Vietnam Memorial Soldiers by Frederick HartThe New York Times usually can’t find anything to like about a combat veteran, unless the person is running for office as a Democrat, or is a Blue Falcon brought to their attention by some anti-military peacenik group, like IAVA=IVAW. So what’s this guy’s major malfunction?

Joshua Bunn was a rifleman in one of the bloodiest valleys in Afghanistan, where his infantry unit killed hundreds of enemy fighters and lost more comrades than any other battalion in the Marine Corps in 2009.

“We were so far out in Taliban country we rarely got resupply,” Mr. Bunn, 27, said in an interview from his apartment in Jonesboro, Ark. “We just got rockets and small-arms fire every day.”

Former members of the military like Mr. Bunn are being refused benefits at the highest rate since the system was created at the end of World War II, the report said.

via Report Finds Sharp Increase in Veterans Denied V.A. Benefits – NYTimes.com.

Oh, the mean evil VA that refuses him his benefits. What benefits are these?

And what report? Oh, that report:

More than 125,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have what are known as “bad paper” discharges that preclude them from receiving care, said the report, released Wednesday by the veterans advocacy group Swords to Plowshares.

What do you think “Swords to Plowshares” holds for a position on national defense? Without looking them up, “supine” is our guess.

OK, so the Times’s Dave Phillipps is engaging in retype-the-press-release and call-the-guy-the-press-contact-gave-you journalism. But it fits The Narrative™ (of which more anon), so there might just be a Pulitzer in it!

You don’t get a “bad paper” discharge because people are “bullying” you (in the Marines?), or because you’re too sensitive a soul for an organization that processes a hundred thousand souls of all sorts with a remarkably low “reject” rate, or because some sergeant or captain was an ol’ green meanie. You get bad paper because you’re a shitbird: a criminal, or a quitter, or someone profoundly toxic to the culture of a group of well-adjusted people, to wit, your unit..

And what sort of bad paper did Mr Bunn have?

After deployment, Mr. Bunn, suicidal and haunted by nightmares, went absent without leave. The Marine Corps charged him with misconduct and gave him an other-than-honorable discharge.

As a consequence, the Department of Veterans Affairs does not technically consider Mr. Bunn a veteran and has denied him permanent heath care, disability pay and job training intended to ease his return to civilian life. According to a new report, he is one of a growing number of veterans ruled ineligible for benefits because of less-than-honorable discharges.

Ah, a deserter!

So that’s the kind of veteran the New York Times likes.

It figures.

Of course, the Times, which employs rounds-to-zero veterans in the newsroom (and not accidentally), doesn’t get the difference between honorably-discharged-after-creditable-service and bad-paper-after-bugging-out. It would interfere with The Narrative™, and in The Narrative™ veterans are:

  • Down-and-outers from flyover country;
  • stupid and ill-educated;
  • damaged goods®;
  • victims; and most of all,
  • desperately in need of big-P Programs.

Ideally, of course, Programs managed by the wise producers and consumers of the Times (groups that can be understood as effete Manhattanites, and effete Manhattanite wannabees) and their Acela Corridor friends and families — people who were “too smart” to “waste their lives” in uniform.

You know what? Intercourse this guy. Intercourse all his bad-paper bugout buddies.

If he’s suicidal, like the article says, he’s a failure at that, too.

There’s always a great sympathy from those who won’t serve towards those that served badly. But nobody deserts because “the pressure’s too great” (or everybody would desert, rationally). He deserts because his character is deficient, and that fact needs to be written down for all time, lest someone else take a chance on him and get let down the same way this non-Marine let down the USMC.

No sympathy at this address, and the deserters’ pals at “Swords to Plowshares” can reach down deep past the fishooks in their pockets and give their own money, if they want to reward deserters.

In 2006, the British Parliament lost its mind and pardoned its World War I deserters. That was wrong, but this is even wronger: Dave Phillipps and the Times want to assault and insult every one of the millions of honorable vets by raising up these leeches above us. To Hell with the lot of them, and sooner rather than later.

Deserter? We’re with Kipling: sympathize with the man, but send him to his fate.

I could not look on Death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.
The New York Times, ever AWOL from the camp of reason, and fugitive from the law of cause and effect.

This entry was posted in Veterans’ Issues on by Hognose.

