VA Not Ready
For Iraq Vets

While we’re awash in banners, magnets and signs saying "support our troops" we, the general public, don’t seem to be doing a lot about it. I don’t know about you but I don’t get up every day and think about a sacrifice I can make or an action I can take that will bring our troops home and thank them for their effort. Newsweek’s current issue will give you a dose of reality with letters home from troops who have been killed. Read it and weep. But further, think about what YOU can do.

Other than the families and friends of loved ones serving, many of us are enjoying the good life, oblivious to the suffering and sacrifice of our troops every day. Many of you have sent items to the troops and supported organizations that are caring for families and that’s wonderful. But there’s more to do.

My wife and I, with several folks from the Rochester, Hancock, Warren area went to the White River Junction VA Hospital this week and were given a tour. We saw a fine facility with "state of the art" personnel, methods and equipment, housed in buildings as old as 1937 and the most recent being 1974. Dartmouth has contributed several modular buildings to help out temporarily. Dartmouth-Hitchcock and the VA work well together and our vets are benefiting.

They’ve formed a research center, largely funded by NIH, where work is being done on Alzheimer’s, diabetes and HIV by eminent medical scientists. This is a first class institution.

But to organize for the current veteran population and to treat those coming back from Iraq the hospital needs an additional 50,000 square feet of space and there is currently no funding for these needs. Vermont is unique in that it contributes funding to our VA facility to care for our National Guard veterans. The federal government is dragging its feet.

We know the future needs, we know who has to be served. By sending them off to war, we’ve made a contract to care for these young people from New Hampshire and Vermont, and we are not ready.

As many of you from WWII, Korea, Vietnam know, there’s a long wait to get into the system even though YOU had a contract with the government that guaranteed you medical care in this system. Not fair.

So now you have a chance to see that we’re fair to these homecoming veterans. Get in touch with your state and federal legislators and tell them to get the needs of our local VA brought up to 2007 standards. We may not feel the pain of the service people in Iraq but we can certainly take the time to do something for them when they come home.

Make some calls today. No matter how you feel about this horrible conflict, this is a way to support the troops. This war has been a classic of bad planning and bad execution. There is no reason, financial or political, that our fine troops must suffer the consequences of our government’s incompetence.

Charlie Biederman

Rochester