I won't be blogging much over this weekend or next because of obligations to MoveOn's Leave No Voter Behind GOTV effort. My precinct goal is huge and I want to be sure we make it. That means lots of hours on the phone and on the street.
But, I did want to point out this story from the NYT today. It describes the difficulities injured and wounded reservists are having getting medical treatment:
Under a web of Army rules, Sergeant Elliott and thousands of other part-timers injured on duty are navigating a system suited to full-time soldiers. Most are required to stay on a military base to get government medical treatment, to collect their active-duty salaries and to finish military evaluations that will decide whether they return to duty or leave with severance or disability payments.
Full-time soldiers recuperating with Sergeant Elliott have to wait, too, but they have lives here - their spouses and children, their churches and their jobs. Long before Iraq, they lived on the base or just down the road.
The rules are affecting a growing number of part-time soldiers, as the military is deploying the National Guard and Reserves in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere at rates unprecedented since World War II.
Many of the injured say they have grown embittered from being away from home so long. Some see the extended separations as one more indication that military leaders consider the needs of part-time soldiers - once taunted as weekend warriors - as less important than those of the full-time troops.
They view themselves as casualties not just of bombs and heart attacks and ankle twists, but also of poor planning for a war that is increasingly being fought by the nation's part-time military.
And it isn't only some soldiers who say this aspect of the war was poorly planned: (emph mine)
In March, a year after the war began, after thousands of part-time soldiers had already returned home sick or wounded, and as complaints began emerging from homesick soldiers, the military said it would begin a test program to let some part-timers receive active-duty pay while being treated at hospitals and Veterans Affairs sites closer to their homes. But even now, only a few are actually receiving that service.
Since January 2003, more than 16,000 reservists and guardsmen have been placed on "medical holdover" - waiting for treatment and the military to decide if they are fit for duty - either because of injuries overseas or because of medical problems found while they were training to be deployed. Of the 4,240 part-time soldiers now on such status, 904 are being treated in their own communities under the Army's Community Based Health Care Initiative. Many others, including residents of more than half the states across the country, cannot even apply.
Col. Barbara J. Scherb, who oversees the initiative for the Army Forces Command, was asked why military leaders had not planned a way for reservists and guardsmen to be treated near their homes before now. "No one really thought much about this before," she replied.
Colonel Scherb described the slim participation in the program. "I think a lot of it is because it's new," she said in a telephone interview, "and, quite candidly, because we're sort of making this up as we go along."
Some of the waiting soldiers, at Fort Lewis and at other bases, said that they had never heard of Colonel Scherb's program or had learned of only one or two soldiers who had been allowed to join it.
And what about that program to treat reservists closer to home? (emph mine)
It is uncertain how much it would cost the Army to allow all part-time soldiers to receive their pay as well as their treatments at home. Some say the military would save in housing expenses, but would be unable to control health care costs. For now, military officials say they are unsure even what the medical costs will be for their current community-treatment program.
The requirements for that program are numerous. A soldier's home must be in one of 23 participating states; he must live near a private medical facility or a V.A. hospital suited to treat his particular problem and accepting Tricare; if he is capable of any work, which most of these soldiers are, he must live near an armory, recruiting station or another military facility for work, and the military must not have begun the process of determining whether he is no longer able to be a soldier - which can take months.
Military leaders began considering such a program, Colonel Scherb said, after they realized there might soon be overcrowding of part-time soldiers at military bases around the country. There is room for only 5,000 of these injured soldiers at bases, she said, and the numbers were mounting by late last year. Fort Lewis had also begun its own similar, smaller program for "remote care" late last year, a program Sergeant Elliott said he was allowed to join briefly.
In recent weeks, the numbers of those allowed to go home for treatment while still receiving active-duty pay has grown significantly, Colonel Scherb said, and she expects that to continue rising.
"Everybody is committed to making this work," she said.
But the future of the program seems uncertain. Announcing it in March, the Army described it as temporary, saying, "Once the number of soldiers needing care drops to a level that can be managed from Army posts, the program will be reduced or closed."
No final decisions have been made, Colonel Scherb said.
It sounds like no preliminary decisions were made either.
You know, if I wrote a novel that had a cowardly, rich boy, ne'er do well dodge service in Vietnam by getting his daddy to pull strings to get him a coveted position in the Texas Air National Guard, and then had him not only not complete that service, but later become a president who sent reservists to fight an unjust, ill-conceived war because he refused to put together a colation and a war plan that involved our allies - AND he didn't provide for the safety of those reservists while they fought or for their care when they returned from doing what he was never prepared to do for even a minute in his own life - well the story just sounds too unbelivable doesn't it? And if the slacker president, who was so bent on starting a war as the first step in some evil neocon economic experiment that he didn't bother to plan for the reasonable safety of the people he sent to fight it, was running against a man, who in his youth not only fought valiantly in Vietnam, but also came home to fight just as vailiantly against that war's continuation because he loved his fellow troops so much that he didn't want another one to have to die or be injured for its mistakes, you'd probably never believe that either.
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