How often have we heard of employees being injured on the job and their bosses trying to squirm out of paying for benefits? We’ve seen it with coal miners and NFL Players, but what if the job was defending our country, and the boss was the US military?
That's what happened to Marine Corps veteran Josh Christmon, the subject of the Brave New Films' newest video, Bad Paper. Josh earned a Purple Heart from his service in Iraq, where a close encounter with a roadside explosion nearly killed him. He suffered back problems and leg injuries, but maybe worse than all that were the nightmares, the depression, and the disconnection from his family - classic signs of PTSD.
Josh's bad dreams followed him back home. Alcohol seemed as good a way to forget as anything, so one night, he went out for drinks. He was also offered a joint. Josh took two puffs. A week later, he failed a random drug test at work. Days after that, he was less than honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, losing all of his veterans benefits, including his medical care.
This kind of zero tolerance policy has invaded every corner of American society. We see it in our schools, where kids are arrested, behavior that used to send them to the principal's office. We see it in our harsh response to our nation’s broken immigration system,labeling those that seek jobs and opportunities as hardened criminals. The worst of all zero tolerance policies - our nation’s long running War on Drugs - hasn’t made a dent in our drug addiction rates, but has sent our incarceration rates soaring past every other nation on Earth.
We’re so interested in the most severe penalties that we are blind to context. In this case, zero tolerance threw away a brave Marine. As Josh puts it in the video, his "purple heart didn't mean shit".
When you hear his story, you can’t help but wonder if the military is looking for any excuse to withhold benefits. After all, marijuana use may be illegal, but it’s also probably a good treatment for PTSD. And you’d think the military would have a vested interest in treating the disorder by any means necessary, considering its possibly deadly effects on veterans and on others.
Like Vietnam veterans before him, Josh is being denied care for PTSD because he was kicked out of the military for behavior stemming from his PTSD. When you place Josh’s story against the backdrop of a military industrial complex intent on spending billions of dollars on an F-35 that doesn’t work and on contractors who have often ripped them off in the past, the situation seems even more egregious.
Fortunately for Josh and other veterans, there are organizations like Swords to Plowshares that are fighting to restore their lost benefits. But it shouldn’t be this way in the first place. A one size fits all policy that doesn’t take into consideration what a veteran has sacrificed is simply unfair.
Congress can stop this madness by using its oversight power to change the way the military handles its discharges.
