I don’t know about you, but I’m tired.
It’s been more than five years since the fall of Baghdad and nearly seven years since we invaded Afghanistan. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander, has quantified our progress as “fragile but reversible.”
Our attention, meanwhile, is elsewhere. Barack Obama has finally (we think) laid claim to the Democratic presidential nomination. Americans are focused on an economy that may soon be in a recession. The housing bubble has burst and the hubris of American investors has been tempered.
But because of the financial devastation rained down on my family, we couldn’t afford a house anyway.
My wife is a disabled vet who fought in Iraq. It took 16 months to get her VA claim processed and approved. She’s not eligible for Social Security because she didn’t earn enough points before her sandy vacation ended badly, and she cannot pay off her student loans because she cannot work.
There’s hope, however: Sallie Mae may be able to have that debt forgiven. In the meantime, some not-so-nice folks call us almost daily to remind us what a bad person she is for not making student loan payments. It’s a good thing the brain injury has played havoc with her short-term memory and that her new hearing aids don’t work so well with the phone, or it might make her feel bad.
After living for years with someone who has PTSD, my kids and I are exhibiting some of the same symptoms as my wife. It’s little things, like irritability and a short fuse with co-workers or teachers, that really show up the most. Try to explain that one to a middle school principal.
We have begun to isolate ourselves from the community around us just as they have isolated themselves from us. We, like tens of thousands of other injured and wounded, live on the periphery of America. We are proud of our service. Many — my wife included — would go back if they could.
But America has forgotten us. At least, they would prefer that we stay quietly on the sidelines so as not to interrupt other, really important issues. After all, who cares about young Americans dying in your name when Britney Spears is caught not wearing panties at the club on Saturday night?
My wife finds solace in the other Iraq vets she meets at the Denver VA Hospital each week and there are some wonderful caregivers there who give us hope.
Each week, filled with anxiety, she climbs into the minivan and drives down the middle of Denver ‘s Interstate 25, eyes wide open for the telltale signs of IEDS and car bombs driven by insurgents. At the VA, she is greeted by four generations of wounded men who share hellos and the nod that says, “I know; me, too.”
Each week, as she walked through the atrium, she would stop at the wall. There, laid in wood, was a gold star for each young man and woman who paid the ultimate price for us these last few years. Regardless of feeling that America doesn’t care about her, here was a place where she could go and press her hand against a star.
But now they’re gone, done in by sheer numbers. Denver VA Public Affairs Officer Christina White told me, “There’s no negative connotation associated with it. When we originally put the memorial up, we didn’t expect to have so many names or for the war to last so long.”
Turns out, the new vending machines fit the space quite nicely.
Now, three senior enlisted members at Buckley AFB are trying to find a new home for the memorial on base.
Most veterans have come to accept that America would rather ignore us. It is sad and uncomfortable and most people have other, more pressing issues. Yet when the Veterans Administration Hospital — the institution mandated to provide our care, the place where we find hope — no longer has room for our names on a wall, we are truly lost and our sacrifice has been in vain.
And the anger wells up inside me again.
It does not come because I believe we are in an unjust or unwinnable war. I do not. It does not come because our wounded come home to fight against a system still unprepared to deal with them. It comes in the night when I hear my daughter laughing with her friends or when my son plays Army in the creek bed by our home.
In two short years, my little girl, only 11 when her mother’s Iraq-bound plane slipped into a hazy North Carolina sky, will graduate, and she and her friends will head off into the world.
How many of them will become stars that won’t fit on a wall?
Peter R. Madsen lives with his wife and three children in Parker. His blog about life after Iraq can be found at www.goingwacko.blogspot.com.
