AlterNet: Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

[Guest guest]

This story has been forwarded to you from

http://www.alternet.org by nandtbearden@...

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

By Penny , AlterNet

Posted on November 11, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

On November 6, the Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was

named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after

coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides

since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of the

campaign to get the military to take the mental health of America's vets

seriously.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed

home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively

insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident;

it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to

outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their

turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion

against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not

happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a

directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No

coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

Randy and Ellen Omvig's success in drawing long overdue attention to the issue

of veteran suicide in an environment that has dismissed or derailed other worthy

causes, can be explained, I believe, by their insistence on going public with

the most intimate details of their tragedy. They complicated and humanized a

debate that has been stalled for decades in a morass of misinformation,

disinformation and other evasion tactics.

They described how his tour in Iraq had changed him, how he suffered all of the

symptoms they now recognize as classic PTSD: the nightmares, the shaking, the

dark moods and consuming fears. They admitted that they had failed to convince

him to go for counseling, accepting his argument that the stigma would wreck his

career plans. And then came the morning when Ellen discovered him locked in his

pick up truck. He had a gun. As she tried frantically to reason with him, he put

the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It's a horrific image: she, banging

on the window, terrified, pleading, while, on the other side of the glass, her

son tells her he will always love her, but that now she must leave. " Go! " he

says, and when she refuses, he raises his gun, angles his head so the bullet

will not hit her, and fires. She was powerless to stop anything, the hand, the

gun, the bullet, the blood. There must have been a lot of blood.

In spite of a suicide rate among solders that has now reached a 26-year record

high, and contradicting the evidence of their own increasingly ominous studies,

the Army continues to insist that they have yet to find a connection between

combat stress injuries (PTSD) and suicide. They trot out self-serving anecdotes

about " Dear " letters, incompetent parents, and what they call

" underdeveloped life coping skills " to blame active duty soldiers for their own

deaths. As for veteran suicides, there has never been any official attempt to

track or count them.

The virtual epidemic of veteran suicides that followed the war in Vietnam has

remained largely beneath the radar of public awareness because there is still

such irrational fear and shame attached to a self-inflicted death. Families,

military and otherwise, have far too often tried to cover up the circumstances

of such deaths, hoping to shield both the living and the dead from blame and

condemnation. What has often been called the " most secret death " has afforded

the military a convenient and virtually impenetrable cover for decades, allowing

them to keep combat-related suicides a theoretical, statistical, deniable issue.

Josh Omvig was not able to keep his war theoretical. He and hundreds of other

veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of Vietnam vets

carried home memories friends lost, bodies blown apart, and lives touched by

real horror. Their wars were up close and personal, and when their memories

became too much to bear, they chose to die.

Both as a war widow and as the mother of a boy who, like Josh, is in his 20's, I

heard the Omvigs' story, saw it and felt it, through the lens of my own

experience. My husband returned from Vietnam with memories he could never

bring himself to share. They haunted him and they haunted our relationship. Was

his death an execution? Euthanasia? Or was it my fault? What did I do to that

poor man? In the years since, unbidden memories of the swirling red lights, the

sirens, the pumps, the drains, and the blood have infiltrated who I am. I rarely

if ever talked about , but I learned to tiptoe around everyone I love,

hoping not to do it again, hoping not to kill someone else by mistake.

So I am enormously grateful to Ellen and Randy Omvig. I do not find their story

inappropriately intimate. I do not think it is in bad taste. Or exploitative. Or

sensationalist, though those are all excuses that are proffered in defense of

the bloodless numbers, the numbing statistics and the endless slogans. It is, in

fact, a vital antidote to the guilt, the silence, and the isolation that is

typically experienced by the families of suicides. It invites empathy, which is

the corner stone of common cause activism. It makes the personal political.

