On Jan. 11, 2005, 1st Lt. William Eddie Rebrook IV stood in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Iraq. A roadside explosion mauled his right arm, shattering the bone. As medics hurried to attend to his wounds, soldiers stripped off his Kevlar body armor, covered in blood. He never saw the armor again.
They took it off me and burned it
he told The Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette.
He could no longer fully maneuver his arm, so Rebrook left the military. A few weeks ago, as he turned in his gear at Fort Hood, Texas, the Army demanded $700 for the armor - there was no record of its removal from his body. If Rebrook did not pay, he would face a weeks-long delay before his discharge, a wait that could extend to months.
He collected money from friends and paid for the armor. He didn't want to wait to be discharged; he wanted to move on with his life.
But he never should have had to pay. After sacrificing his health - and nearly his life - in service to his country, he should not have had to sacrifice his money, too. As his mother put it in The Gazette, It's outrageous ridiculous and unconscionable.
Rebrook's story is only one example of the way this country mistreats its soldiers. Civilians are told regularly to support our troops, but how to do so is never defined beyond blind adherence to presidential doctrine. We certainly have not been asked to support them financially; President Bush is lobbying to make his tax cuts permanent even as the military budget skyrockets to $440 billion in his proposed 2007 budget.
Meanwhile, Congress last year lowered veterans' health benefits, denying TriCare military health benefits to National Guard personnel and cutting programs for troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The soldiers' welfare, which should be the nation's top priority, seems to be taking a back seat in policy making as the president and Congress dig themselves into a deeper fiscal hole. Things are so bad that the government would charge a wounded hero a fee that amounts to petty cash in the grand scheme of a multi-hundred-billion dollar military budget. The operative word here is petty.
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