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It's hard to wrap my head around how this story fits in with the swirling rhetoric of 'supporting the troops' and 'brave heroes who got the world's worst terrorist' and the steadfast refusal to consider defense cuts lest we cause the troops to be ill-prepared. But even with all the double speak, this is a true abomination:

"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job," Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, "or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home."

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon's butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the "bolt" bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

"Personally," his wife told me recently, "I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago," when her husband joined ST6.[..]

In fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.

"We're actually looking into changing my name," the wife says. "Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other."

When the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter's name come out, they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.

Just as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.

UPDATE: Stars and Stripes disputes writer Phil Bronstein's characterization of the Shooter's available benefits:

...(T)he claim about health care is wrong. And no servicemember who does less than 20 years gets a pension, unless he has to medically retire.

Like every combat veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the former SEAL, who is identified in the story only as “the Shooter”, is automatically eligible for five years of free healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But the story doesn’t mention that.

The writer, Phil Bronstein, who heads up the Center for Investigative Reporting, stands by the story. He said the assertion that the government gave the SEAL “nothing” in terms of health care is both fair and accurate, because the SEAL didn’t know the VA benefits existed.

“No one ever told him that this is available,” Bronstein said.

He said there wasn’t space in the article to explain that the former SEAL’s lack of healthcare was driven by an ignorance of the benefits to which he is entitled.

“That’s a different story,” Bronstein said in a phone interview with Stars and Stripes about what he omitted from the article.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.
--Ernest Hemingway

We have become increasingly removed from the horrors of war. We have eliminated the draft; we have subcontracted out military operations to private companies; we rely on unmanned drones to do battles. Unlike the "Greatest Generation" where sacrifice by those stateside was called for in support of those in battle, we have gone to great lengths to make the trauma of wartime much less a part of our daily lives.

But for thousands and thousands of returning vets, it's not so easy to forget. Nor is the transition back home after the unrelenting stress of Afghanistan easy to maneuver. We've lost more service members to suicide this year than we have in battle and that's a shameful statistic to own.

Thankfully, there is a group of returned veterans determined to both honor the sacrifices made and to help returning veterans feel appreciated and unalone. To that end, the VA has created a new site, offering portraits of veterans who have transitioned to civilian life: Strong at Broken Places. From their press release:

Pervasive stereotypes about the downtrodden Veteran have persisted since the Civil War and we still see them throughout popular culture. When we’re in uniform, we’re considered heroes—often thanked for our service—but once we take off the uniform, the world sometimes views us differently.

Given this environment, Veterans can be resistant to speaking openly about their military experiences in the classroom, at work, or with family and friends—thus hampering the reintegration process. At VA, we aim to break that cycle. One way we’re trying to do that is with the launch of Strong at the Broken Places (SATBP). The idea is to convey to civilians and Veterans that success—and healing—after leaving the military is possible.

To kick off the project, we profiled and photographed 12 Veterans—some who have struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, loss of limb, the feeling of isolation and apprehension about what comes next—but who have ultimately transitioned from the military and gone on to lead successful and meaningful lives. The goal of SATBP is to remind everyone that Veterans carry on after their service. We know coming home isn’t always easy but we hope that Vets will see fellow Veterans speak candidly about their transition process and it will encourage others to do the same—and to not be reluctant to seek out help and support.

On this Veterans' Day, as we pause to remember the sacrifice of our service members, please take a moment to look over Strong at Broken Places to see the healing that is possible with support.

And to the veterans who read C&L day after day, happy Veterans' Day...and thank you.

Please note we have a series of posts related to Veterans Day on our Occupy America page.

As Rachel Maddow astutely pointed out this morning in reaction, can you imagine the outrage if a Democratic candidate who had no military experience had opted to use a battleship as the backdrop for a vice presidential announcement?

Romney, who came of age at the height of Vietnam conflict, went to France for his 31-month LDS mission and received four draft deferments. Given his reputation for being on every side of an issue, Romney proudly recounts that he supported our involvement in Vietnam, as long as others fought it for him.

When asked if his sons would serve their country in the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions he similarly supported, Romney told reporters in 2007 that "[o]ne of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected because they think I'd be a great president."

Ryan came of age at a time of relative peace--1988--and chose to serve his country by driving the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile around, while taking advantage of Social Security survivor benefits to attend Miami University. To be fair, he did sacrifice his desire to get a PhD from the University of Chicago, home of the Milton Friedman School of (Supply Side) Economics to instead act as an aide to the conservative junior senator from Wisconsin, Robert Kasten, before moving to the Jack Kemp-founded Empower America (which morphed into FreedomWorks) as a speechwriter. I'm sure that Ryan feels confident that he has served his country to encourage them to support their Galtian overlords.

