Jackson County Democrats

Last Wednesday on the Hill.

10:15 a.m.:  The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Hearing on 
Homelessness has just begun, and already, the twenty-something staffer 
sitting to my left is nodding off.  She’s paid to be here, but you 
can’t pay someone to care.  Testimony at the hearing revealed that:
According to recent VA reports, approximately one-third of the adult 
homeless population served in the Armed Services...Male and female 
veterans continue to be over-represented in the general homeless 
population.  Specifically, male veterans were 1.4 times as likely to 
be homeless as male non-veterans while female veterans were between 
two and four times as likely to be homeless as their non-veteran 
female counterparts.

The Chair of the Vietnam Veterans of America Women Veterans Committee 
reported that at the Mary E. Walker House in Philadelphia, PA, which 
provides transitional shelter for homeless women veterans, 63% of the 
women veterans they see have suffered Military Sexual Trauma.  This 
corresponds with the findings of the recent Sanctuary Weekend™ for 
Women Veterans, conducted in southern Oregon in April of this year, 
where upwards of 60% of the participants disclosed MST.  This figure 
is double the VA statistics regarding the rate of MST in women veterans.

1:00-2:30 p.m.:  I met with staffers at three Senate offices about 
securing sponsorship for a National Military Family Leave Act modeled 
after the Washington State act that went into effect in 2008, and H.R. 
2744, the Military Family Leave bill that will become law later this 
month in Oregon.  This allows an immediate family member to take up to 
14 days of unpaid time off during a period of a family member's 
deployment.
The staffers’ main concern about introducing the legislation was that 
it would place “too much of a burden” on businesses.  Uhm, what about 
the burden on the troops and their families?
“Play the Patriotism card,” I said.
  Businesses aren’t concerned about patriotism – they say they support 
the troops, but we all know that when nobody’s looking, most of them 
couldn’t care less, and aren’t going to go out of their way to help, 
was the gist of the response from every single office.
Then can we please stop pretending?

2:30-4:00 p.m.:  There’s a long line of folks waiting to get seated 
for the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel hearing, but I 
get escorted in and shown to a chair.  My written testimony (click on 
the link at www.sanctuaryvf.org ) is included in the record, but the 
families of citizen soldiers still don’t have a seat at the table for 
this and most other hearings/meetings/town halls, etc. on military 
families.
If there’s an A-Team of active duty military spouses, the women at the 
Senate hearing are on it. Officers’ wives have latitude not available 
to their loved ones.  Even so, I almost fell off my chair when Sheila 
Casey, wife of General George Casey, who was in command of operations 
in Iraq for almost the first three years of war said, “Army families 
are sacrificing too much…we can no longer expect them to just make the 
best of it.”
She talked about the intolerable pace of deployments, and said that 
the only reason that the uptick in Army divorces wasn’t significantly 
higher is because, “Our soldiers don’t have time to get divorced.”  
Mrs. Casey also stated, “Military families are the most brittle part 
of the force – everything is becoming an issue.”
Her concern, echoed by other panelists, is that the worst is yet to 
come.  In the meantime, military families are barely hanging on. Every 
wife addressed the OP-TEMPO as unsustainable, drawing attention to the 
lack of support for the mental health impacts of deployment on 
military families.
The women testified about their Marine getting orders for the next 
deployment on the very day he came home; children growing up without 
fathers; fathers so emotionally disconnected that they would never 
bond with their kids; military families falling apart.
They talked, and my heart broke for the hundreds of thousands of 
military spouses who have been virtual widows for the past half a 
decade and more; for the thousands of young military wives who are 
embarking on journeys that will not have happy endings, and there’s no 
good, goddam thing they can do about it.  I ache for the lost years, 
years we will never get back.  The effects of this war will 
reverberate through generations.  And like the slumbering staffer, I 
suspect that America will sleep through this, too.