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Total Support

By Ben Chitty

[Written in response to an online message reading: "Listen folks ... now that we're in there, don't we owe those troops our total support? Nobody is going to change the way in which this thing proceeds from here. Let's just support the troops."]

You ask me if I support the troops?

The men and women in uniform took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and to obey the orders of the president. Now the president issues unconstitutional orders.

You ask me if I support the troops?

Under "don't ask, don't tell," men and women in the armed forces can be good at their jobs and honorable in their profession, then harassed, discharged, imprisoned — and sometimes murdered — if they tell the truth about who they love.

You ask me if I support the troops?

For nearly a quarter-century at the Air Force Academy, female students were abused and raped and silenced for the good of the service, while their rapists became officers (and gentlemen) and the men who told the women to keep quiet have since retired full of honor and pay.

You ask me if I support the troops?

The Pentagon uses weapons so toxic they sicken everyone exposed to them, for years afterwards.

You ask me if I support the troops?

Again and again, the Corps sent Marines to their deaths test-flying an airplane (the Osprey) which the service did not need and cannot use.

You ask me if I support the troops?

The president's advisers give him intelligence briefings custom-fitted to their imperial political agendas, and the president orders soldiers into action based on this faulty intelligence.

You ask me if I support the troops?

One out of every three veterans of Desert Shield and Desert Storm is rated disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA says it doesn't know what happened to them, and the Pentagon just doesn't say, period. But the president does propose to cut the VA's budget. And the Senate majority leader says veterans will have to make sacrifices to help pay for this war.

You ask me if I support the troops?

I spent years of my youth in Vietnam learning hard and brutal lessons about war and about my country. In his own youth, the president joined the National Guard to keep from going to Vietnam, then went AWOL from the Guard. Now he turns my lessons upside down, and sends the children of my friends and neighbors into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.

You ask me if I support the troops?

You might say, in a way, I reckon I do.

Ben Chitty served in Vietnam in 1966-67. He has been a member of VVAW since 1968 and is currently the New York City contact.