DIGG THIS

No veteran wants Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In fact most will fight it for years, and when things really get out of hand, they have to go through the embarrassment of asking the Veterans Administration for help.

If you Google for a definition for PTSD, you find there are 677,000 pages on the subject. Here is one of the first ones I found:

A debilitating condition that often follows a terrifying physical or emotional event causing the person who survived the event to have persistent, frightening thoughts and memories, or flashbacks, of the ordeal. Persons with PTSD often feel chronically, emotionally numb. Once referred to as “shell shock” or “battle fatigue.”

I can remember when I first thought about getting some help with the problems I was having after returning from Vietnam. I was going to Arizona State University under the Vocational Rehabilitation for Disabled Veterans Program, after a tour in the Republic of South Vietnam with the Marines.

Basically, I was okay as far as I was concerned, but I was having nightmares and almost constant thoughts about Vietnam.

So I sought help at the student health center. I wasn’t the first vet they had seen with these problems. They had the answer all ready for me. That would be a big bottle of 10-mg. pills of Valium. The pills were nice, and they did take Vietnam off my mind, but they also took everything else with it. Since I was trying to learn something at school, after a really crazy week I flushed the rest of the bottle and decided to just stuff everything into the back of my mind.

Like so many other vets, I stuffed that stuff; and every time it popped back out, I would stuff it in again. Some vets from World War II have been doing that for more than 60 years. The problem is that you can’t keep everything hidden. They might not know what is wrong with you, but your loved ones know that something is terribly wrong, and usually they are the ones who tell you that you need help.

There are lots of places to get help. Many vets used alcohol and others smoked lots of pot or snorted their problems away. In the end, though, most vets go to the VA for help, and that is where “scary” comes into play. First off, it is pretty unanimous that vets with PTSD don’t trust the Veterans Administration.

I still remember my first time at the Minneapolis VA looking for some help. The Nam vets at that time distrusted the VA so much that the building for PTSD was down the road about a mile. You couldn’t even see the VA hospital from there.

That first day was very scary. To begin with, I was totally embarrassed because real Marines wouldn’t need help, or at least that is what I thought. Then, to set the tone of the day, the first two vets I saw there were waiting for their “tune up.” Their tune up, as they called it, turned out to be electric shock. After hearing that, I was ready to bolt.

I should back up a bit here. Before I started going to the Minneapolis VA looking for help with my wartime traumas, I was living on the bank of the Big Fork River, about seven miles from the Canadian border … in the woods. I started out trying a program set up by the VA to get rural vets from the Vietnam War some help. They would send a guy out to my house from the St. Cloud VA Hospital, and he and I would sit around my house and talk. At that time I was too scared to tell anyone what was really going on in my head. Before every visit, I told myself that I would open up this time, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t really know what was wrong, and to tell you the truth I don’t think the guy from the VA knew anything either.

After several visits my counselor and I decided that that type of help wasn’t going to do me any good, so I went back to stuffing everything into the back of my mind. It actually took a few more years before I got up the courage to go to the VA.

Meeting another Marine was the real reason that I finally made it to the VA to find some help. I was down in St. Paul, and I met a former Marine who had been in Vietnam about the same time as I had been. This guy was a mess, and we hit it off like old friends.

Confronting
my PTSD

Remember how I said PTSD vets don’t trust the VA? This guy told me his experience with them. While in Nam, he decided to send his younger brother a finger from a dead gook. You know, like a souvenir. I think we became closer then because when he told me that, I said, “Cool,” like he was talking about a hot rod he had built. Heck, I might have done the same thing, but I didn’t have a younger brother. You don’t send severed fingers to your sister.

Somehow this guy’s mother learned about the finger, and she flipped right out. The VA was waiting for him when he got off the plane from Nam, and they put him in the psych ward and started him on Thorazine. Veterans refer to Thorazine as “liquid straitjacket.”

He said they kept him in there for six months, and he was able to get out only because his dad worked on it. What he remembered best was regularly walking to the nurse’s station when a bell rang. The bell rang when it was time for his next dose. He said there was a long line of Nam vets waiting for their pills. Also, he said it could take him several hours to get his shoes and socks on.

Needless to say, thinking about going to the VA freaked me out after that. Like I said, this Marine and I became good friends. He had kids the same age as mine, and a time or two his family drove the 250 miles north to visit us. I didn’t have a lot of friends; in fact he was the only one.

One day he and I were having coffee together, and he got all serious and said, “Man, you are screwed up.” He wasn’t talking about being stoned, and I knew that, but I said, “Well you are screwed up, too.” To which he said, “I know.”

It is one thing to know in your heart that you are messed up but it is another thing when your best friend knows it, too. We both knew that we had to do something, and the VA was the only game in town. He knew if he went for help, he would be drugged again. The VA figured that if you were sending fingers home in the mail, you were dangerous. So I was elected to be the one to check things out. The vote was 1 to 0. I abstained, but lost anyway and, like I said, this guy was my only friend in the world; and looking at the bright side of it, maybe they had better drugs now.

Seriously, I had this guy’s blood oath that if I didn’t come back after a few weeks, he would do a special-operations mission and break me out. I had every confidence that he would do whatever it took to get me out of there if I needed the help.

Entering the
VA Hospital

There was no Internet back then, so there was no way to Google up the question about what they were doing to Nam vets at the VA. I was going in cold, and I was scared.

As with everything else in the government, you start off with lots of paperwork and tests. They had one multiple-choice test that lasted hours where they asked many inane questions, such as how I felt after I heard a sad song.

I must have passed the test because they kept having me come back and I started having interviews with doctors. Now that I look back at it, I have to laugh because those guys had no idea what they were doing. I could tell they were thinking that at any minute I was going to freak out and go nuts. Because they were on edge, I was on edge.

I must have passed with those guys too because I was then sent to the PTSD Unit down the road at Fort Snelling. Fort Snelling was an army fort about 100 years ago. Since then, it was made a historical site, but they did have one building off by itself that housed the VA’s PTSD clinic. Fort Snelling sits on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, and if you walked to the edge of the bluff, there was a retaining wall you could look over. It looked to be about 200 feet straight down to the river. I wondered how many guys thought of taking a dive off there.

Just as an aside, all through my active time getting help at the VA, there were guys doing themselves in. One day a Marine did a header off a footbridge onto the concrete below while a bunch of us were having a smoke across the parking lot. Here is how it went back then. They called in counselors for all of the VA employees, and they sent us home after canceling all of the day’s appointments. The people working at the VA didn’t see this guy take his dive, but we all did. He was dead when he hit, and he left a real mess behind to clean up. Today they have a wire screen on that bridge so you can’t dive off.

I always thought they should have had a plaque there saying, “Corporal John Smith took a header off this bridge, October 23, 1987,” or something to that effect. Who knows, he might have saved some other guy who was thinking of doing the same thing, but couldn’t now because they put up that wire barrier.

That first day at the Minneapolis VA PTSD clinic, I met the two guys waiting for their electric-shock treatment. The sad thing about that was that one of those two guys had his 70-some-year-old mother drive the two of them out for their appointment. These guys were way past having the ability to drive a car. That guy’s mother looked so frail and sad. Over the next couple of years, I kept seeing these guys around the VA, but after a few years they couldn’t carry on a conversation anymore.

I was a bit early for my appointment, and I was talking to the guys who were waiting for their appointments too. They explained to me that one doctor was into using psychotropic drugs. Not that he used them himself but that he had the vets he was working with use them. The other doctor, they explained, was Harry Russell, who didn’t like the idea of using drugs. As worried as I was, I figured that I needed a clear head in case I wanted to skip out of there quick. It was a good choice.

A few years later the doctor who believed in prescribing drugs was forced to retire by the VA. He was a World War II vet and was past the age the government lets you work. I saw a lot of guys break right down and cry when they learned that he was not going to be there to help them, and he had helped a lot of veterans. In truth I didn’t know the guy. The only time I talked to him was when I had a bad headache, and he gave me some aspirin.

Dr. Russell started out slowly with me. I saw him about twice a month for a year. That was about 1,200 miles a month driving back and forth to the VA. There is no magic cure for PTSD, and right from the start Harry was up front with me, saying I would get worse before I got better. Sure enough, the longer he and I talked, the sicker I got. PTSD is a horrible ordeal.

One really great thing Harry Russell did was to have a program for the vets’ families, where he would tell them about what was going on with their loved ones. My oldest daughter went to his talk, and I think she learned a lot.

After a year of talking to Dr. Russell, he told me that it would be best for me if I went to an “in house” trauma-treatment program at Tomah, Wisconsin. He said it would last eight weeks. He could recommend that I go down there but I would have to have an interview first, and the people in Tomah would decide whether they thought I was sick enough to enter their PTSD Program.

The Tomah VA Medical Center sits on 173 acres in west central Wisconsin. The PTSD unit there was about 300 miles from my home, and it was a long trip driving down there thinking hard all the way about whether this was the right thing for me. After having spent a year talking to Dr. Russell at the Minneapolis PTSD Clinic, I was ready to get whatever help the VA had to offer. But I kept remembering that everyone was talking about how hard these VA programs were and that getting everything I had hidden from myself out in the open would make things worse for a while.

They were right, because throughout the visits with Dr. Russell things did grow progressively worse for me. At the start of all of this, I would schedule my appointment for early afternoon at the Minneapolis VA clinic. It was a five-hour drive down, and I could leave at first light and be back that same night. After a while, I noticed that I would get more tense the closer I got to the VA. Another thing: when driving down Highway 46 toward Minneapolis, the sun would be coming up on my left and the flashes of sunlight through the trees would put me right back in Nam. I could not figure out why those flashes of morning sunlight did that to me, but it would freak me out so badly that I had to change my appointment time to early morning. That way I could leave for the VA at midnight and avoid the flashing sunlight.

I now know that things do get worse when you start dealing with your PTSD, because for so long I tried to stuff everything about the war into the back of my mind. What I didn’t realize is that the things that were coming out and bothering me were just the tip of the iceberg. I might have a couple things that were always setting me off, such as, the sound of a helicopter; for some guys, it was the smell of diesel fuel. Those “triggers” would start me thinking of my wartime experiences. For a while we learned how to stop those thoughts. Like I said, some guys used alcohol or drugs; others dove into their work. Whatever it took to take our mind off the things we didn’t want to think about is what we would do.

For some, that diversion technique works for decades and for others it works for a few years. Either way, the time comes when nothing works anymore, and a guy either gets some help or he does himself in. When a guy starts dealing with these thoughts of his war, then everything starts coming back to him.

Many veterans find that their time in the war was just a time in their life, like high school or college. After it was over, it just became a memory. For others, their time in the war zone becomes the most vivid thought in their life. I don’t know why one guy can walk away and the other can’t. I have met veterans who have become executives of successful corporations, and one day their war experience jumps out of the back of their mind and takes over their life.

Some guys have scars on their bodies from battle wounds that remind them of combat every day. I met a Korean War vet there who had been shot in the face, and let me tell you he looked just awful. I asked him if he had ever tried living out in the community, and he said that he had but the looks of little children bummed him out too much.

They can do a lot with plastic surgery but after years of multiple surgeries, some guys don’t want the pain for the little gain they get. Like this guy said, to reconstruct a face you first have to have a face to work with. So he lived at the VA hospital, and I guess he will die at the VA hospital.

Others have no apparent visual reminder, but they are affected by their time in combat too. I met a guy at Tomah who was wounded at Iwo Jima in World War II. He was still in that VA hospital 50 years later. He told me he was better, but he explained that all the time we were talking he could hear his fellow wounded Marines screaming as they waited in horrible pain to be taken off the island. The sounds of those wounded Marines stayed with that guy 24/7. To him these were not just “voices in his head” — the sounds were so real that he actually could hear those screaming, dying Marines.

The decision
to seek help

You read about Iraq and Afghanistan vets needing psychological help after their return home, but they never explain what that help entails. Young men or women needing help with their war experiences, and the stress those experiences can cause, will spend years, decades, maybe the rest of their lives trying to get back to normal.

I know I was going to write about the PTSD program at Tomah, but I got off on this tangent. I could try to blame that on having PTSD, but I know too many people who have never been to war and who have trouble with their mind’s wandering as well.

Maybe I just don’t want to think about my program there at the VA. It wasn’t fun; it was hard work. Something most people don’t know is that the program is free, provided by the government to help veterans who have served in a war, and because of that service they are having problems. The program is free, but that is it. You don’t get any money to live on, you don’t get any money to travel on, and your family has to get by while you are away.

To say the least, you have to really need the help in order for you and your family to put your and their lives on hold while you try to get yourself back together. A lot of guys start, and a lot of guys quit. Some find it easier to go back to the bottle or return to being a workaholic. Others decide it is easier to take their own life and end the torment the war zone has placed on them.

As I stated earlier, Dr. Russell from the Minneapolis VA PTSD clinic wanted me to go to the Tomah VA Medical Center in Wisconsin for an in-house, long-term PTSD program. He could tell Tomah that he thought that its program would do me a lot of good, but Tomah had to decide whether it wanted to take me on, because it had many more referrals than it could ever handle.

I remember driving down there from the north of Minnesota. I went through Duluth and down Highway 53 to Interstate 94. It was the start of Wisconsin’s deer-hunting season and their northland was filled with guys outfitted in red or blaze orange, carrying rifles. I had to stay alert all the way because all those hunters in the woods got the deer moving, and there could be a deer on the road around every curve.

Entering the
VA hospital

When I finally got to the VA hospital, I was amazed at how big the place was. There were huge brick buildings that looked as though they had been built before World War II for some Ivy League college. The sprawling acres of lawn gave the place a parklike setting, and there were many little ponds with tall wire fences surrounding each. I later learned that the fences were put up to keep vets from drowning themselves in the ponds. Tomah VA Medical Center had been a veterans’ psychiatric hospital for years.

