Tulsi Gabbard: evaluation

Transcript context

…So many. Central to those lessons learned was having my eyes open to the very real cost of war. Of course, I served in a medical unit during that first deployment to Iraq. It was 2005 during the height of that war, and unfortunately we took a lot of casualties. We, across the entire US military, my brigade that I deployed with was from the Hawaii National Guard. We had approximately 3000 soldiers who were operating in four different areas of Iraq. And my first task every day was to go through a list of every combat related injury that had occurred the day before in the country. I went through that list name by name, looking to see if any one of our nearly 3000 soldiers from Hawaii had been hurt in the line of duty. And then, if seeing them on the list, tracking them down. Where were they? Were they getting the care they needed? Would they be able to get sufficient care to stay in the country and return to duty? Did I need to get them evacuated? Usually it would be to military hospitals that at that time were in Landstuhl and Ramstein in Germany. And then from there, getting them to either Brooke Army Medical Center, which is here in Texas, that specialized in burn related injuries, or to Walter Reed, and tracking them and their care until they were finally home with their families. It never became a routine task. It never became like, okay, cool, check the list, kind of dot the Is, cross the Ts. It was that daily confrontation with the reality of the cost of war. Friends of mine were killed in combat. Experiencing firsthand that high human cost of war caused me, a 20-something-year-old from Hawaii… I had left my seat in the state legislature to volunteer to deploy with my brothers and sisters in my unit to Iraq, and so recognize the cost of war, I think, in two fundamental ways. Number one is the high human cost of war on our troops and on the people in the country where this war was being waged. And also the cost on American taxpayers. Seeing then, back again in 2005, and recognizing KBR Halliburton, one of the biggest defense contracting companies then, and I know that they’re still very much in that business now, Dick Cheney being connected with that company at one point or another, but in our camp specifically, which was one of the larger ones in Iraq at that time, there wasn’t anything that happened in our camp that didn’t have the KBR Halliburton logo imprinted on it. We had a big shack, a place where we ate our meals. They call it a dining facility, a DFAC in the military. They served four meals a day. They brought in, and they being KBR Halliburton, they imported workers in from places like Nepal and Sri Lanka and the Philippines to come in and cook food and work at this dining facility. als a day. They brought in, and they being KBR Halliburton, they imported workers in from places like Nepal and Sri Lanka and the Philippines to come in and cook food and work at this dining facility. I got curious about how much it costs us as taxpayers. And so I started asking around some of the people, and I think at that time it was like, well, every time a soldier or a service member walks through the door, if I were to go in for breakfast and grab a banana and walk out, that’s an automatic $35 per head per meal four times a day, thousands and thousands of people. And then we made friends. There’s a pretty large Filipino community in Hawaii. A lot of Filipino soldiers from Hawaii. We made friends with the Filipino workers who were there. They would often go in the back of the tents and set up their own rice cookers and cook their own meals, which is where the real good food was. But just started talking to them and getting to know them and asked like, “Hey, how much do you get paid?” And on average it was like, “Oh, I get paid like 500 bucks a month.” 500 bucks a month to go and do this work of either cleaning out porta-potties, picking up trash, the dining facility, doing laundry, all of these different tasks, because the military wanted soldiers to be out doing things that only soldiers could do. Understandable. But when I started putting two and two together and knowing that this company, one company alone, was making trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars, and yet this Filipino mom is making 500 bucks a month, maybe getting one day off a week, maybe, working 12 hours a day otherwise. And I said, “How often are you able to go home to your family?” “Well, they’ll let us go home a couple of weeks every other year.” It was an eye-opening experience that growing up in Hawaii, I frankly hadn’t given much thought to before, but it’s what led me ultimately coming back from that first deployment there was no way that I could go back to the life that I had left behind. And I knew somehow, someway I needed to find a way to use those experiences to try to make a positive impact, to try to influence those… I mean, frankly, the politicians who are making decisions to go and launch these regime-change wars and send our men and women in uniform into war, and to what end, ultimately. If we can just go back to that list. So the list is just name and injury, name and injury.…

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