out of the Marines.
He was jumped by a gang of kids in his hometown of Albany, N.Y. , and he went for the assault rifle he kept in the back of his SUV.
He's serving "three flat, with two years of post-release" at Groveland Prison in upstate New York.
Maybe it's tempting to write McMahon off as just a screwed-up person who made the kinds of mistakes that should have landed him in jail, but maybe that's because his injuries don't show on the outside.He enlisted in the Marines right out of high school.
For the first time in his life, McMahon found himself in a meritocracy. He was promoted regularly and quickly, making sergeant by the time he got to Afghanistan.
Then two days before his five-year contract was up, he was caught drinking on the job, busted down to lance corporal and administratively discharged. He lost all his benefits.read more here
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