Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for March 14, 2010

Sorry, Toggle. It’s the Same Old Situation.

Screw the dishes. Can you imagine what is was like being raised by Deluca? Toggle must have had a “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” childhood. I bet their biggest Mother/Son bonding experience was at a Blink 182 concert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrTZT49u0kM

You can get Hep from all them tattoos.

I’d give up my 4 grand a month,VA and SS, to be sane.

4k from the va? what country is that?

$2823 VA and $1216 Social Security

Try not knowing what is real and what is not for over 40 years and see how it feels. I can wake up one morning and realize that what I thought was real for the last 2 or 3 years wasn’t true.

So Toggle’s distant relatives are Beavis and Butthead!

That VA rate is 100% disabled for vet +spouse, mine is ‘Nam era, combined mental and physical disabilities- as many are. My son is currently waiting for disability discharge after Iraq and other “fun” places- VA is doing okay, but the Navy is still trying to make his life miserable, as for many coming back. Amazing how quickly you can get blown up, and how long the military will take to do (screw up) the “paperwork”.

27 of 33 months in country with 5th and 7th Marines doing comm support for birds and guns.

Forty years now passed this month. Fifteen jobs, fired six (beat the bleeep out of one manager because he called me crazy), quit eight, last job alone on late shift no one to bother me, last hope now - wife of 38 years put me out Christmas - tired of putting up with a zero. VA? Only laughter. Other Vets? Very funny. 63 years of completely wasted life.

Should’ve stood up at Hue.

In my case it wasn’t the VA so much as one, no one follow up on honorable discharge but had seen the psych and two, put in for it in Florida where the VA sent me to an a**hole who just wanted to treat me but not give me disability. Moved to North Carolina. The VA sent me to a psych who put me in for 100% service connected as soon as he heard I had been to see one in the service. I should have been 100 % disabled upon discharge but no one cared and being mental you don’t know it. Same old story, divorce, job to job and homeless at times. Never knew what was wrong until I met a guy from DAV.

Fair: LOTS of vets wrote after I and II. Hemingway on down the line.

Larry: the Army is now being run like a business. Get hurt, you aren’t really hurt or not by the job (Comp doctors universal language) so you’re on your own. THAT’S business. And you probably expected the military to run like and honorable institution and do the right thing like you did signing up.

MY wife dealt with comp docs. I REALLY sympathize.

Insurance companies, the expense of benefits, of actually paying you for being zapped. They could have saved a lot of money and the hole was looking to look good to someone. They always are.

“Don’t mean nothin’ ” really means “I ain’t gonna process it now, we gotta get this done”, or “If I stop to think about it, I’ll freak and get us all killed!”

Some of the worst is the lies we were all told to get us to send our ‘19 and bullet-proof’ kids off to be cannon fodder. It happened then, it happens now.

Gulf of Tonkin; it was known as a lie within hours.

WMD; anybody who looked closely knew it was a lie.

I forget; what was the excuse for Afghanistan again? Oh, yeah, find Osama Bin Laden. I’m guessing he was sipping hot chocolate on the shores of Lake Geneva after his dialysis, rather than in a cave in Tora Bora, but why stand in the way of a good story? Some nine years later, any sightings? HA.

“What if they threw a war, and nobody came?”

“Reality; what a concept!” Bookmark this daily Oracular random fortune-cookie

@larry, my very (really) deepest sympathy. I can empathize.

@legacyshooter, your description made me shiver. I never was in an official war, but I sure had many of the same experiences as you mention.

It doesn’t make me happy to know others are in similar situations to mine!

I’ve been reading about mindfulness meditation. It seems to have something useful, even for those who feel their lives were wasted.

(I first tried Transcendental Meditation, and found it very helpful. But they put in a lot of garbage with the helpful part - you know, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. One piece of garbage was calling it TM to begin with. So it was fashionable. Lots of people tried it just for that reason. Not me. So now I’m ready for another step.)

I’m reading three books simultaneously (I often do that):

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein, and The Mindful Way Through Depression, by four different authors; the first is listed as Mark Williams.

If either of you (or anyone else feeling bad) feels able to read, why not try one of these? They all complement each other. And I tried the first one a few years ago and found it unreadable - incomprehensible. Now I’m reading it.

I’ve noticed that with a few books, that I sort of mature into them - because the books sure haven’t changed! the words are the same!

Blessings to all.

Incidentally, the best, the most complete, the most accurate description I have ever heard of war is:

“War is hell.”

And war is never fought by those who start it, they are the cowards who send other folks’ children to die for their squabbles. One reason I never had kids – I watched Nam and decided the services would never touch a kid of mine. I feel the deepest empathy for all you guys who went thru hell and as I’m sure you can attest, the gift just keeps on giving.

I’m not a vet . Judging by today’s strip and the comments, Closure for vets is something deeply desired and hard to come by.