After checking in and filling out a lot of paperwork, I was given a map of the place and sent over to the PTSD unit. As soon as I got close, I knew which building it was because of all the vets my age standing around outside smoking.

I still remember the guy who interviewed me. His name was Jim Oliver, and he was born and raised in Tomah. He told me that as a kid after World War II, he would have to walk by this VA hospital on the way to school every morning. He described how he could hear the screams of the veterans inside. Then one day the screams stopped. He later learned that the hospital had started using psychotropic drugs that quieted down the veterans. That got him interested in the field that would later prove to be his career. Interestingly, there are still wards at Tomah that are filled with padded cells. Maybe I should say “padded rooms.”

To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I said that made Jim Oliver decide that I should start in the next program but he offered to give me a room until then. We had talked about what my life was like at home and how I got along with my family, the community, and a bit about my service in Vietnam. I declined his offer of the room, as I had to get home to get everything ready back there for my absence. It was late fall, and I would need to get several cords of firewood up near the house, and I had to figure out what I was going to do about my house payment and utilities. Now that I think back on it, the only thing that stands out in the interview was that I made eye contact with Oliver. Dr. Russell had told me that was important. I know a lot of vets who have a problem doing that, but I don’t think I ever have.

I have to admit that everyone back home was very helpful. The bank told me not to worry — that we would work things out when I got home. The woman who owned the bank was a World War II veteran herself. I had enough savings to handle the rest of the expenses, but there was one group that stiffed me, and that was the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I was in the VA hospital when it was time to pay my yearly dues, so the VFW post dropped me from their membership rolls. So much for the VFW’s helping the vet.

I packed all the clothes I thought I would need, did a tune-up on the truck, and headed back down to Tomah. The first place I stopped at on the way was Les Beach’s house outside Grand Rapids. Les was in Nam when I was, only he was in the Army. If I thought I had PTSD, I knew Les had it much worse. He was a total workaholic and would always tell me, “Hey, I work, I pay my bills, and I own a house, so I am like totally together.” What Les wasn’t saying is that he lived alone and couldn’t leave the Grand Rapids area without having to hurry back, because he would start having panic attacks so badly he would stop at the first hospital emergency ward he could find, thinking he was having a heart attack. But Les was a great guy and a very good friend. He worked for the electric co-op and fell out of a tree during an ice storm as he was trying to clear some wires. He died on the spot. Les wasn’t a lineman; he was a staking technician. He put stakes in the ground to tell the crew where the power wires should go when somebody was building a new house. He was in that tree, clearing wires of ice only because he loved to work every hour they would let him.

Les told me every bad thing he had ever heard about the VA while we played a few games of cribbage, and then he took me out to what he called my final dinner on the outside. He really figured the VA would never let me go. He said that too many World War II nut cases were dying, and they needed Nam vets to fill the beds so they could keep their budget. Like I said, many Vietnam vets do not trust the VA.

So after Les’s vote of confidence in my going down to Tomah, I headed off with my head full of all sorts of thoughts.

When I got down there and checked in, they had me put my truck in the impound lot. They said there would be no weekend passes and not to worry — if the battery in my car ran down, they would get me started when it was time for me to go home. That was comforting.

When I started this series I gave the following definition for what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is, but there are hundreds if not thousands of definitions to choose from if you search them out. I learned from other veterans that each person with PTSD has symptoms that appear to be the same, but when you get to know vets well, you find that their symptoms and their methods of coping with them vary just as much as the traumatic events that caused their stress in the first place.

The definition of PTSD is: “A debilitating condition that often follows a terrifying physical or emotional event causing the person who survived the event to have persistent, frightening thoughts and memories, or flashbacks, of the ordeal. Persons with PTSD often feel chronically, emotionally numb. Once referred to as ‘shell shock’ or ‘battle fatigue’.”

I have met vets who have lost limbs, are scarred up, limp, or walk with the white cane of the blind, and you don’t have to even wonder what caused their troubles. Others have physical wounds and scars you don’t readily see, but they are affected the same way. As an example, I met a vet who had to jump into a small pool of water during a firefight. A couple of hours later, when the battle was over, he found that his body was covered with leaches, which left permanent scars all over him from his chest down. While swimming in our lake in Minnesota, I found how hard it was to notice a leach on my foot and what a nasty looking creature it was. A little salt made it let go, but even having it on there for just a little while left a small scar on the top of my foot. Having hundreds of them on his body for a few hours would not only freak a man out when he saw them, it would leave his skin looking very bad.

I saw one vet with his shirt off when we were playing basketball, and he had a huge chunk out of his back with a series of scars across his chest that looked as though someone had taken an ice cream scoop and made holes all over him. I know every time this guy looked at his body, the memories of his being wounded would flood back.

Veterans have every kind of wound imaginable, and many that no one could imagine. It seems understandable that veterans with these wounds could suffer from combat stress for years, maybe for a lifetime.

There is another group that suffers the same combat stress as those I just described, but this group has no physical scars to remind them of their time in combat. I think a good example is the corpsman who had to deal with the Marine who had all the leaches on his body. Remember, corpsmen in the Marines and medics in the Army are not doctors; they are just soldiers and Marines who have been sent to a course in advanced first aid. In wartime, that course can be as short as six weeks, and they are expected to deal with sucking chest wounds, blown-off limbs, intestines coming out of the stomach, and, who would guess, a body covered with leaches.

Then there are young men and now women in combat who have to deal with wounded in their unit. The best corpsman or medic can deal with only one person at a time, and so there are many times when a soldier or Marine who is not trained as a medic is put into a position in which he has to administer first aid to keep his comrade alive.

American troops are constantly dealing with wounded civilians. Helping the severely wounded child is hard. In a tour of duty in a combat zone, there could be many times that any one soldier will have to deal with dead bodies or parts of them. That would be our dead and the enemy’s dead.

Somebody has to put our dead into body bags to get them to the rear, and then Graves Registration personnel have to take those bodies back out of that body bag, clean them up, identify them, and get them ready for the trip home in the flag-draped coffin.

So knowing all of this, because of the year I had already spent working with Dr. Russell at the Minneapolis VA PTSD unit and talking to fellow vets in the clinic’s waiting room, I was wondering what the vets would be like at Tomah.

Like most vets, I thought I was in pretty good shape, but all these other guys were really sick. I just needed a tune-up; these other guys needed a complete overhaul. Of course, all of them were thinking the same about me.

Arrival at
Tomah

I am not going to give you a day-to-day report on the Tomah PTSD program, but I will let you see a bit of what they did for me. There were eight guys in my group, and we stayed together almost to the end. One guy dropped out.

Starting out, they gave us a complete physical and a few of the guys were in rough shape after living on the streets for years, but most were healthy and looked to be fit. None of us knew the other, and so we were assigned rooms (two to a room) by luck of the draw. We had one floor on one wing of the hospital along with a group of vets who had started the program four weeks before we came.

The guys who had been there before us seemed to me to be in terrible shape, but I would find that we would deteriorate pretty rapidly in the weeks to come. Bringing out everything about our combat experience — everything we had fought so hard to keep hidden for years — would do that.

So that first week was used to start our group getting to know each other and to get us started on a journal. We could start writing about any time of our life: when we were six years old, or when we joined the service, or when we went to Vietnam, but every day we were supposed to spend time writing in it. Every week the doctors would spend some time reading the journals, and if one of us didn’t work on his, he was told to do so. For some guys this was hard because they never wrote anything, and for others it was a way of getting things out that they couldn’t talk about in the open. I found a little room that doctors used to write things on medical charts, and they let me use it to write each night after most of the staff had left.

We had one floor on one wing in one of the many huge hospital buildings at Tomah. At one end of the floor we had a smoking/reading room where we could all get together and talk. The coffee pot was always on in there. At the other end of the floor, there was a recreation room that had a bar-size pool table and an exercise bike. I can’t remember there being a television.

There were veterans from all over the country, and I remember there being one from Delaware and another from Wyoming in our group, with the rest from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Each of us had been an enlisted man — two of us had been Marines, one had been in the Navy, and the other five all had been in the Army. We had a couple of guys who had been living on the streets, two guys who were corporation presidents, a county veterans’ service officer, a carpenter, an accountant, and one guy who would never tell us how he made a living.

After a few hours in the smoking room I noticed that we had all fallen back into talking as though we had left Nam a week ago. Lots and lots of swearing and lots of slang were used. We were kind of feeling each other out, finding out when and where a guy served — I guess trying to figure out if my war was anything like their war and vice versa.

We had to walk what seemed like a mile through connected buildings to get to the cafeteria for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was no leaving the grounds, and even if we wanted to go for a walk we had to check in with the floor nurse to go out and come back in. There were two floor nurses on duty 24/7, and if things got hard for us, we could always have a talk with one of them.

That first week was orientation, and after that the fun began. As I look back on it now, the whole program was very interesting. I found some parts to be very helpful and others to be a waste of my time, but I am sure some of the things I thought were a waste, were beneficial to others.

Next month I’ll tell you about the structured program we started after that first week of settling in.

So far I have gone from thinking about needing help with post-traumatic stress, to going to the Minneapolis VA and getting a year of one-on-one sessions with a shrink, and on to an intensive eight-week in-hospital PTSD program at the Tomah, Wisconsin, VA Medical Center.

Now I’ll take you further into the program, starting with my second week at Tomah. You know, I wish this was exciting, but it isn’t. I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I can remember most of the program. But I might have things out of order. Some of the classes or therapy sessions we had were assertiveness training, dreams, relaxation, trauma, journaling, and relationships.

Assertiveness training was good for me because, to begin with, I realized that I had two ways of dealing with things. No matter what the situation was, either I got really angry and said whatever came to mind, or I would mentally say, “To hell with it,” and walk away not saying anything.

Let’s say that I went into the rural electric office to dispute a bill or the courthouse to talk about my real-estate taxes. Usually I could get my question out in a coherent manner, but if the answer I got was not what I wanted to hear or wasn’t in a form I could understand, I would start to get worked up. I could get terribly angry in 10 seconds and because I was so angry and didn’t really want to be that way, that would frustrate me. My best bet was just to walk away, which I learned to do.

A lot of Vietnam vets took the other path. When they got frustrated they would get angry, and then many of them went from angry to violent. Lots of Nam vets spent time in jail or even prison because what started out as a simple problem escalated into something totally different.

I don’t know if I am right here or not, but the way I figure it, many veterans who have problems with post-traumatic stress are stuck in the way they thought while in the combat zone. Too many times if a person didn’t answer a soldier’s question or didn’t do what the soldier wanted him to do, the soldier got violent. Usually, going nuts verbally with an automatic rifle in his hands got the results the soldier wanted. If things went from bad to worse, the soldier could always shoot or even kill the person who was wasn’t doing what he wanted.

Giving 18-year-old kids that kind of power of life or death over a population is not a good thing, and when he comes home he tends to forget that that power has been taken away. Power does corrupt, and the Marines and Army will give a recruit absolute power. Remember too, that a Marine or soldier is given that power when he is scared out of his mind. He is that scared, and he is watching friends and comrades-in-arms being killed or wounded on a regular basis. That is a bad position to be in, especially for a teenager.

That is probably why, when I got home, I would walk away when I felt things start to escalate. Many times I would walk away and throw up because a huge dose of adrenalin would be dumped into my body so that I could be ready for whatever was going to happen. I think this is called the “fight or flight” response.

Regaining control

The assertiveness training classes at Tomah could have been called “being in control” class or “being prepared” class. What they taught me was to have a balance in my response to whatever situation I was in. I learned that nothing is black or white. A person’s being on the other side of the counter did not mean that he even had an answer to my question; and if I couldn’t understand what he was saying or I didn’t agree with his answer, I could always ask to see his supervisor. Another good pointer for me was to do my homework and try to be as knowledgeable as, or even more knowledgeable than, the person to whom I was talking.

Now when I have a problem with a bill, or with the county, the state, or the federal government, I take it as a challenge. It becomes a game for me, and if I do the research before I start asking questions, many times I don’t even have to take it to the next step. Before Tomah, I thought I was always right because I didn’t take the time to study my problem. I could look at a bill and think, This isn’t right. Now I take a second, third, and maybe fourth reading of that bill, before I take it to the next step.

That assertive class was one of the first classes we had at Tomah, and it got me off to a good start because it was something practical that I knew that I could use. In the big picture it wasn’t that big of thing, but it got me to change the way I thought about things.

I’ll tell you one thing that saved me a lot of trouble, and that was that I lived in the woods of northern Minnesota, and that was by choice. Living in the woods when I was upset with something meant I was usually too far away to do anything about it. There are lots of vets living out in the woods because it gives them a cushion of time and distance to things that could get them in trouble.

Nobody likes to think this but dealing with PTSD has something to do with maturity. A GI leaves that combat zone as a young man who knows how life works in that zone but the military never gets him ready for the new zone he is going to after his war is over. That new zone is life in the real day-to-day world of America.

Maybe getting out of the combat zone is akin to getting out of prison. We’ve all heard stories of the prisoner who has done his time and gets out of prison. He doesn’t know how to relate to the real world and gets himself in trouble and lands back in prison. It’s the same way in the military — we knew how things worked in that setting, and that is all we knew. We tried things that worked there just fine, and they don’t work in this new world at all.

We knew how to act and we knew how to think, but those actions and those thoughts didn’t work anymore. In fact, they got us into trouble. The hard thing is, those thoughts and actions kept us alive. It is a hard transition to make.

Last month I wrote about the assertiveness training in the Tomah Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) program and how I thought it helped me. This month, it’s dreams and relaxation therapy. I am purposely saving the trauma group for last, both because it was the most important part of the program and because I don’t really want to talk about it, and putting it off seems like a good idea.

Honestly, the dream class seemed kind of bogus to me. Guys would talk about their dreams. The facilitator would then try to interpret what the dreams meant. Some of the guys had dreams that were completely far out in left field, and they had every detail of the dream. On top of that, they would take the whole class period to describe one dream. I don’t know about other people, but I don’t dream in minute detail like that.

