Warfare Class

Compare this story in the Washington Post to the one in USA Today about which I posted earlier:

Army Capt. Lonnie Moore lost his right leg and -- he thought -- his career last April when his convoy was ambushed on the road to Ramadi, in central Iraq. The injury led to some dark days in Walter Reed Army Medical Center as Moore, 29, began his recuperation and contemplated life outside the military.

Within months, however, he had received job offers from a munitions company, an information technology firm, and the Department of Veterans Affairs itself. And that's without sending out a résumé.

"People tend to seek us out," Moore said of the veterans, particularly those who have been injured, returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. "They know we'll be an asset to their companies, and that we're not going to let our injuries stand in the way. . . . Everybody I've known that's gotten out, they're not having a hard time finding jobs."

The only other personal account of a wounded veteran finding such lush job placement was also an Army Captain. Maybe I’m being too cynical, but I’m distressed by these two stories—one in USA Today featuring the difficulty of infantrymen and reservists (and one Marine corporal who is singled out as not having PTSD) getting back to their lives, where it is said that it’s the responsibility of the soldier to seek help, versus one in the WaPo featuring Army captains going to career fairs at Walter Reed where they are offered jobs by US government contractors without so much as a résumé.

I’m reminded of Fahrenheit 9/11, which, contrary to popular opinion, I felt was much more about classism in America than a divide between the Left and the Right. I get the feeling that the soldiers featured in the USA Today article are of the kind picked up in the parking lots of poor communities—the kind of recruiting we saw in the aforementioned film. The soldiers from the WaPo article…well, I don’t know if they were West Point grads, or grunts who worked their way to captain or what, but the important part is that they came out as captains, and that seems to have afforded them a certain level of concern that the other soldiers weren’t.

There’s not really enough information between these two stories to definitely discern whether my suspicions are accurate, and I hope I’m wrong, but there was an underclass of severely messed-up and forgotten vets created after Vietnam, and, at this point, it sure looks that’s yet another mistake from which we’ve failed to learn.