Objective Truth The Victim In This War...

The Wounded, the Harvard Study and the Truth

A Harvard study finds fault with the way the VA has handled and processed the wounded through the system with the result that the average minimum time before a claim is met is now six months. The VA’s goal has been to reduce the caseload to under 250,000 but the reality is that there currently 401,702 claims waiting to be reviewed and processed.

Part of the reason is that Veterans Affairs is woefully understaffed at 235,000; still another factor is that the number of veterans applying for benefits that have literally doubled in 2006 over the prior year.

While the government obfuscates the total of wounded: We are told that there are some 23,000 who were wounded seriously enough that they were unable to return to duty, but the truth may lay somewhere else. It is virtually impossible to find accurate data and figures are not released unless one goes and makes a personal appeal to the Pentagon; but even that doesn’t get you a comprehensive answer because each branch of the service reports its own wounded. To add another level of complexity, there are no gross figures inasmuch as each service chooses to break down its wounded as to “accidental” or “wounded in the line of duty.”

What we do know is that as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan alone, there are 73,157
Mental health claims alone for conditions ranging from posttraumatic stress disorder (33,754 cases) to nondependent drug abuse (28,732 cases)….This by itself is three times the numbers of wounded reported as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In all fairness, many of the other 401, 702 claims refer to not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but wars dating back to WWII. The fact is, however, that as many veterans of the WWII era pass on, the growing bulk of claims are transferred to a younger generation, Vietnam and Middle East veterans…and comparatively very few wounded in the first Middle East war.

While the government maintains its claim, the fact of the matter is that hospitals all across America and Germany are crowded with the wounded coming from Afghanistan and Iraq and were it not for the whistle-blowers at Walter Reed, we might not even know about it.

Anyone who applies an objective yardstick to the numbers of dead and wounded provided by the Pentagon must question whether the information being doled out bears the imprint of truth. It is hard to believe that our government would keep the truth from us on such matters; yet, the record shows otherwise.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon