A Tale Of Two Soldiers (Black POW Given Less Benefits Than Jessica Lynch)

[wellst0nev0ter]

A Tale of Two Soldiers
By Christine Phillip, BET.com Staff Writer

Posted October 24, 2003 -- Army Spec. Shoshana Johnson, the African American women who was held prisoner of war in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was looking forward to a quiet discharge from the Army in a few days.

Battle scarred and weary, she has said not a word as her fellow POW comrade in arms Jessica Lynch cashes in with book and movie deals and a celebrity status in the media.

But it is the Army that is forcing Johnson to break her peace.

A few days ago, military brass informed her that she would receive a 30 percent disability benefit for her injuries. Lynch, who is White, was discharged in August and will receive an 80 percent disability benefit.

The difference amounts to $600 or $700 a month in payments, and that is causing Johnson and her family to speak out. The are so troubled by what they see as a "double standard," that they have enlisted Rev. Jesse Jackson to help make their case to the news media.

http://www.bet.com/articles/0,1048,c1gb7802-8643,00.html

[WildClarySage]

1. Well, please,

It's not like she did anything heroic fer gawd's sake, like give the admin a PR Boost or distract anyone from the news of the day, sheesh.

The nerve of people who think the government owes them equal treatment. :eyes:

[SoCalDem]

3. Shoshona was shot in both ankles, IIRC

and you can bet your bottom dollar that most jobs she would end up getting would not be of the sit-down-at-a-desk type.. SHE needs the higher disability percentage at least as much as Miss Jessica..

The fiddling with disability percentages is a really nasty piece of business for the military.. It is applied so randomly, it's ridiculous.. I have a friend who is a wounded viet name vet, and his disability is only 30%, yet he still has shrapnel near his spine, and has raging back pain (has had it for 30 some years).. He goes round & round with the VA, and they just give him more papers to fill out..

His wife has had to be the main breadwinner, because T has had to have so many medical procedures done during the height of his "so called high earning years", that his career has really suffered too..

The military cuts the soldiers no slack when they are asked to sacrifice, but gives them little help when they get injured.:(

[neuvocat]

6. I guess you have to be a blue-eyed-blonde

before you can be considered a hero.

[Atman]

2. Check the date on this. People called me names...

She was a hero and I was just a sick whatevva. That's what they said, they did.

Edit: I realized I didn't put the date in the frame...April 5. For what it's worth.

---------

[Mairead]

4. Jessica got 80%?? That sounds high. Or were her injuries

permanently disabling? I didn't think they were--I thought she had a really serious couple of fractures, but that she would fully recover. No?

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. She didn't need Jesse on this one.

We're all behind her.

[loudnclear]

7. I have a friend (black) who was wounded severely and discharged

with 30% disability while others in his same group with less severe wounds (white) were given 80%. I bet if a study were done on disabilty discharges for comparable injuries, blacks would be far far less than their white counter parts.

I heard a program tho other day about a book titled "The Black Holocaust" which gives the history never told about the role that blacks played in freeing concentration camp survivors as well as the differences in the kind of assignments that black liberators were given compared to whites. I intend to purchase that book...I just couldn not believe how much history is purposely withheld from us. But one stark statement from that program was made about the fact that some returning black soldiers were lynched in the south in their ARMY UNIFORMS!! I broke down and cried...I still think about it, even though it was a radio talk show and I could see no pictures.

This is the America we still live in.

[CVSoprano1]

8. Substantiation please?

Anyone?

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Sitting down to converse with my new father-in-law, many years ago...

I learned something that shook my world. You and I grew up being taught that blacks fought in WWII and served in the military to earn respect and to earn a right to share in the American dream. Talking to my father-in-law I learned that whites were fighting for a different America. They were fighting to keep their neighorhoods "pure" from undesirable minorities. That was the first time I realized that there was a major disconnect and that the two worlds were due to clash.

[DulceDecorum]

10. She should be GLAD

that we did not leave her naturally black ass back there in Iraq.


The seven told their stories to two American reporters on board a C-130 transport plane flying them out of Iraq to Kuwait, where they were being debriefed and subjected to medical and psychological evaluations. Members of the logistics team were taken prisoner after being overpowered when they took a wrong turn into Nasiriyah. As THEIR RIFLES JAMMED BECAUSE OF THE SWIRLING SAND, Edgar Hernandez was shot in the right arm, and Joseph Hudson in the ribs and upper left buttocks. The group also included Jessica Lynch, the badly wounded 19-year-old private who was rescued earlier from a hospital in Nasiriyah by Delta Force troops.
<snip>
The gung-ho American media, and an openly jubilant President Bush, are already feting them as heroes. Their stories made clear, however, that THE GRAVEST DANGER THEY FACED WAS NOT FROM THEIR CAPTORS BUT FROM US BOMBS. At the first of their prisons, in Baghdad, the Iraqis had set up an artillery post, which made them feel especially vulnerable.
<snip>
Although the seven had no concrete news of the progress of the war, they understood that the Iraqi defences were slowly crumbling. And that made them especially fearful. "We were a hot potato," said Specialist Johnson. "It was getting to the point where I believed they were going to kill us." At their final detention centre, in the town of Samarra, their captors were no longer Iraqi soldiers but ordinary policemen, WHO POOLED THEIR OWN MONEY TO BUY FOOD AND MEDICINE FOR THE PRISONERS. Samarra is the setting for a famous appointment with death in the Arabian Nights, but for the seven American PoWs the town was to be their place of liberation.
Members of the Marines' 3rd Light Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion on their way to Tikrit were tipped off about their location and came running. "I was sitting there," said Private Miller. "Next thing I know the marines are kicking in the door, saying: 'Get down on the floor.' They said: 'If you're an American, stand up.' We stood up and they hustled us out of there." THEY DIDN'T WANT TO BELIEVE AT FIRST THAT SPECIALIST JOHNSON, WHO IS BLACK, WAS AN AMERICAN, BUT DEMURRED AFTER HER FELLOW PRISONERS VOUCHED FOR HER. Within three minutes, they were all on board a helicopter taking them to Numaniyah airfield south-east of Baghdad, and then on to Kuwait.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=397381

MEANWHILE:

WASHINGTON -- Pfc. Jessica Lynch is the beneficiary of a long-held U.S. military maxim -- NEVER LEAVE YOUR OWN UPON THE BATTLEFIELD.
A wounded Lynch was loaded on a stretcher Wednesday and flown to Germany after more than a week in Iraqi captivity.
HER DRAMATIC RESCUE, CAPTURED ON A DEFENSE DEPARTMENT VIDEOTAPE, was the work of combined U.S. forces who fought their way into the Saddam Hospital in An Nasiriyah to retrieve her and then had to fight their way back out, officials said.
"IT WAS A CLASSIC JOINT OPERATION DONE BY SOME OF OUR NATION'S FINEST WARRIORS, WHO ARE DEDICATED TO NEVER LEAVING A COMRADE BEHIND," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters at Central Command in Qatar.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/iraq/1850324

[UpInArms]

11. CNN Transcript link

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0310/24/ltm.08.html

excerpt:

JACKSON: It is a double standard. But not only is it the media factor. The fact is Jessica Lynch was injured, and she is now in recovery. How it's handled by the media is one issue. But Shoshana Johnson was actually shot and in captivity for 22 days, and still physically injured, and emotionally going through highs and lows, and she has been discharged with a $600 a month, 30 percent disability, and it does not correspond to the nature of her injury, physically or emotionally.

...more...

[DulceDecorum]

12. Wilkinson's word

Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson’s mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the R.N.C.
Mr. Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 Presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet." Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount: "We find it interesting that when Jesse Jackson has thousands of protesters in the streets, it’s O.K., but when a small number of Republicans exercise their First Amendment rights, the Democrats don’t seem to like it," he told the Associated Press.

For his troubles, Mr. Wilkinson was made deputy director of communications for planning in the Bush White House, and was among the aides who set up the Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero that redefined George W. Bush’s Presidency. During the Afghan war, he managed "Coalition Information Centers" in Washington, D.C., and London, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Qatar, he became the point man on the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch and delivered the most memorable and sellable quote of Gulf War II: "America doesn’t leave its heroes behind," he told reporters at a late-night briefing.
http://observer.com/pages/frontpage5.asp

[PATRICK]

13. I try to avoid TV but

the ad about her upcoming moving thriller put my jaw into the basement.
I'm surprised they didn't have Stephen Segal lead commandos in to chop up the nurses and doctors and rescue the vulnerable, but heroic, damsel in distress.

An appalling abuse of fiction against every Amemrican addicted to the tube.

[No Passaran]

14. injustice?

Yes. Johnson was shot and in my eyes deserved her purple heart. She should have been given a bigger disability check. I know of some soldiers here that receive 50-60% disability and there is really, absolutely nothing wrong with them. They just retired from military and claimed a lot of knee injuries, arthritis etc. The only injury you can't claim upon your ets is hearing loss.

I think it's just luck of the draw. In the end, yes injustice was done in this case.

[TahitiNut]

15. duplicate

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=181653

I'm locking this thread. Interested DUers are welcome to continue discussing this in the referenced thread.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation,
TahitiNut - DU moderator