This story on Boston.com is outrageous and brought me to tears. It's bad enough Bush and his posse of gun-totting war-hungry neocons are sending our young men and women to die in a civil war, but it's downright criminal that those who do survive and make it back are treated like an afterthought with a sickening "it's not our problem" attitude.
STEWART, Minn. -- It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready. On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.
Family and friends had convinced him at last that the devastating mental wounds he brought home from war, wounds that triggered severe depression, violent outbursts, and eventually an uncontrollable desire to kill himself, could not be drowned in alcohol or treated with the array of antianxiety drugs he'd been prescribed.
And so, with his father and stepmother at his side, he confessed to an intake counselor that he was suicidal. He wanted to be admitted to a psychiatric ward.
But, instead, he was told that the clinician who prescreened cases like his was unavailable. Go home and wait for a phone call tomorrow, the counselor said, as Marianne Schulze, his stepmother, describes it.
And it gets worse:
When a clinical social worker called the next day, Jonathan, 25, told again of his suicidal thoughts and other symptoms. And then, with his stepmother listening in, he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list for one of the 12 beds in the center's ward for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers.
Four days later, on Jan. 16, he wrapped a household extension cord around his neck, tied it to a beam in the basement, and hanged himself.
One in three Iraq war veterans is seeking mental health services, according to a report by an Army panel of experts last year.
"Sadly, there are a lot of Jonathan Schulzes out there," said Robinson, a veteran of the Gulf War who investigates cases all over the country of service members suffering from mental illness and other injuries who are struggling to get the care they deserve.
And every member of Bush's criminal administration should be required to read the closing paragrpahs:
Last week, it was 10 below zero with the windchill factor in the farming town of Stewart. Before his shift at a nearby dairy plant, Jonathan's father crunched through dry, drifting snow toward the St. Paul's Lutheran Church cemetery to visit his son's grave .
Dead flowers from the funeral and a small American flag that marked the grave were disappearing beneath the drifting snow.
"This never should have happened," said James, tears welling behind a pair of sunglasses.
"This country should have taken better care of one of its sons. They owed that to Jon."
You can read the entire heartbreaking article here:
Boston.com Article