About Hognose

Former Special Forces 11B2S, later 18B, weapons man. (Also served in intelligence and operations jobs in SF).

14 thoughts on “The New York Times Finds a Veteran they Like!

Jim Scrummy

I never expect anything other than this crapola from a “publisher” who was a Vietnam War protestor. He’s done a bang up job of running the NYT into the ground (not that I’m shedding any tears over this predicament), that he had to have a billionaire invest capital into this fish wrapper to keep it afloat.

Haxo Angmark

that would be…Mexican..billionaire. Which means the open-borders NYT is now owned by an amalgam of 2 hostile, white-American hating groups. The other I won’t mention

and, by way of oposition research, I always read 10 free NYT articles every month. Then stop when the paywall appears

Stacy0311

the “pressure’s too great”????

Do what Marines have always done: massive amounts of alcohol and women with low self esteem and lower morals.

Dirty Dan’s and The Driftwood are right out the gate depending on whether you’re West Coast or East Coast

staghounds

Women or men, Marines move with the times.

Kirk

Without knowing the details of the individual’s service and discharge, I refuse to pass judgment on these guys.

The system is fucked up beyond all recognition, and I’ve personally witnessed people who should have been taken out and been shot in the back of the head instead be sent off to OCS with no bad paper, and others who served loyally and well break under strain and be rewarded by their non-deploying commanders fucking them right in the ass. What’s most painful is having been unable to intercede in either situation, and having to have been a witness.

The first guy I’m talking about is going to put the Army on the map in a bad way, one of these days, and when that happens, I’m going to take a little road trip and find the assholes who passed the buck, and wave the news stories under their oblivious noses.

Second guy isn’t a problem. His demons led to an appointment with a handgun under a stairwell, not too long after his less-than-honorable discharge. He should have been in treatment, and still wearing the uniform he wore so well for many years, but his new commander and NCOs didn’t know or ever even see the man he’d been before two trips to the sandbox and the dead he lost there broke his ass. Never sought help, and they never knew what he was struggling with. What was most enraging was that when those non-deploying pieces of shit pogues were made aware, they neither cared, nor changed their course of action with him.

The system is broken, from enlistment to retirement, and so is the VA. The problem is, we don’t acknowledge the fact, and nobody is really trying to fix it. So long as the gravy trains keep running, nobody will, either.

Boat Guy

“As a consequence, the Department of Veterans Affairs does not technically consider Mr. Bunn a veteran and has denied him permanent heath care, disability pay and job training intended to ease his return to civilian life. ”

“Technically” my ass.

File that under “Things the VA’s done correctly”. It’s a damnably skinny file but it DOES exist after all.

Kirk

Dude might be a piece of shit, might not. I don’t know because I didn’t serve with him. As such, I’m not going to pass judgment on him, at all. I saw a couple of cases of “desertion” where it was more that the leadership deserted the servicemember than the other way around. And, yeah, it’s screwed up that this dipshit was a deserter, but it is equally screwed up if he really does have issues stemming from his service and didn’t get the help he needed. The odds are good that he’s a flaky POS, but… What if he isn’t? Should he be written off, because his service to the nation broke him?

This all is why I think we need to do a much better job of screening recruits. The number of guys I dealt with, over the years, who were discipline problems and who “had issues”? Most of them should never have been in uniform, in the first fucking place. And, the fact that they made it through the screening, enlistment, and training processes before manifestly demonstrating that fact? That’s not their fault; it is the fault of the military for enlisting them in the first damn place. You can, after awhile, predict which of your incoming new troops are likely to be “problem children”, and in the first few weeks or months. I refuse to believe that we couldn’t be doing this predictive screening before they ever got through the process to reach their first unit, or that this stuff can’t be figured out. The vast majority of my “problem children” all had common features, and similar behavioral pathologies. Why the hell the system couldn’t see that, and weed them out before wasting my time with them, I’ll never understand.

And, that having been said? I don’t think we should be saying “Hey, we took you in, a barely functional human being, and then we broke you to where you don’t work anymore, which led to us throwing you out of the service with bad paper… Fuck you, you don’t get shit for help dealing with this situation…”. I’m of a mind that there ought to be a “You broke it, you bought it…” mentality taken here, in that if the dipshit was functional as a human being to where he was considered enlistable, then… Maybe we ought to consider the idea that where the mistake was made wasn’t by him, but by the system itself. I’m not saying a deserter should get the full range of veterans services, but I do think that we ought not be putting these guys back on the street in anything less than the condition they were in when we so foolishly said “Yeah, you’re from a broken home, have no real family support system, grew up on the streets, barely managed to graduate high school, and actually have all the markers for being unlikely to complete your first enlistment… So, yeah… We’ll take you. Hell, statistically speaking, you have a five-in-a-hundred chance of turning your fucked-up life around during your enlistment…”.

