We can't turn our backs on disabled veterans

There seems to be little energy these days for anything but anxiety and finger-pointing about the economy. Still, it's sobering — even shocking — that Monday's final report by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses failed to find a place on the front page of a single major newspaper.

For nearly 20 years, a succession of Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense officials under both Republican and Democratic presidents have denied even the existence of what's come to be called Gulf War syndrome, a complex of neurological afflictions ranging from memory problems and chronic pain to brain cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Veterans who have sought help for their illnesses frequently have been treated as head cases or, worse, malingerers.

Now a panel of prestigious scientists and veterans, working under congressional mandate, has concluded not only that the syndrome exists but also that it afflicts at least 175,000 Gulf War vets — one in four of those who served. The cause, according to the panel's 450-page report, was ingestion of a drug administered out of fear the Iraqis would use nerve gas, as well as exposure to pesticides used to hold down sand fleas. There is no known cure for Gulf War syndrome, and the panel has recommended an annual appropriation of $60 million to find one.

That would be a good first step — but only that.

It would be convenient to regard neglect of the Gulf War vets as an anomaly, but the discomforting fact is that it's all of a piece with this country's historic maltreatment of its returning service men and women. The government, usually extravagant in its rhetorical gratitude for military service, has been miserly when it comes to making "the thanks of a grateful nation'' material.

Shays' Rebellion, the new American nation's first exercise in popular unrest, occurred before the U.S. Constitution was written and involved unpaid Revolutionary War conscripts who returned home to find their farms seized for back taxes. Some were thrown into debtors' prisons.

Some 75 years later, a traditional ballad, "Paddy's Lamentation,'' recounted the sad fate of new Irish immigrants lured into New York's famous "Fighting 69th'' during the Civil War, then left disabled and without their promised pensions:

General Meagher to us said, If you get shot and lose your head

Every mother's son of you will get a pension

In the war I lost my leg, all I've now is a wooden peg

By my soul it is the truth to you I mention.