It is true though that veterans with PTSD do not sleep very well at all, and while at Tomah I never got up in the middle of the night without finding two or three other guys up already. I still do that to this day. I get up and walk around just to make sure the perimeter is secure. I have bad dreams a lot, but I don’t usually remember what they were about, and my wife used to tell me that I would call out numbers. Later on I figured out that they were grid coordinates.

With the dream class we learned tips on how to get a good night’s sleep. Exercise during the day, don’t use caffeine after 4 p.m., and don’t drink a lot of liquids or alcohol before bed. Most of the tips were just common-sense things that we should have known by then. I guess if the dream class helped some guys, it was worthwhile.

For me, the relaxation class was very helpful, and I still use what they taught me every day. A lot of vets are what they call hyper-vigilant, and many have a strong startle response. For some guys, if a truck backfires, they hit the ground and cover their heads. It is an automatic response, and it can be very embarrassing. Many are constantly looking around to see where they are in relation to other people. Those vets will always sit with their back to the wall and try to never be out in the open and vulnerable.

It can be exhausting if you are staying alert all the time, and learning how to relax did a lot for me. I don’t know how the class started out, but the guy giving it had a voice that could put anyone at ease. He had us try all sorts of techniques, and I remember the first one that worked for me was to take one muscle group and flex that for about 10 seconds and then let it go limp and then move on to another group. That worked for me, and all the time we were trying it, the instructor was quietly talking us through it.

Later on he taught us another method that I still use today. In this one I start out thinking of my toes and do deep breathing at the same time. In my mind I envision my toes getting bigger as I inhale and smaller as I exhale. I start with my toes and go to the ball of my foot and on to the rest of my body until I have relaxed my whole body. Today I can start with my whole foot, move on to my legs, and get totally relaxed in about one minute. It feels so good when a tense muscle lets go.

I don’t fall asleep doing this, and I do it for only about 15 to 20 minutes in the afternoon. When I am done, I am refreshed. A couple of years ago a drunk driver went through a stop sign and plowed into my truck. I was lying on the side of the road with a dislocated hip, a broken hand, a lot of cuts, cracked ribs, and pain like I couldn’t imagine. So I prayed and then started doing my relaxation-therapy routine while waiting for the ambulance. It worked wonders for me.

Now if I hurt my back or am having a bad day, I take the time to run through that routine, and I sure feel good. I do the same thing if thoughts about Vietnam start springing into my head. I can get so relaxed that I can no longer feel any part of my body. I use music now to help me get relaxed and have found that American Indian flute music works best for me.

Having post-traumatic stress is hard on the body and the mind. The PTSD program had us work on both. Learning how to live a healthy life was just one part of the program, but I came to believe that the program was a package, and I needed to work on everything they gave me if I wanted to get something out of it.

Now we come to the very reason that veterans get PTSD. More than likely, there was a traumatic experience or experiences that, you might say, overwhelmed them.

Now that I have been through it, I believe that the whole Post Traumatic Stress Program at the Tomah VA Medical Center was designed around the trauma group. Everything we did there — the relaxation class, the dream workshops, assertiveness training, the journal, even the set-up with a small intimate group of fellow Vietnam vets — was designed to get us focused on that trauma or those traumas that had taken over our lives since we left the war. Getting the things we had kept secret in our minds out in the open where we could look at them and getting feedback from a group of our peers was supposed to help us.

It is hard for me now to remember the first trauma group meetings, but I do remember that we had that group more often than any other class. I think we started by reading something out of our journals about Vietnam. And it wasn’t long before we all knew what kind of unit each guy had been in, where in Vietnam he had been stationed, and what years he had been there. We learned about each others’ jobs, and we talked about the good times and the bad.

As the weeks went by, we explored more and more of what was really the problem with each man. It didn’t take me long to figure out that, like me, each of those guys had something that sounded pretty bad, but they could talk about it. For me, it was like a cover story. I could talk to the doctor about it; heck, I could use it myself to keep what was really bothering me hidden in the back of my mind. So everybody would tell his “cover story,” thinking that it would be good enough, so that he didn’t have to tell everyone that secret thing in the back of his mind, that thing that was so horrible that he didn’t even want to let it out for him to look at.

Some guys’ cover stories were pretty horrible, and if it wasn’t for having something that hurt them more, that cover story could have been the thing that they were keeping hidden. When we went to group, we agreed that what was said in that room stayed in that room, so I won’t be repeating what the guys I was with were saying; but here is what I talked about when I had to come out with something that was on my mind all the time.

The woman in
the cage

I was taking some radios from Signal Hill, above LZ Stud which was down Highway Nine past the Rock Pile. I hitchhiked a ride on an H-37 helicopter to Dong Ha, took an H-46 to Phu Bi, and from there I got a ride on a Huey helicopter to Da Nang, where our repair facility was. It was hard getting from the airfield to where I needed to go, with the radios weighing more than 50 lbs. each; and I had all my other gear, flak jacket, rifle, helmet, pack, ammo, and probably some C-rations. I finally found the place and turned in the radios and they gave me two new ones to take back.

It was late, and I made my way back to the field, knowing that I wouldn’t get out until morning, so I walked around looking for a place to sleep. I was walking around an area that was a staging area for supplies, and I found a place between two conex boxes that wasn’t all that far from a head, and there was a bunker nearby that I could go to if there were incoming rounds. I should explain. Conex boxes are big green metal boxes that supplies are shipped in. They are about 8 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet and have skids under them so that a fork lift can move them.

After I got situated, I walked around having a smoke, and as I came around one conex box, I saw that there was a wire mesh screen attached to it that formed a cage. There was a Vietnamese woman in that cage with her young child. I guess the child was about three or four. The woman was tall and at one time she had been pretty, but right then she was exhausted and she was begging me for water. The child was lying at her feet, alive, but not moving. I got out my canteen and was about to give her some water, when an American army major came running up and yelled at me, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” I said I was giving the woman something to drink, and he put his hand on his .45 and told me to walk away, which I did.

The next morning I had to take a look and see what was up with this woman. She and her child were both lying in that cage dead. I believe that they died of thirst. A metal conex box sitting in the sun would bake anyone and the inside of that box was the only shade they would have had.

I don’t know what that woman had done. I don’t know what information she might have had that that major wanted, but I do know that we, the United States of America, murdered her and her child, and it bothers me today just as it bothered me back then. It is one of those things “I could’ve, should’ve” done something about; but I was a Marine sergeant who had been through the brainwashing boot camp all enlisted Marines go through, and when a major tells a Marine to walk away, he walks away. I pay for that almost every day.

That is the thing that I would use to hide what was really sticking in my craw, and it worked for a lot of years, until I got to Tomah. Here is the goal that they told me I was working for: Things about my time in Vietnam were constantly on my mind, and they were really affecting my life. The doctors at Tomah said that they couldn’t make those things go away, but they might be able to get me to the point that I could have those thoughts and memories in a special place from which I could retrieve them whenever I wanted; but I could also put them away, so they were not right out in front always trying to jump out at me.

Did it work? Kind of, sort of. Like I said, the story about the woman in the cage was horrible, but I had already dealt with it and its guilt. Now I used the thought of that woman and her child to hide some things much worse than that. I was hiding those things from myself. I knew about them, but I didn’t want to ever think about them again. So when Vietnam would overwhelm me, I would go through the story of that woman again and that kept everything else at bay, but the other things were always trying to come out.

That is why they have the trauma group at Tomah. They told me that I had to get those things out in the open before I could get better. Here is something strange. A lot of the guys’ horrible, terrible experiences, the ones that were driving them nuts, didn’t seem to me and many in the group as traumatic as other things that happened to them. It was the time, the place, and the way our minds saw things. What was horrible, terrible for one, might not really be that bad for another.

Some of the things the corpsmen and medics went through, I think would give me a lifetime of bad dreams; but out of all of the wounded and dying men they had to deal with, somehow, one of those was the memory that they couldn’t shake. I don’t know why it is that way, but it is.

By the time I left Tomah there were many memories of my time in Vietnam that had surfaced there that I hadn’t dealt with before. I don’t know whether I was better or not, but the program gave me some tools to work with, and I got a lot of things out in the open so I could look at them. They were and are sometimes overwhelming, but at least now I know what I am dealing with, and sometimes I can put them away and live my life; but then again there are things that will pop them out, like the sound of a helicopter going over, or a little kid screaming at play, or the flashes of sunlight through the trees.

The pain of
PTSD

Yes, post-traumatic stress is scary stuff. It is scary for the veteran who has it, and it is scary for the veteran’s loved ones. On top of that, it is also embarrassing.

The reason I say that post-traumatic stress is embarrassing is that it is. A man gets home from the war, and he wants to forget about what he saw and what he did, but he can’t. Many veterans want to avoid being around those close to them because they don’t want their loved ones to know that they are having problems.

The whole reason that I wrote this series is that there are tens of thousands of veterans returning from George Bush’s wars, who are now having psychological problems, and there will be many thousands more who will develop traumatic stress later on. Dr. Michael G. Rayel, writing for AboutMental Health.com says,

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder characterized by avoidance, hypervigilance, emotional difficulties, and recall behavior such as flashbacks and nightmares after a traumatic event such as rape, war, vehicular accident, or natural disasters. Recent researches have shown that after a trauma, biochemical changes develop in the brain that can result in psychological signs as shown above.

If untreated, some people develop emotional difficulties such as depression associated with inability to concentrate, sleep, or eat. Occasionally, they also become hopeless to the point that they want to die.

There have already been reports of returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed suicide, and I expect that will continue because it can now take many months to start getting help through an already-overwhelmed VA system.

I can still remember thinking that I had better “suck it up” and blow off the thoughts I was having. I was thinking, Marines don’t do things like I was doing. I kept telling myself that I was one of the “few, one of the proud.” As we said in Nam, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I am the baddest #%@*$% in the valley.” When I finally did go for help, it was an incredible relief to find many other Marines going through the same things I was.

I have to tell you that even though I went through the VA’s program at Tomah, the stress didn’t magically go away; neither did the intrusive thoughts of Vietnam. They don’t have a special stress pill to give us. I did get some tools to use to make the whole thing a bit more bearable. I know some of the guys in my group have done well, but others, from my point of view, are in worse shape after going through the program.

The program opens up a whole new can of worms by getting vets to confront everything that happened to them in a combat zone. For some guys that was a relief, but for others it was too much for them to handle.

Now with these new veterans coming into the system, everything at the VA will be a little bit slower for those veterans already in the system. There are still World War II vets, Korean War vets, Vietnam vets, and Desert Storm vets making their initial visits to the VA asking for help with the problems they are still having from their time in combat.

I have met veterans who have thought that post-traumatic stress was just a bunch of hooey. That is, they thought that until one day everything about their war experience came crashing down on them, and they didn’t know what to do.

I was always told, if you are at a VFW or American Legion bar and there is some guy bragging to everyone how he won the war at one end, and there is another guy sitting at the other end not talking to anyone, put your money on the quiet guy as really having been in the thick of things.

I believe that to be true, and we are going to have a lot of soldiers and Marines coming home now, who are not going to talk about their time in combat, and they are going to try to work things out on their own as long as they can.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

James Glaser Archives

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I sent in another donation to Ron Paul’s Campaign today; I believe it is money well spent. Doctor Paul has done wonders, for a blackballed candidate. I don’t think anyone can say that he has gotten a fair shake from either print or television media outlets.

Doctor Paul came in second in Nevada, but nobody would ever know that from the press. He also came in second in Montana, again no media. For a strict constitutionalist, Ron Paul is doing very well. Remember there are no groups looking for a handout backing Doctor Paul, because Doctor Paul is, as his backers affectionately call him, Doctor No.

Why I think my donation money was well spent is proven to me every time I see a Huckabee ad that says he now wants to abolish the IRS. Every other candidate can see the enthusiasm that Ron Paul backers have for his message.

Without Ron Paul in the race, there would be no talk about the size and scope of our military and its effect on our foreign policy. If Ron Paul was not in this race, the problem of fiat money would not have even come up. In fact, without Ron Paul, I doubt if the Constitution would have even been mentioned.

Sixteen delegates — that is how many Ron Paul has so far, and if we can keep him in the race until the convention, he should pick up some more. Even with the ongoing media blackout of Doctor Paul’s campaign, there is almost no way the convention will be able to keep our candidate from getting his shot at speaking to the whole convention, and to the American people.

Ron Paul has started a movement, and I am proud to be a small part of it.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

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Yes, you can watch the debates and hear snippets of what Ron Paul would like to say on a few subjects, but the debates are set up so that no candidate will have the time to go into depth on any subject.

You can Google "Ron Paul," and you will find 8,600,000 pages, but most of them are written about Ron Paul, with a smattering of columns by Doctor Paul.

If you want to look at a real body of Doctor Paul’s thoughts in one spot, then it is best to look at his archives on LewRockwell.com. Better yet, here is a direct link to over 400 of Doctor Ron Paul’s columns.

These columns cover things like: What the Fed has Done to our Money, Tax Reform, Foreign Policy, Democrats, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Selective Service (military slavery), Gas Prices, the WTO, the United Nations, Peace and Freedom, and 400 other things.

If you really want to get to know what Congressman Ron Paul thinks and what he is not afraid to put down in print, Lew Rockwell’s archive of the Congressman’s columns is invaluable. Also, every column seems to be a good read, although many times the truth he writes of can upset you. After a few columns I bet you will be ready to go out and wave a "VOTE for Ron Paul" sign.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

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Laurence M. Vance wrote a column in which he heaps a lot of the blame for the horrors of war on our troops.

It is the troops that are occupying a foreign country. It is the troops that are dropping the bombs. It is the troops that are throwing the grenades. It is the troops that are launching the missiles. It is the troops that are firing the mortars. It is the troops that are shooting the bullets. It is the troops that are destroying homes and infrastructure. It is the troops that are injuring, maiming, and killing people, including thousands of civilians.

