News From the Cause
Veterans’ struggle (Financial Times)
January 23, 2012
In the car park of FedExField, a sports stadium in Maryland, just before Christmas, thousands of military types gathered for a curious American tradition: the tailgate. As the army and navy academies’ football teams prepared to confront each other inside the stadium, row upon row of SUVs lined up outside. Commanding top real estate in the parking lot, hundreds of veterans associated with a group called Team Red, White & Blue (Team RWB) ate pulled pork cooked on a barbecue so huge it was towed in, filled their plastic cups from beer kegs and, between banter, watched the game on a TV set up on make-shift tables.
Two of those joking around were Joe McDonald and Jesse Llamas, both 28, both Iraq veterans, both students at the University of Maryland. They have known each other for only three months but they are developing a close bond.
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McDonald, a West Point military academy graduate who served two tours in Iraq and has almost finished his MBA, is acting as an “advocate” for Llamas, a self-described “army brat” who was deployed to Iraq three times. His last tour, starting in 2007, cost him both legs, most of his fingertips, and his get-up-and-go when an improvised explosive device blew up the vehicle in which he was travelling. This set off a chain of events that involved medical evacuation to Germany, three years in residential care in the US undergoing physical and occupational therapy and a divorce.
“It’s awesome that you wear shorts,” McDonald tells Llamas when they meet up a week later at a café not far from their university. Llamas is in a grey hoodie and black sports shorts, ready to go to the gym. “It’s bad ass dude, a huge accomplishment!” McDonald says, exhorting Llamas not to pay attention to people who stare at his bionic legs.
The two have been paired up by Team RWB, an organisation that tries to help wounded veterans reintegrate into society. It was set up by Mike Erwin, an active duty army major and West Point professor. The idea is to recreate the kind of close community that service members enjoyed in the military but is absent from their civilian lives.
McDonald, who was in the army until August 2010, heard about the group through a friend. “There are a lot of organisations that help veterans but for me, the thing that was the most helpful was having people with a shared experience that I could talk to. I wanted to be able to pass that along,” he says.
For Llamas, having McDonald spurring him along is helping him get back on to his prosthetic feet. “I still have pain in my limbs and sometimes I get depressed,” he says. “This helps me out of my depression, helps get me motivated. I’d just be sitting at home thinking about the past otherwise.”
. . .
Thousands upon thousands of troops such as Llamas and McDonald have returned home from Iraq in the past few months as the US ended the long polarising war there. Ninety thousand more will arrive from Afghanistan over the next two years as that mission also winds down.
The toll of this decade of combat is now well known: the lost limbs, the brain injuries, the deaths. The separations from spouses, children and normal life. More than 6,000 dead, 30,000-plus life-altering wounds, untold numbers with post-traumatic stress disorder. Suicide now claims more lives than combat – about 18 a day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Veterans comprise 9 per cent of the total population but 15 per cent of the homeless. From The Odyssey – the original returning veteran story – onwards, society has always recognised that service members are out of sorts when they come home from war. But what is seldom recognised is how different things are this time around.
This is the first time that the US has fought a sustained war overseas without a draft, leaving the country without a sense of shared sacrifice and with little connection to those who have borne the burden of fighting. That makes the 2.3 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan the forgotten “1 per cent”.
Unlike the Wall Street bankers who have been feeling the heat from the 99 per cent – but also unlike the Vietnam veterans who were called “baby-killers” – this 1 per cent come home to complete indifference. Click here to read on
