At the beginning of Lent, we heard more devastating news reports about our wounded coming back from Iraq. Chilling details came out on the disgraceful way our veterans, returning extremely wounded, have been treated because of failures rooted in the Pentagon. The cry in the country is that we must "support the troops." People who oppose this chosen war have been unjustly blasted as being unpatriotic.

If we are honest, however, we have to admit that nothing dishonors the troops more than the crass treatment so many of them get from the government that sends them to risk their lives in battle once they are out of uniform and called "veterans."

We have to demand an accounting from the government for atrocities recently uncovered at the Walter Reed medical facility, and for why, because of Pentagon rules, some veterans have to wait as much as a year and a half before getting benefits.

Why is it that the Department of Veterans Affairs has a backlog of 600,000 claims? Why is it we can hear so many stories from veterans saying they had to wait nearly two years before getting their first disability check, during which time their families had to grapple with poverty?

There's nothing new about the way the federal government chooses to forget its veterans after they come home from war. Many of us remember that after the first Persian Gulf War some veterans appealed for help, claiming they were made ill by biological agents supplied to Iraq by a U.S. research company; their appeals were flatly rejected in Washington.

At a Mass for veterans at St. Paul Cathedral in Worcester, Mass., shortly after that war was underway, the deacon, Joseph M. Baniukiewicz, preached, "We go to war, we go on peace-keeping missions. Yet when our men and women come home from military service, and yes, military service is a ministry, we forget them. We promise them certain benefits for their service and even now during a war we talk about taking away and reducing their benefits. And I ask, Why, Why, Why?"

Sadly, I keep seeing how nothing much changes when it comes to respecting the needs of our veterans. For more than four decades, I have been following the unbelievable treatment of veterans made ill because of their service experience but shunted aside by the U.S. government.

That's because my late, much younger brother, Joseph Oppedisano, an Army man from 1954 to 1962, was one of the victims of the U.S. Army's experimentation with chemicals when he was on active duty in Panama. When you sit at the bedside of a once dynamic, but now dying loved one, you ask a lot of questions.

Joe had told us how he and some of his buddies became deathly sick after a 1958 "spraying" by the U.S. Army. That's when they first learned of the devastation of Agent Orange. Battling illness ever after, diagnosed later as "hairy cell leukemia," my brother went back to the VA to seek financial assistance. They rejected his claim and those of his similarly affected buddies, saying he had no proof because their Army records had been lost in a fire.

It took 22 years for Joe to win his case. But that didn't save his life. He died in 2004. It is a sad story to see how the U.S. government gives praise to people in uniform, then throws them aside when they become veterans in civilian clothes.

All of us must demand that the government give veterans the financial and medical care they need and deserve.

Antoinette Bosco is a columnist with Catholic News Service.