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It now appears that the Bush administration and the right wing cabal that has taken over the Congress cares neither for the active duty military nor for veterans of previous wars. Within the past view days I have spoken with several health care providers for military and veterans. Two converging streams are truly distressing. First is the abuse of the military with the frenetic deployment tempo. Combat stress, created in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot really be relieved when the soldier returns home because he or she knows there will be redeployment very soon. Continuing stress levels are now having a widespread impact upon families as marital problems mount

This present crisis also sets the stage for a whole host of future problems. These military personnel and their families will face a lifetime of problems as a result of their service, but the Government will not assume any responsibility. The civilian leaders of our government have discovered they can get by with using our military personnel as windup toys, sending them on frequent deployments with no real down time because the public really doesn't care enough to complain.

The second issue is the continued underfunding of the VA. There is now pressure in some areas to reduce the number of times veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be seen. This is a decision made not according to medical considerations, but it is budget driven. Again, our political leaders have read the public rightly. American don't care and so they just go ahead and do it. There are hopeful signs that a revolt is brewing. I encourage veterans and all others who care to get involved in whatever way possible to unmask the charlatans who now hold high office and to change these destructive policies

This is only one of many issues which indicates a serious decline in our standards of lilfe in American. For a list of others see.

Yesterday a young sailor who lives not far from us was deployed for the second time in a few months to the Persian Gulf. This is actually his fourth deployment. He and his wife are great people. Kind of quiet and apparently rather conservative, people who would never say an unkind word about anyone. When I said I thought Bush was abusing the military, he began to say what he really thought. He is angry about going back after just a few months at home. He sees this as an endless cycle and he said that "everyone" in the fleet knows this is wrong. It makes no sense to his fellow sailors. They see no reason for the war in Iraq and they resent what it is doing to them and their families. This corresponds with what I am hearing from some sources in the active duty army and with what I have heard from veterans of the Iraq war who are now in the VA system. The military command is even beginning to speak out publicly about what the pace of deployment is doing to military.

Vanished into thin air is the old fashioned notion of taking care of the troops who perform the mission. The Pentagon could care less about the ordinary people who make up the military. As one friend of mine, a retired navy captain, said recently. They use them like "windup toy soldiers" and keep sending them back.

This flagrant abuse of the military is but one instance of the total lack of concern for ordinary people on the part of the administration and the Congress. It is now abundantly clear that the government is being run only for the corporate interests which now have their way completely. This is only one instance, but it is one that enrages me. If they had tried to do to us during the Vietnam war what they are doing to these people, there would have been open revolt.

Support our troops. End this insane deployment pace. Bring them home. And get Bush and his ilk out of office.

We recently had "justice Sunday" sponsored by some religious right organizers and featuring Senate majority leader Bill Frist, which is trying to rev people up for the "judicial wars," an attempt by right wing Republicamns to exert political control over the judiciary.

This event provided me with a kind of "aha moment" of insight into what is really going on. I remembered a conversation I had in Moscow in late April 1989 with a former political officer in the Soviet army.

I was part of a delegation, many of us Vietnam veterans, who had gone over to Russia to help the Russian veterans of the war in Afghanistan to readjust. This ex political officer, who spoke perfect English, tried to convince me that I, as an army chaplain in Vietnam, had done the same thing in the American army that he had done in the Soviet army, i.e., to encourage the troops to support and fight for the idology of our respective regimes. I insisted that the role of a chaplain is quite the opposite. A chaplain is to represent and embody the religious tradition to the soliders--to the their pastor in the field. When a soldier has religious and moral objections to fighting in the war, the chaplain is required to assist him, and if appropriate, to help him obtain a conscientious objector discharge. I had in fact done this on a number of occasions.

After a few vodkas, he broke down and wept, telling me that he had endorsed atrocities done by Soviet soldiers against the Mujahadeen and had done so in the name of Communist ideology. He now knew that this ideology was entirely false and had considerable guilt about it. I talked to him of grace, repentance, forgiveness and redemption.

It occurs to me that what we are now experiencing in this country is the rise of a large number of "political officers" like Bill Frist and the religious leaders who have wholeheartedly endorsed a bellicose politicy of American religious/moral pre-eminence and "exceptionalism" and then married it to a distortion of traditional biblical Christianity.

They are seriously attempting to create a one party state (remember it was the Community party which totally controlled the Soviet government and enforced its ideology on the entire populace).

We see the emergence of something that could morph into a similar situation here. The religious right is not content with simply exerting a moral and religious influence on society, which is perfectly within its legitimate prerogative, but it wants to control the entire government as well.

This is very dangerous and political and religious leaders have warned us against it. We need to take these warnings seriously and be ever vigilant.