No way to treat the dead or the living By Mike Carlton
April 29, 2006

LOSING Private Kovco was not a good look. The Prime Minister was desperately sorry and very sad. It was just one of those incredibly unfortunate things.

The Defence Minister announced that it was a terrible, unacceptable mistake.

The Chief of the Defence Force was very upset. Everything was being done to establish the facts.

And on it went. A Government which so efficiently sends live soldiers to war should have devised a foolproof system for bringing dead ones home again, but not so. The Kovco family had every right to give John Howard an earful.

In fairness, the blunder is probably the fault of the American contractor hired to transport the casket from Kuwait to Australia, a firm named Kenyon International.

Here the plot thickens. Kenyon's parent company, Service Corporation International (SCI), boasts that it is "the dominant leader in the North American death care industry". It is based in Houston, Texas. You will not be surprised, therefore, to hear that SCI's billionaire founder, one Robert Waltrip, is an old buddy of the Bush family and a big-money donor to the two Georges.

Back in 1999, when George jnr was beginning his run for the White House, SCI was embroiled in a grisly scandal known as Funeralgate. A whistleblower accused the company of "recycling" graves. Old corpses had been removed and replaced by new ones. At two Jewish cemeteries in Florida, bodies were exhumed and dumped in the woods to be eaten by wild hogs.

I am not making this up. The scandal ran through the Texas courts, reaching all the way to, yep, Governor George W. Bush. There were uncomfortable questions about the donations he had accepted from SCI.

Happily, the whistleblower was paid off and everything smoothed over in time for Dubya to win the Republican presidential nomination. SCI later paid compensation of $US100 million to its victims' relatives.

And who fixed this? Why, none other than Harry Whittington, the Texas lawyer shot by Deadeye Dick Cheney on that famous hunting trip in February.

This is the crew handling our fallen soldiers. I don't suppose anyone told John Howard any of this. They never do.

THE truly appalling blunder, though, is home-grown. Last Saturday, Brendan Nelson told us Jacob Kovco had shot himself. The soldier had been "simply handling his weapon, and maintaining it as soldiers are required to do", he said. "For some unexplained reason, the firearm discharged, and a bullet unfortunately entered the soldier's head."

Come last Thursday, that story had changed. "He wasn't in fact cleaning his weapon," Nelson revealed. "It was near him … and he made some kind of movement which suggests that it discharged."

The Government's confusion is unforgivable. Talk about going off half-cocked. Private Kovco's family knew him to be a skilled handler of firearms, and not only through his army sniper training. A country boy, he had been around guns since childhood. They were horrified at the suggestion he had killed himself through carelessness.

"The things in the paper about him accidentally shooting himself, we all knew in our family that he did not do that," said one of his cousins on radio on Thursday.

"I can see the way everybody is talking, the Government and everything, we're never going to be told the truth about what happened to him."

POLITICIANS, of course, love a bemedalled veteran even more than a bemedalled Olympian.

But with the Anzac Day flags put away for another year, here's another story of rank injustice. Civilian nurses who served in the Vietnam War have been left out in the cold by successive Australian governments, callously denied the repatriation benefits automatically available to their sisters in defence force uniform.

I met one of them on Tuesday. Jan Bell was nursing at Sydney's Concord Hospital in 1967 when volunteers were sought to go to Vietnam to help win the locals' hearts and minds. Young, and keen for a bit of adventure, she found herself working in a Vietnamese civilian hospital at the coastal town of Vung Tau, near the Australian base there.

She risked her life in the carnage of war, most especially during the famous Tet offensive of 1968, when the dead and the dying - women, children and infants - were piled in a bloody shambles in her emergency ward. Some 120 of her civilian colleagues gave similar noble service to our country.

Jan is now a handsome, grey-haired woman in her 60s. These many years on, she has been diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder, the result of her wartime experience.

Had she been a uniformed army nurse, she would have been offered all the medical and other benefits available to returned veterans. Instead, she and her colleagues are on the same sort of compo entitlements as a Canberra public servant who stabs himself with a paper clip.

These women have campaigned about this injustice for years, to Labor and Coalition governments, but they get nowhere. Is there no female member of the Federal Parliament who will fight for them?

smhcarlton@hotmail.com