Could be your kid

This is how Al Giordano got to where he is today.  By accident.

IF LIFE HAD gone as planned, Giordano would be a deli owner today with a successful catering business that counts West Point among its clients. He'd probably be living in Rockland County, not Orange. But this is where he and his wife, Beth, fell in love with Warwick because of its small-town quality. And he never would have graduated from college, much less law school...

...Giordano was born on the Camp Lejeune Marine base in North Carolina, into a long line of servicemen. In his younger days, he played life hard. He partied, had a 1.2 grade-point average and was, he says, living for the moment when he joined the Marines in 1981. He served until 1985.

Then in 1990, Giordano was in his deli when a telegram arrived: Report to duty in California. You're going to Iraq.

At 28, Giordano realized he was no longer a kid.

"The kids were excited, (saying) 'We are going to war,' " Giordano recalls. "I said 'Are you crazy? They shoot back.' "

Giordano never got to Iraq. He tore up his leg in training and spent two years in surgery and recovery. By the time he came home, his business was dead, as were his hopes of becoming a New York City cop.

Giordano settled down, got married. And, one day, he was filing for benefits, and the officer asked him if he wanted to fight the government on behalf of veterans.

Where Giordano is today is he's doing this a lot, taking phone calls like the one Dianna Cahn of the Times Herald-Record heard him take while she was working on this story about Giordano.

GIORDANO'S CELL PHONE RINGS for about the hundredth time one early July day. The caller is a young father with a severe spinal injury. His veterans' benefits haven't kicked in. He wants to take a job hauling garbage. He needs the money.

Giordano shakes his head. You could end up paralyzed, he says.

"I am not going to sugarcoat this, John. It's a s*** sandwich," he says. "You've got to take little bites, swallow, and move on."

The young father's benefits will kick in.  Giordano will see to it.  That's what he does.  Giordano and a partner, John Melia, run the Wounded Warriors Project, a charity they founded to help wounded vets adjust to a life back home, difficult enough under any circumstances, unimaginable for those who come back without arms and legs, which an awful lot of Iraq war veterans are doing because of the way so many of them get wounded, by getting blown up in their vehicles.

MORE THAN 14,000 U.S. servicemen and women have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many are hit by rocket-propelled grenades or roadside bombs and wake up in hospital beds with nothing but the gowns they are wearing – and often, missing body parts.

They spend months in hospital beds. And then they spend months living in a dormitory nearby, to train with prosthetics and with occupational and physical therapists, maybe learn to walk again or just to go to the bathroom on their own.

And someday, they finally get back out in the world they yearn for – and find they no longer fit the lives they had planned.

Giordano and Melia set up the Wounded Warrior Project, a mammoth national effort designed to tend to the cracks in the system. The Army offers phenomenal medical treatment when the men and women it sends to war return unwhole.

But it is not equipped to handle their awkward return to their lives as civilians.

"Sometimes," says Giordano, "it's almost like the disabled brother hidden away in the house."

Time for me to editorialize a bit:  We know part of the reason the Army isn't equipped to to handle the wounded's return to civilian life.  The Army's bosses don't want to admit there are any wounded.  They want them disappeared.   They want them as invisible as they've tried to make the dead.

The Army does what it can.  In order to do more, though, the doctors and generals in charge of the hospitals need money and attention that the Bush Leaguers are just not going to give.  Nevermind they don't want to admit the War's had any nasty consequences.  The Bush Leaguers' attitude towards anyone who's had a hard time in life, anyone who isn't rich or who can't be used for photo-ops that make the President look good, is "Go suff."

"If God wanted you to be happy, healthy, well-fed, whole, with all four limbs, you'd be happy, healthy, well-fed, and whole, like us."

So the Army muddles along and people like Giordano and Melia pick up as much slack as they can.

You land in a hospital bed, wake up with a missing limb. You probably don't even have a toothbrush. And life just doesn't make sense anymore.

