Saturday, June 7, 2008

Occupation Iraq: Supporting Our Troops?

The question really becomes why we need veterans groups to have to lobby for this stuff.

The same
BLOOD-SOAKED WAR-MONGERS who have us all ginned-up on the lies of "terrorism" DON'T SUPPORT the TROOPS!!!!

How many articles need to be written and posted before AmeriKa realizes this unfettered militarism (BASED on LIES) is enriching the few (Israel and war-profiteering contractors) and screwing the rest of us?

HOW MUCH LONGER must your sons and daughters be ABUSED for Bush's lies, America?

"For former servicemen, an Ivy League outpost; Dartmouth embraces, learns from war vets" by Irene Sege, Globe Staff | June 7, 2008

HANOVER, N.H. - On Nov. 9, 2004, three hours before Samuel Crist suffered the gunshot wounds that would reroute his life to the Ivy League, a photojournalist caught the Marine carrying a rocket launcher under a cloud of white phosphorus during the Battle of Fallujah. By the time the picture appeared in The New York Times the next morning, one bullet had torn through Crist's right arm, a second had lodged in his left leg, and a comrade was dead.

Please see: Memory Hole: Willie Pete

Within days, Crist arrived at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he met James Wright, Dartmouth College president and a former Marine, and began an improbable journey to Dartmouth. Crist's classmate Brendan Hart, another former Marine steered to Dartmouth via Wright's efforts, enrolled so weakened by an adverse reaction to his mandatory smallpox vaccination that he needed a wheelchair to traverse the campus.

Crist and Hart just finished their first year as Dartmouth students; Crist still thinking daily of Iraq and Hart on medical leave from school since March. They are the face of Wright's campaign - through visits to military hospitals, a program he established at the American Council on Education that is helping 200 seriously wounded veterans continue their education and his lobbying for GI benefits - to encourage returning veterans to go back to school, whether to community colleges, elite institutions such as Dartmouth, or anything in between.

Dartmouth has pushed them to appreciate the power of their minds, and they, in turn, have provided quiet examples of service and sacrifice on this campus of 4,100 undergraduates. They are creating a community of veterans and, as the spring term comes to an end, raising the public profile of veterans and their concerns....

Crist, a Middle Eastern history major learning Arabic, and Hart, a founding member of Student Veterans of America, season their ambition with the mission of proving what veterans can achieve....

A meeting of East and West

Crist, a soft-spoken Louisiana native, barely noticed the brilliant New England autumn because he was so engrossed in his books, so motivated by his experiences in Iraq.

"I was exposed to a culture that was completely foreign," Crist says. "We're having interactions with this culture under the worst possible circumstances, and that's a problem, because we both have to share this world. The West and the East. It's one of the reasons why I'm studying their culture and their language."

.... Members of Crist's Arabic class know that his two bracelets memorialize fallen friends. "It brings the war to the forefront," says Katie Pine. The edge of Crist's US Marine Corps tattoo peeks from beneath his T-shirt sleeve, and whenever he walks shirtless to the shower, his dorm mates surely notice the tattoo covering his back: the motto "Death before dishonor" and an image of an M-16 and combat boots.

"People in the military at a very young age volunteer for something that they know is potentially dangerous, potentially lethal, and basically it's for an ideology.


And WE KNOW WHICH ONE!!!!

"You're saying I'm going to do what my country needs regardless of what they ask," Crist says. The dog tag chain in Crist's dresser also holds the bullet removed from his leg. That leg remains susceptible to cramps, and he cannot throw a baseball with his injured arm. Five men in Crist's platoon died in Iraq. Nightmares occasionally disrupt his sleep....

All for ISRAEL!

To press for the expanded GI bill subsequently approved by the US Senate, the nascent Dartmouth Undergraduate Veterans Association collected the signatures of 250 students. Native Americans at Dartmouth invited them to present flags at their May powwow. Next fall, the veteran association plans to welcome seven new undergraduate US veterans and to sleep outdoors to protest the plight of homeless veterans....

WTF?! Why aren't our vets being TAKEN CARE OF NOW?

Doesn't BUSH support the troops?

Or is supporting war-looting war-contractors "supporting" the troops?

Since going on medical leave, Hart has lived in the New York borough of Manhattan in his mother's former apartment, where he put a magnet on the refrigerator that reads "Never, never, never give up." He has suffered auto-immune ailments since going into anaphylactic shock after being inoculated in 2005 in anticipation of deploying to the Middle East.

Translation: You are a HUMAN GUINEA PIG, soldiers!!!

His unit previously provided security at Guantanamo Bay. Hart accompanied them to Bahrain, only to be evacuated.

"The vaccination," he says, "started with my respiratory system when I went into shock, then moved into my immune system, and has subsequently moved into my skeletal system and has also affected my brain." Hart sometimes spends days or weeks in bed...."

Support the troops!!!!

Translation: SUPPORT BUSH'S INVASIONS and OCCUPATIONS!!!!!