Last night I finished watching seventeen and a half hours of Ken Burns' “The War” (not all in one night).  As I told my 14 year-old son, I watched seventeen and a half hours of “The War” so that he wouldn't have to.

NEWSFLASH! – And now this, just in from the physical disability war front . . . Nothing.

Although completely ignoring the impact on the many thousands of nurses who served, the program did talk a fair amount about the psychiatric impacts of the war on the men who fought in it, pointing out, “there were many names for it – shell shock, battle fatigue, combat exhaustion. One out of four of all the army men evacuated for medical reasons in Europe and the Pacific suffered from some form of neuro-psychiatric disorder. Army planners determined that the average soldier could withstand no more than 240 days of combat without going mad” (George Bush, call your office). 

Even though the program talked a lot about the 400,000 American soldiers who were killed, and the many many more who were “wounded”, there wasn't a word, not a single word, about anyone coming back with a physical disability after the war, not one.  Everybody in Ken Burns' “War” came home with all their limbs and features intact. Nobody came back blind, deaf, disfigured, an amputee, or in a wheelchair. One of the soldier's mom's just stood there looking at him for the longest time to make sure that he had all his limbs, all his parts, made a big point of talking about how important that was.  

But according to the VA website, the VA alone provided 621,000 disabled WWII veterans with job training₁. How many other disabled vets were there, the ones who didn’t get job training from the VA?  A million? Two million?  It is likely that more than twice as many soldiers came back physically disabled as were killed, but not a word about disability.

Even though Mr. Burns spent a lot of time on death and blood and gore and rotting corpses (OK, that is soooo sexy in a war movie – death/pornography/whatever) but showing or even just talking about disability would be really messy, especially talking about all of the millions of men who came home crippled; the ones who didn't come home gloriously dead or gloriously intact₂.

Hey, The war is over, time to move on.  Soft music, silky soliloquies, fade to black, roll the credits, it's a wrap.  As in cellophane, as in invisible₃.

NEWSFLASH !  – And this just in from the Iraq physical and psychiatric disability war front . . . Nothing.

by Ken Stein

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Ken Stein is a longtime disability rights advocate. An early employee of Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living, he has been the Program Administrator of the City of San Francisco Mayor’s Office on Disability for the past five years.  A photographer in the 1980s, Ken’s photos of the early days of the disability rights movement are currently on display in the windows of Rasputin Music in Berkeley.  This exhibit, “BERKELEY’S ‘OTHER’ REVOLUTION: Celebrating 35 Years of Independent Living, Disability Access, and Disability Rights,” can be found at 2401 Telegraph, in the windows between Channing and Haste, through December 25.

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Footnotes:

1. http://www1.va.gov/opa/feature/history/history4.asp  - The Disabled Veterans' Rehabilitation Act of 1943 established a vocational rehabilitation program for disabled World War II veterans who served after  Dec. 6, 1941. As a result of this law, the VA provided 621,000 disabled World War II veterans with job training . . .  Amputees returning from World War II at first found difficulty obtaining artificial limbs.  But Congress quickly authorized the VA to fill this need. The VA's experience in assisting thousands of veterans led it to become a world leader in the development of prosthetic devices.

2. "To the safety of sterility the threat has been refined."  -  Phil Ochs

3. From the musical Chicago:

    Cellophane

    Mister Cellophane

    Shoulda been my name

    Mister Cellophane

    'Cause you can look right through me

    Walk right by me

    And never know I'm there

    Hope I didn't take up too much of your time.