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You're looking at scenes of training from the past
year at Fort McCoy, which is where we are for
InWisconsin this week.
Hello, I'm Patty Low.
Last year, more than 130,000
military personnel trained here at Fort McCoy.
They came from all branches of
service from reserve and active units.
We're going to show you a little bit more
of Fort McCoy right here in Monroe County throughout
the program tonight.
We'll also hear from some Wisconsin soldiers who
have recently returned from Iraq.
They were there specifically to help the
Iraqi people rebuild their country.
Meanwhile, back home in Wisconsin, we'll meet
a doctor originally from another country working to
help people here.
But first, we continue our We're in
Wisconsin series of road trips with U.S.
Senate candidates.
Remember, the candidates don't know where
they're going, who they'll be with or what they'll
be asked.
This week, it's Republican Rustero.
Reporter Frederica Freiberg is
with him, the first stop Verrocua in Vernon County.
Main Street Verrocua bustles with business.
This is an area attracting population.
One reason is because of a growing number of organic
farms. Such farmers are moving to the area from
Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana.
Another reason people are moving to town from across
the country, the Pleasant Bridge Waldorf School, a
private K-8 school where there are no grades, no
computers, no standardized tests, where lunch is
always organic and movement class is part of multi-sensory
learning. Enter a big business car dealer from
Southeast Wisconsin.
For a millionaire salesman, a
place like Verrocua is a haltingly different world
from million dollar showrooms.
But it's where Rustero gets dropped in for his
wherein Wisconsin road trip.
So we're going to learn all about politics from
you today, right?
I would ever believe me.
That's what I'm here for is to
listen and find out what's important and what I know.
Listen and you'll hear.
And does Darrow ever get an earful at Verrocua's
Common Ground Cafe.
Vernon County farmer Dan Pepper
hammers away on what he considers the evils of
current free trade policy.
And I hope you don't promote that kind of stuff you
win because that's driving America into the ground.
Darrow says he's used to making
customers happy.
We know the world of politics a lot of
people aren't happy but the key is they respect your
judgment and they respect the fact that you really do
care. I'm not so concerned about happy as I am for
and becribed a medical treatment.
Yes, a reason to income and cry.
I was kind of thanks.
After a lot of listening Darrow does not
manage to make this customer particularly happy.
He moves on to someone he
relates to a little better.
The owner of the cafe Tom Milaco.
What's your single biggest thing if you had
number one thing that the federal government could do to
help you as a small business person?
What would that be?
Healthcare. And health care is three things because
it has to be made more affordable and available.
And one of them is that we allow
to increase the the personal medical savings accounts.
And number two is still outpooling it.
And number three is torture form.
You got to get rid of that.
Stop these lawsuits.
They're driving up the cost.
Milaco says it all sounds good but things
that will be hard to achieve.
Moving on through town Darrow hits his stride
heading into Verokua's big hardware store.
I don't know about you but I said it
in the morning because I live in a place like this.
Big retail is Darrow's kind
of language.
At nearly every turn he relates his
candidacy back to his experience as a car dealer.
You got some serious inventory in here.
Several citizens want to talk with the US Senate candidate
at the hardware store.
Brian Wickert is looking for an advocate for the small
business people who are organic farmers.
So much time they get pushed off to
the side because they don't have the political out to
have the lobbyists.
Okay, I started from scratch with that
and I believe me.
I appreciate it.
I mean, it's not like don't forget it when you get
to Washington.
No, I want Lauren Nordrin came in looking
to buy a mailbox when he ran into the candidate.
Prisoner abuse was weighing heavy on Nordrin's mind.
In my view, Rumsfeld should resign.
It's a hard thing to rush to judgment and say it's
a president's fault or Donald Rumsfeld fault
or the next general in command's fault.
You'd have to that'll come out.
It'll come out and I it's not my
position to try and say that and I hope that people
are patient with that while the investigation goes
on. Nordrin says after talking with Rustero, he changed
his mind about wanting Rumsfeld to immediately resign
over the prisoner abuse.
I thought it was direct.
I thought he was very candid and he
is in agreement that it's a terrible terrible thing
that's going on.
