soldiers

Gayle Brandeis is the Bellwether Prize winning writer, the author, most recently, of Self Storage (Ballantine, 2007). This is her stunning meditation on soldiers and loss and the things we throw away.
Please welcome her to CultureKitchen.

A few months ago, Patrick Rogalin, a 20 year old Army Reserve specialist, came home from Iraq to find that all of the belongings he had put into a self storage locker had been auctioned off. All his clothing, all his furniture, all mementos of his life before Iraq, gone to the highest bidder.

My novel Self Storage just came out, so I've been thinking so much about what "self storage" means. How our selves can be so wrapped up in our things. How we often store ourselves away from the world, lock parts of ourselves up. I can't help but see a different metaphor here, though. Our soldiers are coming home to very little to begin with--reduced benefits, meager military pay that often has to be supplemented with food stamps. These young men and women put their lives on the line, and we thank them by denying them treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, by increasing their co-pays for prescriptions. Aside from reuniting with family and friends, they might as well be coming back to empty storage lockers.

Governor Bill Richardson has sent out a worthy email about the disgustingly negligent treatment of our soldiers when they are injured. He hits the nail on the head: we should be ashamed of the way Bush has sent our soldiers to fight in a war with no purpose and no exit strategy, and when they are injured in the course of this war, we do not take proper care of them. When I diaried about my disgust at the way this administration is viewed by the world and how badly Bush behaves abroad, I was accused of celebrating. But celebrating is not what I am doing. I am expressing anger at the embarassment we have to go through with this administration and with the Halliburton Republicans who support war profiteering over the suffering of our soldiers.

I am not endorsing Richardson, but I have highlighted things said and done by John Edwards, Tom Vilsack and Barak Obama. I am now happy to highlight something good being done by Bill Richardson.

Here is Governor Richardson's message:

We should be ashamed. When our government sends our military men and women to war, we enter into a covenant to provide care for the injured and protection for those in harm's way. Our soldiers have been sent into a war we cannot win with insufficient equipment; and now, when they return wounded in the line of duty, our government has failed to provide the quality care our service people deserve. Our government has broken the covenant, and shamefully failed our troops.