You know, I have always been a Independent voice in the Blogging world. I don’t answer to either side. But there is one thing, even as a Conservative/Libertarian/Constitutionalist, or in just plain terms, a center right type of person. I cannot and will not gloss over this kind of a story.

This my friends, is Bush’s true legacy:

Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad’s dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We’d been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don’t always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would." – America’s Medicated Army – (via TIME Magazine)

All that, because Bush acted on some very admittedly now, false intelligence and did not properly prepare for it. Unlike many of the Iraq War’s planning, these guys have to live with the scars, both mental and physical.  

This extremely sad story continues:

"In a Total Daze"
And yet the battlefield seems an imperfect environment for widespread prescription of these medicines. LeJeune, who spent 15 months in Iraq before returning home in May 2004, says many more troops need help — pharmaceutical or otherwise — but don’t get it because of fears that it will hurt their chance for promotion. "They don’t want to destroy their career or make everybody go in a convoy to pick up your prescription," says LeJeune, now 34 and living in Utah. "In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication. In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly." LeJeune says the medications — combined with the war’s other stressors — created unfit soldiers. "There were more than a few convoys going out in a total daze."

About a third of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq say they can’t see a mental-health professional when they need to. When the number of troops in Iraq surged by 30,000 last year, the number of Army mental-health workers remained the same — about 200 — making counseling and care even tougher to get.

"Burnout and compassion fatigue" are rising among such personnel, and there have been "recent psychiatric evacuations" of Army mental-health workers from Iraq, the 2007 survey says. Soldiers are often stationed at outposts so isolated that follow-up visits with counselors are difficult. "In a perfect world," admits Nash, who has just retired from the Navy, "you would not want to rely on medications as your first-line treatment, but in deployed settings, that is often all you have."

And just as more troops are taking these drugs, there are new doubts about the drugs’ effectiveness. A pair of recent reports from Rand and the federal Institute of Medicine (iom) raise doubts about just how much the new medicines can do to alleviate PTSD. The Rand study, released in April, says the "overall effects for SSRIs, even in the largest clinical trials, are modest." Last October the iom concluded, "The evidence is inadequate to determine the efficacy of SSRIs in the treatment of PTSD."

Chris LeJeune could have told them that. When he returned home in May 2004, he remained on clonazepam and other drugs. He became one of 300,000 Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and suffer from PTSD or depression. "But PTSD isn’t fixed by taking pills — it’s just numbed," he claims now. "And I felt like I was drugged all the time." So a year ago, he simply stopped taking them. "I just started trying to fight my demons myself," he says, with help from VA counseling. He laughs when asked how he’s doing. "I’d like to think," he says, "that I’m really damn close back to normal."

That which I just quoted, is President George W. Bush’s true legacy. How that man sleeps at night, knowing full well, that he has caused this, is beyond me.

I just truly hope, that the Republican Party has learned it’s lesson. I thought that they would have after Nixon. I guess, that I was wrong.

God Bless our suffering troops and those still in actions overseas now.

Others: VetVoice