US Awards to its Soldiers: Priceless Lives, Injuries...Dead Bodies to Trash or Cut
In theory, the price of human life is prices less.
However, in the American aspects of democracy and capitalism all things are to be priced: even the lives of US soldiers. And here are some of the hidden proves.
The salary of a US soldier with a low rank reaches $15,480 a year - only a thousand dollars more than the average pay for an usher in a movie theatre in the US.
Moreover, the so-called nation of human rights recompenses its soldiers on the fire line in Iraq and Afghanistan with minimal pay.
According to soldiers' families, the soldiers risk their lives and many more returning home amputees and permanently impaired for a salary that neither feed their children nor provide a respectful future for them.
"Is it possible to sustain an army when mercenaries for private contractors take less risk and earn 10 times as much as soldiers?" wonders Professor Huck Gutman of Vermont University.
Moreover, an injured US soldier or contractor must be financially covered.
But this is not the case of Daniel Brink who was working for US top governmental security contractor DynCorp.
Brink was injured in a bomb explosion on the 22nd of December 2005 just outside Baghdad.
Months after the injury, the soldier's medical bills started pulling up and various medical providers refused to give him treatment.
"The Sheriff repossessed my wheelchair because Insurance stopped payment on the check that they issued to the suppliers and my life really started spiraling out of control," Brink explained.
And if the US soldier dies, the sufferings of his behind survivors start and do not end.
Upon official notification of the soldier's death, primary beneficiaries are entitled to a $100,000 death gratuity for soldiers killed in hostile areas or battlefields and are lessened to $12,240 for those dead away from combat.
If a US military member is retirement eligible at the time of death, his/her spouse receives a Survivor Benefit Plan Annuity equal to 55% of retired pay until age 62, after which the annuity is reduced to 35% of retired pay.
In this context, wrath spreads among spouses as the housing allowance the government provides them longs for only 6 months while the children receive an amount of $803 per month for up to 45 months.
Thus, the lives of dead soldier's children move into vagueness after the governmental durations.
However, the following is the biggest scandal of all.
A US military member may be buried in a respectful military cemetery free of charge - for both plot and headstone.
But between what should be and what US government is performing a bitter reality that stuns all who might know.
The military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware is the largest of its kind in the US and is where the country's war dead are taken before being handed over to their families.
More than 6,300 US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been flown there.
The must to be trust placed in the base by thousands of grieving relatives was shattered by revelations that body parts had gone missing and remains had been cremated and then dumped in a landfill.
In February 2010, an embalmer at the mortuary was asked to cut the arm off the body of a Marine who had died in Afghanistan a few days previously.
His supervisor wanted the body to fit into a military uniform so the Marine could be viewed at his funeral. The embalmer refused to perform the task but another worker did.
The Marine's family was not informed of what happened. The process of cremating and incinerating soldiers' remains and then dumping them in a landfill site in Virginia was 'common practice' between 2003 and 2008.
Body parts that could not be identified or were recovered from the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq were disposed of in this way. Relatives were kept in the dark and the landfill site was not made aware of what it was handling.
Although she has no proof, Elizabeth Herlem believes there is a "very high probability her husband's remains were mishandled."
"We're given the choice when our husbands are killed to receive their body immediately or we can wait two weeks to get as much of them back as we can," she explained.
Family members were not told what happened to their relatives - and the company running the landfill site was not even informed what was being thrown away.
Gari-Lynn Smith, portions of whose husband's remains were disposed of in the landfill after his 2006 death in Iraq, told the Washington Post she was ‘appalled and disgusted' by the way the Air Force had acted.
She said: ‘My only peace of mind in losing my husband was that he was taken to Dover and that he was handled with dignity, love, respect and honor.
"That was completely shattered for me when I was told that he was thrown in the trash."
Trash and Cut: that's the feature of American respect for their dead soldiers, so don't expect that they would respect others' nation's rights starting from Afghanistan to reach Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
