Editorial Observer

A Wary Veteran Patrols the Daunting Home Front

By FRANCIS X. CLINES Published: June 18, 2007

"I was kicking down doors, driving Humvees," is the terse way Rob Timmins summarizes a year in Iraq. His description of his new job - roaming the American home front trying to get Americans to care about other returning soldiers - is more complicated. "The Support Our Troops magnets on people's cars will eventually come off, and 5, 10 years from now, who will remember the veterans?" asks the 25-year-old Mr. Timmins, outspoken as the Staten Island bartender he used to be.

As outreach director for a nascent veterans group, Mr. Timmins engages the casualty wards at veterans hospitals, addresses public hearings and lobbies Congress, all the while sensing the insufficient traction of his cause. "We live in an MTV-"American Idol" culture where you can change the channel and not have to be engaged in this war," he says.

There's only fitful attention to the resettlement problems of more than one million men and women who have been cycling home all too anonymously from two war fronts, wounded and otherwise damaged and not making much noise yet.

Their troubles range from the mushrooming brain traumas from roadside explosions to outdated benefits pegged to the costs and cares of World War II. The veterans' hospital scandal that uncovered a legion of outpatients foundering in a sea of bureaucracy gave little comfort to Mr. Timmins's organization, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Sure, the headlines prodded a bit of public attention, he says, but they only hinted at costly problems that will haunt the nation and its casualties long after the war and the Bush administration are finished.

More than 26,000 returning fighters are dealing with war wounds, 45,000 with post-traumatic stress disorder. The government's backlog of benefit claims reaches to the hundreds of thousands, with the data transition from soldier to veteran status a computer disaster between the Pentagon and Veterans Administration.

Mr. Timmins tries to make the public grasp that troops are being returned to second and third combat tours with untreated mental disorders. At home, there's homelessness on the rise for veterans who also discover that the G.I. Bill can't cover the cost of public college. Their unemployment rate is three times the national average. The old veterans' movie, "The Best Years of Our Lives," is ready for a grim remake.

And day after day Mr. Timmins has to grind his teeth at how swiftly, how vapidly the occasional news of troubled veterans is bumped aside by a deluge of bulletins about Paris Hilton or some other this-just-in frippery. "It's staggering, sickening," he says. "There are days I scream at the television - lives are being taken, families left in heartbreak."

He half apologizes for being so properly obsessed. He muses that "compassion fatigue" is one of the risks of paying attention to veterans of a failed war now longer and far less glorious than World War II. A once pro-war public would sooner forget about it. "The point is we got to galvanize this generation of veterans now, and not several years from now," he reminds himself. "Other national themes and issues will quickly follow this war - health care, whatever - and the vets better have a voice in the public dialogue."

But new veterans typically want to get deeply lost again in civilian life, not organize and beg for their rights. The three-year-old nonprofit group employing Mr. Timmins is one of the stronger veteran groups, and it has signed up 3,200 actual veterans as opposed to the 70,000 donors and other supporters looking for ways to help.

"In this war, you don't really engage a single enemy, so everybody becomes the enemy," Mr. Timmins explains, speculating that a warier veteran is returning, branded with the dark battlefield anomie of Iraq. "You have a generation of vets coming home from a fight where everybody was a threat. The mental health challenge is going to be tremendous."

As he works the home front, the Support Our Troops bumper stickers eat at Mr. Timmins. He concludes lip service is better than nothing, but fantasizes asking bumper-sticker patriots exactly how they support the troops. "I figure they'd fumble, without an answer," he says. Then again, he hardly looks forward to the day the stickers fade entirely from sight.

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