Those are hard charges, and if it were 1969 and I were just getting off the plane from my tour in Vietnam, I would be red-faced and swearing after reading Vance’s column. But that was then, and this is now. I have worked with veterans for many years now, and I have met many men who are living with the guilt of being that trooper who killed the civilian, who threw the grenade that blew away the child, who dropped the bomb or fired the mortar that destroyed the village, and those troopers suffer a lifetime of guilt.

Even when I was in the thick of things in Vietnam, something inside of me was telling me that what we were doing was wrong. Yes, we had pep talks by our officers telling us we were bringing freedom and democracy to the poor people of South Vietnam, but the next day you might see the wounded child holding on to the dead body of its mother, and all the words in the world couldn’t make that scene seem all right.

People keep telling me it took a lot of guts for me to defend America over in the Nam, but I don’t remember it like that. I joined the Marines, they sent me over there, and that was that. Some how I think it takes a lot more guts for someone in uniform to say, "this isn’t right," and file for conscientious objector status, than to follow orders like I did, all the while trying to stuff those thoughts of doing wrong into the back burner of my mind.

For sure it took a lot of guts for Laurence Vance to write his column saying, "I don’t support the troops, I don’t support the troops in this war, and I won’t support them in the next one with Iran or any other country."

There it is, Vance lays it right out there for all to see, and his thoughts are just as clear as they can be. Laurence M. Vance is anti-war in the truest sense. I have been anti-war for over twenty years now, and I have met thousands of combat vets who feel the same way, but it is hard to lay warfare at the feet of the enlisted man. It much easier and way more popular to blame President Bush or some mysterious group of neocons that we think is really running the show. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to blame the troops, after all they were just doing their job. When you are one of those troops, and years after the battles are over you are still fighting to keep down the guilt you feel for things you did, you know in your heart that you should have stood up and said, "NO! I won’t do that."

When it comes right down to it, no matter what George Bush says, he cannot have a war without the consent of the troops. If the young men and women in uniform stand up and say "No," it is all over. I know those troops we have in Iraq today have that little voice in the back of their heads saying what they are doing is wrong. It doesn’t matter how many people thank them for what they are doing, because way deep down inside, they know it’s wrong, and years from now they will pay the price for not doing the right thing.

At the end of Vance’s column he says another thing that I and all veterans can get behind.

And when they are all home — from Iraq and everywhere else in the world — I support using the troops to actually patrol our coasts and guard our borders. I support the troops so much that I don’t want them sent to fight any more foreign wars.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

I don’t know about you, but I have to get up and make breakfast before I start off to work. Maybe that is it. You listen to the President, look at the clock and see it is almost eleven, and you think, I got to take a shower and head to bed. No time to listen to the experts (pundits) tell you if the President said anything of substance or if he shaded the truth, and for sure no time to listen to the opposition’s take on the State of the Union.

Today I took some time and read over a transcript of George’s speech, and you know what, he did tell a few whoppers. Like "we are winning" and we have "a clear path to victory" That sounded good last night when George had more than half the chamber filled with his cheering section, but to sit down and read it without the applause light lit up, the truth stares you in the face.

In 2005 we lost just as many soldiers and Marines as we did in 2004, and I believe insurgent attacks were up. Every day we hear about multiple Iraqis being killed and constantly there are Iraqi bodies found, bound, sometimes headless, and dead.

For awhile this year, George Bush went around the country giving speeches at Army bases, trying to explain the path he has taken that will lead to victory. Each speech was filled with wonderful platitudes about those who serve in the military and the troops ate it up, but George never did get around to explaining how victory would come about. Those speeches faded like his talks on Social Security reform.

George went on with, "We’re on the offensive in Iraq." I don’t buy that. Who are we attacking? We have already taken the country, and now we are fighting a guerilla war. That means that there is no set army to attack, and the insurgents don’t take up fixed positions that we could attack.

There are multiple factions attacking our troops: some are former Baathist government/Saddam sympathizers, some are Islamic Fundamentalists, then there are the Iraqi nationalists, and some are foreign and Iraqi terrorists. On the same day as Bush’s State of the Union Speech, Knight Ridder Newspapers had a report stating that "Nearly half of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops." They went on with "U.S. officials have acknowledged in the past that the mere presence of American troops in Iraq has helped fuel the insurgency."

On this same subject of Iraq George Bush stated, we are "continuing reconstruction efforts." Constantly in the last year there have been stories about how badly the reconstruction effort in Iraq is going. Stories about construction companies pulling their workers because it is too dangerous, how three years into the effort, electricity and oil production have not yet reached pre-war levels, and how so much of the money (American taxpayer money) was squandered or stolen.

I could go on, but you get the drift. In Washington it is called spin. George talked about the economy and health care too. Next time you fill up with gas, cash your pay check, or send in your health insurance payment, think about what George Bush could have said to make you feel better.

George has a tough hand to play. No doubt he has tried hard in every topic he talked about, but in truth he hasn’t done a good job. I guess that answers my question about why we have a speech at 9 PM on a Tuesday night.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

George Bush is so afraid of the truth coming out about his war in Iraq, and the position we are in over there, that he has resorted to name-calling of anyone who speaks his mind.

President Bush stated in a speech to the nation on December 18, 2005:

Yet there is a difference between honest critics who recognize what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see anything right… Defeatism may have its partisan uses, but it is not justified by the facts. For every scene of destruction in Iraq, there are more scenes of rebuilding and hope. For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed. And for every terrorist working to stop freedom in Iraq, there are many more Iraqis and Americans working to defeat them. My fellow citizens: Not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.

Sounds Good. One has to admit that George Bush is pretty slick with his speeches (either that or his speech writers are), but every time he talks he makes it an "us against them" position.

Right off the bat George says the people who disagree with him and his war are "partisans." Merriam Webster defines a partisan as "one who exhibits blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance." George is hinting that those "partisans" who disagree with him are just Democrats who are trying to tear him down and the country with him. What George Bush does not realize is that many of the people who now believe that George Bush’s Iraq War was a mistake from the start and a war we can’t win, do have an allegiance, but that allegiance is not to the Democrat party or even the Republican party, but to the American Constitution, and to the American troops George has sent on this fool’s mission.

When George Bush says, "For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed," he has no basis for that statement. America has told the world that "we don’t do body counts." According to the Secretary of Defense and his top generals, we have no idea of how many Iraqis we have killed and using the number "countless lives reclaimed" is so nebulous that it has no meaning at all.

George claims that there is more rebuilding going on in Iraq than scenes of destruction. Watch the evening news and look at the videos they show, and see if you can spot this massive rebuilding effort. The Iraqi people have fewer than 12 hours of electricity a day and on many days fewer than six. We, the United States of America, destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Iraq at the start of this war. That is a war crime. The fact is that Iraq produces less electricity today than before we attacked. Iraq pumps less oil and refines less gasoline than before we attacked, and they now must import fuel from other countries. Without electricity, drinking water does not get purified, and sewage treatment comes to a halt

Bush goes on to state the obvious — we have more troops than the terrorists have. What is also obvious is that most of the people fighting us are not terrorists, but Iraqi citizens trying to kick our troops out of their country.

It is a fact that our troops can not walk or even ride around Iraq on their off-duty time. Iraq is a total combat zone for American troops. Our military command and our embassy staff are locked up in a place called the Green Zone in Baghdad, where extraordinary security is provided because of the constant threat of attack by insurgents — insurgents who are thought of by many Iraqis as patriots.

I must give George Bush a bit of a break though. George Bush never went to war. George was the right age when his country put out a "call to arms" looking for patriotic Americans to defend our country, but George never heard that call. Because George Bush never went to war, he is really in the dark when it comes to understanding what is going on in Iraq. Bush has no idea of the suffering we are inflicting on the Iraqi people nor is he able to understand what he is asking of our troops. Without knowing what war and combat entail, George Bush does not possess the knowledge needed to claim that we are winning.

George Bush is trying to paint a rosy picture about Iraq, and the help we are getting from the Iraqi people. That might have been true in the euphoria of defeating Saddam Hussein, but we have been fighting there too long, and we have worn out our welcome. The British Sunday Telegraph reports about attacks on coalition troops:

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

Other views, moreover, are more negative: Fewer than half, 46 percent, say the country is better off now than it was before the war. And half of Iraqis now say it was wrong for U.S.-led forces to invade in spring 2003, up from 39 percent in 2004.

The number of Iraqis who say things are going well in their country overall is just 44 percent, far fewer than the 71 percent who say their own lives are going well. Fifty-two percent instead say the country is doing badly.

There’s other evidence of the United States’ increasing unpopularity. Two-thirds now oppose the presence of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, 14 points higher than in February 2004. Nearly six in 10 disapprove of how the United States has operated in Iraq since the war, and most of them disapprove strongly. And nearly half of Iraqis would like to see U.S. forces leave soon.

Two thirds of Iraqis oppose our presence in Iraq, and George Bush says we are winning this war. Of course many in George Bush’s administration told us before we attacked, that the Iraqi people would lay flower petals in our troops’ path. That didn’t happen. Instead they laid down hidden explosive devices and killed and wounded almost 20,000 of our troops.

Think about these facts: 2,180 American Soldiers and Marines are dead, 16,155 are wounded, and tens of thousands have psychological problems after their return from the combat zone. Somewhere between 35,000 and 110,000 innocent Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands more are maimed (we really don’t keep a count) and still more are displaced. Iraq was a pitiful third-world country when we attacked. They had no navy, no air force, outdated weapons, and poorly trained troops. It is now almost three years later, and no American is safe any place in Iraq, and George Bush says we are winning.

George Bush is the "partisan" here, not me. I just don’t know what faction he is giving his blind allegiance to, but I do know it is not to our troops, or our nation’s Constitution, or the truth.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

So with weeks to prepare his escape before America attacked, bin Laden slipped through our fingers, and is still free today. George Bush acted like he was the bully on the playground, and thought he could get his way, but like many bullies, he found out that a little guy can be trouble.

The next time around, George Bush did the same thing. He ranted and raved about taking on Saddam Hussein, and told the world exactly how and when we were going to attack, months before we actually did. This gave Saddam the time to plan and implement an insurgency that is still working today. Rather than keeping his thoughts and our plans to himself, George Bush had to act with bravado, and give the Iraqis all the time they needed to salt away weapons, ammunition, and money, because they knew they had no chance against us in a conventional war.

To add insult to injury, George Bush was not satisfied with taking Iraq in a matter of days, No, he couldn’t keep quiet again, and he had to give his now infamous "bring ‘em on" speech. That is where Bush taunted every potential terrorist on the globe to try and take out an American Soldier or Marine. Those who decided to take George up on his offer have managed to kill about two Americans a day, while wounding another 16, each and every day since George popped off.

Now President Bush is doing the same thing all over again, only this time it is Iran he is talking about. Saturday, on Israeli television, he said he could consider using force to press Iran to give up its nuclear programs.

George Bush does not know how to keep his mouth shut, and by telegraphing our plans to an opponent in advance, he makes certain that more American troops will die.

Right after that speech, you would have to think that Iran would be planning their counter move to George Bush’s threat. If they weren’t before, you know Iran is going to help the Iraqi resistance as much as they can. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Iran knows, as we do, that it is better to fight in Iraq than in their country, so more young Americans will be dying, because George Bush just had to "strut" and crow like a bantam rooster. "Loose lips sink ships," and they also get troops on the ground killed.

There was a time when America’s threat of military action could cause a foreign government to do what ever we wanted, but those days are over. Today, every nation can see what a rag-tag group in Iraq is doing to us, and they can see that the warlords, who were running things in Afghanistan before we attacked, are still doing the same today.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

I don’t know why Ms. Sheehan wants this meeting, but I know that the woman is still grieving for her son and will be until the day she dies. She is asking the President of the United States for a few minutes of his time and he, so far, is unwilling to give it.

Now other women are starting to join in on this vigil, and George is looking worse and worse. Every mother knows the bond between them and their son. Every woman, even if they are for the war, can understand Cindy Sheehan’s loss, and their prayers go out for her.

George Bush will not win this one. Already there are people on the right trying to slander this grieving mother, and that will not work either. Cindy Sheehan represents every parent in America. She has given her most precious possession, her son, to George Bush’s War on Terrorism and she wants some answers.

Millions of mothers will soon be watching how this plays out and if George Bush does not want to destroy any chance for the military to keep an all-volunteer army, he had better handle this "mother" with compassion.

Every mother who has a son or daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan fears that she will someday feel the pain that Cindy Sheehan is living, and if George Bush blows this woman off, thousands more will bond with her and her cause. American mothers are a very powerful group, and you do not want to make them angry at you.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

It almost sounds medieval when we think about "burning them with hot irons." Of course the people doing the burning are in our employ, and employ is the right word, because not only are we paying these Iraqi torturers, we are supposed to be training them too.

These new torture "experts" are not in an "on the job training program," as we hired these people because of their experience. Hider, goes on to report, "In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, Iraqi and US authorities have enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein’s regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told the Times."

We all have read about, and seen the photos of America’s "new age" torture techniques, where we use sexual humiliation to get what we want out of someone, but even America knows the tried and true methods of the infliction of pain still work. No, you won’t get more honest answers, and if a person is innocent no amount of torture will make them guilty, but when you release a person from custody and they are almost insane from what you have done to them, and their whole body is a testament to that fact, well, you have instilled fear in every person who sees them.

Now don’t get me wrong, and think that the Bush administration has done away with our methods, but because of all the bad publicity from the proof positive photos released showing how we torture now, Washington feels better employing Saddam’s experienced torturers. These men know that "no cameras are allowed," is the rule, and for the right price they will work for anyone.

