Support the Troops

One Saturday in March, unknown number, came up on the caller ID. Unknown number means that it is either my sister calling from Germany or a telemarketer calling. Our family get the pleasure of telemarketers in Spanish and in English, but that's a story for a whole other time.

The call was my sister who had just finished her Thanksgiving dinner. Jim, my brother in law, was back on post on a 2 week rest and relaxation from service downrange in northern Iraq. When you're an Army family nowadays, Thanksgiving is as likely to include an NCAA basketball tournament game as it is the Dallas Cowboys on TV.

It's not often that I get to talk to my brother in law who has deployed three times to Iraq and once to Afghanistan in his 8 years of service in the Army. Jim is truly one of those people that you meet and say, "wow, what a nice guy", I'm especially partial as he married my sister and is the father to my 1 year old niece and two year old nephew.

He told me a story about finding an IED before he left, he was in the first humvee in a convoy behind the scout car, they saw the guy placing it, who scurried off before they could get to him, and initially thought in was a burlap bag full of trash. It actually contained two 155mm artillery shells rigged with some det cord, which would have been buried likely 5 minutes later.

So, what does it mean to support the troops? As some experienced veterans leave the army, counting the days at this point, until their service is over and their involvement in the conflict will be memories. Younger less experienced soldiers will take their place, soldier that may be described as "trigger happy" and will certainly lack the leadership skills and NCO's and junior officers that do most of the tactical leadership in the field. So is a protracted conflict with multiple deployments truly the way to support the troops and their families?

For most of us, support the troops may consist of the contemporary shallow expression of patriotism of the ubiquitous yellow ribbon on their car. I got nothing against the yellow ribbon per se, but really what does it mean. I mean we send cookies, letters, toiletries, etc. I imagine Iraq must be littered with baby wipes at this point. But do these small efforts, and our thoughts and prayers resonate with those mostly young folks who are risking everything?

Will the cost of caring for our veterans who are wounded, both those whose wounds are visible and those that may be hidden for decades become victims of budget cuts or a bureaucratic morass that benefits the drug dealers of big pharma more than those that have served us? Recently we've seen what this move to veteran's care can look like at Walter Reed, already a failure in leadership. Where was the chain of command here? How could someone, a general, a captain, a sergeant, a custodian possibly let this happen?

When other vets come home, those that will need to transition to civilian culture, will the support be there? For jobs, both public and private, for time, the understanding that it will take some of these guys time to transition to an America that has had a very small part of its population make an actual sacrifice, and even benefited from tax cuts during war time.

As my daughter is born during what has become an unpopular war, I think of myself being born during another unpopular was and the lifelong effect it had on my uncles returning and then thinking of Elena's uncle Jim. The politics and society of my childhood in retrospect appeared to be a reflection of the first generation of American warriors to come home in defeat, not at the fault of the warrior but of the politician. We must remember to honor and respect and reward the warrior, to repair the mistakes of a generation passed.