In LaCrosse, a group assembled at the
Chamber of Commerce asks Rustero to tell them what
he's about.
I mean, I balance budgets for all those 38
years. I really know the difference between you know,
surplus and deficit as in $550 billion because of not being
able to say no.
In terms of overspending, where would
you cut the money?
I think every every federal government
agency could take a cut of three or four percent
in billions of dollars.
Dera also says President Bush's tax cuts should be
made permanent.
He says businesses like his boom when
people have extra money to buy things like cars.
I'd like to hear your point of view on
trade balance and how you level that playing field.
I've lived it and I've watched what happens when
an administration means it when they say you want to keep
importing products in here.
You build plants here.
You create employment here.
Now we've got 80,000 employees working
in auto manufacturing plants here in the United States
with Toyota, Honda, Nissan.
And so that's not a bad thing.
It's a change.
At the Western Wisconsin Technical
College in LaCrosse, Dera tells an assembled group of
teachers that tax incentives for worker retraining are
an important piece of his platform, relating it back
again to his own car mechanics and how they need
to keep up with changing technology.
But then he gets an unexpected question from one of
the teachers in the group.
After my sex change, my spouse and I
had found that we were in a same-sex marriage and we agreed
to stay together.
Would you support any legislation or a
constitutional amendment that would make our marriage illegal?
From where I said a marriage is between a man and a woman.
Dera says he would, in fact, support an amendment making
same-sex marriage illegal.
Dera tells the group he is 100% diametrically opposed
to the way incumbent Senator Russ Finegold votes,
including Finegold's signature legislation.
The campaign financier for him, I think, is a disaster.
What it started out to be is not what it ended up to be.
Dera says it takes away free speech and says it
ought to be called the Incumbent Retention Act.
Dera says he's especially chapped by Finegold's lone
vote against the Patriot Act, saying Homeland Security
is key.
Tech college teacher Antonio Ray is
disappointed by Russ Dero.
I'm not sure that business and government, you can
run government as business.
I think that that's a misconception.
While Dera believes President Bush's no child left behind act
requiring testing and benchmarks is a step in the right
direction at the very non-traditional Waldorf
school in Verokwa.
Dera learns something new.
How do you measure accountability?
The school's administrator tells Dera it's not
through grades or tests, but through the fact that seventh
grade Waldorf students perform on average at an eleventh grade
level and then go on to the best colleges.
Dera calls that a different kind of step
in the right direction.
I'm really impressed.
This is very, very nice.
On our next program we'll follow another US Senate candidate,
find out which candidate and where in Wisconsin he'll
be by joining us next week.
In the meantime, you can find more information
about all of the candidates in Wisconsin's US Senate
race by going to our election year resource,
Wisconsin Vote.
The address is WisconsinVote.org.
There are only two military installations in the US that
have as their full-time mission, the servicing of America's
part-time military, the soldiers who make up the
reserve and guard units.
Fort McCoy is one of those installations.
This post has barracks and
facilities to support 12,000 soldiers during peacetime
and 20,000 during mobilization.
Members of the military have full medical
benefits, but of course that's not the case with
some people.
In Milwaukee, a group of doctors originally
from India is helping to bring medical care to people without
insurance. Student production assistant Megan Colleen,
along with producer Joanne Garrett, brings us this report.
I grew up in Bombay, the area called Fort Area,
which is one of the very oldest business area.
Dr. Madhavi Parake was born in India.
I lived in a house.
The building was at present with about 120, 130 years
old, but very well maintained.
Now Dr.
Parake lives and works in the United States
and calls Milwaukee home.
I went to medical school there.
I came here when I was 24 years old in 1973.
I wanted to take deep breath in and out.
She came to the United States as a medical doctor.
Over 30 years ago.
Now, the important thing that we need
to control your diabetes.
No sugars.
She became a citizen and as a citizen and a doctor,
she's worried about medical care in America.
We all feel that people are dying
because they don't have medical care and we believe
that nobody should die for the lack of medical services.
Open wide.
Because of this belief, Parake and a group of doctors
called the American Association of Physicians of Indian
Origin started a free clinic.