American troops have tried the "old methods," and yes, we have kicked to death prisoners who were handcuffed to wire ceilings, so we do know how to do it. However Americans really don’t have the stomach for torture, and every time, some "do-gooder" will turn us in. So it is better for George Bush, and really everyone in Washington if we hire "Saddam’s old guard." You can’t beat them for the money they cost and the experience they bring. Soon all of Iraq will know that they are back in business and people will live in fear again.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

From Camp Pendleton, in California where the 1st Marine Regiment built their Memorial on top of a peak in the San Onofre Mountains with the money collected by a Brooklyn, N.Y. high school, to a "Warriors Walk," at Fort Stewart, Georgia, honoring the 94 Soldiers killed in Iraq from "the Third ID," America is being criss-crossed with monuments to the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is the 4th Infantry Division’s Monument in Fort Hood, Texas, dedicated on Sept. 9, 2004. It is called the Task Force Iron Horse Memorial, and displays the names of the unit’s 81 Soldiers, killed in Iraq.

In Fort Riley, Kansas, there is the "Global War on Terrorism Memorial," dedicated October 2, 2004. It is in honor of the Fort’s 54 Soldiers killed in Iraq.

At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the 101st Airborne put up an "Iraqi Freedom Monument," dedicated May 31, 2004, and it honors the 58 "Screaming Eagles" lost in Iraq to date.

The 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), also at Fort Stewart, Georgia, dedicated its memorial on September 25, 2003 and is in the City of Hinesville, Georgia.

On December 2, 2003, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, California dedicated a plaque to the 15 Marine aviators killed in Iraq.

The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment Memorial, at Fort Carson, Colorado was dedicated on May 27, 2004, and lists the names of the 56 troopers who have been killed so far. The 3rd ACR is back in Iraq now.

Also near Fort Carson, is, "The Mountain Post Global War on Terrorism Fallen Soldiers Memorial," dedicated on June 10th, 2004 and is in Carson Park. It honors 88 Soldiers, (including the 3rd ACR) who were killed in Iraq.

Over seas, there are still more American monuments to our dead. At Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan there is a monument to all military personnel killed or wounded in Afghanistan. As of June 28, 2005, there have been 206 Americans killed there.

Nancy Montgomery reports in Stars and Stripes, "Eight tons of German granite carved with scenes of grief and glory now rest on the grass outside V Corps to honor troops killed in the first 18 months of the Iraq war." (945 killed)

All across America there are plaques and memorials going up to remember those American men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some are formal and built of stone or bronze and others are simple reminders like the one in my home town. In the local café, there is a framed photo of Sergeant Dale Panchot. Dale was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq and until our community finds the right place for a lasting tribute, Dale will be remembered with a photo.

There are a lot of families in America waiting for the tribute their loved one deserves and soon there will be more memorials with more names in every state. Most monuments are open ended, so that more names can be added as need be. If this war goes on much longer, many monuments and plaques will have to be rededicated, with new names added.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Lance Cpl. Jeff Boskovitch, of North Royalton, Ohio, died in Iraq this week. His uncle Paul said, "We got a lot of e-mail from him." "He felt he was making a difference there and that the Iraqi people were appreciative of what they were doing. He loved the Marines and he loved his unit."

Every Marine I knew in Vietnam loved the Marines and unit loyalty is a given. I too thought that the Vietnamese loved us and appreciated everything we were doing for them. Like most Americans in Vietnam and most Americans in Iraq, I didn’t speak the language, so smiles and shaking of the head, looked to me like approval, but who knows, they might have been saying, "Get out of my country, you son of a bitch."

More and more Americans are complaining that all the good things we are doing in Iraq get under reported by our media or go totally unreported, but is there really that much to report?

Yes we are fixing up schools and we are trying to fix the infrastructure, but if one American unit destroys something, and another tries to fix it, is that really progress?

In Vietnam, I think they called it "Winning Their Hearts and Minds." I don’t know what they call it in Iraq, but the Iraqi people know what we have done to their country and a few Americans fixing up a school or a water supply system is not going to change hearts and minds.

Every Iraqi knows that if they tell an American what they really think, chances are very good that they will be taken away to some prison, and every Iraqi knows what Americans do to prisoners. So, even if you hate and want to kill every American you see, you are far better off to smile and say how much you like the Americans.

The continued growth of the insurgency tells us that there are hundreds of Iraqis willing to die, in the hope of taking an American with them. We are still a foreign aggressor occupying their land. Think how much we would like that here in the United States. Americans seem to forget that Iraqis love their country, just like we love ours.

No matter how much we want to help the Iraqis, we are still the people who have killed and maimed tens of thousands of innocent people over there.

Like I said, I thought we were winning in Vietnam and I thought we were doing a lot of good things, but the longer I was there, the more dead and mangled children I saw, the less sure I was.

When I finally came home and started learning just how much death and destruction we were causing, I knew we would never win that war. When you are in a combat zone, you can only see what is going on right in your area and yes, there are a few mistakes, and yes, some women and children are killed, but only a few. When you have a chance to look at the big picture and realize that those "few mistakes" are happening all over the country, you know something is very wrong. When you add all those mistakes up, they reach sickening numbers. Soon you realize that no matter how many "good works’ you and your unit do, you will never overcome the horror and suffering inflicted throughout the country.

Some reports say we have killed 25,000 innocent Iraqis, while other reports put that number at over 100,000. No one has any idea of the numbers wounded, but it is safe to assume that American and coalition troops have hurt someone from almost every family in Iraq. Those people look at their country after two and a half years of occupation, and there is destruction everywhere. There still isn’t reliable electricity. Iraq still doesn’t have safe drinking water and much of the raw sewage is pumped directly into the river, untreated.

Yes, some American troops are doing some good things, but when those things are compared to what most of the American units are doing, it isn’t much. If you kill with the right hand and attempt to heal with the left, which hand is remembered?

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Close knit families, some might say, Christian families, seem to extend that period of responsibility longer. Many parents would be surprised by how much some of their older children still want their advice.

Somehow our government has decided that they have a right to send salesmen into our high schools. Military recruiters can have a shot at vulnerable young adults, some as young as thirteen. In our local school, which has all grades in one building, every child gets to see this "nice Army man." These recruiters wear dashing new uniforms, with medals and ribbons, or they come looking ready for combat in their desert fatigues. One way or the other, they are going to impress a wide segment of the student body.

The only thing between those recruiters and a student signing on the dotted line, is the child’s parents.

Today, because Washington is so desperate for bodies, children are allowed to go to Boot Camp between junior and senior year. Then when they finish their senior year, they are all ready locked in to go.

The new "No Child Left Behind" education program has a clause in it that will cut a school’s funding if they try and protect their children, by having recruiters stay out of the school.

Many parents are taking their responsibility seriously and are counseling their children to not "sign up." They are giving them alternatives, like college or vocational school. These are not as exciting as the television ad that portrays life in the Marines as fighting dragons, or the adventure of dropping out of a helicopter into the ocean as seen in an Army ad.

Parents have a lot to compete with, but many children in America today are trusting those parents, who they know love them. Eric Schmitt, writes in the New York Times, July 24, 2005, that LT. General Franklin L. Hagenbeck, "The Army’s top personnel officer acknowledged this week that the service will probably miss its recruiting goal this year, the first admission by a senior Army official and a stark reminder of the Iraq war’s impact on enlistment." It is also a reminder of how powerful a parent’s loving advice can be.

Brad Edmonds, writing for LewRockwell.com, reminds us, "Note that children of Congressmen, military officers, and corporate executives rarely are killed in these wars."

It is a sad fact that many parents in this country do not have alternatives to offer to their children, and just because of the family’s economic situation, military service can be enticing. Today the thousands of tax dollars used to bribe a young man or woman into signing up could be more money than that family has ever seen in one chunk. The children signing their name, can relate to a fine athlete, signing that bonus contract with a professional sports team. After watching some of the television ads about life in the military and hearing the lies of recruiters who are looking for promotions based on numbers of recruits signed up, who could blame a child for that fantasy?

It is up to the parents to see through all the hype and sort out what is true and what is false about a military career, so that their child has an honest chance of making an informed decision about whether or not "joining up" is in their best interest.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

An Open Letter to Wounded Veterans of
George Bush’s War on Terrorism

I know that it is an American War that you have fought in, but from now on this war will be called George’s War or Bush’s War. WW II was Roosevelt’s War, Korea was Truman’s War, and Vietnam was LBJ’s War.

I am writing to you as a fellow combat vet, who did his stint in the military and Veteran’s Hospitals. I had no idea of what the future held for me when I came home and I am sure you are in the same boat.

For the next few years people will be saying, "Thank you for your service." It will probably embarrass you as it has me. It makes those people feel better because they have no idea of what you have gone through and have no idea of what to say to you. To tell you the truth I don’t know what to say back to them either. Usually I say "yeah" or say nothing. Your experience in combat is so distant from what most Americans know, you will just get frustrated if you try and explain anything to them.

Sometime in the next thirty years you will realize that the only people who have an understanding of your combat experience are other vets. You will be talking to some guy at the VA who is thirty or forty years older and he will know what is going on with you when thoughts of combat start jumping into the front of your mind and they will. I have been talking to a WW II or Korean War vet and it feels like we are both eighteen again, because the trauma of combat happened to both of us when we were that age.

Right now the whole Nation is on your side. Politicians love you and the President showers you with praise. I am sorry to tell you that this will end. The only people that are really there for you are your close family and other vets. Washington is constantly trying to save money by cutting Veteran benefits. President Bush and his administration have cut veteran medical care by over $1.8 billion. Congress knows about this shortfall and they wanted to fix it, but they had to go home for the July 4th holiday and left the veteran hanging until they get back.

Veterans from past wars have had to band together and form groups to lobby Congress and the White House so that we get the help we do today. That is why there are the American Legion, VFW, AM Vets, Blind Vets, Paralyzed Vets, Vietnam Vets, Gulf War Vets, and many more.

These groups formed because Washington stopped keeping promises to care for those who fought for America. If Veterans couldn’t vote, we would have nothing.

If you are severely wounded, the American Government will help you out. The money they give you will not make you rich or even middle class, but if you watch what you spend, you will have enough for food and shelter.

I want to tell you some things about the Veterans Administration and the medical care you will be dealing with for the rest of your life. First the good part. The people who work at the various Medical Centers are great. The doctors, nurses, people who clean the halls, security, and the guy who plants the flowers and cuts the grass are all there because they want to be and they truly want to help you, the veteran. You will find that many are veterans too, but that makes no difference because everybody there is out to help you.

The people working at the VA do the best they can with budgets that are cut, old equipment, out-dated facilities, and an Administration that is constantly trying to get them to save money. Remember that, because time at the VA can get very frustrating.

The bad part is that getting help from the VA is a game that can cost you your life. You will find that all of those Veteran Organizations are your advocate. There are a few Senators and Representatives that will go to bat for you, but for sure they are in the minority. Your best bet is to learn how to play the game from other vets. They can save you from beating your head against the wall. Also keep in mind that the Veterans Administration loves to make you nuts with paper work, forms, and appeals.

Right now you are working on getting your body back to the best it can be, depending on what happened to you. For the rest of your life you will be working on your mind. You have been to combat and that changes you. Everything you saw, heard, and experienced in combat was experienced by other vets too. Never exactly like what happened to you, but close enough so that other veterans are at least able to understand where you are coming from.

Other veterans were nice enough to give me their time and understanding so that all the sick and terrible things I saw and did could some how fit into my head. For years it felt like they were spilling out and I couldn’t keep them in and hey, you can’t. Trying to shove those thoughts of war to the back of your mind does work for a while, but they demand to come out and there is nothing you can do to stop them.

Sure some people handle it better than others, but like it or not you have joined a new club. The price you pay to join is so very high and you can never get out now that you are in. It is up to you to make the best of it you can. There are thousands and thousands of Americans from every war we have had who are willing to help you out in any way they can and some of them will need your help.

So, I will say thanks for what you did for our country. I won’t bullshit you though, the next few years are going to be harder than any time in your life. You have to learn how to become a civilian again. Old friends won’t seem the same and so many things that people worry about will seem trivial after what you have been through.

If you have a wife or husband, clue them in about all of your thoughts. You have to do that or those thoughts will tear you apart as a couple. It took me years to learn that and it is hard. Talk to your spouse or I can guarantee you that you will be talking to a shrink.

America is a wonderful country and I would be there in a heart beat if it needed my protection again and I know you feel the same. Right now the best thing you can do for your country is making yourself as whole as you can. Take your war experience and use it to self-motivate your life in a direction that can bring you happiness. You earned it!

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

It didn’t happen right away. I came home from the war and I looked at the peace movement with anger. I was, you might say, still in the jungle. I still knew lots of guys who were counting down their days and I couldn’t believe that young Americans were not joining up to "fight the good fight."

When I got back to the States I still thought we were trying to save the South Vietnamese from the terror of Communism and that if we could get a few good Generals, it would be over in months.

I never realized that Washington wasn’t trying to win the war, nor did I know the whole thing was started by a President lying to the American people about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened.

It is hard to believe that our leaders in Washington could sit there and watch as thousands and thousands of Americans were getting killed and wounded every month. I remember in Da Nang, seeing body bags in rows next to the runway. Almost every day over there I saw somebody’s blood, be them American or Vietnamese.

That first summer home I would wonder why the killing went on and on. In my mind, I was still a Marine and Semper fi, I had to back what the Marine Corps was doing. I just knew the Marines would never waste one of their own.

I guess it was harder to convince me that the war was wrong, because I had too much invested in it. That is why to this day there are thousands of Vietnam Vets, who think the war was worth the effort. They just can’t admit that they were "had" by Washington and that all those deaths and wounds were for nothing, but that is a fact, jack.

We look at Vietnam today and wonder what the war was all about. We LOST. I will say that again for all my brothers in arms, America lost that war. Washington sent us there on a lie and watched as we bled and bled and only with the effort of millions of Americans was the war brought to an end.

