Commentary

"Use 'em, abuse 'em and lose 'em. This has been the U.S. military mantra since before George Washington slapped on a pair of boots. This brilliant work documents it all. A searing condemnation of an ungrateful nation."

David H. Hackworth,Colonel, U.S. Army Retired, Author of Steel My Soldiers' Hearts

"I don't know why the government, if it cares so much about its troops, isn't saying 'My God, 200,000 disabled in that war, 11,000 dead! What did we do?'"

Joyce Riley, Former Army flight nurse and veterans' advocate

"Every American who has a child contemplating joining the military for any reason should buy him or her a copy of this book to read... This book provides an extremely moving, compelling and irrefutable account of what happens to the young men and women of America when they go into the military, and also when they come home--if they do."

Francis A. Boyle from the Foreword

Review

"Anderson’s books should be flogged side-by-side every military recruitment center and recruitment fair booth. Every high school should have several copies readily available for students,"
- Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice 
For full review go to:  http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/04/%e2%80%9cdumb-stupid-animals-to-be-used%e2%80%9d-the-us-war-against-its-troops/

When Johnny Comes Home
Home Front: The Government’s War on Soldiers
by Rick Anderson
Clarity Press, Inc., 2004,
review by Joe Martin of Real Change News, Seattle's Alternative Newspaper

The valiant tradition of journalistic muckraking is alive and well. Walking in the path blazed by renowned American investigative reporters like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell is Seattle Weekly’s Rick Anderson. Long ago he established his credentials as a friend of common folk by writing about people and issues often underreported in much of the media. Anderson doesn’t shy away from controversial stories related to Seattle city politics, Boeing, the UW, the state Department of Social and Health Services, or the criminal underworld. By turns Anderson can be funny and sarcastic, and he can write with erudition and the kind of gravitas that packs a mean journalistic punch.

In this formidable reporter’s first ever book, Home Front, Anderson’s versatile skills are on full display. The result is a brutal account of the medical and social plight of discharged American military veterans and present-day enlisted men and women. Every young kid who might be contemplating a career in the armed forces would do well to peruse its pages before sauntering down to the recruitment office. It is must reading for social workers and medical personnel within and without the labyrinthine system of the Veterans Administration. Many will be shocked to learn that despite the $401.3 billion Pentagon budget set for 2004 ­ that’s 45 percent of all the world’s total military expenditures ­ there is often inadequate assistance for veterans who need help with lingering physical and psychological ailments precipitated by their experiences in the military.

Anderson’s book is hair-raising. In the execution of contemporary warfare, embattled areas of the world become contaminated with a panoply of toxic chemicals and radioactive substances that cause a broad spectrum of maladies. If that were not bad enough for both combatants and the hapless indigenous civilians who must continue to survive in those devastated terrains, United States military personnel are simultaneously fair game for medicinal experimentation at the hands of their commanders. “They’re the soldiers and veterans,” writes Anderson, “who have increasingly been injected, gassed, medicated, experimented on and exposed to chemicals by their own government in recent decades.” Any enlistee who protests the routine administration of vaccines of questionable safety can be accused of insubordination and subject to a less than honorable discharge.

Often, these vaccines and other medications that are given to our troops ­ ostensibly to protect them from the extensive health threats that pervade 21st century battlefields ­ are not approved by the FDA. Anderson reports on the dismal fate of those who have suffered physical and mental hardship after the ingestion of these substances. Some veterans have died following horrible ordeals.
Adding insult to injury is the Feres Doctrine, a piece of legal legerdemain implemented in 1950 of which many are unaware. Anderson defines the doctrine as “a body of law that holds that a serviceman cannot sue the government for putting him or her in harm’s way. The doctrine helped the government avoid damages most notably for injuries to service members caused by its freaky LSD experiments in the 1960’s.” Anderson writes of an attorney named Derek Braslow. He represents a group of vets who are trying to argue that private corporations which sell the Department of Defense “an experimental and defective vaccine” should be held liable for such slimy profiteering. “If Feres prevails,” Braslow admitted to Anderson, “we have nowhere to go. Then no one is responsible.”

