16 May 2008
 
Tommy

I’m not talking about the deaf, dumb and blind Tommy  The Who sang about, though there are a lot of kids with head wounds who are coming home that way. Better medical care and body armor are preventing their deaths on the battlefield, which is a good thing, though their rehabilitation is a very expensive proposition.
 
I wouldn’t mind finding the old album and throwing it on the record player, if either of those things existed. Realistically, I could hop over to the iTunes store and buy the MP3 files, and listen to it on the tinny speakers of the computer- and five computers only, thanks to the licensing agreement.
 
I have been through four computers since I started collecting the odd MP3 file, and when I shifted the library over to the new Mac there was a warning from Mr. Jobs that my right to listen to the music I bought was going to run out in one more move.
 
I liked albums. Nobody told you how many record players you could listen to them on.
 
I can’t help think of the past this morning. It is raining again. I tell myself it is a good thing, but it still makes me pensive. I have been waiting to hear what the Congress is going to do about the educational benefits I did not get from military service.
 
When I signed up, and we were still listening to albums, there was a benefit called the “Veteran’s Educational Assistance Benefit,” or VEAP for short.
 
Rhymes with “cheap.”
 
The scheme in those days was that the government matched dollars you saved two-for-one up to a limit of six thousand dollars. I dutifully saved away for a couple years until I realized I was a lifer with a young family, and a total of nine grand was going to get me zip-squat for anything useful.
 
At some moment I cashed it in to do something for the ex or the kids, I forget what.
 
It was such an awful program that they had to fix it. The Congress passed the Montgomery GI Bill, named after a champion of the troops, Rep "Sonny" Montgomery (D-3-MS). Sonny was chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee for a while. He had earned the Bronze Star in the ETO in the Big One, and got yanked back into the service for the Police Action in Korea. He benefited from the original GI Bill, and if he was not able to give the troops the same good deal, at least he tried.
 
My Dad went back to school on the Bill, and I talked to him about it last weekend. He said that without it, he never could have afforded to marry Mom, and life as we all knew it would never have happened.
 
I forget what happened in the transition period between the two programs. I missed the opportunity to convert to the new program, and the whole idea of getting out of the service to go back to school was just something I thought about when things got bd.
 
I have been thinking about it again, since Senator Jim Webb brought a bill to the floor which would give the kids who served in the Middle East Wars something like what the WWII generation got.
 
You can imagine that my ears pricked up when I heard. I did not retire for a couple years after 9/11, and theoretically my service would overlap the new entitlement.. I would like nothing better than another chance at some education. Maybe go back to law school, and spend my days filing the sort of motions that the ex does, free of charge.
 
Of course, I knew they would find a way to write me out of it, since they always have. The Defense Department doesn’t like us very much, which was a hard lesson to learn.
 
I was at a forum at the famed St. Regis Hotel two years ago where Deputy Secretary of Defense for  AT&L (Acquisition, Technology and Logistics) Ken Kreig railed bitterly about the cost of military health care, and benefits in general. It was having a hell of an impact on his program to buy ships and airplanes.
 
I was dumbfounded by the emotion in his voice, particularly when I looked around at the audience of veterans.
 
It was then that I realized that it is the policy of the Defense Department to actively deny, minimize or defer benefits to veterans. Look at the Ageny Orange saga- my pals who served in-country are producing an astonishing percentage of lymphomas these days, and the Department spent a couple decades fighting the idea that there was anything wrong at all.

When I went to pay my respects to Lee, who died a last Fall, the Veterans Administration was in the process of denying his request for disability. Since the Agent Orange-related immune disease killed him, they regretfully closed his case without a ruling.
 
It is unstated DoD policy to suppress any initiative that could impact negatively on the Volunteer Force. The new GI Bill falls in that category, since it would be awful if the kids got out of the service after doing their hitch and went to school.
 
Everything at DoD is about the Mission- and if something does not contribute to it, it must be eliminated.
 
We retirees contribute nothing to the current mission, any more than soldier or Marine that leaves active duty to go to college. Plus, the expense of the educational benefit could impact the acquisition of new hardware.
 
The real GI Bill was intended to serve the needs of a civilian military demobilized at the conclusion of a war. Since this one has no prospects of ending, and so the troops need to be kept on the rolls, whether it takes "stop loss," or burning out the Reserves.
 
The alternative is too horrible to contemplate. We might have to resort to a system where all adult citizens were expected to perform a short period of national service. You know what that could mean. People might actually care what happened to the troops.
 
It was the Iron Duke who coined the popular nickname Thomas (or Tommy) Atkins for the ordinary British soldier. He was asked to come up with a 'typical' soldier's name, and thinking back to his first campaign, he remembered a badly wounded trooper named Thomas Atkins. The trooper took his fate stoically, not expecting much from his government.
 
Later, Rudyard Kipling said it this way:
 
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that,
an' "Tommy go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins,"
when the band begins to play.”
 
It is an interesting thing. Senator Webb was wounded in Vietnam, and has a son on active duty. Senator McCain was wounded in Vietnam and he has a son on active duty. One authored the new GI Bill , and the other is opposed.
 
It is simple, really. The benefits would be paid with a special tax imposed on people who make more than a half million a year. The Democrats are in favor of that approach, and the Republicans are not. They say a tax is a tax, and this is a slippery slope.
 
I am certain they are right- after all, I paid the “millionaire’s” Alternate Minimum Tax last year along with tens of thousands of other middle-class wage slaves. That was something that was never supposed to happen. But I suppose we all ought to pony up something for the troops, you know? There is a lot of other worthy stuff we could do, if we just raised the taxes on other people.
 
I guess I am with the original Tommy Atkins. I am not going to wait around for anyone to do the right thing.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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