KNOW YOUR GOVERNMENT:

Supporting the Troops: "Shut Up and Suffer"

A soldier at Walter Reed ponders his future.

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.

Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot mold, mice or other problems in their quarters.

They were also told they would be moving out of Building 18 to Building 14 within the next couple of weeks. Building 14 is a barracks that houses the administrative offices for the Medical Hold Unit and was renovated in 2006. It’s also located on the Walter Reed Campus, where reporters must be escorted by public affairs personnel. Building 18 is located just off campus and is easy to access.

The soldiers said they were also told their first sergeant has been relieved of duty, and that all of their platoon sergeants have been moved to other positions at Walter Reed.

While no one could possibly expect the foul, perverted, fourth-rate minds of the Bush Administration to pay even the briefest quark of concern or attention to the hundreds of thousands of innocent people they have murdered in Iraq or the millions of American citizens they have driven into deep poverty, one might think that they would at least make a show of caring what happens to the men and women they have so cynically and criminally abused in the service of their apparently limitless greed and infinite stupidity. Especially as the Bushists (and their innumerable little bootlickers out there instapunditing and powerlining and pajama paryting and blowing hot air) have made such a fetish of "supporting the troops." But as any sentient being now recognizes, they are not interested in the concept as a physical reality, but only in the mere phrase – and only so far as it can be used as a cudgel to beat their political enemies.

They literally, demonstrably, do not care what happens to the actual human beings in the U.S. armed forces. In fact, they are demonically adamant that more and more soldiers be sacrificed to their war of aggression and crony conquest, dying – or living lives blighted by pain and suffering – for the sake of the Iraqi "oil law." (Or, in the case of most of the bootlickers, for the sake of their own warped and stunted psyches, their apparent need to experience vicarious murder and domination – seeing the state as an extension of themselves – in order to assuage or cover up the various inadequacies, anxieties and craven fears that bedevil them.)

This is a remarkable state of affairs: a militarist faction that doesn't even take care of its soldiers. Once again, we see a glaring example of the blind and brutal stupidity that is the hallmark of the Bush White House. (And this stinking fish most definitely rots from the head.) The early Caesars had the good sense to keep their legions sweet, especially the Praetorian Guard; even Saddam Hussein knew enough to take good care of his Republican Guard. But the Bushists merely chew up their soldiers and spit them out, like drunks heaving after a binge.

Witness the language used by former Pentagon warlord, Donald Rumsfeld, one of the chief sources of moral rot in Washington (and who, by the way, is still gainfully employed full-time at the Pentagon, working there every day with a phalanx of aides, doing God knows what – perhaps still running the place behind the scenes). The scene was one of the "rock star" press conferences where Rumsfeld used to preen before a pack of fawning media sycophants. This was in January 2003, with the invasion of Iraq looming on the horizon. Rumsfeld was rejecting the idea that conscription would be needed for the coming war – and the many other promised conflicts of the "War on Terror." As I wrote then in the Moscow Times (Jan. 17, 2003):

"So Rumsfeld swatted the [draft] question away -- but it was perhaps the very ease of the parry that undid him. Ever the corporate pedant, Rumsfeld couldn't simply dismiss the notion of a draft; he had to explain why it was such a bad idea. His reason? Because the biological material "sucked" into the last draft, during the Vietnam War, was of such "inferior" quality.

Here the contempt finally broke through the avuncular rictus. Rumsfeld explained that your quality types -- college boys, married guys, teachers and others -- took advantage of "all kinds of exemptions" to skip out on combat. "And what was left" -- not even "who," just "what" -- "was sucked into the intake, trained for a few months, then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services."

Think about that. "No value." More than 58,000 of these "intake suckers" were left dead on the battlefield; hundreds of thousands more were maimed, scarred, tormented, brutalized, broken -- but they had "no value" to the "United States armed services." No value -- just meaningless biological material to be chewed up in geopolitical games.