The Omvigs let their grief feed their activism. They insisted that behind the

statistics there are real human beings whose suffering is monumental, and

monumental as well for the people who love them. For me, and I imagine for a

host of others who have been moved to help push this legislation forward, the

impetus came, at least in part, from the courage it took for them to share the

raw emotional intimacies of a son's death. Thanks in no small measure to the

advocacy of his parents, the Department of Veterans Affairs will soon be

required to develop and implement a comprehensive suicide prevention program at

each of its medical facilities, including mandatory staff training in suicide

awareness and prevention, a designated suicide prevention counselor in each

facility, and a 24-hour suicide hotline. The bill that bears Josh's name is

perhaps a small victory, but it will make more of a difference to veterans than

any parade.

Note: The bill, as currently written, no longer requires the VA to screen all

its patients for suicide risk factors and make an effort to keep track of

at-risk veterans, an important element that was dropped because otherwise one

senator, Tom Coburn (OK-R), threatened to block its passage indefinitely. Coburn

feared that such a database could also be used to deny veterans who have sought

help at the VA for mental health issues the right to purchase a gun. Too bad,

but even so, it's a start.

Penny is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after

coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide

and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is

Flashback.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

-------------------------------------

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/67556

Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars.

That's not an accident; it's policy.

-------------------------------------

[Guest guest]

This story has been forwarded to you from

http://www.alternet.org by nandtbearden@...

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

By Penny , AlterNet

Posted on November 11, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

On November 6, the Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was

named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after

coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides

since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of the

campaign to get the military to take the mental health of America's vets

seriously.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed

home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively

insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident;

it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to

outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their

turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion

against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not

happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a

directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No

coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

Randy and Ellen Omvig's success in drawing long overdue attention to the issue

of veteran suicide in an environment that has dismissed or derailed other worthy

causes, can be explained, I believe, by their insistence on going public with

the most intimate details of their tragedy. They complicated and humanized a

debate that has been stalled for decades in a morass of misinformation,

disinformation and other evasion tactics.

They described how his tour in Iraq had changed him, how he suffered all of the

symptoms they now recognize as classic PTSD: the nightmares, the shaking, the

dark moods and consuming fears. They admitted that they had failed to convince

him to go for counseling, accepting his argument that the stigma would wreck his

career plans. And then came the morning when Ellen discovered him locked in his

pick up truck. He had a gun. As she tried frantically to reason with him, he put

the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It's a horrific image: she, banging

on the window, terrified, pleading, while, on the other side of the glass, her

son tells her he will always love her, but that now she must leave. " Go! " he

says, and when she refuses, he raises his gun, angles his head so the bullet

will not hit her, and fires. She was powerless to stop anything, the hand, the

gun, the bullet, the blood. There must have been a lot of blood.

In spite of a suicide rate among solders that has now reached a 26-year record

high, and contradicting the evidence of their own increasingly ominous studies,

the Army continues to insist that they have yet to find a connection between

combat stress injuries (PTSD) and suicide. They trot out self-serving anecdotes

about " Dear " letters, incompetent parents, and what they call

" underdeveloped life coping skills " to blame active duty soldiers for their own

deaths. As for veteran suicides, there has never been any official attempt to

track or count them.

The virtual epidemic of veteran suicides that followed the war in Vietnam has

remained largely beneath the radar of public awareness because there is still

such irrational fear and shame attached to a self-inflicted death. Families,

military and otherwise, have far too often tried to cover up the circumstances

of such deaths, hoping to shield both the living and the dead from blame and

condemnation. What has often been called the " most secret death " has afforded

the military a convenient and virtually impenetrable cover for decades, allowing

them to keep combat-related suicides a theoretical, statistical, deniable issue.

Josh Omvig was not able to keep his war theoretical. He and hundreds of other

veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of Vietnam vets

carried home memories friends lost, bodies blown apart, and lives touched by

real horror. Their wars were up close and personal, and when their memories

became too much to bear, they chose to die.

Both as a war widow and as the mother of a boy who, like Josh, is in his 20's, I

heard the Omvigs' story, saw it and felt it, through the lens of my own

experience. My husband returned from Vietnam with memories he could never

bring himself to share. They haunted him and they haunted our relationship. Was

his death an execution? Euthanasia? Or was it my fault? What did I do to that

poor man? In the years since, unbidden memories of the swirling red lights, the

sirens, the pumps, the drains, and the blood have infiltrated who I am. I rarely

if ever talked about , but I learned to tiptoe around everyone I love,

hoping not to do it again, hoping not to kill someone else by mistake.

