“You were so brave, honey,” I reassured my 7-year-old daughter as she re-told the story of her father collapsing to the ground in front of her during a seizure caused by the traumatic brain injury (TBI) he had sustained in Iraq 15 years before. It was her way of processing the trauma, and my job was to bury my own feelings to support her as she worked through hers. I had to hide my terror that it might happen again, my anxiety about how to juggle full-time work and driving my spouse to yet more medical appointments, and my rage that the TBI continued to find new ways to affect our lives. I soothed her while trying not to worry that the TBI also predisposes her dad to dementia and increases his risk of brain tumors.
A brain injury is not just a “headache,” as all of us coping with the “invisible wounds” of Iraq and Afghanistan knows far too well.
Which makes former President Donald Trump’s callous response to a question about wounded warriors during a recent press conference so deeply personal to me. When a reporter asked Trump about the more than 100 soldiers under his command in Iraq who were injured by Iranian ballistic missiles in 2020, he responded, “What does ‘injured’ mean? You mean because they had a headache?”
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This response was more than just a grotesque lack of compassion from the former commander in chief, though. It also highlights the challenges military leaders faced at the time when they felt pressured to downplay the severity of the incident, which led to delays in awarding injured troops the Purple Hearts that can be key to unlocking care and benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
It is also a stark reminder that Trump does not care about wounded, ill, and injured troops and veterans, whose service and sacrifice he not only fails to comprehend but also actively disparages.
Those on the right who want to help him run the government are also eager to find ways to gut veterans’ care and benefits. My husband was medically retired from the military for combat injuries, so he gets both a military retirement and VA disability compensation. The Heritage Foundation wants to scrap that “concurrent receipt” to save money. And even though (or perhaps because) issues like cancer from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam or burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan can take decades to develop, they want to slap an arbitrary 10-year time limit on when veterans can apply for disability compensation at all.
And Project 2025, written by former Trump appointees who are itching to get back into leadership roles with no guardrails and a day-one agenda to dismantle popular and effective government programs, has its own poison pills. After installing Trump loyalists and pushing out experienced civil servants, the plan is to reduce veterans’ disability ratings and force more veterans into lower-quality for-profit community care.
As the caregiver to a combat-wounded veteran and a veteran myself, I’m acutely aware of how critical it is to protect the VA. My husband tried getting care in the community for his TBI, only to be told the doctors don’t have expertise in blast injuries like the one a roadside bomb gave him. Community providers also lack military cultural competence and are less likely to use evidence-based treatment.
We desperately need to maintain and strengthen VA so that it will be there for the millions of other veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors who rely on caring civil servants for our care and benefits. There are millions of military and veteran caregivers in the United States, providing billions of dollars of uncompensated care. Those of us caring for veterans under age 60 are often supporting veterans with TBIs and mental health conditions like PTSD, a unique burden that contributes to our own high rates of depression.
We deserve a president who understands these challenges and wants to find ways to ease our burdens, not one who mocks and minimizes them. Vice President Kamala Harris is squarely focused on the care economy and wants to build a strong, functional government. While Trump minimizes the brain injuries troops sustained while he was in office, she is working to ensure those troops and their families will be able to thrive in the decades to come. I know who has earned my vote.
Kayla Williams is the author of Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War and a former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
