The Iraq & Afghanistan Story Told in Whispers

 SPY AGENCIES INTERROGATE CRIPPLED VETS

LOOKING FOR "POTENTIAL PROTESTERS"

by Tom Barnes STAFF WRITER

American wounded are being hounded, spied on and intimidated by our intelligence agencies, gone crazy or with too much time on their hands.  This is what I have learned:  I have a friend of who has worked at Walter Reed for years.  We both live in the Northern Virginia and have been close for years.  You see things here you don’t see in other parts of the country.  I live about six minutes from D.C. at 0600 on a Sunday morning.

Some of the things you see make you sick.  This is one of them My friend has been interviewed several times in the last year by several American intelligence agencies.  All of these "spook"s are concerned that these horribly maimed kids coming back from Iraq with two arms and a leg missing, eyes blown out, brain stem injuries and AWOL wives are going to turn violent. 

Since when did the CIA, NSA and Homeland Security start investigating "runaway wheelchair" incidents?  What the hell is going on here?  Bush never counted on these working class kids having enough smarts to understand that they were used for Cheney and his gang to make money.  The problem for all of us is that they certainly do understand. Is the real problem potential violence or the potential for the truth about Iraq getting out? 

They actually saw it over there and were smart enough to grasp the full implications of what they were seeing. The twenty four hour news cycle and cable television news has made people a whole lot more informed than at any other time in human history.  And informed people can often be very dangerous, dangerous to crooks and liars, no so much to family or friends. 

My buddy at Walter Reed has been asked by these spooks "what are these kids saying to each other?  are they making threats?  if so, who are they threatening?  are they making plans for violent protests?  do you think they will act on any of this talk?" For any who don’t know the law, these agencies can’t ask these questions.  Asking these questions is illegal, a crime. 

The people asking these questions are criminals.  Doing this is a threat against the men and women who fought for this country.  Who do we report crimes to when the law and criminals are one in the same?  

In Alexandria or in Arlington you cannot go to a restaurant here on a weekend without seeing some horribly maimed young kid and his wife and kids sitting at a table.  Faces deformed, legs missing, that goofy look a human gets on his face when his brain stem has been dislodged from his spine is available for your gaze if you have the courage to look.  You see the whole gamut. 

It is heartbreaking. As you can well imagine, my conversations with my friend were off the record upon his insistence.  He of course wants to keep his job and federal access to jobs.  It was all supposed to be hush hush. Coverup and retaliation is a way of life.  It is how we managed to lose so much with so many seeing so little or saying nothing.  The ability to make a family starve is real power.  The ability to make someone "disappear" is even more frightening.  But as he tells it, "the suits" are at Walter Reed all the time now. 

They interview people who work on these kids or around them in almost any capacity.  If I understand him correctly the real fear here is that the kids that are maimed (1) actually might have a set of agendas that they will act upon and (2) they might be savvy enough to not share those plans with anyone except another severely injured Iraq or Afghan war veteran.  The tipping point for these kids seems to be the AWOL wives.  Most of the young wives, even the ones with kids, take off pretty quickly once the maimed soldier or Marine gets home. 

That story has been hushed up very successfully by the Bush White House and it is too early to see if the Obama White House will follow suit with this public relations tack. How do we get troops to leave home when they can be assured that when they phone home, that spouse may not be alone or that a mysterious uncle or aunt will be taking their place with the kids.  Do you know all the suicides that are taking place with the returning soldiers?  Most of them are due to unfaithful or AWOL wives.  That is another part of the story that is not being told out in the hinterlands.

And to make matters even worse, due to the universal availability of the medivac helicopter, the kevlar flak vest and the kevlar helmet these kids are living when only fifteen years ago they would have died.  That is not always good news. 

Consider the following: Four years ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was a Major in the Air Force and a physician at that time.  He now works as the personnel doctor at a federal agency in D.C.  I helped to get him hired when I worked there also.  He was telling me that military medicine now has ethical considerations to deal with on the battlefront that it never had to deal with before. 

A kid can lose all of his limbs, his eyes and half of his skull and still stand a good chance of being "saved" by military medicine because of the protections in place that I mentioned above.  This is causing real concern among military doctors because the question is one of quality of life now.  Are they condemning him to 60 years in a V.A. hospital in a bed defecating  himself every night and day if they save him?  In other words, at what point do military doctors insert a judgment about quality of life for a nineteen year old kid who can never be any better than a vegetable? 

It is happening more and more now and military doctors are very uncomfortable with "saving" kids in this situation.  They are damning them to a living hell and they know it.  The doctors are very uncomfortable with it.  My friend left the Air Force because of it. Once you live out here and see the ramifications of this hellish war on the kids something in you dies. 

You see them and their hollowed out lives with their devastated bodies and demoralized wives and kids who cannot stand to look daddy in the face because half of it is reconstructed. They bravely sit silently in a restaurant and pretend everything is normal and it actually haunts you.  You can feel their agony right in your solar plexus as you sit at the table next to them.  It takes your breath away. 

This is the face of modern warfare.   They are making Frankenstein monsters out of these kids with artificial electronic eyes and limbs that are attached to their spinal cords electronically through surgery and stuff I cannot even describe. And they do it because if they do not do it, these kids will have no chance at a life that even approximates normal.   

It makes you just want to go home and cry.  This is the stuff that you never see in the papers. Never.  My God I hate this useless, unnecessary war.  What in the hell have we done?  

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)