So I am enormously grateful to Ellen and Randy Omvig. I do not find their story

inappropriately intimate. I do not think it is in bad taste. Or exploitative. Or

sensationalist, though those are all excuses that are proffered in defense of

the bloodless numbers, the numbing statistics and the endless slogans. It is, in

fact, a vital antidote to the guilt, the silence, and the isolation that is

typically experienced by the families of suicides. It invites empathy, which is

the corner stone of common cause activism. It makes the personal political.

The Omvigs let their grief feed their activism. They insisted that behind the

statistics there are real human beings whose suffering is monumental, and

monumental as well for the people who love them. For me, and I imagine for a

host of others who have been moved to help push this legislation forward, the

impetus came, at least in part, from the courage it took for them to share the

raw emotional intimacies of a son's death. Thanks in no small measure to the

advocacy of his parents, the Department of Veterans Affairs will soon be

required to develop and implement a comprehensive suicide prevention program at

each of its medical facilities, including mandatory staff training in suicide

awareness and prevention, a designated suicide prevention counselor in each

facility, and a 24-hour suicide hotline. The bill that bears Josh's name is

perhaps a small victory, but it will make more of a difference to veterans than

any parade.

Note: The bill, as currently written, no longer requires the VA to screen all

its patients for suicide risk factors and make an effort to keep track of

at-risk veterans, an important element that was dropped because otherwise one

senator, Tom Coburn (OK-R), threatened to block its passage indefinitely. Coburn

feared that such a database could also be used to deny veterans who have sought

help at the VA for mental health issues the right to purchase a gun. Too bad,

but even so, it's a start.

Penny is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after

coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide

and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is

Flashback.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

-------------------------------------

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/67556

Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars.

That's not an accident; it's policy.

-------------------------------------

[Guest guest]

This story has been forwarded to you from

http://www.alternet.org by nandtbearden@...

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

By Penny , AlterNet

Posted on November 11, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

On November 6, the Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was

named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after

coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides

since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of the

campaign to get the military to take the mental health of America's vets

seriously.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed

home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively

insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident;

it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to

outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their

turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion

against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not

happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a

directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No

coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

Randy and Ellen Omvig's success in drawing long overdue attention to the issue

of veteran suicide in an environment that has dismissed or derailed other worthy

causes, can be explained, I believe, by their insistence on going public with

the most intimate details of their tragedy. They complicated and humanized a

debate that has been stalled for decades in a morass of misinformation,

disinformation and other evasion tactics.

They described how his tour in Iraq had changed him, how he suffered all of the

symptoms they now recognize as classic PTSD: the nightmares, the shaking, the

dark moods and consuming fears. They admitted that they had failed to convince

him to go for counseling, accepting his argument that the stigma would wreck his

career plans. And then came the morning when Ellen discovered him locked in his

pick up truck. He had a gun. As she tried frantically to reason with him, he put

the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It's a horrific image: she, banging

on the window, terrified, pleading, while, on the other side of the glass, her

son tells her he will always love her, but that now she must leave. " Go! " he

says, and when she refuses, he raises his gun, angles his head so the bullet

will not hit her, and fires. She was powerless to stop anything, the hand, the

gun, the bullet, the blood. There must have been a lot of blood.

In spite of a suicide rate among solders that has now reached a 26-year record

high, and contradicting the evidence of their own increasingly ominous studies,

the Army continues to insist that they have yet to find a connection between

combat stress injuries (PTSD) and suicide. They trot out self-serving anecdotes

about " Dear " letters, incompetent parents, and what they call

" underdeveloped life coping skills " to blame active duty soldiers for their own

deaths. As for veteran suicides, there has never been any official attempt to

track or count them.