Today, Vietnam is an American trading partner. Thousands of Americans go there as tourists. Vietnam is not trying to hurt us, they are trying to increase trade with us. We were told we were fighting them to protect America…that was another lie.

Many people will tell you many reasons that the war ended, but the real reason to pull our troops out and stop fighting, is that politicians could see if they didn’t stop the war, they would not get reelected.

Washington is all about money and power. If a politician loses an election, he loses his power and his chance to get more money. Right now many politicians are starting to hedge their bets with little quips about what is wrong with Bush’s War in Iraq. The war they voted to start.

Many thought by giving up their Congressional power to declare war, they would be held innocent and all blame would fall on Bush. Now they see that too many Americans are coming home in boxes or on stretchers. There has been enough American blood spilled in Iraq, so that every Congressional District has been splattered and politicians are starting to worry.

George isn’t helping things with talk of staying the course and Rumsfeld saying Americans might be dieing in Iraq for a dozen more years hurts everyone’s poll numbers. Things are heating up in Afghanistan too and after holding up that country to the voters as a success, new American deaths do not sound right.

Soon a majority of American voters will know that they have been "had" too, just as we were back in the 60s. They will see that this war is about making billions for a few of the powerful in Washington. They will see that those in Congress are willing to watch our sons and daughters bleed and die as long as their political future seems safe, but once those in Washington get scared about losing power, this war will end fast.

That bumper sticker should have read, "Washington Lied and Our Soldiers Died." I am sure there are many powerful people in Washington who are now ready to pull the plug on this war. They have their 30 pieces of silver and more.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Americans believe the myth that our military is somehow different than every other army in history. Part of that myth has been produced by Hollywood, with movies where our Soldiers are killing only the evil enemy and any contact with the civilian population is purely humanitarian or romantic. Also then, there are the many war movies where the hardened American fighting man becomes the positive role model for some orphaned child.

The Pentagon knows the truth and that is why they insisted that American troops, in fact all foreign troops, diplomats, or contractors charged with killing Iraqi civilians are immune from any prosecution in Iraq and are only subject to the legal jurisdiction of their home country. We made sure that law was passed by the previous US-led occupation authority.

America’s media gives little time or space to report civilian deaths caused by our troops in Iraq, but it gives lots of coverage to the insurgent’s killing of these people.

The UK Observer-Guardian in a report by Peter Beaumont, states, "Farah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed. An American soldier threw a grenade through the window of her apartment. Her death, early last Monday, was slow and agonizing. Her legs had been shredded, her hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting that the bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from the explosion."

After reporting another civilian death, Beaumont makes his point with, "What is perhaps most shocking about their death is that the coalition troops who killed them did not even bother to record details of the raid with the coalition military press office. The killings were that unremarkable."

I am not writing this as a criticism of the American troops fighting in Iraq, but rather to tell you that the killing of innocent civilians is a byproduct of all wars. Because few if any in the current Bush administration have personally witnessed any sort of combat in their lives, out leadership in Washington probably has not a clue of the scale that this is happening nor why. We have been told over and over again that we no longer count the bodies of those we kill, so we have no idea of the impact of these deaths on the Iraqi population.

Many Americans hold those countries that refused to participate in Bush’s War in disdain, but many of those countries have first-hand knowledge of what war really involves. We are fortunate, America has been safe from ground combat for over a hundred years, but there is a price to pay for that. Because of our lack of knowledge, we have come to the point that war and warriors are glorified, while countries that have seen war think of both, either as a necessary evil or with horror, depending which side of the conflict they were on.

Anyone who has served any amount of time in a combat zone will tell you about that Soldier or Marine, who killed a civilian, so they could claim they killed an enemy in the war. I heard that story many times and even though I saw many Americans treat Vietnamese civilians with cruelty, I only saw one, out and out execute an unarmed civilian. The number of troops doing that is extremely small, but the stories spread making it sound like it happens all the time. Troops who kill for "sport" are shunned by their comrades, but like the police having a code where an officer does not report a fellow officer, soldiers do not turn in their own, unless they really run amok and continue killing.

Most unarmed civilians deaths are caused by fear. Troops on a patrol or an operation in the combat zone are on a hair trigger and will start firing at the drop of a hat, especially after they have seen others killed or wounded in their unit.

You could be walking along with thoughts of your children or your wife in your mind, knowing how much you want to get back to them in one piece. You start thinking of the guy who was killed last week or yesterday and what is going to happen to his children and all of a sudden someone shouts or fires and you open up before you really know what is going on.

You and your unit are called upon to break into a house at night. You know there are Iraqis in there and that they are suspects, but you don’t know much more than that. You have heard stories of booby traps and guys getting killed on this same type of raid and the adrenaline is pumping through your veins when you break down that door. A child screams, there is commotion behind a door and somebody opens up and nobody stops to think, they all open up too and you find more children or a mother and child huddled behind the door you have exploded open with your weapons. Sometimes miracles happen and nobody is hurt and other times it is hard to identify what you have shot. Everyone talks about the miracles and no one talks about the deaths. Your officers don’t want to hear about them, because that takes a lot of paper work and looks bad on their record. The troops all try and tell themselves that the others did the killing and they were aiming high, but that only works for awhile.

Most people the world over have seen what invading or "occupying" armies can do. Millions of people the world over have lost loved ones, unarmed loved ones, to people who said they were trying to set them free or bring them liberty. It is reported that in South Vietnam alone, a million civilians were killed while we were at war in that country. Sure the VC and NVA killed many, but it was the Americans with the extreme fire power. We even had special programs like the Phoenix Program, set up to assassinate civilians who were suspected to be playing both sides. I have no doubt we do something of the same in Iraq; it is part of warfare and has been throughout history.

Americans don’t want to think about things like killing civilians, it just doesn’t seem right. We hide the facts about how cruel and horrible war really is and paint our troops with goodness and glory, but those who have been to war know it is not about being good, it is about staying alive and if a few or even many civilians get killed…well that is too bad.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Instead of spending years trying to train enough Iraqis to control their own country, we can cut the time down and the number of trained Iraqis we will need, if we just arrest every man in Iraq between the age of 12 and 60.

Now I know that might sound a little radical, but we already have children in the prisons in Iraq now and if we can have those kids for maybe five years, we can reeducate them into our way of thinking. That worked just splendidly for the North Vietnamese after they beat us in our war and we left the South to fend for themselves. The North took those in the South that we trained, and made the ones who lived through their schooling into "good" Communists. Isn’t education great?

That brings up a great example of why what we are doing now, is not going to work. In our war in Vietnam, we had over a decade to train South Vietnamese troops. Heck we taught them how to fly airplanes, helicopters, drive tanks, and trucks. Then we gave them all the equipment they could ever use and way more guns and ammo than they would ever need and it didn’t work. We pulled our troops and the North defeated our "trained" Army of the South.

We could spend a decade training troops in Iraq, even better than we trained those Vietnamese and after we pull our troops, we might be back to square one in a matter of months and nobody is going to buy us attacking Iraq again. If we really want to control that oil, we better get this occupation thing down right the first time.

So, I think my plan will work. Well it really isn’t my plan, but some really successful despots have used this in the past, which makes George Bush perfect to lead this action. We build lots of prisons, (which America is very good at) and we grab every Iraqi male between 12 and 60 and put them in the slammer.

As the really young boys (under the age of 12) get older, we train them into being prison guards and like those we hold in Cuba, we keep every Iraqi we take now, in prison forever. With the young boys growing up, we get a population of males we can train without the bad influence of adult male Iraqis screwing everything up.

As Dick Cheney might say, this is a "win, win" all the way around.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Dick Cheney took on a hurt attitude saying, "Frankly, I was offended by it." President Bush on the other hand took more of an offensive tactic by calling the human rights report, "absurd."

For months now, both Bush and Cheney have been dancing around repeated accusations of American human rights abuses. By classifying the most damning American prisoner abuse photos from the Abu Ghraib Prison, the Bush administration has bought some time and by spreading out the release of "proof positive" photos, negative world judgment is somewhat tempered.

The "offended" Vice President Cheney said, "Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment, but if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and are now peddling lies about how they were treated."

Cheney’s words do sound plausible, except for the fact if we released these people back to their home countries, they were Not Guilty of any crime against the US and by holding them for years with no charge or right to legal proceedings, we had abused them from the start just by holding them.

Sure Amnesty International used interviews with former prisoners for their report, but what both Cheney and Bush seem to over look is that they also used reports by the International Red Cross and by our own United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

A December 21, 2004 report in the Washington Post says, "Detainees at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time. Left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors, according to documents released yesterday." The memos released cover a two-year period and were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the Federal Government to get them.

In one case reported, an FBI Agent said, "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

These FBI documents "also contain what may be the first witness account of the use of military dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. A memo initially classified "Secret" said that members of the agency’s Behavioral Analysis Unit had witnessed the use of "loud music/bright lights/growling dogs" during interviews by US military personnel at the island prison. Senior Defense Department officials have always denied the use of dogs in any interrogations.

People the world over have been abused and tortured by their own governments, but there was always the perception that the United States was different and that we followed the rules of the Geneva Convention. Now with photographs of American physical and sexual abuse of prisoners in every newspaper throughout the world, and the release of our own FBI reports on prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, it seems ludicrous for the President and Vice President to feign that they are upset with these "absurd" accusations.

Shooting the messenger after the message has already been given to the whole world is counterproductive, but then so much of what these two Americans leaders do is just that.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Memorial Day is the time of year that gardeners put in their crop and more and more children come home to help with that job and they look forward to returning on Labor Day at the end of the summer to help with harvest. Working the soil is a real treat if you live and work in an urban area. You can’t rush gardening, you have to slow down to do it right and that brings a person closer to nature and that gives you an appreciation for the rural life you gave up.

There are many towns and cities around the country which claim that they started Memorial Day, but I like to believe that it was started by a woman of the South, Nella L. Sweet. Nella wrote the hymn, "Kneel Where Our Loves are Sleeping" in 1867. She dedicated that sweet song, "To the Ladies of the South who are Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead."

I don’t know why that touched me so and I know the North lost more men, but the South not only lost the war, but the place was devastated. I can imagine the sorrow of the women as they brought flowers they grew out to the graveyard and tried sprucing up the graves a little bit.

Today we have fancy tombstones, a caretaker who mows the grass, and flowering shrubs are planted all around the cemetery. If you have the money, you don’t even have to go out and visit your loved one’s tomb, you can hire someone to put out flowers for you.

Like every other year, our VFW Post will be doing a memorial service at all the little cemeteries around here. We split up into two groups and both groups come together for a final memorial tribute at the Northome Cemetery, which is the largest. It is getting harder and harder to have enough members to form two honor guard details, because so many members are WW II vets and the legs don’t work like they used to.

What is nice about Memorial Day, is that no one judges the veterans we are honoring. No one’s war is more important and no one’s service more honorable. All the veterans served our country with patriotism. Our community lost soldiers in almost every war from WW I to the war currently going on in Iraq. There will be mothers and fathers, sister and brothers of the fallen at our services. Many will remember that classmate who never returned and every year we hear how they are still missed.

Memorial Day is sad. In 1915 Moina Mitchael wrote,

We cherish too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.

You look at the graves of those who died and see that most were just teenagers when they were killed, but they left behind so many who loved them. In a small community like this, it isn’t just a loss to the family. Here high school classes number in the teens and losing one or two from your class, takes a real toll from all of those left behind. Their memory is strongest in the men and women who also fought in their war and each of them knows that it could have been them in the ground and they stop and wonder what life would have been like if their friend, brother, or lover hadn’t died.

After a few years of being in the Memorial Day Honor Guard, you learn the stories of all those who fell in battle. You recognize the sister who lives in Montana or the brother from Saint Paul who come home every year, because they miss him so much and this day has been set aside so that the grief of the loss can be felt again.

The hard one is the family whose loss is still fresh. Time hasn’t had long enough to work its magic. The loss is still new and the pain is raw and nobody knows the words that will help them on this day, so they are left alone and you pray for them.

Before Memorial Day I go out to our township cemetery and put a flag on every veteran’s grave and the day after Memorial Day I go out and take them down. I always "talk’ to each vet as I’m doing that and wonder what they would be doing now if they had lived. I look at the dates of their lives and know which war was theirs. Yes this holiday is sad and it shows us how far we have yet to go. Someday peace will come to America, but it won’t be soon.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

All of Europe was thankful for our help after WW II and even Japan became our steadfast friend because of the way we treated them after the war.

I can still remember that huge white hospital ship, The USS Hope that went around the world bringing modern medicine to third world countries. In grade school we went around the neighborhood collecting used eye glasses so we could send them to poor countries and even middle size American cities had "Sister Cities" around the world that they would help out.

As a young man, I felt proud to be an American and I knew without a doubt the rest of the world looked u2018up’ to us. It felt good to be a citizen of this great nation.

Today things have changed. Amnesty International, the international human rights watchdog, who in cold war day would constantly get on the Soviet Union for their dark ways is now talking about American human rights failures.

These last four years have been hard on many Americans who took pride in what we were trying to do for mankind.

Now Amnesty is saying the same things about us, as they said about Ronald Reagan’s nemesis, the "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union. In fact they even use the same terms. Paisley Dodds writes for the Associated Press, "Amnesty International branded the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a human rights failure." Amnesty Secretary General Irene Kahn said, "Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time." When I hear the word "Gulag" I immediately think of Joseph Stalin and the millions of Soviet prisoners who died in his prison camps. There are reports that some Americans, who were captured in the Korean War, spent their last years in some of those camps.

What has been so sad these last four years is that we have changed from the champion of freedom and liberty, to a nation that tortures and sexually abuses those we hold in custody. There is just no wiggle room for us to deny what is going on, because the whole world has seen the pictures and we are still enough a nation of law, that some of our investigations into prisoner murders have been made public.

