I spent 122 months serving this country in the United States Navy, and for the most part I enjoyed my time. I joined when I was 20, jobs were a little tight and I was pretty patriotic and thought every able bodied young man should spend some time in the defense of this country. It only took a year or so for my patriotism to fade. After I had been in for a few more years, I felt like I was just a mercenary looking for paycheck. I no longer cared about the politics of what we where doing just as long just as long as that eagle shit me a paycheck every two weeks. If it had been up to me I would stayed in till I had twenty years in then retired to a nice Caribbean island or maybe a small fishing village in Mexico.

In 1995, during my second deployment to the Persian Gulf, I found out how much The Department of the Navy and the U.S. Government really cares for its veterans when I took a little tumble off a shipboard radar antenna and broke my back, foot and wrist. The ship had neither a doctor nor any x-ray equipment. It took me four days to convince them I was hurt and needed to get off the ship.

When the ship pulled into Karachi, Pakistan, I was dumped on the pier with a pair of crutches and my sea bag. A Pakistani working with the US Embassy and a couple of Pakistani sailors drove me to the airport and put me on Lufthansa flight to Bahrain. After arriving in Bahrain I had to call the American consulate to get someone to pick me up. I was finally driven to a small American base and seen by a doctor and had x-rays taken. They quickly determined that they would be unable to treat because of the lack of facilities. I was placed in ambulance and then driven to a local civilian hospital and treated by a civilian doctor. It's a pretty scary feeling being alone in foreign hospital when you don't speak or understand the language of the doctors and nurses that are treating you.

After spending a week there, the navy came back for me and put me on a plane to Germany. I spent a week in the hospital there but was never seen by a doctor--it was just a waypoint on the way back to the US. A month after my accident, I finally made to America. I was taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where I was placed in an 8 x 12 foot room across the road and up a small hill from the hospital in a building referred to as the "medical hold barracks." I had no job or responsibilities; all I did for months was lie in bed and stare at the walls and worry and think too much.

The treatment I received there was assembly line medicine: They would get six enlisted patients at time in the orthopedics room, a doctor would come in and spend a minute or two with each one then leave. I never saw the same doctor twice in a row; it was always someone different. I really felt like a non-functioning piece of equipment that was tossed aside to be repaired when it was convenient.

While there, I was responsible for getting my own meals; the mess hall was in the basement of the hospital. I had on a back brace and my right leg and arm were in a cast, and had to make my way down the hill across the street and into the hospital three times a day to get food. I went from 155lbs to 115lbs by the time I left there.

A month after completing the second surgery on my foot and a little over year since arriving at the hospital, I was discharged. They gave me a severance check of $30,000 and no pension. I was only 20 percent disabled, and was informed that if I needed further treatment, I should seek out the local VA hospital. I found myself unemployed and still on crutches. One trip to a VA hospital convinced me to cut my own cast off when time came.

I've had five low paying menial jobs since I was discharged. I don't sleep much and have developed the autoimmune diseases psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis and have a little trouble getting around now. My doctor tells me these are common in people with post traumatic stress.

I watch CNN's nightly body count in Iraq and think how lucky those kids are. The dead have it easy. They can sleep. The wounded are going return to America and spend the rest of their lives dealing with the physical and emotional damage. The VA hospitals are a sick joke, understaffed overworked employees who are too burned out to care any more.

What is it all about? Money plain and simple, not only oil but fat defense and rebuilding contracts. A few people on Wall Street are going to get very wealthy from the blood and sacrifice of thousands of young Americans. I get a kick out of seeing those "I support our troops" bumper stickers on the back of a big gas guzzling SUV. I wonder how many of them have ever called or wrote to their congressman and asked to bring those kids home or get more money for the VA hospitals.