The virtual epidemic of veteran suicides that followed the war in Vietnam has

remained largely beneath the radar of public awareness because there is still

such irrational fear and shame attached to a self-inflicted death. Families,

military and otherwise, have far too often tried to cover up the circumstances

of such deaths, hoping to shield both the living and the dead from blame and

condemnation. What has often been called the " most secret death " has afforded

the military a convenient and virtually impenetrable cover for decades, allowing

them to keep combat-related suicides a theoretical, statistical, deniable issue.

Josh Omvig was not able to keep his war theoretical. He and hundreds of other

veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of Vietnam vets

carried home memories friends lost, bodies blown apart, and lives touched by

real horror. Their wars were up close and personal, and when their memories

became too much to bear, they chose to die.

Both as a war widow and as the mother of a boy who, like Josh, is in his 20's, I

heard the Omvigs' story, saw it and felt it, through the lens of my own

experience. My husband returned from Vietnam with memories he could never

bring himself to share. They haunted him and they haunted our relationship. Was

his death an execution? Euthanasia? Or was it my fault? What did I do to that

poor man? In the years since, unbidden memories of the swirling red lights, the

sirens, the pumps, the drains, and the blood have infiltrated who I am. I rarely

if ever talked about , but I learned to tiptoe around everyone I love,

hoping not to do it again, hoping not to kill someone else by mistake.

So I am enormously grateful to Ellen and Randy Omvig. I do not find their story

inappropriately intimate. I do not think it is in bad taste. Or exploitative. Or

sensationalist, though those are all excuses that are proffered in defense of

the bloodless numbers, the numbing statistics and the endless slogans. It is, in

fact, a vital antidote to the guilt, the silence, and the isolation that is

typically experienced by the families of suicides. It invites empathy, which is

the corner stone of common cause activism. It makes the personal political.

The Omvigs let their grief feed their activism. They insisted that behind the

statistics there are real human beings whose suffering is monumental, and

monumental as well for the people who love them. For me, and I imagine for a

host of others who have been moved to help push this legislation forward, the

impetus came, at least in part, from the courage it took for them to share the

raw emotional intimacies of a son's death. Thanks in no small measure to the

advocacy of his parents, the Department of Veterans Affairs will soon be

required to develop and implement a comprehensive suicide prevention program at

each of its medical facilities, including mandatory staff training in suicide

awareness and prevention, a designated suicide prevention counselor in each

facility, and a 24-hour suicide hotline. The bill that bears Josh's name is

perhaps a small victory, but it will make more of a difference to veterans than

any parade.

Note: The bill, as currently written, no longer requires the VA to screen all

its patients for suicide risk factors and make an effort to keep track of

at-risk veterans, an important element that was dropped because otherwise one

senator, Tom Coburn (OK-R), threatened to block its passage indefinitely. Coburn

feared that such a database could also be used to deny veterans who have sought

help at the VA for mental health issues the right to purchase a gun. Too bad,

but even so, it's a start.

Penny is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after

coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide

and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is

Flashback.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

-------------------------------------

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/67556

Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars.

That's not an accident; it's policy.

-------------------------------------

[Guest guest]

This story has been forwarded to you from

http://www.alternet.org by nandtbearden@...

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

By Penny , AlterNet

Posted on November 11, 2007, Printed on November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

On November 6, the Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was

named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after

coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides

since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of the

campaign to get the military to take the mental health of America's vets

seriously.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed

home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively

insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident;

it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to

outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their

turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion

against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not

happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a

directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No

coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

Randy and Ellen Omvig's success in drawing long overdue attention to the issue

of veteran suicide in an environment that has dismissed or derailed other worthy

causes, can be explained, I believe, by their insistence on going public with

the most intimate details of their tragedy. They complicated and humanized a

debate that has been stalled for decades in a morass of misinformation,

disinformation and other evasion tactics.

