ETCETERA

NIGHTCAP

Shameful Treatment

By Harry Kirsbaum

He's been home from Afghani-
stan for three months and is still
one month away from his first
VA doctor's appointment.
He considers himself lucky be-
cause his only major problem is the
inability to get a full night's sleep.
He also has slight back problems,
and his stress levels are still a bit el-
evated, but that's normal for soldiers
when they come home.
My nephew, Eric Kirsbaum, an
Army Specialist with the 715 MP Co.
at Bagram Air Force Base, returned to
his Jacksonville, Fla., home in Febru-
ary from a nine-month deployment.
Eric worked 12-hour shifts at the
gate and trained Afghan soldiers he
didn't trust.
Night and day shifts at the gate
are equally dangerous, he said."But at
night a lot of freaky activity happens.
You see people at 2 or 3 a.m. where
they shouldn't be, and we have to go
out and see what they're doing."
Wearing night-vision goggles,
he'd spot men digging holes along
highway A76, the main road to Kabul.

1

He and his unit would sneak up on
them and "paint"them with the lasers
on their weapons. The men would
be patted down, questioned, then
turned over to Afghan soldiers who
would cart them off in trucks.
During the day, traffic coming
through was pretty much the Afghan
Army "and 25 percent of them are

linked to the Taliban or Al Qaeda," he
said. "All these vehicles look the same.
Any one of those vehicles out there
— and there are thousands of them
— could be carrying a bomb'
He added,"We also trained Afghan
soldiers to run convoys, run their
entry control points and how to take
over when we leave!'
Training aside, he thinks the same
thing will happen to the Afghan
soldiers that are happening to Iraqi
soldiers now.
"They're not capable of running the
country themselves," he said. "They
have a 10-year-old mindset, but
they're wielding AK-47s and RPGs.
They know religion and farming and
killing.That's all they know about and
all they care about. Once we leave, it
will turn into another safe haven for
terrorists."
What bothers him more than any-
thing else is the way he and his fellow
veterans are being treated by the
government and the VA.
Once they arrived home at Fort
Bliss in El Paso, Texas, civilian doc-
tors from the VA did a quick health
overview.
"You fill out a survey and write
what you think is wrong. You take a

quick test, and they'll set up an ap-
pointment for you. My appointment
happened to be four months later," he
said."They'll probably follow up my
sleeping problem with a follow-up
appointment, but I've heard people
with their first appointments get
assigned into sectors — green or red,
depending on what's wrong. And
each of those sectors has a three- to
six-month waiting period.
"It's not the way people with legiti-
mate problems should be treated. It
should be immediate," he said.
The government covers Eric's
health care for six months after
deployment, then he will pay $52 per
month for basic insurance, but it's
only through the VA, and you're still
on a waiting list, he said.
He knows soldiers with legitimate
problems who are self-medicating
with alcohol and drugs while they
wait.
While we consider them heroes, the
way our soldiers are treated by the
government with its inability to prop-
erly care for them when they return
is troubling, to say the least. And we
cannot say that our armed forces are
the best in the world until we spend
the resources and fix the problem. RT

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