I really don’t know the numbers here, but I’m with that guy I know who’s a VFW assistance counselor: After listening in to the guy who was ahead of me when I was dealing with my retirement, I kinda went “That guy is faking it, big time…”, just on the vibe I got. Mentioned that to the counselor, and he basically said “Yeah, you’re probably right… But, neither you nor I know that for a fact, do we? I’d rather have ten guys getting disability if three of them really need and deserve it, and seven don’t, than have none of them get it at all…”.

staghounds

The British only pardoned the 306 deserters that they killed first.

Hognose Post author

Oh, well, that’s alright then. So long as they applied Regulation 3-0-3 first!

Jjak

Doubly hilarioud-they’re advocating to give him benefits from a failed organisation. Should they manage to get him VA eligibility they’ll promptly forget him when he complains VA actually fails to deliver said benefits.

H

Having come from the “McNamara’s hundred thousand” days and served thru the RIF following Viet Nam, when a lot of people who had served reasonably well and honorably got the ax, and some who had served damn well got shit-canned too, I’m kinda sorta with Kirk on this, on a preliminarily general basis.

However, and I quote: “we rarely got resupply”

The bullschidt is strong in this one, mmm?

Cap’n Mike

The guys that saw combat I can see cutting some slack.

The rest of them and Bergdahl deserve a dishonorable discharge.

Hognose Post author

Yeah.. a dishonorable discharge from the muzzle of a cannon, like “the false Dmitry”. (A Russian historical figure who is reported to have met such an end).

archy

***Deserter? We’re with Kipling: sympathize with the man, but send him to his fate.***

Yeah.. a dishonorable discharge from the muzzle of a cannon, like “the false Dmitry”. (A Russian historical figure who is reported to have met such an end).

Not necessarily. There are those [rapists and traitors, primarily] who do not deserve a bullet.

“What are the bugles blowin’ for?” said Files-on-Parade.

“To turn you out, to turn you out,” the Color-Sergeant said.

“What makes you look so white, so white?” said Files-on-Parade.

“I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,” the Color-Sergeant said.

…For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,

…The regiment’s in ‘ollow square – they’re hangin’ him today.

…They’ve taken of his buttons off an’ cut his stripes away,

…An they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.

“What makes the rear rank breathe so ‘ard?” said Files-on-Parade.

“It’s bitter cold, it’s bitter cold,” the Color-Sergeant said.

“What makes that front-rank man fall down?” said Files-on-Parade.

“A touch o’ sun, a touch o’ sun,” the Color-Sergeant said.

…They are hangin’ Danny Deever, they are marchin’ of ‘im round,

…They ‘ave ‘alted Danny Deever by ‘is coffin on the ground;

…An’ e’ll swing in ‘arf a minute for a sneakin’ shootin’ hound –

…O they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the morning’!

“’Is cot was right-‘and cot to mine,” said Files-on-Parade.

“E’s sleepin’ out an’ far tonight,” the Color-Sergeant said.

“I’ve drunk ‘is beer a score o’ times,” said Files-on-Parade.

“’E’s drinkin’ bitter beer alone,” the Color-Sergeant said.

…They are hangin’ Danny Deever, you must mark ‘im to ‘is place,

…For ‘e shot a comrade sleepin’ – you must look ‘im in the face,

…Nine ‘undred of ‘is county an’ the Regiment’s disgrace,

…While they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.

“What’s that so black agin the sun?” said Files-on-Parade.

“It’s Danny fightin’ ‘ard for life,” the Color-Sergeant said.

“What’s that that whimpers over’ead?” said Files-on-Parade.

“It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,” the Color-Sergeant said.

…For they’re done with Danny Deever, you can ‘ear the quickstep play.

…The regiment’s in column, an’ they’re marchin’ us away;

…Ho! the young recruits are shakin’, an’ they’ll want their beer today,

…After hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.