But to give the sacrifice that conservative constantly claim liberals do not appreciate to the point of scorn? Both Romney and Ryan had other priorities.

It's easy to love the troops when you don't have to be the troops--Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.)

Chris Hayes is still quite visibly moved by the uproar caused by his Memorial Day show, when he expressed discomfort with the ubiquitous use of the word "hero" to discuss our military, because rhetorically, it shuts down all discussion of justifications of war. It's a fair point, if inartfully made, and I'm sure that he's still feeling the reverberations from the blowback he received in the last week.

But the larger discussion deserves--and gets--exploration. And Chris Hayes give is the respect and time it needs, speaking to MSNBC's Military Analyst Col. Jack Jacobs (ret.), Josh Trevino, founder of RedState.com and an Iraq war vet, Anu Bhagwati, co-founder of the Service Women's Action Network and Kayla Williams, of the Truman National Security Project and also an Iraq vet.

The percentage of the US population who are active duty military is ridiculously small (less than one percent). It's not enough to slap a yellow ribbon magnet on your car and feel self-satisfied that you support the troops, safe and anesthetized, tens of thousands of miles away, as they endure their third, fourth and fifth tour of duty. It's not enough.

Jacobs suggests that bringing back the draft would bring more skin in the game. And while the notion sends shivers down my spine, I agree with the premise that if the war was everpresent in our collective consciousness, it would not still be dragging on in its eleventh year.

We talk about the trillions of dollars added to the deficit because of our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan...but how can you monetize this very real and very painful cost?

For the second year in a row, more American soldiers—both enlisted men and women and veterans—committed suicide than were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excluding accidents and illness, 462 soldiers died in combat, while 468 committed suicide. A difference of six isn't vast by any means, but the symbolism is significant and troubling. In 2009, there were 381 suicides by military personnel, a number that also exceeded the number of combat deaths.

Earlier this month, military authorities announced that suicides amongst active-duty soldiers had slowed in 2010, while suicides amongst reservists and people in the National Guard had increased. It was proof, they said, that the frequent psychological screenings active-duty personnel receive were working, and that reservists and guardsmen, who are more removed from the military's medical bureaucracy, simply need to begin undergoing more health checks. This new data, that American soldiers are now more dangerous to themselves than the insurgents, flies right in the face of any suggestion that things are "working." Even if something's working, the system is still very, very broken.

One of the problems hindering the military's attempt to address soldier suicides is that there's no real rhyme or reason to what kind of soldier is killing himself. While many suicide victims are indeed afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after facing heavy combat in the Middle East, many more have never even been deployed. Of the 112 guardsmen who committed suicide last year, more than half had never even left American soil.

It sickens me. Every week as I do the In Memoriam post, I read so many of the service members official cause of death as "non-combat related" and my heart grieves, because I know that's likely a suicide. All those months of separation, the unrelenting stress of being under fire, the inability to adjust back to a non-combat life. It's all a vicious cycle. But there are people trying to be part of the solution

(h/t Russ, S&R)

I love love love Google Earth. I can easily spend hours swooping all over the globe, looking at satellite pictures of the homes of friends and family, favorite vacation spots and dream destinations.

Sean, part of the content design team for Google Earth, has put together a special application for the program that is perfect for this Memorial Day: Map the Fallen.

This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories—you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died. [..]

For this project I collected information from a number of sources, including the Department of Defense's Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualties.org, MilitaryTimes.com's Honor the Fallen, Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen, the Iraq and Afghanistan Pages, and Legacy.com. I used the Google Maps and GeoNames.org geocoding services to get coordinates for each person's home of record and approximate place of death. The map includes data through March 2009. I'd like to point out the incredible time commitment the above organizations invest in maintaining this information; as I've learned, it is not an easy task. All of the data I have assembled and generated for this project will be made freely available for download in the near future.

During this project, I have sought the advice and perspectives of several groups directly tied to these losses, including Gold Star families, veterans' groups, active-duty servicemen and women, and leadership in the United States Army. I've done my best to incorporate their feedback and suggestions in creating something that pays tribute to the memory and service of these fallen heroes. Out of respect for the families of those people on this map who have taken their own lives, I have chosen to describe these deaths as coming from "non-combat" related causes. This is a broad category used by the Department of Defense to define other causes of death resulting from accidents or illness.

I recognize that this map is just a slice of the story in these conflicts. The Iraqi and Afghani people have incurred substantial civilian losses through these wars; there are also U.S. and Coalition civilians, contractors, and reporters who have died as well. For this project, I've chosen to focus on the U.S. and Coalition military casualties, but I recognize that the losses extend beyond what is mapped in this project.

Each figure on the map denotes a servicemember lost during the last six years. Tied to their hometown, each figure pops up a screen that gives information about that fallen troop. In addition, families can add photos, audio and a guestbook for others to give their remembrance and honor their service.

