Letter to the Editor

I am one of the 43% of veterans who applied for and used the GI Bill to work my way through college. You’ve read that right: 57% of the veterans who applied for the Montgomery GI Bill did not receive their benefits. According to the article “Military Money for College: A Reality Check” based on the research by Sam Diener and Jamie Munro, this means that 1.35 million veterans lost out on their education benefits. As an educator, this breaks my heart because much of the training and education that veterans receive while in the military does not translate to the civilian world. In fact, an article on http://www.healthcarejobsite.com/ states that many combat medics think that their medical training and experiences in the military will help them land a good job in the civilian medical field, but even though the veterans have saved lives and treated wounds under the most stressful conditions their opportunities are limited and are at the lower levels of the medical field.

Imagine my dismay when just this week the Coast Guard, Army, and Marine Corps suspended new enrollments for the popular tuition assistance programs to meet the cost-cutting demands of the sequestration process. Beyond this suspension, each of the nearly 250,000 military personnel enrolled in college courses will be considered new applicants once they complete their current courses, and they will be ineligible for assistance. It is beyond my scope of comprehension how we can take more away from military personnel while asking them to continue to execute impossible tasks, especially while Congress is frivolously spending money. A CNN report just last October states that Congress is forcing upon the military new tanks worth $181 million—there are currently more than 2,000 inactive M-1 Abrams tanks sitting at an Army depot in the California desert! The Army's chief of staff, Rep. Silvestre Reyes—who, since 2001, has received $64,000 from General Dynamics (the company that will likely receive the contract to build the tanks)—played the national security card, saying "we don't want to play Russian Roulette with the national security of this country." But I say that our destruction will come from the lack of education of our nation, at every level. This includes the men and women that we have trained to bring warfare around the world. It is true that we are welcoming these veterans back into our society, but we are doing so without aiding many of them to regain their humanness or educating them beyond those skills that cannot exist outside of the military without calling those skills criminal.

Mark Joseph Runge
Specialist, 5^th Combat Engineer Group during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm
Veterans for Peace, Saint Petersburg Chapter 119