The clinic is located in West Milwaukee.
The physicians arranged to use the facilities
of the Angel of Hope clinic on the weekends.
The free Saturday clinic's mission is to serve
those who might not otherwise receive medical
treatment because of lack of income or insurance.
But now I can no longer see him because the
insurance has insurance ran out.
As a physician, we all have gone through
this, you know, our practice that we have lost patient
because they have lost insurance or they
cannot afford a medicine and we all feel pain about
that. I can't stand.
I can't stand long links
of time.
I can't walk.
The physicians first opened their clinic in
July of 2002 and have seen more than 600 patients
to date.
The clinic doors are open the second Saturday of
every month and each month a different doctor volunteers
to see patients.
Well, either you can choose
your health or you can choose tests.
I mean, you don't have much choice
left unfortunately.
The doctor's services are free, but often the medicine is not.
In here are the ectronome that's for us to go and you know the
prices of the medication in this country is sky high.
Drugs are donated, but are
often in short supply.
If a patient needs a drug that the clinic doesn't
have in stock, the doctor must write a prescription.
We just have to give them prescriptions and hope
that they can fill it.
We try to give the cheapest
one. Like today, I brought some samples, but again,
you know, all of us bring some samples, but
not enough.
Not enough.
I want you to start day one.
There's two color pills for one week.
Dr. Parakeh says most patients who come to the free clinic
do not have insurance.
Without this option, it's likely many of these patients would
end up in the emergency room or not receive treatment at all.
The hospital is too high.
The last time we got to Sanduks, I paid $2,700.
It is very satisfying.
Actually, I love it working here.
Dr. Parakeh says her work at the clinic gives
her more satisfaction than her regular job.
Working as a family physician at Oak Creek Family Medicine.
People thank you from the bottom of their heart.
This clinic is good for all people.
I have everybody's.
It's not paying nothing.
So it's free.
It's too much help for everybody's.
This is I like it.
But this is our adopted country.
And this country has given us so much.
So much in every way.
Happy as financially.
And we have to do something for our adopted
country too.
This is the Fort McCoy Military Equipment Park.
You can find all kinds of historic equipment.
As well as contemporary vehicles like that Abrams Tank, one of
the types being used in Iraq.
Part of what's going on in Iraq is rebuilding something a
group of soldiers from Green Bay knows all too well.
The 432 Reserve Battalion Civil Affairs
Unit did militarily pretty much what its members did in civilian
life. Our packet reports on their work and their homecoming.
All right, that's a flight and they are down.
The 128 Green Bay-based reservists arrived back in
Wisconsin late last month.
They are specialized workers.
The Army draws almost entirely from reserve units.
Lieutenant Colonel Mark Nussi is the 432
Commanding Officer.
I'm an urban planner in civilian life.
For the state of Florida.
So you do what there?
I look at water treatment plants,
I look at roadways, police stations, anything new
they're going to build.
Rebuilding public utilities and re-establishing local government
is what civil affairs units do.
The soldiers for you are not the same people who left 14 months
ago. They've entered combat, they've seen a number of
things, many good and bad, but I will tell you
we will only remember the good as time goes on.
They have grown in many ways
and their stories will continue to grow with them,
so make sure you get their stories tonight
and not tomorrow.
So we went in search of the stories of three
of the reservists, an accountant, an electrician,
and a police officer, jobs they hold both in their civilian
lives and in the military.
We called this the "desk bowl".
This was our first refueling part.
A lot of the pictures actually
got belated because quite really could not see anything
all you saw was brown.
Sergeant First Class, Lehelikorragan of Seymour
is an accountant.
In spite of her financial training,
she arrived in Iraq as the manager of the units,
nuclear, biological and chemical defense equipment.
I was like, "Oh, there's nobody going to have a need
of a two-year accountant."
I was probably not going to end up using my particulars,
really, in skills.
Boy was I wrong.
In mid-May of 2003, Corrigan and other members of the
432 arrived in D'Linia.
I mean, there wasn't a whole lot of fighting in D'Linia,
so we pretty much just went through D'Linia without
too much damage.
