Ignoring the scars of war

Injured ex-service personnel still have to rely heavily on charities for support and rehabilitation. Peter White asks why government offers such a raw deal

Few would deny that a civilised society has a duty to offer the best provision to those disabled in battle while fighting its wars. You might even say that such provision should be the standard for all disability, since how you acquired your disablement has no impact on how you have to deal with it.

The truth, though, is that government rhetoric has rarely matched this aim. In our “land fit for heroes”, disabled ex-servicemen used to have to sell matches on street corners to get by; and help tended to come from voluntary organisations like St. Dunstan’s and the British Limbless Ex-servicemen’s Association.

Relatives of soldiers shot for cowardice when suffering from shell-shock have been waiting almost a hundred years for an apology. If that’s because we now know more about this condition than we did then, explain the reluctance of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to recognise post-traumatic stress disorder today, or the effects of chemicals on soldiers in the first Gulf War. Explain why servicemen who suffered hearing loss as a result of war injuries in the 1990s could only claim for initial deafness, not the incremen­tal deafness that followed.

The MoD often fights to the last ditch to avoid paying more than minimal compensation. It may offer impressive rehabilitation services in the immediate aftermath of injury to the rising number of servicemen wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but longer-term duties are often ignored.

The prosthetics offered to those who lose arms and legs may initially be “state of the art” but it can be a different story a couple of years later, when they go back for replacements. And too many people trained to fight at the limits of human endurance aren’t helped to adjust to the different demands of civilian life.

Fostering a bond between all disabled people, however their disability was acquired, would help, because work done by and on behalf of ex-servicemen has often had wider benefits. Rehab work after the first and second world wars expanded society’s view of the jobs we could all do; and the anger of disabled American soldiers returning from Vietnam led to the USA’s groundbreaking anti-discrimination laws over access and employment.

Let’s drop the idea that disabilities acquired in war are heroic and agree that all disabled people are united, that the best weapons for disabled people are their own tough thinking, and that there must be fair, appropriate provision by our still rich country, regardless of its banker-induced debts.