The Amnesty report states, "During the year, released detainees alleged that they had been tortured or ill-treated while in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo." Before Bush’s War on Terror we could have blown off these reports as disgruntled prisoners who were trying to make us look bad, but the report goes on with, "Evidence also emerged that others including Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and the International Committee of the Red Cross, had found that such abuses had been committed against detainees."

I guess we can look at it as a positive note that the FBI is still honest enough to speak out when they find the Pentagon running amok and tarnishing our once good name.

On top of the report’s criticism of the Unites States, it points out that, "In Afghanistan, a downward spiral of lawlessness and instability had shaken the country once again." I know the rest of the world has lost a lot of respect for our nation because of constant abuses condoned by the Bush White House and the lying that got the United States into the war in Iraq in the first place. Now they see this report and think about all the rhetoric George has expounded about what a success Afghanistan has been.

Here in the States many Americans are losing their respect for our country. One blow after another for the last four years has taken its toll. Citizens of our country liked looking at what Washington was doing with the confidence that what ever we did, we could take a certain pride in it. We knew Washington was doing the "right thing."

Today we have to question what is going on in our names. Many Americans cringe when they hear the latest faux pas by this administration and wonder what will come next.

Americans have thick skins and they can blow off critiques from foreign lands, at least we could at one time, but now there is a growing concern by the American people that what we are doing is just wrong. We have all seen the photos, we have heard the lies, we have read the reports and we find it hard to respect what our country is becoming.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

There are Pentagon reports from every theater of this war describing the torture and killing of prisoners by our troops. In a 2,000-page Pentagon report leaked to the New York Times this weekend, it reports that Specialist Damien Corsetti an American interrogator was called "Monster" and "He had that word tattooed in Italian across his chest. "One Saudi detainee testified that Spc. Corsetti held his penis against his face and threatened to rape him.

This is really nothing new for many veterans of past American wars; they know what we have done in the past and they have to live every day with their memories.

We have all seen some of the pictures that came from the sexual abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq, but we haven’t seen the most graphic photos that are still classified, because they were too terrible for the public to see.

We can read all sorts of reports about torture and abuse of prisoners in our special prison set up in Cuba and we now know about American guards kicking to death Afghan prisoners.

"Habibullah was captured in November 2002. He was locked in an isolation cell with his hands shackled to the wire ceiling above his head. The report describes how he was literally kicked to death over several days."

Just how many men and women do you think will pay the price for our policy of torture? Oh sure, a few will do a bit of prison time, but what about all those who were never really involved up close, but had to witness what went on?

If we add up all the prisons in Iraq, the several in Afghanistan and our Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba the number of American prison workers, guards, and interrogators could number in the thousands.

No one who has never heard it can even imagine what a man sounds like when he is beaten to death or tortured, but that sound is horrible and carries for a long ways. People outside might think there is an animal in a trap or someone had their guts ripped out with a knife. Soon everyone at the facility knows what is going on and everyone is affected.

Our troops who were assigned to our prisons will carry the sounds of torture with them until they die. Not right away, but someday the memories will start to eat at them. Some will take the easy way out and commit suicide, others will take their pain out on their loved ones, and still others will be going to the VA Hospital or one of the Veteran drop-in centers set up around the nation for a lifetime of counseling and/or drugs.

Maybe some in Washington will tell you that we have to torture prisoners to save American lives, but those people telling you that have no idea of the number of troops who will be paying for that torture for decades to come.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

Many people said they knew all along the war was wrong, so they have no blood on their hands. Others said because they didn’t vote for George, they couldn’t be held responsible, but those on the Religious Right are.

Some people wrote that the blood on their hands and on Bush’s hands was a badge of honor to cherish. Others said all the blood was on Osama’s hands, because he started the war.

Others blame the American Soldiers and said they should have refused to fight.

I know George Bush takes responsibility and that is one of the only things I respect him for. George has said on the record, with a note of pride, that he is a War President.

People who sit on the sidelines and say they didn’t vote for George or that they knew all along this War was wrong and therefore they take no blame are cowards. Those that put the blame on the Troops are worse.

Very few in America have risked anything in trying to stop the killing we are doing in the Middle East. Our news media have done everything they could to shield the American public from the realities of war. Most Americans can live their lives like this War isn’t even happening. Out of sight, out of mind.

I have to wonder what these people will say on Judgment Day. All Americans have benefited from our War economy. Millions of us make money, either directly or indirectly from our government killing people in foreign lands.

Lots of Americans have their jobs, because we have a War going on. Yes, we all know about the Merchants of Death, who make billions off the Military Industrial Complex and they are nice to have around to blame, but it takes millions and millions of Americans to supply our War machine.

We as Americans have a collective guilt in the killing of babies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The reports differ, but they all say we have killed tens of thousands of innocent people in Bush’s War on Terror. To the rest of the world it is America’s War on Terror and we are all Americans. If we felt that what our government was doing was wrong, then the world thinks we wouldn’t have re-elected George Bush.

Sorry to say this, but every American is now painted with the same brush by the rest of the world. Maybe when the time comes, you will be able to honestly tell Jesus that you had nothing to do with America’s killing and that no way did you benefit from all the death and destruction the United States Armed Forces rained down on the world. I hope you can, I know I can’t. I live here in America, better than almost anyone else lives on this planet. I was blessed to be born here. I thank God every day I am not living on two dollars a day like billions of humans are. If like me, you live the good life, in the United States, then you too are benefiting from our nation’s killing. So, for me, I have to ask for God’s forgiveness and keep trying to stop Washington’s madness. Maybe you can say, "not me."

I wish I could.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

The reputation of our country hinges on our credibility and that credibility is at an all time low right about now. The Muslim world is upset about reports that our prison interrogators will desecrate the Koran, the Muslim Holy Book, their bible if you will, to intimidate prisoners into talking. In some Muslim countries, desecrating the Koran is punishable by death and several reports say American Prison Guards, have shown disrespect toward the Koran and have even flushed it down the toilet.

A few decades ago no one would believe a report like that, but today nothing is unbelievable when it comes to what our country will stoop to.

Colonel David H. Hackworth wrote, "By April 2004, rapes and assaults of American female soldiers were epidemic in the Middle East. But even after more than 83 incidents were reported during a six-month period in Iraq and Kuwait, the 24-hour rape hotline in Kuwait was still being answered by a machine advising callers to leave a phone number where they could be reached." This is how we treat American women. This is a reflection on our "culture and values."

It is widely reported that many American military women serving in Iraq, need guards in order to take a shower because of fear of sexual assaults by their fellow soldiers. Washington wants the world to believe that some of these same troops would never flush a Koran.

American Soldiers have been indicted for raping Iraqi women, but we have no numbers and because we keep no numbers on the number of Iraqi women and children killed in this war, it should be no surprise that we keep no count of Iraqi women reporting that they have been raped by Americans.

The whole world has seen the photos of American troops sexually humiliating and torturing Iraqi terror suspects. We have all read reports of prisoners being beat to death in American run prisons in Afghanistan, but we want the world to know we would never flush the Koran down a toilet.

American citizens were horrified when they saw the photos from Abu Ghraib Prison, but we were only shown the tame ones. Senator Richard J. Durbin saw the photos our government wouldn’t let us see and he said, "There were some awful scenes. It felt like you were descending into one of the rings of hell, and sadly it was our own creation." Congressman Martin T. Meehan said, "I was obviously shocked and horrified to discover that the new photos are even more gruesome than those we have seen in the media." Now Washington wants the world to believe that our values and culture are such, that we would never desecrate a Holy book. Torture, sexually humiliate, and sexually assault, Yes. Desecrate, No

Our admitted acts in Bush’s War on Terror are so criminal that it is impossible for the White House to hold the line and say that what we are accused of now, the desecration of the Koran, never happened.

From the fact that we attacked Iraq because of fictitious Weapons of Mass Destruction, to the torture and killing of Iraqi and Afghan suspects, American credibility has been on a steady downward path. Today with the availability of cheap video cameras and the use of cell phones to send photos, the world’s media no longer has to rely on America’s major news outlets to see what in going on in the combat zone.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan there have been independent and Arab news sources broadcasting the horror of Bush’s Wars. Horrors the American people will never see here at home. The rest of the world sees the carnage taking place every day in Iraq. The bodies of children and their mothers are shown where they died. The horror of an Iraqi hospital can be seen all over the world, except in North America. In North America, we are not even permitted to see our own Military Hospitals on television, nor the flag draped coffins of our troops who have died in Combat.

Washington and even George Bush himself will try and spin this latest charge against our country, but today the United States has too much baggage from what we have already done, for anyone to take Bush’s denials seriously.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

The American public was filled with blood lust after the 9/11 terrorist attack and we really didn’t care whom we killed, just as long as we killed someone. This September it will be four years since that attack and we are still taking our revenge and we are all a little bit responsible for what has been done in our name.

It is hard for most Americans to admit that no Iraqis were involved in the attack on America that started this whole mess, but the fact is and President Bush has admitted it, no Iraqi was involved in the September 11th attack on the Pentagon or the World Trade Center.

Three and a half years later and here is what I read in the paper. "Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight two squad members were killed and five were wounded. In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in the far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be. Every member of the squad — one of the three that made up the 1st platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment — had been killed or wounded. All told 1st Platoon sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting unit," wrote Ellen Knickmeyer in the Washington Post.

George Bush, and you and I have started this bloody war in Iraq, where we are fighting people who not only never attacked us, but who never even had the means with which they could have attacked us. Thousands of American Soldiers and Marines are now dead or maimed for life. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are dead or wounded and this includes thousands and thousands of women and children. We don’t even have the decency to count the number of infants we have killed.

This war goes on and on and nobody is taking to the streets nor are there many public outcries for peace. Every day more and more American troops are being killed and every day more innocent Iraqis are dying (400 so far in May). There is no end in sight and the Pentagon starts new combat operations while they wait for some sort of exit plan.

Right now America has no exit plan and there is no demand from the American public to come up with one.

America has attacked both Iraq and Afghanistan in an attempt to stop terrorism. Neither nation had ever attacked us. Today Afghanistan is now the largest producer and dealer of heroin in the world. Fighting still goes on there and Americans still get killed. We are about to build permanent military bases there to protect the puppet government we have installed. Iraq is a total mess with blood running in the streets every day in many cities. The world watches what we are doing and they see the mess we have made and the hate for our American government is starting to transfer to the American people, because the world sees we are doing nothing to rein in our government and stop its killing.

There are now more terrorist attacks in the world than before George Bush started his War on Terrorism. Every day America garners more hate. George’s War is not working. The world sees that we torture prisoners. They see us destroy major cities like Fallujah. They hear us claim that we are bringing freedom and democracy to Muslim countries and they look at the governments we install and they know what we are doing.

So, what can you or I do? To start, we can take pen in hand and write both of our Senators and our Representative in Washington and tell them it is time to stop this war. Personal letters do have an effect. We can pray. We can support antiwar groups with time and money.

It won’t be easy to change what Washington is doing, because some people are getting very wealthy off of our killings and they want to keep making more money. The only tool we have is our vote and as much as our leaders in Washington love the money the Military Industrial Complex gives them, they still love the power their position gives them more. If enough of the American People tell them it is time to end this, they will.

You can sit on your hands and say what will my letter do? But if you do that, then you have to know that you will never be able to wash the blood off your hands, because this War is yours, just as it is George Bush’s War. We are all Americans and we should make an effort to take our country back from our merchants of death.

Our killing and torturing and bombing have done nothing to make our country safer. We are making more and more terrorists every day. Today there are hundreds willing to commit suicide to attack American troops, soon it may be thousands. Our Terror begets terror!

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

In real life and real combat people don’t grab a hanky to dab at the blood, because with so many wounds, huge chunks of flesh are ripped off the body or maybe a limb is totally gone.

Two years ago in May 1st, President Bush gave his now famous Mission Accomplished speech. Since that day, on average, every day, two Americans have been killed and sixteen have "only" been wounded.

Thousands of those who have only been wounded have lost an arm or maybe a leg or it could be their eyes or their nose or heck, maybe they only lost their testicles. Think about getting shot right in the face and losing your nose and an eye socket and then think about how lucky you were… only wounded.

The American public has no idea of what the sound of screaming is like when it comes from wounded men and women. Those that have to lend aid to them can never forget it. With some wounds, blood pumps right out into the air with every beat of the heart and that is why you first try to stop the bleeding. Sometimes your buddy has to take off his shirt and hold it over the wound, and it is a real relief when the Corpsman or Medic gets there to take over.

The sights and sounds and obvious pain Soldiers and Marines witness every time some one in their unit is wounded, adds to the fear and stress the whole unit suffers from. Seeing wounded children with their high pitched screams is even harder to take, but the American public gives a sigh of relief when they hear "three Marines wounded."

In Iraq the numbers of dead and wounded would be much higher, but we only count those Americans who serve in the Military. We have literally thousands of paid mercenaries who work for private contractors who are paid with our tax dollars. These people make the big money in this war when you compare what they get, to what our Soldiers and Marines are paid. They make these high wages because this is very dangerous work. We will never know how many of these "troops" have been killed or wounded, because like the Iraqi civilians who are killed or wounded, we don’t keep a public count.

We know that 176 coalition troops have been killed so far in Bush’s war in Iraq, but we have no number for the wounded. If the ratio is the same as ours, then over 1,400 coalition troops have been wounded.

Every Soldier or Marine that suffers a debilitating wound will be paid compensation for the rest of their lives and many will be calling a VA Hospital home for months if not years. We still have troops in our government hospitals from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. They are some of the troops that were "lucky" enough to be only wounded.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

When she was no longer able to verbally express her wishes, Charmaine had to trust that I would stand firm and stop any move to keep her alive with artificial means. It was hard to do that. I loved her and didn’t want her to go. I wanted just a little more time with her so I could say everything I had said to her over again, but I also knew that I had the very awesome responsibility to live by her wishes.

