By Kayla Walker

The son of a friend of mine was hit by some shrapnel from an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in Iraq on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, the Iraqi boy standing no more than 15 feet from him was killed. Thankfully, my friend’s son walked away with nothing more than what I imagine is heavy bruising. Who knows what kind of care he might have received had he been injured.

Recently, newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times have run stories about the health care that soldiers returning from Iraq are receiving.

On Feb. 18, The Post broke a story about poor conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center. Since the story of poor outpatient services and moldy hospital buildings broke, the government has, admittedly, moved quickly to fix the problems.

Following the reports, there has been a flurry of Congressional hearings; the removal of several officers at the medical center, including Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley who announced his retirement Tuesday and the appointment of former Sen. Bob Dole and former cabinet secretary Donna Shalala to spearhead a review board.

However, as an article on March 12 in The Times shows, we’re still not providing our soldiers with the best health care available. The article highlighted many servicemen who returned from Iraq with devastating injuries only to be given up on.

Staff Sgt. Jarod Behee had been hit in the head by a bullet from a sniper. When the government pressured Marissa Behee, Sgt. Behee’s wife to allow him to be retired, which would leave his care to the Veteran’s Affairs system, she refused.

The V.A. hospital Sgt. Behee had been admitted into told his wife that the only logical option was to have Sgt. Behee sent to a nursing home. They also said that he would never walk again. Instead, Behee took her husband to the private community rehabilitation center Casa Colina, which Sgt. Behee’s military insurance policy covered. Three months later, Sgt. Behee was able to walk without assistance.

Why is the government so quick to give up on these people? Shouldn’t we be willing to exhaust all efforts to properly rehabilitate our soldiers before surrendering them to a life of dependency? Why are we allowing this to happen?

According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, the majority of Americans believe that all citizens should have health care; half of those polled were willing to spend as much as $500 a year in taxes to cover the cost. If we are so willing to pay for all Americans to have health care, why do we allow our veterans to have anything less than the best in care?

To me, the cost of providing our soldiers with the best care and medical technology is as invaluable as the sacrifice that our soldiers make when they join the military. Giving them the best we have to offer is a small price to pay for their sacrifice to defend our country.

One cannot walk down a street in New York City without seeing one homeless person claiming to be an injured Vietnam veteran. Considering that the current war in Iraq is often compared to the Vietnam War, I wonder where that leaves the men and women that are currently serving in Iraq once they return.

The Vietnam War brought us an incredible number of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder cases and the first Gulf War that America participated in gave birth to the Gulf War syndrome, an illness with symptoms that include immune system deficiencies and birth defects.

If this is what awaits our soldiers when they return, the least we could do is provide them with the best hospitals and most thorough health care.

Our parents protested their generations’ war and we sit idly by while our high school classmates, friends, cousins and siblings fight a war that few Americans still believe in. The least our generation could do is demand that these people receive the best that our nation has to offer them.

The time and energy required to stand up for our soldiers is insignificant compared to the time, energy and blood that they spare to fight in this administration’s war. We can’t allow our soldiers to return home without providing them with basic medical and psychological care.

When my friend asked her son if he had fired his gun and he affirmed that he had, she warily asked if he had killed someone. With a sigh he answered her, “I honestly don’t know mom, there was an awful lot of blood.”

Kayla Walker is a junior print journalism student. You can e-mail her at [email protected].