Our Orphan Vets

Col. David Hackworth writes:

Despite George Washington's wise warning, "The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation," American vets from our Civil War to Desert Storm have been consistently treated like orphans.

Most recently, more than 161,000 Desert Storm vets have been disabled, and almost 10,000 have died from Gulf War Illness. During the near-decade they spent pleading for help, in pain and dying, their ingrate government kept insisting that their wounds – now proven to be caused by U.S.-destroyed Iraqi chemical munitions and an assortment of other killer cocktails such as oil-fire fumes, untested inoculations and local bugs that they weren't protected against – were "all in their heads."

(Thanks, Mike)