The gallimaufry of vaccines, compounded by the environmental contamination of today’s battlefields have combined to create a pernicious “cocktail effect.” This condition accounts for a nauseating spectrum of illnesses that manifest themselves over time and can result in psychosis, suicide, and murderous behavior, in addition to degrees of physical debilitation. Anderson reports that 11,000 veterans of the first Gulf War have died since 1991, even though their average age while in the service was 36. Two hundred and fourteen thousands veterans of that war have filed for disability benefits; at present 161,000 of these vets have been granted such status. Many of them believe that the cause of their myriad physical and psychological problems “has something to do with serving in the most toxic war in military history. So far.” Keep in mind that the official casualty figures for the U.S. forces during the Gulf War of 1991 ­ compiled at that point in time ­ were 293 killed and 467 wounded. The tale told grimly by Anderson reveals that the war’s lethality for many thousands of common soldiers did not end in 1991.

Scattered throughout this informative work is the constant reminder of war’s profitability for businesses that make the medicines, vaccines, chemicals, bombs, bullets and related materiel that seem indispensable to the 21st century practice of megaton mayhem. “War, if good for anything,” observes Anderson, “is great for business.” Even the leftover waste from nuclear weapons development, known as depleted uranium (DU), turns an odious profit as a component of armor piercing projectiles. Anderson writes: “U.S. forces used more than 300 tons of DU weapons during Desert Storm. Troops in 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom fired off hundreds of tons more.” Radiation levels in parts of downtown Baghdad had levels of radiation “1,000 to 1,900 times higher than normal background radiation levels.” A former Pentagon nuclear physicist, Dr. Douglas Rokke, has condemned the use of DU weapons as “a crime against humanity.” Citizens of the Puget Sound should be alarmed to know that “the Navy has been firing DU rounds in exercises off the Washington state coast, near the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, since 1977.”

The list of businesses which get fat off war’s fury, from banks to weapons manufacturers, is an impressive one. Notably, Vice President Cheney’s former place of employment, Halliburton, will earn “a $500 million profit from the taxpayers on the Iraq contract alone.” Concerning Boeing, Anderson writes that it is “the United States’ major supplier of military weapons to allied countries and its potential new military programs include the ground missile-defense system, Star Wars II, with a price tag of more than $200 billion. War or the threat of it has its rewards.”

But for too many weary vets, sickened in body and soul by the scars of battle, rewards are few indeed. Anderson details the sad saga of Joe Hooper, a Vietnam vet whose ghost haunts this book. Hooper was the most highly decorated soldier to serve in Vietnam, “a war he came to hate as much as did the people who called him baby killer when he returned.” He earned more medals than either Alvin York or Audie Murphy; and his life fell completely apart when he returned home and reentered the civilian sphere. Anderson got to know Hooper and came to appreciate him as a man as well as a friend. He died in 1979, a victim of alcohol and despair. The VA system should have been there as a life raft for Hooper, but in the end it failed him. David Willson, another vet and Hooper’s friend, asks, “If we can’t save our heroes, who can we save?”

In an August 27 report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one highly distraught and angry National Guardsman ­ recently returned from Iraq ­ admitted that as soon as he got off the plane at McChord Air Force Base, “I wanted to start tearing people’s heads off.” A lot of young soldiers are returning from Bush’s fiasco in the Middle East with a plentiful dose of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). This same vet comments insightfully: “Those guys on the side of the road with the cardboard signs, I can see how they got there… I’m afraid of losing everything I came home to.” He is 35 years old.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush is busy cutting away at the already paltry benefits available to veterans and their families. It has been known for some time that a sizeable percentage of the homeless are veterans. A 1996 Urban Institute study estimated that anywhere from 529,000 to 840,000 vets were homeless at any given time in the course of a year. It’s safe to say that those figures have not changed much and may indeed have worsened in the intervening years. The VA itself figures that 299,321 veterans are homeless every night of the year, and that annually more than a half million vets are homeless at some time. One thing would seem to be certain: a whole new wave of troubled service men and women will be arriving on our streets, in our jails, and at the doors of homeless shelters in the near future. Rick Anderson’s compelling work ­ it is truly an anti-war book ­ will give us a good overview of how they got there.