So, this journal is basically going to be a bunch of my random thoughts just finally exploding out. Sunday, November 16th is my birthday and I have a friend who joined the Navy last December and he's been gone this entire time. Well, just this morning at 2 a.m. he randomly called me and he was at my door step. Needless to say I was really excited that he had taken time out of his one month leave which is usually used to visit family and such to visit me. Anyways, we started talking and I was asking him about the Navy and basically all he was telling me is that once you sign on the dotted line, you in effect sign your life away. Well, I "knew" that, but what I didn't know is all that this entails. Okay, yes, I had known that once you enlist in pretty much any branch of the military you belong to the government and you get money for education and for this and that and they can do pretty much what ever they want to with you, but what I didn't know is that based on what you sign up for influences how much you get paid. My friend, like I said, belongs to the Navy and he signed up for submarine duty. Basically he's out in the middle of the ocean for any certain length of time and only goes a shore a few days at a time. Because of this, he gets paid not only like his "monthly stipend", but also hazard pay and health pay and like all this other kind of death related money. What good is that going to do you if you die? So, besides for everything else that he told me about, this semester at school (I go to an Illinois state school) I had to take a class called Texts and Contexts: The Interdisciplinary study of Cultures of War. Believe me, it's not all it's cracked up to be, but it's not a bad class. Very eye opening. Basically this entire semester we've been studying different periods of time and how the soldiers of that time are treated and all that I can say is that they're pretty much treated like crap. We had to read four novels and the first novel was A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. This book follows the experiences of Joseph Plumb Martin, obviously a revolutionary Continental Army soldier. He enlisted as a very young man of 16 and it was because his friends just happened to all be joining and he didn't want to miss out on the "excitement" and be thought of as a coward. The entire time he actually serves in the military, he's starving and exhausted and dirty. He never has enough to eat and doesn't even have a full uniform, he at one point in time has to make moccassins for the winter because his boots and fallen a part at the seams. I know that today our soldiers don't suffer as much as physically when it comes to dealing with the natural elements and phyiscal fatigue, but they can suffer just as much if not more emotionally. The third novel we read was A Rumor of War. In this book we follow a marine, more specifically Liutenant Philip J. Caputo. This time we're based in Vietnam and this is were we read and deal more with the mental side affects of war. The men in Caputo's company are firing at shadows, rustling in the bushes, and non-existent VC, Viet Cong. And well this is not the only thing we read about, we also get to read about death. Lots and lots of death. Within Caputo's mind there is a difference bewteen a "hero's" death and just death. While at a base camp he gets assigned the job of keeping track of the death ratio of Americans versus Viet Cong. Caputo often discusses this job and how it's wearing on his mental state. He has to count and report the deaths of his friends! How horrible is this? and what makes it worse is towards the end of the war, the survivors like Caputo discuss how they know they won't be coming home to a ticker tape parade. Both of these books deal with the physical and mental strains that the men who FIGHT FOR OUR country have to deal with, and what saddens me the most is when they come home, they often aren't guaranteed the respect they deserve. Now I realize you're all probably sitting there thinking, what a weirdo and a crack pot, but these are just things that have started to bug me as time goes on. While in my Cultures of War class we had to do a group research project and present it to the rest of the class. From all of the groups I've seen so far, I can basically say that Veteran's of war are often forgotten or by passed when it comes to funding. Hospital's set up for the war damaged have slowly been cut down because of under funding. The Montrose Hospital has seen some of the most shrinkage out of any of the veteran's hospitals. Montrose went from having 1,964 beds to 300. Even more than this, out of the 184 acres that are part of the "college" like campus the hospital sits on, 172 are going to be leased to the highest bidding developer. Granted the residential area is meant to be leased to aging vets, whats to say without constant attention from the government this won't start to change? Most vets are just concerned that with this leasing their hospital will turn into nothing more than a walk in clinic. Underfunding isn't the only issue that vets are starting to face and while there are plenty of communities that do as much as they can for their veterans, I just don't feel the government is doing enough.