Afghanistan, Vietnam and the VA Hospital
My Orange County Register column for August 29, 2021
The day Kandahar fell to the Taliban, I drove early to the VA Long Beach Healthcare System for an appointment and routine blood tests set up weeks earlier. If you haven’t been to a VA hospital, they’re just like regular hospitals. Nowadays before you go in, you have to wear a mask and answer questions: Any contact with COVID? Health problems?
Also the same as most hospitals, most of the patients are middle-aged, with the usual age-related pains and afflictions.
But because of what was in the news, more than usual I was aware of the young vets in wheelchairs without legs. Or with legs, meaning they were paraplegics. Or walking but with no arms. All races, creeds and colors.
In 2019 just before COVID hit, while there I saw a vet wheeled in on a stretcher whose legs and arms couldn’t move. A quadriplegic.
I’ve been going to the VALBHS now for about 17 years. The good news is the care has improved a lot from the national VA scandals half a decade ago. There also has been a lot of construction.
It’s been bipartisan. President Trump started the reforms and President Biden continued them. Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed the legislation. For once, you can be sure your tax dollars are going to something good.
Not so the $2 trillion now estimated as the cost of the 20-years of the Afghanistan War.
The butcher’s bill also has been high, beginning with 2,443 U.S. troops killed and 20,000 wounded. Also killed were 3,800 U.S. defense contractors, 1,144 allied troops, 66,000 Afghan forces on our side and many tens of thousands of civilians. That’s on top of the even higher toll of the Iraq War.
From both wars, wounded in other ways were the civilians back homes: the spouse, children, parents and friends of those killed and wounded. Imagine a woman who just got married to a troop. It’s human nature to pair up during times of distress. And nothing is more stressful than war.
Then he’s In Country a week and an IED snaps his spinal cord. He’s choppered to a Combat Support Hospital. Then he’s medevac’d home.
The wasted money is important, too. How many potholes in Southern California and elsewhere could that $2 trillion have filled? Or schools built or healthcare expanded? Maybe the national and local health systems would have been better prepared for when COVID hit.
Or how about giving the money back to taxpayers for their individual needs? How many people never got married or had kids because taxes were $2 trillion too high?
Maybe you remember the Afghanistan War meant the end of the brief period when the federal budget balanced. There now have been 20 straight years of borrowing with the national debt hitting $27 trillion.
Who’s going to pay back that money? How can anyone put $27 trillion on the tiny backs of children?
When I was at the VA waiting for one appointment, I listened to three vets talking about another war, the one in Vietnam. All three were 19 or 20 when the Tet Offensive began in 1968. They’re now 71 or 72. I listened.
One guy remembered he had just flown into Saigon when he saw “the VC running across the bridge into the city.” He fought them there. The guy now in a wheelchair remembered he had just got there as well. A Marine helicopter repairman also waiting to ship out to a base, he was assigned to fix the choppers in Saigon. He said, “You’d be amazed what you can fix with just a crescent wrench.”
That was another pointless war, with 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead.
Two days after my VA appointment, Kabul fell to the Taliban.
Link: https://www.ocregister.com/2021/08/29/afghanistan-vietnam-and-the-va-hospital/