At this moment, if you're lucky, there's Giordano or one of his small clan, with toothpaste, a razor and some kind of clue about finding a way out of this mess....

...As a former Marine, Giordano has military sensibilities – always looking for the practical solution, never saying never, maintaining a deep respect for his fellow servicemen. But he will cut through military bureaucracy in a flash.

He pushes through benefits claims for young and old veterans alike, fighting as hard for a guy in his 80s as he fights for one still lying in a hospital bed. He describes navigating the Department of Veterans Affairs as trying to turn the Queen Mary around and has been known to tell officers there, "I will make a deal with you. If you don't screw it up, I won't make a stink about it."

Giordano is relentless, taking his energy from the very men and women who lean on him.

"He doesn't understand why anything can't be done," says his wife, Beth Giordano. "He doesn't take no for an answer. It's just not an option."

On the matter of photo-ops.  Giordano and some of the vets he's helped have been to the White House.  Cahn's story doesn't say what kind of reception they got, whether Bush treated them the way he treated Cindy Sheehan when she asked him why he sent her son Casey to die in Iraq.  Giordano, who comes across in the story as a voluable outgoing guy, has no details to report.  I don't know if Cahn didn't ask Giordano how he felt about his meeting with the President or if Giordano wouldn't say.  If I was in his shoes I think I would make a serious effort to have no opinion on the War one way or another, no feelings about Bush.  He has to deal with the military, after all.  He has to try to convince bureaucrats to cut red tape for him, bureaucrats who work for people who owe their jobs to George Bush.  Then he has to turn around and face a lot of people who are probably really, really, really mad at the government.  Not just the wounded vets themselves.  Their wives and husbands, parents, kids...a lot of angry people.

To get the job done, I'd guess Giordano has to put politics aside, leave the rightness or the wrongness of the war for others to worry about.

Must be hard to do.  Everyday, there's the evidence in front of you something big's out of whack over there.

The day after meeting the president, Giordano is back at Walter Reed, talking with the amputees.

Some of them are so young, he says. He would love nothing more than to be able to shut down the whole operation, but the number of wounded keeps growing.

"You know what's a bad day?" he says. "When there's another 30 on the way."

____________________________

Here's the link to the Wounded Warrior Project's webpage.

At the time Cahn was reporting her story, Giordano was taking part in SoldierRide, a cross-country bike ride by wounded veterans and their friends and families to raise money and awareness.

You should read the whole of Cahn's story.  At the end there are capsule biographies of some of the wounded vets Giordano's been working to help.  I'm not sure if you'll have to register.  The Times Herald-Record likes every story online to be a surprise that way.

 Also see the Heretik for an excellent round-up of stories about Cindy Sheehan, her protest outside Bush's Crawford Ranch, and the building blogswarm in support of Sheehan.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

I know it's human nature and I know it's not unique to our country and its history, but soldiers get the shaft every time. For instance, returning Vietnam vets didn't get the help they needed to deal with the trauma of combat and return; once their job is done they're expected to shut up and go away.

But the disconnect, as usual with Bush, Inc, is greater than ever. It's drilled into our heads that everybody in uniform is a hero - that makes it easier to turn them into abstractions. Then off they go to do whatever it is they're doing - also never truly defined; rather we hear they're "defending our freedom," "freedom isn't free," choose your bumper sticker.

Next they're back in the States if they're lucky, dealing with the day to day reality - no slogans, no yellow ribbons, what good are they - of reaclimating. Some, as described above, have to find their way minus a limb or two, or otherwise maimed.

Think about the government that would call up young men and women, lie about why, ask them to do the impossible, then shun their families if they die, hide them if they are wounded, and ignore them if they speak out. Meanwhile, more troops and their families lose jobs (precarious these days anyway), fight for their rightful benefits, subsist on minimum wages and generally get fucked over.

Bush and his cronies are the worst of the worst.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

I've got the Big Brass Alliance blogswarm round-up here, for anyone who's interested.