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June 2004

Volume , Number 0
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Bush, Veterans, & the Confederacy

By Kyle Tucker
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I t is disturbing that President Bush not only has refused to attend the funeral of any service- person killed in Iraq, but also refuses to send condolences to fallen servicepeople’s relatives. Bush’s denial of acknowledging U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq—the same as his government’s media ban on showing body bags and coffins—is even worse when compared to his sending wreaths to Confederate graves on Memorial Day. However, looking at his record, this should not be surprising: 

  • While soldiers are fighting in Iraq, Bush cut soldiers’ danger pay and family separation allowances, cancelled a Congress-proposed doubling of servicepeople’s life insurance benefits, and slashed GI Bill benefits. Most servicepeople now are too low-paid to receive Bush’s per-child tax credit and many live on food stamps. 
  • Bush cut $600 million from the Veterans Administration budget, although the VA is already under-funded by around $2 billion a year and now has over 200,000 new veterans to service—many of whom are already sick with Gulf War Syndrome, which has left over 270,000 Gulf War vets disabled and over 10,000 dead. There are also plans to cut $1.5 billion per year from the VA’s budget for each of the next ten years. 
  • Wounded National Guard and Army Reserves have returned home only to be placed in “medical hold” while the Army decides what medical treatment and benefits—if any—they should receive. Some soldiers have stated the Army has tried to claim their Iraq injuries/illnesses were “pre-existing conditions.” Soldiers are having to wait four to six months to receive medical care while their treatable ailments turn to permanent disability. At Fort Knox, more than 400 wounded soldiers lasted the Kentucky summer in a non-air conditioned, animal-infested barracks. At Fort Stewart (Georgia), over 600 wounded soldiers languish with no indoor plumbing and have to pay for food and lodging. On a re-election stop last fall, President Bush visited Fort Stewart, but refused to see the wounded soldiers. 
  • All evidence indicates the war was started on fictitious grounds. It has left more than 700 soldiers killed, over 9,000 wounded, and over 1,000 evacuated for psychiatric evaluation. 

In contrast: 

  • As governor of Texas, Bush wrote official state letters honoring white-separatist organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whom Bush praised for their “high standards” and “dedication to others,” and to the unreconstructed Sons of Confederate Veterans, to whom Bush has had a membership. 
  • Bush also wrote a fundraising letter for the revisionist Museum of the Confederacy in support of their annual ball. The ball, held in a slave hall turned gun foundry which produced Confederate munitions that killed union soldiers, entertains hundreds of all-white guests in antebellum costumes surrounded by Confederate flags. The museum sells books that support the Confederate Constitution. 
  • Bush, who previously attacked the NAACP’s boycott of South Carolina over the Confederate flag, campaigned at South Carolina’s white-supremacist Bob Jones University and, in the words of southern journalist Jackson Thoreau, “genuflected before the Confederate flag.” 
  • Close ties between Bush’s Southeast Regional 2000 campaign chairperson, Warren Tompkins, and neo-Confederate vanguard, Richard Hines, resulted in Hines’s (then-unregistered) political action committee mailing over 250,000 letters condemning John McCain for seeing the Confederate flag as a racist symbol and lauding Bush for appreciating it. Hines, long connected to the nation’s leading white-supremacist apologia magazine Southern Partisan (which celebrates the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) claimed on one of his websites to have “an active voice in the current Bush administration,” which Bush has never denied. 

It will be interesting to see what President Bush does this year. Will he again pay tribute to fallen Confederate soldiers? Will he finally acknowledge U.S. casualties from the Iraq War? Being an election year, probably neither—nor will he memorialize fallen servicepeople from the Vietnam War, the war President Bush was so unwilling to fight that he deliberately lost his flight status.  

Kyle Tucker is a freelance writer living in the Joplin, Missouri area. 
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