Newsweek Cover - Double Amputee - Forgotten Heroes

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17316437/site/newsweek/

After returning from Iraq in late 2005, Jonathan Schulze spent every day struggling not to fall apart. When a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic turned him away last month, he lost the battle. The 25-year-old Marine from Stewart, Minn., had told his parents that 16 men in his unit had died in two days of battle in Ramadi. At home, he was drinking hard to stave off the nightmares. Though he managed to get a job as a roofer, he was suffering flashbacks and panic attacks so intense that he couldn't concentrate on his work. Sometimes, he heard in his mind the haunting chants of the muezzin—the Muslim call to prayer that he'd heard many times in Iraq. Again and again, he'd relive the moments he was in a Humvee, manning the machine gun, but helpless to save his fellow Marines. "He'd be seeing them in his own mind, standing in front of him," says his stepmother, Marianne.

Schulze, who earned two Purple Hearts for wounds sustained in Iraq, was initially reluctant to turn to the VA. Raised among fighters—Schulze's father served in Vietnam and over the years his older brother and six stepbrothers all enlisted in the military—Jonathan might have felt asking for help didn't befit a Marine.

But when the panic attacks got to be too much, he started showing up at the VA emergency room, where doctors recommended he try group therapy. He resisted; he didn't think hearing other veterans' depressing problems would help solve his own. Then, early last month, after more than a year of anxiety, he finally decided to admit himself to an inpatient program. Schulze packed a bag on Jan. 11 and drove with his family to the VA center in St. Cloud, about 70 miles away. The Schulzes were ushered into the mental-health-care unit and an intake worker sat down at a computer across from them. "She started typing," Marianne says. "She asked, 'Do you feel suicidal?' and Jonathan said, 'Yes, I feel suicidal'." The woman kept typing, seemingly unconcerned. Marianne was livid. "He's an Iraqi veteran!" she snapped. "Listen to him!" The woman made a phone call, then told him no one was available that day to screen him for hospitalization. Jonathan could come back tomorrow or call the counselor for a screening on the phone.

When he did call the following day, the response from the clinic was even more disheartening: the center was full. Schulze would be No. 26 on the waiting list. He was encouraged to call back periodically over the next two weeks in case there was a cancellation. Marianne was listening in on the conversation from the dining room. She watched Jonathan, slumped on the couch, as he talked to the doctor. "I heard him say the same thing: I'm suicidal, I feel lost, I feel hopelessness," she says. Four days later Schulze got drunk, wrapped an electrical cord around a basement beam in his home and hanged himself. A friend he telephoned while tying the noose called the police, but by the time officers broke down the door, Schulze was dead.

How well do we care for our wounded and impaired when they come home? For a country amid what President Bush calls a "long war," the question has profound moral implications. We send young Americans to the world's most unruly places to execute our national policies. About 50,000 service members so far have been banged up or burned, suffered disease, lost limbs or sacrificed something less tangible inside them. Schulze is an extreme example but not an isolated one, and such stories are raising concerns that the country is failing to meet its most basic obligations to those who fight our wars.

[Erika]

1. Put your name on the waiting list

How W, the elitist, treats our troops.

[Hekate]

2. KnR. I'm so ashamed for my country that we've let BushCheneyInc befoul our troops...

...and abuse them like this. :cry:

Hekate

[lostnotforgotten]

8. I Am Livid At The Christian Fundamentalists, Beer Drinking NASCAR Bubbas, and

Country Club Republicans that put the idiot * in office to begin with.

Let's place blame where blame belongs and not sugar coat the truth.

Progressives SCREAMED loud and wide that * was a disaster.

Progressives SCREAMED loud and wide that Iraq was a disaster.

We were not listened to by the media and the idiots that put * where he is.

I lay the blame at their feet and will not feel ashamed for being a progressive.

If we need an eradication program in this country it is for the idiots mentioned above, not progressives.

[Hekate]

10. Suppose one's brother turned the family home into a crack house.That's the shame one would feel.

Suppose one's brother turned the family home into a crack house. That's the shame one would feel.

And that's the shame that I, an American and a liberal, feel for my country. I don't feel ashamed of my values -- just the behavior of my country.

I didn't do it. I opposed it with all my heart and enlisted others to oppose it too. But we failed -- at least for now.

The wheel will turn....

As Thomas Jefferson wrote during another dark time in our nation, and Elizabeth Edwards posted on DU Nov 06, 2004:

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

Hekate

[Imagevision]

3. This story sickens me as an American, do you support our troops too?

Bush has the balls to say all is being done to give our troops the support they deserve??

[Erika]

4. Bush could care less about our troops

It's all about world corporate profits.

[Imagevision]

5. What is taking the new house and senate to get their act together??!!!

[w8liftinglady]

6. I am glad the images are being shown.

I am outraged and sickened by them.Anyone with a conscience would be.We haven't been shown the images...the true price of this war.I hope they continue showing the images,telling the stories.Then...and only then...John Q Public might become engaged in this fiasco.

[malaise]

7. Finally MSM is ready to

show the victims of Bushco's venture.

[Olney Blue]

9. Bush probably thinks: "How do you know he would have had a happy life?"