General Petraeus's remarks require much reflection by our society

UPDATE August 24, 2012
A comment left on this post had a link (that's it, just a link) and I followed it instead of just deleting it. I am glad I did.
Snopes.com had the link to the original article.

I Wrote This
BEST OF RANGER UP, NEWS, NICK, NICK'S WRITING
AUGUST 5, 2012
BY NICK


Hello America, my name is Nick Palmisciano and I wrote the essay below, not General David Petraeus, “A Marine in Iraq”, General Schwarzkopf, any of the wounded warriors it’s been attributed to, or anyone else.

The order of events went something like this:

1) I was talking over with Tom Amenta, my COO, about how the world has changed over the years relative to military service. We had the Occupy Movement as the backdrop.

2) At the end of our conversation, I sat down and wrote this essay and posted it to Ranger Up.

3) The US Army reposted it on their Facebook page, which was a huge honor for me. It received tens of thousands of likes in a day. They attributed the post to me at the bottom. This was a huge honor for me as I felt I had addressed the feelings of many service members. I write a lot, but I had never touched a chord with our community the way I had with this one.

4)In the next few weeks and months I started receiving spam letters or seeing incorrect blog posts attributing this essay to various people. The Ranger Up fans did such a great job of correcting people that I didn’t get involved.
click the link for the rest of this.

If Nick Palmisciano wrote this powerful piece attributed to someone else, it should be corrected. So please share the update to anyone you shared the original article with.

Here are some more numbers before you read this. As of April 27, 2012, these are the numbers of disabled veterans.

VA Benefits and Health Care Utilization
8.574 million enrolled in the VA system
3.42 million receive Veterans Disability Compensation
1,448,000 OEF OIF Amputees as of 4/1/2012
513,589 Compensated for PTSD

General Petraeus's remarks require much reflection by our society.

Thanks to my fellow veterans:

I remember the day I found out I got into West Point. My mom actually showed up in the hallway of my high school and waited for me to get out of class. She was bawling her eyes out and apologizing that she had opened up my admission letter. She wasn't crying because it had been her dream for me to go there. She was crying because she knew how hard I'd worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I wanted to be an infantry officer. I was going to get that opportunity. That same day two of my teachers took me aside and essentially told me The following:

“David, you're a smart guy. You don't have to join the military. You should go to college, instead.”

I could easily write a theme defending WestPoint and the military as I did that day, explaining that USMA is an elite institution, that separate from that it is actually statistically much harder to enlist in the military than it is to get admitted to college, that serving the nation is a challenge that all able-bodied men should at least consider for a host of reasons, but I won't.

What I will say is that when a 16 year-old kid is being told that attending West Point is going to be bad for his future then there is a dangerous disconnect in America, and entirely too many Americans have no idea what kind of burdens our military is bearing.

In World War II, 11.2% of the nation served in four (4) years.
During the Vietnam era, 4.3% served in twelve (12) years.
Since 2001, only 0.45% of our population has served in the Global War on Terror.
These are unbelievable statistics. Overtime, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the burden and it is only getting worse. Our troops were sent to war in Iraq by a Congress consisting of 10% veterans with only one person having a child in the military. Taxes did not increase to pay for the war. War bonds were not sold. Gas was not regulated. In fact, the average citizen was asked to sacrifice nothing, and has sacrificed nothing unless they have chosen to out of the goodness of their hearts. The only people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation.

You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on. You've lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you'll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don't understand. Then you come home to a nation that doesn't understand. They don't understand suffering.

They don't understand sacrifice. They don't understand why we fight for them. They don't understand that bad people exist. They look at you like you're a machine - like something is wrong with you. You are the misguided one - not them.

When you get out, you sit in the college classrooms with political science teachers that discount your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can't understand the macro issues they gathered from books, because of your bias. You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the violent strain at that. Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, while they ask you to do more. But the amazing thing about you is that you all know this. You know your country will never pay back what you've given up.

You know that the populace at large will never truly understand or appreciate what you have done for them. Hell, you know that in some circles, you will be thought as less than normal for having worn the uniform.

Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group. “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” -Winston Churchill- Thank you to the 11.2% and 4.3% who have served and thanks to the 0.45% who continue to serve our Nation.

General David Petraeus
West Point Class 1974