Military out of step on smoking issue Posted On: Tuesday, Nov. 18 2008 05:51 PM My first exposure to smoking was in high school as a young, naive freshman.

I was 14 years old and I thought smoking looked cool. So, one day I tried it and nearly hacked up a lung.

Smoking and I never became an item.

And then I joined the Army.

Smoking — tobacco use in general, actually — is prevalent in the military. At times it seemed that there were more smokers, or tobacco users, than non-smokers.

In formations sometimes, smokers were offered privileges the rest of us did not get.

In fact, I remember many times when for some reason a formation was prolonged and the first sergeant would announce that he was going to let everyone rest in place, except for the smokers; they were told “if you got ’em, smoke ’em,” which meant the smokers could leave the formation, walk to the back about 20 or 30 feet behind the rest of us and take a real break.

While they were “smoking and joking,” the rest of us stood there. We couldn’t wander away to chat with our friends or rest on the picnic tables, but when the formation area was too littered with cigarette butts, it wasn’t just the smokers picking up the trash.

As a company commander, I remember getting only one flier from the medical facility encouraging soldiers to sign up for a smoking cessation class that was offered. It was the military’s one attempt to offer a program to help smokers to quit. It was voluntary, of course, and soldiers were offered group counseling sessions to talk about the dangers of smoking, nicotine gum or patches and all of it was free of charge.

No one in my unit jumped on the bandwagon.

In Iraq, smoking and tobacco products were so popular that those were the first things to fly off the shelf at the AAFES stores. Iraqi vendors set up tobacco shops on all of the military camps to sell cheaper cigarettes, cigars and tobacco products.

I know of several people who took up smoking in Iraq because it was something to do to pass the time. Smoking, I learned, is a popular pastime in a field environment.

And with all of the smoking and tobacco cessation efforts across the nation — anti-smoking commercials on television, high-priced tobacco products — it seems as if the military is “out of step” and barely making the same effort to save its soldiers.

After all, what happens when a soldier who’s been smoking or using tobacco products for 20 years comes down with a smoking-related condition such as cancer, cardiovascular disease or noncancerous respiratory disease?

That soldier will seek medical assistance from his or her local VA hospital or military medical facility. And American taxpayers will foot the bill.

Why should American taxpayers be held liable for illnesses caused by soldiers’ decisions to use harmful tobacco products?
To be a soldier does not mean a person is required to be a smoker.

I’m sure there are a lot of people out there, just like me, who may perceive smoking to be cool. But, besides the harmful effects on a person, the effect on taxpayers’ wallets negates any coolness.

So, in honor of the annual Great American Smokeout, slated for Nov. 20, I urge all soldiers, non-soldiers and former soldiers, to put out that cigarette for the last time.

Iuliana Petre is a former active-duty officer who served in the Army for seven years and is a veteran of the Iraq war. Contact her at ipetre@kdhnews.com or (254) 501-7469.