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Monday, December 14. 2009

Proud Uncle of a Navy Corpsman

My niece Nancy! What a sweetheart! Well, she is getting married. What the fuck is she thinking? No matter, the guy in question is allegedly a good man. You know, someone said that about me once and … well … results may vary I guess.

Anywho … that’s a cute woman’s term: “anywho.” Women are cool! Not just the ones I ogle from time-to-time on these blasted Internets, but women in general. I have three sisters, all of whom are unique and very special to me. Yes, even Mary Lou — especially Mary Lou, who makes the best peanut butter cookies! And chocolate chip! Then there’s Cheryl and Elaine!

Elaine is pretty special. She and I are but 20 months apart in age, which means we’re both right around … err … 35. My sister Elaine defines the phrase, “matching calamity with serenity.” Having her Catholic faith is a big part of that but really, she’s one of the toughest — TOUGHEST — people I know. Maybe that comes from faith as well, but as the saying goes, “Faith without works is dead.” You have to get up off your ass and put your faith into action. That’s Elaine. The same could be said for Cheryl. Adversity is but a speed bump on the road of life.

For me, adversity is often Mount Everest and I don’t have any Sherpas! Well, I usually do, but just don’t see them and often enough Mount Everest turns out to be … err … just a speed bump on the road of life. sigh. That’s what I learn from my sisters.

Same with all of my nieces, which, now with the addition of Little Bean, makes it a total of six nieces! Were I a diligent Uncle I’d go broke at Christmas. Luckily for me, I’m a slacker. Sorry nieces, your Uncle Tim is a slacker — but you probably knew that already.

Women are the special part of the human race. They bear the children, raise them and provide nearly 90% of what we children — yeah, that includes we adult men — need to get by on a daily basis. Well, except for guys like me who choose not to be married and therefore live in squalor, instead of a nice clean home.

Biologically, women are pound-for-pound stronger than men, better equipped to handle stress and fight off disease and, if they didn’t waste their lives being married to men, would naturally live longer. Recent studies have shown that married men tend to live longer than single men, but single women tend to live longer than married women and having children doesn’t seem to have an effect on that statistic. Apparently, getting caught up in all our male drama kills them.
 See, I’m doing women a favor by staying single.

But this is about my niece Nancy, an Iraq War veteran who served in country for six months in 2003 as a corpsman with the United States Marine Corps. You have no idea how proud I am of Nancy, just for that. There’s a lot about Nancy we can all be proud of: she’s a good mother, a wonderful daughter, an okay sister according to her brother (eh, it’s a sibling thing) and a wonderful niece. But, I remember she chose to serve as a corpsman with the Marines and that’s pretty damn special to me.

So, it’s rather disheartening to read about how shitty women veterans have it when they get back from their time in the wars. People tend to treat them like ornaments, as if getting shot at, having IED’s explode in your face and sexual harassment from your fellow servicemen is nothing.

Women are not allowed to serve in “combat” billets, like infantry and artillery, but in the wars we’ve been fighting as of late, every inch of that foreign country is a combat zone, whether you be Marine Recon or a Navy cook serving in a land-side duty station.

The bullets and shrapnel do not distinguish between the genders. They kill both with equal efficiency.

When most people meet women veterans they assume the vets are either wives or girlfriends, or they served in some cutesy desk job far from any action. Why buy a woman vet a drink? What did she do to fight the war? Well, maybe she was a gunner on convoys; maybe she got caught up in a firefight and did everything her male counterparts did to get out of it alive and free; meaning she fired her weapon and killed the enemy.

Maybe the woman vet doesn’t get invited to those informal reunions because the wives and girlfriends would get intensely jealous about a woman who has been far more intimate with their man, minus the sex. There’s a bond that develops and for many, it’s stronger, at least for a few years, than any marriage certificate.

But, it isn’t just our fellow countrymen (and women) who don’t treat our women veterans with the respect they earned and deserve. The Veterans Administration has institutionalized their lack of respect. The V.A. said it’s starting to change the way it handles women vets and their combat experience. Until now it was ignored. Seriously. Now, as a start, there is a woman’s liaison to advocate for a woman vet’s benefits and interests at every V.A. facility.

There’s a women’s vet group now, American Women Veterans, that advocates for issues related to women veterans. It’s about time. On the other hand it’s too bad women have to form an advocacy group to get what they’ve already earned.

My niece Nancy deserves a hell of a lot better.
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Today, while at the Veterans Administration Medical Center to have my injured wrist looked at (got a new, bright blue, fiberglass cast) I met a young woman, younger than Nancy, who was a paraplegic due to an IED blast. Very pretty, dressed quite fashionably, but confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of her life,
or until a way is figured out how to fix her.

She wasn’t doing some cutesy desk job far from the action when she served.

Posted by Tim Forkes in Social Responsibility at 12:01 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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