You suffer a debilitating head injury after a grenade explodes. They have to cut away part of your skull. You have to re-learn how to walk and talk. You’re then discharged by the Army for medical reasons. Guess the percentage of the disability rating you are given. Or ask Tim Ngo. He can tell you:

When he got back home to Minnesota, he wore a white plastic helmet to protect the thinned-out patches of his skull. People on the street snickered, so Ngo’s mother took a black marker and wrote on the helmet: U.S. ARMY, BACK FROM IRAQ. On this much, everyone agrees.

But here is the part that is in dispute: The Army says Tim Ngo is only 10 percent disabled.

Ten effing percent? What the hell were these people thinking when they said he was only 10% disabled? But wait. It gets worse. Because there is a waiting period to get enrolled with the VA, Tim was uninsured for a time, and …

(cont.)

When a service member is retired for medical reasons, the military’s disability rating makes a difference. If Ngo had been rated 30 percent disabled or higher, he would have gotten a monthly disability check instead of a small severance check. He also would have stayed in the military’s health-care system. […]

In October, while he was uninsured, Ngo had a seizure, caused by his war injury. He remembers being outside and blacking out; he fell to the ground on the driveway. […]

An ambulance took Ngo to the nearest emergency room for treatment. It cost him $10,000. Ngo says that today, the bills for the incident are still unresolved.

By the way, after he was finally accepted in the VA’s program, they gave him a 100% disability rating. So why didn’t the Army come to the same conclusion? Tim’s mom knows the answer to that question:

Ngo’s mother, Hong Wyberg, says the Army gives soldiers such as her son low disability ratings to save money.

“I don’t fully think they were prepared for the length of time this war is going to last,” Wyberg says. “They had no idea of how many injuries or the type of injuries that were going to come out of this.”

We have had the largest increases in defense spending since the Second World War, yet we have to scrimp and save pennies by denying proper medical treatment to our wounded veterans. I guess the Halliburton and Blackwater Stock Price Support Bills of 2001-2006 just didn’t leave any room in the budget for actually taking care of the people who volunteer for cannon fodder duty.

[Ret. Lt. Colonel Michael] Parker started digging through Pentagon data, and the numbers he found shocked him. He learned that the Pentagon is giving fewer veterans disability benefits today than it was before the Iraq war — despite the fact that thousands of soldiers are leaving the military with serious injuries.

“It went from 102,000 and change in 2001… and now it’s down to 89,500,” says Parker. “It’s counterintuitive. Why are the number of disability retirees shrinking during wartime?”

I assume that’s a rhetorical question by Michael Parker. Because in war time somebody has to sacrifice for the common good. And it ain’t gonna be rich folks, at least not so long as the Republican Party retains its hold on the White House. So buck up soldiers, your country needs you to take another bullet for the cause of protecting the freedoms of people like Paris Hilton and Donald Rumsfeld.

At a Senate hearing last week, [Retired Army Lt. Gen. James Terry Scott who heads up a commission on veteran’s disability benefits] said that his commission had compared the way the Pentagon and the VA rated the same soldiers.

“The Department of Defense records were matched with VA records on 2.6 million veterans receiving disability compensation,” Scott said. “Those rated zero, 10 or 20 percent [disabled] by the Department of Defense were rated in the 30 to 100 percent range by VA more than half the time.”

In other words, troops often get small disability checks and no military health care when rated by the Pentagon’s disability boards. But when they go to a VA board — with the same injuries — they get much more. […]

Scott said [one] reason may be that the Pentagon wants to keep down its costs.

“It is also apparent that the Department of Defense has a strong incentive to rate less than 30 percent, so that only severance pay is awarded,” Scott said.

Strong incentive. That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one. Billions for mercenaries and companies who overcharge the US taxpayer for very poor services, like failing to provide safe, drinkable water to troops in the field, but pennies on the dollar to the men and women who suffered permanent damages to their health. Makes a lot of sense to me.

After all, they are expendable. Corporate profits for Bush’s cronies and Republican party political contributors, on the other hand …