Charmaine trusted me and that meant a lot. No matter what, I had to think about all the talks we had about her dying. I was lucky, because no one protested her wishes.

Michael Schiavo’s life would have been so much easier if he would have just walked away from his wife and let people keep her alive for as long as they could. According to the New York Times, Terri Schiavo’s "heart stopped because of an undiagnosed potassium deficiency, on February 26, 1990." That is fifteen years ago and since that time she has been in a "persistent vegetative state, meaning she could breathe on her own and had periods of wakefulness, but was incapable of thought, memory, or emotion."

Michael Schiavo tried for several years to rehabilitate his wife, even taking her to California for an experimental brain treatment, but nothing worked. The media never tells us about this, but there have been many reports of groups offering Michael big money to walk away, and he didn’t.

It took a lot of guts to do what this husband did for his wife. He stayed married to her when it would have been much easier to give the responsibility of her care to her parents, who challenged his right to make decisions for her.

CNN reported that Terri Schiavo’s husband Michael was with her when she died.

I was with Charmaine when she died too and even though she was in the hospice program and we knew she was going to die, when it actually happened, it was devastating.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Michael in his time of grief and to all of Terri’s loved ones. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the job Michael Schiavo did in keeping with his wife’s wishes. I know it was a gut wrenching job and there is no doubt in my mind, that many times he thought of walking away, but Terri put her trust in her husband and he honored that trust. What more can a spouse ask for.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

What do you think is going to happen 15 years from now when one of these present-day guards is asked by his son, "What did you do in the war, dad?" All the horror of the beating and the killing is going to come rushing back to these men and with the passage of time, many will realize the crime they have committed.

I don’t care how hard you think you are, looking back at the beating and torture of men and boys who are shackled will be revolting. Those in Washington don’t have to worry because everything was "out of sight and out of mind" for them.

From documents dated August 16, 2003, and obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union by suing our government, we learn of this order given to our prison guards in Iraq, "Take the detainee[s] out back and beat the f__k out of them."

Think about what that order means to a young American soldier, who has watched some of his friends get killed or maimed over there.

From Independent News of the United Kingdom, 27 March, 2005, "Damning evidence of American soldiers abusing detainees at another prison in Iraq was made public yesterday. It details how prisoners were u2018systematically and intentionally mistreated’ at a military base in Mosul, culminating in the death of one. Nobody was court-martialed over the abuse."

You will notice that the new evidence of prisoner abuse was made public on Good Friday and this has become a Bush administration ploy used to minimize the impact of damning information about Bush’s War on Terror. Give the public information just before the weekend and there is a much smaller distribution to the citizenship.

The ACLU, "charged that the government is attempting to bury the torture scandal involving the US military by failing to comply with a court order requiring release of documents to the ACLU. The documents the government does release are being issued in advance to the media in ways calculated to minimize coverage and public access."

You see, if the Bush administration doles out the documents in small batches, the full impact of the torture is not learned until weeks, maybe months later. George Bush’s people know how to keep you and me in the dark about what they are doing in our names. Of course the rest of the world knows what is going on before we do, because the reports of torture and killing of prisoners by our troops are fully reported the world over with testimony from those we torture. Our media does not even contact those people.

Some of the documents released Friday tell of a high school student whose jaw was broken and that "Abuse of detainees in some form or other was acceptable practice and was demonstrated to inexperienced infantry guards almost as guidance."

The report also talks about the death of Abu Malik Kenami while in detention in Mosul, Iraq. While in a report in the UK’s Independent, "Last week the US reopened an inquiry into how an Iraqi government scientist died while in detention. Mohammad Munim al-izmerly, 65 when he died on 31 January 2004, is the only known weapons scientist to have died in US custody. The family commissioned an Iraqi post mortem, which found he died of a blow to the head."

The federal court order for this week’s document release came from a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace.

Veterans groups want to stop our torture of Iraqi prisoners, because they know how much our troops will suffer later on in life when they reflect on what they have done to helpless human beings.

One of the ways used to get American troops to torture is to use their hate and fear. Troops whose units had suffered from the enemy were put in charge of detainees and like the boy who had his jaw broken, "The detainees had sandbags over their heads that were marked with different crimes, leading the guards to believe that the particular detainee committed that particular crime." The bag on the boy’s head was marked "IED" the acronym for the roadside bombs that have killed and maimed so many American soldiers. None of the soldiers, who were in the room when this boy had his jaw broken, saw who hit him, so none were punished.

That is how it starts, you get your guards to believe that the people you have in detention are the people who hurt their fellow troopers, even if they were just taken in a sweep that took all males of a certain age. After repeatedly beating prisoners and being rewarded by your superiors for doing it, it gets easier and easier. We haven’t been in Iraq long enough to have mass killings yet, but that is just a matter of time.

The Pentagon admits to over 100 deaths in our prison camps and even admits that a couple dozen of those deaths were result of out and out murder. Those are the numbers the Pentagon will admit to and if you were ever in the service you have to know those numbers are very very conservative. The Pentagon would not admit to any of this unless the proof was irrefutable.

On August 12th, 1949, we signed the Geneva Convention to stop the abuse of Prisoners of War, but the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to the abuses we use in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soon we will have enough hardened prison guards and torturers to disallow that Convention completely if that is what we want to do, but we better think about what this is doing to those carrying out this horrible job for us.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

I don’t know what triggers it; maybe it is the way the sun was today or some song I heard on the radio. Heck, maybe it is always out front and I am able to keep busy enough to cover those thoughts with daily routines.

I know I’m not the only one thinking about Vietnam tonight here in Minnesota. This week three men from here were killed in Iraq. There was Staff Sergeant David Day, 1st Lt. Jason Timmerman, and Sergeant Jesse Lhotka. All were National Guardsmen with the 151st Field Artillery.

When people get killed in a war and you hear about it, all those people you knew who were killed in your war come rushing to the front of your thoughts, almost like they’re saying, "don’t you forget about me." You never can forget about them. War becomes a life sentence, and you are forced to relive parts of it until the day you die.

I guess I could have gone over to someone’s house and talked to get my mind off the subject, but it would all be back when I got home. It is almost like the war wants its time with you and if you give it to it, it will let you alone, for a little while.

I have watched as people tried to drink it away with alcohol or even tried to shoot it down with smack. Most of them learned that dying was an easier way to get away from it. The booze and the heroin were a shield to hide behind, but after a while, it would creep right in no matter how wasted they got.

Those people in Washington who send us off to war have no idea of what they are inflicting on us. They always give away those pretty medals with their colorful ribbons and think those medals will somehow make your time in combat seem worthwhile. Some of my medals are on this little shelf above my head as I write. I have never worn them in public; I have never worn them in private either. I don’t know why I keep them.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

IRAQ HAS ELECTION!

Smaller headlines this weekend:

Marine (TX) Killed in Crash Was Due Home Soon

3 More Louisiana Guardsmen Killed

Hawaii Soldier Killed in Iraq

Son of Storm Lake (IA) Woman Killed in Iraq

Reedley (CA) Soldier Killed in Iraq

Martinsville (VA) Police Officer, Marine Killed in Iraq

Pennsylvania County Loses Sixth Soldier in Iraq War

NJ Marine Killed in Iraq Crash Always Wanted to Serve

GI ‘Paying His Dues’ Dies in Iraq

Northeast Ohioan Among Marines Killed in Deadly Helicopter Crash

NC National Guardsman Dies in Iraq of Apparent Heart Attack

Veteran (CA) Dies in Kuwait

FL Marine Killed in Copter Crash

Another Local Marine (TX) Among Dead in Iraq Crash

N.H. Man Killed in Copter Crash

IL Marine Killed in Copter Crash

Marine From Macomb County (MI) Killed in Iraq Helicopter Crash

Bay Area Marine Killed in Iraq Chopper Crash

Carmel Valley (CA) Man Among Helicopter Crash Victims

Vermont Marine Killed in Iraq

Iowa Marine Killed in Copter Crash

Utah Marine Killed in Copter Crash

Ex-Centennial Student (IL) Was One of Marines Killed in Crash

Iowa Marine With Ties to Texas Dies in Iraq

St. Paul (MN) Soldier Killed; He Was Cretin-Derham Athlete

Marine (TX) Killed in Crash

Marine From Spotsylvania (VA) Killed in Iraq

Texas Marine Dies in Iraq

Wheelersburg (OH) Mourns a Hero

Roseburg (OR) Marine Dies

IN Family of GI Killed in Iraq Says Tour Was to End Next Month

Vermont Leads Nation in Iraq Deaths

Thanks to Carol Watson who researched and prepared this list for Sunday’s Antiwar.com.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

You would think if we were going to do that, we would give them some place better than a tent to eat in. My God, we have been spending money like water over there, you would think we could have built those guys a big bunker to use. I bet the Staff Officers have one.

I can remember the first time I ate in a big mess hall in Vietnam. It was at Dong ha, late in the summer of 1968, and I bet the place held 400 guys. On that day the first thing we heard was the shrapnel flying through the metal roof as a round hit just outside. The walls had row upon row of sand bags to absorb any short rounds, but a direct hit would have taken a lot of us out too.

There were long deep trenches outside and that is where we all headed. Sitting across the table from me was Staff Sergeant Christian and next to him was a Sergeant who had on a leg cast. Christian picked that man up and carried him by me like I was standing still and I followed him to the trench. I jumped in and Christian bent over and handed off the Marine he was carrying.

About then another round came in and blood started pouring out of Sergeant Christian’s forehead. All it took was that couple of seconds handing off that wounded Marine, and that Staff Sergeant had himself a Purple Heart and at the end of the week, they awarded him a Bronze Star.

After that, I started to find that I could make C-rations taste pretty good if I had enough Tabasco sauce. Sitting around with a few hundred other guys in a combat zone, no longer seemed like a good idea to me, and fewer and fewer guys would line up for chow.

Maybe those in charge in Iraq have forgotten that you don’t want to make your troops into one big target. I am sure there are Iraqis working on that base over there and probably every base in the country. They know where the prime targets are. All they have to do is figure out a way to get a suicide bomber near there.

We can’t do things like that, because we value the lives of our troops and suicide missions are only used in dire circumstances, but that isn’t the way it works for our enemy. From all reports, they have guys lining up ready to give their life for God and country, and here we were in Mosul, giving them a target to die for and they did.

Now I know when we screwed up big time and dropped the ball on September 11th and about 3,000 Americans were killed in a suicide attack, nobody stood up and took responsibility; heck, no one even lost their job. But now we are in a combat zone, we know there are maybe thousands of crazy guys ready to "pull the pin" just to take a few of us out and nobody in charge even thought about spreading out the target.

Right in Mosul, where insurgents have killed and dumped over a hundred Iraqi National Guard Troop’s bodies in the last few weeks, we have our young men and women eating like they were at a buffet. Presenting a target of our troops like this should be a crime, and somebody should be held responsible.

We claim we have the finest fighting force in the world and that they have the best equipment and the best training money can buy, but one boneheaded move like this mess hall can give the enemy the boost they need to carry on the fight for many more months to come.

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

The Department of Defense reports that 38 U.S. troops were killed and 275 wounded in the ongoing operation in Fallujah. 60 of the wounded could return to duty. Without our incredible medical care, we might have lost a couple of hundred troops; as it is over 300 casualties in less than a week is bad enough.

Remember, this is just our losses in Fallujah. According to Defense Department reports, another 17 soldiers were killed in the rest of Iraq. Depending on which report you read, we lost either three or four helicopters, several tanks and who knows how many other vehicles.

Now I was in the Marine Corps and it really tears me up to see these losses, but what is even harder to cope with, is that these deaths and wounds were for almost nothing. Washington kept telling the country and the enemy that we were going to attack for weeks. Therefore, any of the top enemy commanders who wanted to, could walk away from Fallujah long before any fighting started.

We claim we killed anywhere from 600 to a 1,000 of the enemy fighters, but there has been no count on the number of innocent civilians we killed. Just like in Vietnam, you see a leg lying there and you just know that leg belonged to an enemy soldier. No way could that leg have belonged to an old man or woman or some teenager in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

You drop a 500-pound bomb or a 155 artillery round on a house, you’re lucky if you can identify a leg. Sure we killed a lot of the enemy, but to put a number on them and no number on the civilians killed tells us a lot. We haven’t a clue as to whose body parts we were counting and we really don’t want to know. Civilian deaths are hard on troop morale.

Will taking Fallujah get our troops home faster? Only the ones coming home in a box or shipped to some state-side hospital. How about enemy troop strength, did we cut that down? Iraq has a custom of "blood feuds" and by destroying a huge city like Fallujah (Pop. 300,000+), we very well might have increased the number of fighters against us.

Before this war, all we talked about was how Saddam destroyed whole towns and villages of those who opposed him and now we are using that same tactic.

The world sees a lot more of the fighting going on in Iraq this past week than we see here in the States. All of our coverage is approved by the military and we only see what they want us to see. The world on the other hand sees only what we don’t want our own citizens to see. If there is a dead child, you know the rest of the world is going to see that little body over and over again.

We are in a War on Terrorism and the rest of the world watches in horror as American troops bomb, fire artillery, use tanks and attack helicopters and jets against a city whose claim to fame is that it has over two hundred houses of worship.

We are losing this War in Iraq and I believe, even though we took that city and killed several hundred Iraqi fighters, we have lost this battle. There is no way that we could win, when we displace hundreds of thousands of innocent people, kill who knows how many innocent civilians who couldn’t leave for one reason or another, and destroy much of a huge metropolitan area.

The whole world sees what were are doing and they have to ask is the price the innocent people had to pay worth it so that the United States could kill maybe less than a thousand Iraqi freedom fighters? How many of those Iraqis died defending their own homes? Wouldn’t most Americans do the same and fight, if a foreign power was destroying their home town?

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of VFW Post 3869, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.