Please, take some time to look through Map the Fallen and honor the sad sacrifice these men and women have made.

VetVoice:

The ad features Peter Granato, Iraq War Veteran. In the ad, Granato fires shots from an AK-47 through the kind of flak jacket troops were given early on in the war, and modern Body Armor, featuring (Stand Alone Protective Insert (SAPI) plates. The shots go through the older vest, but are stopped by the newer armor. Granato explains that Chambliss voted against funding to give American troops the newer armor.

Chambliss did so twice, voting against an amendment offered by Senator Christopher Dodd in 2003 (S.Amdt. 1817), which would have appropriated $300 million more for needed equipment for the troops, including proper Body Armor, to make up for a funding shortfall that did not meet the request of the US Army. He also voted against an amendment by Senator Mary Landrieu ( S.Amdt. 452) in the same year that would have appropriated $1 billion for equipment on a list of priorities from the Marines, also including Body Armor, as Landrieu made clear in her press release on the amendment at the time.

"Senator Chambliss should be held accountable for these votes, and troops and veterans are doing just that," said Jon Soltz, Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org.

Chambliss, the man who smeared triple amputee Max Cleland to win his seat in 2002 is now locked in a really close race against Democrat Jim Martin -- in fact, the state of Georgia is now a swing state -- and with your help, his seat could be part of our filibuster-proof 60 seat Democratic majority.

You can help Jim Martin at Act Blue. Do it for Max.

The Cunning Realist: One helluva gamble. It's hard to understand how anyone would trust another Republican to run anything.

First Door on the Left: Supporting the troops

Obsidian Wings: Is there any corner of the Bush administration that isn't hopelessly corrupt? Now it's Medicare officials who're caught not doing their jobs, lying about it, and costing us billions.

The Belgravia Dispatch: Thoughts on Georgia

Beat the Press: Why do reporters find it so difficult to understand protectionism for people like themselves? The atrocities continue below...

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: They print the propaganda first, because their good friends in the White House tell 'em to...WaPo or The Onion?...The Sleeping Media....Nearly half of Americans favor government mandated political balance on radio and TV...Lifting the ban on press photographing coffins of returning dead...The corporate media continues to operate as the propaganda arm of the Pentagon...Limbaugh: "Nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy"...Any press criticism of the Israeli government is off limits...Corsi frequent guest on White Supremacist radio..News Corp stock in the toilet...US targets Al Jazeera

The awesome archives of C&L: Originally posted by Silent Patriot on 04/25/07.

Stewart and McCain got into a brawl in this segment…Do you think any of the talking heads would have this kind of debate with McCain? Check out the second half of the interview around the six minute mark for the fireworks to begin...

Stewart tries to explain a few things to St. McCain about fighting a civil war:

Download | play Download | play

"…but that assumes that we're fighting one enemy—they're fighting each other. We're not surrendering to an enemy that has defeated us. We're saying, how do you quell a civil war when it's not your country?"

McCain got very angry that Stewart called them out for using the " you're not supporting the troops," theme and was trying to filibuster the segment…He tried to use the troops as a wedge. Stewart got hot and fought back…McCain started to stutter. (rough transcript)

Stewart: When they say the talking point of "they'll follow us home,"---they're trying to follow us home whether we're in Iraq or not.

Stewart: All I'm saying is you cannot look a soldier in the eye and say questioning the president is less supportive to you than extending your tour for three months when you should be coming home to your family.

McCain: Every American..

Stewart: And that's not fair to put on people that criticize…

McCain: Jon…

Stewart: And you know I love you and respect your service and would never question any of that—this is not about questioning the troops and their ability to fight and their ability to be supported. And that is what the administration does and that is almost criminal.

The Orstrahyun: Monday, Australian investors, mostly middle class people who were enthusiastically encouraged by the former prime minister John Howard, and his treasurer, to pour their savings into the markets last year, lost $110 billion before lunch. In 21 days, $300 billion of investors savings have been wiped out.

echidne of the snakes: Would you like to sign an Open Letter From American Feminists? Katha Pollitt has written one, an important one.

Collateral on blip.tv: This episode looks at the privatization of the election process and the recent - so far largely ignored - problems with voting equipment in the New Hampshire primaries.

Scott Horton: The Emails Dick Cheney deleted

gin and tacos: File this under, "Supporting the Troops".

HOLY CRAP: Translating Huckabee...Fundies Say the Darndest Things!...Banned from church...Abortion as litmus test...Jesus Politics...Romney and religion...Government Funded Religion...Rudy's reinvention as a Holy Fool...Ray Comfort's Bible Science...Smilentology! ...God's Profits...Pastoral Electioneering