The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.
Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.
One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.
He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.
Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.
A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.
Let me ask you something. $3,000 in the grand scheme of things is nothing, so why not let this young man keep the bonus? I think I can safely assume had he not been injured that he would have fulfilled his military duties, so who cares about a paltry $3,000?
There are currently about 175,000 troops in Iraq and another 20,000 or so in Afghanistan.
So we have 195,000 troops deployed abroad fighting in wars.
So, let's also assume for a minute that this $3,000 is an average amount. That's $585 million dollars. We spend more then that on dumb things. To give you an idea, that's roughly 1/60th of the amount of pork spending that was passed by Congress in it's last spending bill. That spending bill included $50,000 to explore the POSSIBILITY of a mule museum.
That same $50k could have paid for the bonuses of 16 "Jordan Fox"'s.
There are some things that could technically be pushed one way or another, such as this situation, however there are situations such as this one, that the money should simply be forgiven and the soldier told "I am sorry you were injured or wounded, your bonuses and benefits will continue on even though you didn't "fulfil" the obligations".
It's not like he didn't want to fulfil those obligations, he simply CAN'T, and the best way to honor him is to make sure that he gets the bonuses and benefits the he and others so richly deserve.
But politicians would much rather spend the money on fucking mule museums.
Travis
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