A Vermont National Guard Chinook helicopter flies a mission in Afghanistan in 2010 (US Army photo)
With the official “combat role” of US armed forces in Iraq over, and the Obama administration finally acquiescing to “political optics” and actively discussing the near-complete withdrawal of most US troops from the country, most Americans would probably say they feel little direct impact from a war in Iraq currently in its eighth year. Financially, that’s just not true. Taxpayer money on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars each month are devoted to Iraq. And in Vermont, the US occupation of Iraq is quite literally a matter of life and death.
The wake of Hurricane Irene brought devastation to New England late last month, causing mass power outages and sever flash flooding. Vermont was among the states that received the hardest hit. Roads were washed away, homes were destroyed, lives were lost, and entire cities and towns were cut off from the outside world due to the floods. Help was needed.
Many states were impacted by Irene’s aftermath, with a combination of internal state assets and some outside aid taking shape to bring relief to residents. It was all typical post-disaster mobilization.
But Vermont was different. Vermont was faced not only with a hurricane’s wrath, but with a man-made disaster that only became apparent when it was too late. In Vermont, helicopters were necessary to bring in supplies and help those citizens trapped by the flood waters. But in Vermont, their own helicopters were on a different mission; a mission in Iraq.
As the Burlington Free Press reports, all six choppers of the Vermont National Guard, along with their crews, were finishing up a yearlong tour of duty in Iraq when Irene hit. They were unable to get back in time, leaving Vermont in a crisis. Fortunately, helicopters from the Illinois and New Hampshire national guards were available to fly in to the state and take over rescue and relief efforts.
Eight helicopters on loan from the Illinois National Guard were expected to arrive Tuesday night in Vermont to help the Vermont National Guard deliver food, medicine, water and other supplies to 13 Vermont towns cut off from the rest of the state in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene.
The outside helicopter support is needed because all six of the Vermont Guard’s Black Hawk helicopters are still in Iraq, where they and 55 Vermont soldiers are wrapping up a yearlong hospital transport mission, said Lt. Lloyd Goodrow, spokesman for the Vermont Guard.
But the absence of Vermont’s guard choppers was acutely felt. “We’d be in a very different scenario if they were here,” said one member of the Vermont guard.
Goodrow said the Vermont soldiers in Iraq are on their way home and should be back in the state late this week or early next week. The six helicopters, however, will need to undergo an extensive maintenance check to remove desert sand and grit from their machinery before they are cleared for use back in the state.
Goodrow said that process could take a month to complete. One of the Vermont Guard’s missions in the aftermath of the Irene-related devastation is to get supplies to residents in about a dozen stranded cut-off towns.
That is being done via very small deliveries being carried out by the Guard’s two Lakota and two Kiowa helicopters, which are much smaller than Black Hawks and Chinooks.
……….
“We’d be in a very different scenario if they were here,” Goodrow said, referring to the Vermont Guard’s Black Hawk helicopters now in Iraq. Goodrow said the Guard has both a federal and a state mission and, thanks to the help from Illinois and New Hampshire, expects to be able to perform both functions.”Our primary federal mission is a combat mission in Iraq that is saving lives,” he said. “And we are able to reach out across state lines at home to allow us to do both our state and federal missions.”
Whether “saving lives” in Iraq is a higher priority than “saving lives” in Vermont is a question up for debate, apparently. And the situation in the Green Mountain State is proof that the end of “combat” in Iraq is not the end of the war itself, and the sacrifices Americans are being forced to make in order to further that “mission.”
Sadly, the wake of Irene is not the first instance where America’s dual wars have adversely affected disaster response back home. With helicopters vital to both wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as relief missions following natural disaster like hurricanes or wildfires, the utilization of state and National Guard choppers has caused problems in the past.
In some cases, the time it takes for help to arrive from distant states could be a matter of life and death. Critics of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have claimed at various times that waging war in the Middle East has diminished America’s ability to respond to disasters at home. A Department of Defense assessment of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 noted that “significant attention” had been paid to “the question of whether the demands of overseas operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in any way affected the quality of response of both active duty and National Guard forces. Both DOD and the National Guard have denied any deleterious effect; however, there is some anecdotal evidence that equipment shortages among National Guard units and the non-availability of some active duty units could be attributed to overseas deployment.”
An ABC News report in May of 2007 found that many states, including several in the Midwest and Western regions, had most of their helicopters deployed in overseas combat operations and few left for fighting floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters. National Guards in Kansas, Texas, and Montana reported the vast majority of their helicopters were deployed out of state, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nebraska’s contingent of Black Hawk helicopters was deployed in Iraq. A backup system of sharing aircraft is of limited help when a number of neighboring states have all or most of their helicopters overseas, Melvyn Montano, retired adjutant of New Mexico, told ABC.
“Where are they going to tap their equipment from if they’ve all been deployed?” he asked.
The helicopter situation in Vermont is just one of several recent developments that raise serious questions about the future and viability of the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A government report released at the end of August delivered a scathing review of how the federal government and the military have handled contracts and reconstruction in both countries. Waste, fraud, and poor oversight have cost taxpayers up to $60 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $60 billion, and the tally could grow, according to a government study released Wednesday.
In its final report to Congress, the nonpartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting said lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption resulted in losses of “at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion” out of some $206 billion in total payments to contractors by the end of the current fiscal year.
“Much of the waste, fraud, and abuse revealed in Iraq and Afghanistan stems from trying to do too much, treating contractors as a free resource, and failing to adapt U.S. plans and U.S. agencies’ responsibilities to host-nation cultural, political, and economic settings,” the 240-page report read.
And in Afghanistan, August was the deadliest month for US troops in that conflict’s decade-long history.
I hope that Vermont’s Senators and Congresspeople get on this issue.
Not to mention that we are presently paying over $12 billion in Afghanistan to train police and military for Karzai.
And Vermont has to ask other states for help. And Congress wants to cut US programs to offset costs of helping Americans.
And the Tea Party nods and says this is good.
We’re still suffering results of Bush’s folly.
Folly seems too frivolous a word, however, to describe the debacle and destruction based on lies, called the war in Iraq.