They described how his tour in Iraq had changed him, how he suffered all of the

symptoms they now recognize as classic PTSD: the nightmares, the shaking, the

dark moods and consuming fears. They admitted that they had failed to convince

him to go for counseling, accepting his argument that the stigma would wreck his

career plans. And then came the morning when Ellen discovered him locked in his

pick up truck. He had a gun. As she tried frantically to reason with him, he put

the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. It's a horrific image: she, banging

on the window, terrified, pleading, while, on the other side of the glass, her

son tells her he will always love her, but that now she must leave. " Go! " he

says, and when she refuses, he raises his gun, angles his head so the bullet

will not hit her, and fires. She was powerless to stop anything, the hand, the

gun, the bullet, the blood. There must have been a lot of blood.

In spite of a suicide rate among solders that has now reached a 26-year record

high, and contradicting the evidence of their own increasingly ominous studies,

the Army continues to insist that they have yet to find a connection between

combat stress injuries (PTSD) and suicide. They trot out self-serving anecdotes

about " Dear " letters, incompetent parents, and what they call

" underdeveloped life coping skills " to blame active duty soldiers for their own

deaths. As for veteran suicides, there has never been any official attempt to

track or count them.

The virtual epidemic of veteran suicides that followed the war in Vietnam has

remained largely beneath the radar of public awareness because there is still

such irrational fear and shame attached to a self-inflicted death. Families,

military and otherwise, have far too often tried to cover up the circumstances

of such deaths, hoping to shield both the living and the dead from blame and

condemnation. What has often been called the " most secret death " has afforded

the military a convenient and virtually impenetrable cover for decades, allowing

them to keep combat-related suicides a theoretical, statistical, deniable issue.

Josh Omvig was not able to keep his war theoretical. He and hundreds of other

veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and thousands of Vietnam vets

carried home memories friends lost, bodies blown apart, and lives touched by

real horror. Their wars were up close and personal, and when their memories

became too much to bear, they chose to die.

Both as a war widow and as the mother of a boy who, like Josh, is in his 20's, I

heard the Omvigs' story, saw it and felt it, through the lens of my own

experience. My husband returned from Vietnam with memories he could never

bring himself to share. They haunted him and they haunted our relationship. Was

his death an execution? Euthanasia? Or was it my fault? What did I do to that

poor man? In the years since, unbidden memories of the swirling red lights, the

sirens, the pumps, the drains, and the blood have infiltrated who I am. I rarely

if ever talked about , but I learned to tiptoe around everyone I love,

hoping not to do it again, hoping not to kill someone else by mistake.

So I am enormously grateful to Ellen and Randy Omvig. I do not find their story

inappropriately intimate. I do not think it is in bad taste. Or exploitative. Or

sensationalist, though those are all excuses that are proffered in defense of

the bloodless numbers, the numbing statistics and the endless slogans. It is, in

fact, a vital antidote to the guilt, the silence, and the isolation that is

typically experienced by the families of suicides. It invites empathy, which is

the corner stone of common cause activism. It makes the personal political.

The Omvigs let their grief feed their activism. They insisted that behind the

statistics there are real human beings whose suffering is monumental, and

monumental as well for the people who love them. For me, and I imagine for a

host of others who have been moved to help push this legislation forward, the

impetus came, at least in part, from the courage it took for them to share the

raw emotional intimacies of a son's death. Thanks in no small measure to the

advocacy of his parents, the Department of Veterans Affairs will soon be

required to develop and implement a comprehensive suicide prevention program at

each of its medical facilities, including mandatory staff training in suicide

awareness and prevention, a designated suicide prevention counselor in each

facility, and a 24-hour suicide hotline. The bill that bears Josh's name is

perhaps a small victory, but it will make more of a difference to veterans than

any parade.

Note: The bill, as currently written, no longer requires the VA to screen all

its patients for suicide risk factors and make an effort to keep track of

at-risk veterans, an important element that was dropped because otherwise one

senator, Tom Coburn (OK-R), threatened to block its passage indefinitely. Coburn

feared that such a database could also be used to deny veterans who have sought

help at the VA for mental health issues the right to purchase a gun. Too bad,

but even so, it's a start.

Penny is the widow of a Vietnam Veteran who took his own life after

coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide

and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is

Flashback.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/67556/

-------------------------------------

Veterans' Suicides: a Hidden Cost of Bush's Wars

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/67556

Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars.

That's not an accident; it's policy.

-------------------------------------