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Police-Fire Post 456 News

October 1, 2012
Greg Corrales

“With or without a weapon, Marines are always armed.”

Pentagon spokesman George Little, responding to media reports suggesting Marine security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo were unarmed when Egyptian protesters stormed the compound September 11.

 

            There are nineteen American Legion posts in San Francisco, which comprise the 8th District of the American Legion, Department of California. Currently the Police-Fire post is in sixth place within the district in membership renewals at 69.26%. If you have not yet renewed your American Legion membership dues for the 2012-2013, please do so ASAP. If your partner is a veteran, get him or her to join up!

            Speaking of veterans, for the first time since the election of 1932, neither presidential nor vice presidential candidates in either major party are veterans. Many veterans believe this is not a turn for the better. Don Zillman, president of the University of Maine at Presque Isle, is a Vietnam vet who has researched the influence of military experience on legislating. He told the Washington Times: “I would like to have someone in the White House who has had some period of military service. The nature of military experience is that it forces you into international thinking” and beyond your “own district.”   

            John Nagl, an Iraq vet and professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, wrote in the Washington Post: “A commander-in-chief who has actually served on the battlefield has peerless personal experience and can make that decision [to go to war] with greater empathy.” When vets of Iraq and Afghanistan finally hold the highest offices in the land they will do so wisely. “Forged in war, they will work to build a better peace,” he wrote.

            This year Gold Star Mother’s Day will be on Sunday, September 30, 2012. The special recognition of the families, especially mothers, of Americans killed in war dates officially back to World War I. When a family had a member killed in France or elsewhere in 1917-1918, a gold star replaced the blue star on a service flag flown in the front window of a home. Extending that symbolism, on June 23, 1936 Senate Resolution 115 (amended in 1985) designated the last Sunday in September as Gold Star Mother’s Day. A further honor was bestowed two years after World War II, when a set of commemorative postage stamps was issued recognizing these exceptional mothers. Sadly, few Americans today recognize the Gold Star Flag as a symbol of sacrifice. Still fewer are even aware that a special day of recognition exists and that it has bestowed honor for more than 75 years.

            Every time I write about this issue I get the urge to go get another physical exam, since I am one of the 650,000 individuals affected. I was stationed on Camp Lejeune for 13 months 1967-1968, before leaving for Vietnam. Notifying Lejeune victims is very important, as it is amazing the number of Marines that still know nothing about the water problem at Lejeune.

            The bipartisan law President Obama signed August 6, 2012, making the VA the healthcare provider of last resort for an unknown number of victims of contaminated tap water years ago at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, provides care for many ailing Marine Corps veterans and family members. For many, it’s too late. The law applies to veterans or family members who lived at Lejeune for at least 30 days between January 1, 1957 and December 31, 1987, including those in utero while their mothers lived on base. To qualify, former residents must have one of 15 illnesses linked to the volatile organic compounds found in Lejeune water wells. These include cancer of the esophagus, lung, breast, bladder, and kidney, as well as leukemia, multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndromes, renal toxicity, hepatic steatosis, female infertility, miscarriage, scleroderma, neurobehavioral effects and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

            When I stopped drinking the poison water at Camp Lejeune, I went to Vietnam, at which time they began spraying me with Agent Orange. We kept asking, “Are you sure this stuff won’t hurt us?” For years, the military, citing research by Dow Chemical (they made the stuff) denied any link between exposure and veterans’ illnesses. In 1991 Congress passed the Agent Orange Act, which lists more than a dozen cancers and other illnesses for which the VA must compensate veterans. Unfortunately, the VA takes years to process claims and many vets die before they see any money. Of the nearly 500,000 Vietnam veterans who died between 2000 and 2007, 58 percent of them were younger than 60. “The mantra of the VA,” said Paul Sutton, former chairman of the Vietnam Veterans of America, “is delay, delay, delay, until they all die.”

            In the past, when my wife questioned me about wearing captain’s bars on my pajamas, I would reply that if she had been a lieutenant for eighteen years, as had I, she too, would wear captain’s bars on her pajamas. Now I can bolster that explanation with having consumed Camp Lejeune’s toxic water for over a year, and then graduating to Agent Orange exposure throughout my tour of duty in Vietnam. As Alfred E. Neuman so eloquently used to say, “What me Worry?”

            Just before a McKeesport, Pennsylvania, man was found guilty of all charges connected with burning the hands of his three children over a gas stove, his lawyer pointed out to the judge that, after all, “he could have killed them….”