Pentagon "spits" on troops

By Libby

If this doesn't just say it all about how much this administration "honors" the sacrifices of our fighting men and women.

When they came home from Iraq, 2,600 members of the Minnesota National Guard had been deployed longer than any other ground combat unit. The tour lasted 22 months and had been extended as part of President Bush's surge.

1st Lt. Jon Anderson said he never expected to come home to this: A government refusing to pay education benefits he says he should have earned under the GI bill.

"It's pretty much a slap in the face," Anderson said. "I think it was a scheme to save money, personally. I think it was a leadership failure by the senior Washington leadership... once again failing the soldiers."

Anderson's orders, and the orders of 1,161 other Minnesota guard members, were written for 729 days.

Had they been written for 730 days, just one day more, the soldiers would receive those benefits to pay for school.

...Both Hobot and Anderson believe the Pentagon deliberately wrote orders for 729 days instead of 730.

No shit. This is classic ploy, long employed by corporate retailers like WalMart and grocery chains. They hire "part-time" workers and give them just under the working hours that would cause full-time benefit requirements to kick in. They then schedule the hours to make it nearly impossible for the employee to seek additional work outside of the company. The corporation gets the productivity benefits while the worker gets the shaft.

This is on top of another nefarious avoidance of responsibility mandate currently in vogue among the military bureaucrats to deny war veterans medical benefits based on "pre-existing conditions. They're kicking them out of the military rather than pay for mental health treatments. As Fester pointed out this morning,

The Army screened these individuals and believed that they would be adequate soldiers after they passed boot camp and their individual advanced training. The Army was able to use these soldiers for the mission in Iraq, and now they're trying to dump the costs of treatment onto someone else. If there was a significant pre-exisisting mental condition, the individual should either never have been accepted into the Army, OR seperated before being combat deployed.

Exactly right. Every one of those paper pushers responsible for this dereliction of duty to our fighting forces should be immediately deployed to Baghdad for a couple of months and then let's see if they feel like having fun with numbers after that.