An article in yesterday's New York Times outlines how the widows of some soldiers killed in Iraq are having to jump through proverbial hoops to collect the survivor benefits to which they are entitled. [Read story.]
According to the article, "[s]ometimes it is simply the Pentagon's massive bureaucracy that poses the problem. In other cases, laws exclude widows whose husbands died too early in the war or were killed in training rather than in combat. The result is that scores of families — it is impossible to know how many — lose out on money and benefits that they expected to receive or believed they were owed, say widows, advocates and legislators."
Meantime, Halliburton gets richer from this war.
This is horrendous.
These widows and their families paid an enormous price for this country. I don't like the idea of my tax dollars funding a bureaucracy so inefficient that it causes them further suffering beyond their already enormous loss.
Whether we approve of this war or not (and I do not), we cannot neglect the needs of our troops or the families they might leave behind. It's not the troops who made the decision to wage a war of choice on Iraq.
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