Most of the damage was from
looting. Corrigan set up her office in a bank building
because it had one of the few functioning vaults.
I ran the D'Linia finances off of this computer.
It was very handy to have a loan.
She wound up using her own personal laptop for much
of her work.
This included managing the payroll
for D'Linia's direct rates.
That's the Iraqi term for a government department.
Some of the direct rates still had very detailed
records, and some of them had been keeping their records
in Baghdad, and their records were destroyed.
She remembers the trips to Baghdad
to pick up the payroll.
Payroll for the civil servants, we were talking
$7 million a month that I personally picked up from
Baghdad. I tracked every bit of money that came in,
every bit that went out.
At Sergeant First Class Robert, Blasie's house in
Kenosha, the welcome home decorations were still
up a week after he arrived back in Wisconsin.
Blasie's civilian job is as an
electrician at a pharmaceutical plant.
In Iraq, my particular job was to take care of the
electrical system in D'Linia.
What kind of shape was the system in when you arrived?
Well, from what I could see, I did a tour of the
government over a period of a few weeks.
A lot of the towers were bent over, and
people had torn them down.
At first we thought it was looters,
but a aluminum wire really doesn't have a whole lot of
value. So the only thing that personally I could come
up with is that it was somebody trying, you know,
has an agenda.
They wanted to incite some people, and
so they had powers, a very good way to get people
alive and dumped, you know.
By the time he left, Blasie says D'Linia was back to
pre-war levels of power.
It wasn't great, but it was pretty good considering
that they had just went through the war.
Staff Sergeant Marty Anton of Green Bay is a detective with
the O'Nighter Police Department.
His first duty in Iraq was shepherding convoys.
He then worked to rebuild the
police department in Najef.
Weapons are gone, evidence was gone.
Some officers did stay, and they did
try to hold on to like computers and databases and
some reports.
Everything was like pretty much torched
and broken and burned.
One of the domes falls of starting up a department
in the Jeff was they didn't have any weapons
at the station.
We actually had to go looking for
bullets. I mean, if there was, we consider bad guys
that were caught during a crime.
We take their weapon, turn it into the evidence room, evidence
technician, register it, and then we're put it
right back out on the street with another officer
that needed a weapon that evening.
By the time we finished, we had
approximately 6,000 police.
We had seven different agencies and 6,000 armed police law
enforcement type people.
We had security police inside of hospitals, we
had them in schools, and there was a lot of schools.
Sergeant Bazi says there was a sense of accomplishment.
They were starting to understand us to, I don't
know, embrace us to a certain point.
If you would go to any of the locals, the
people that were just mom and pop, you know, on
the street, most of them thought we were great.
They thought, hey, you're here to help us.
Midway through their tour, the 432nd moved to
Ramadi in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle.
Kaurgan and Anton managed to reconstruct an efforts.
Bazi was stationed at a phosphate
fertilizer plant at Al-Qaim.
United Nations reports say it was once used to enrich uranium.
Bazi says that part of the plant was cemented over a
decade ago.
Now the plant wasn't producing anything.
It was not running at all.
They were coming to work on a daily
basis, not the workers, but the management was coming to work on
a daily basis, just to try and begin the process and to keep
the place from being looted as well.
Bazi's laptop computer is filled with
close-up photos of the people he worked with.
They were taken to make ID badges,
but he decided to keep them.
This is male kawas production manager at the
phosphate plant.
This is a group.
This is just before we started producing
fertilizer. This was like a momentous moment here
for us.
That's inside, right when they fired up.
This was a good moment for us.
The 432nd left Iraq in March of this year,
just before the violence against US troops began to
escalate. I was planning to write in a book one day,
and I was taking a head of Excel spreadsheet.
In each day I'd take one day and
plug something in there.
And I saw this talian helicopter shutdown and soldiers killed,
including good things too, not all bad things, but you
could gradually see it as I put it on the spreadsheet.
Things were just increasing.
Sergeant Kauragan is unsure why.
We figured things would get rough
for a little while with the shift in forces, that
they'd be testing the Marines.
Or it may be that the projects the 432nd
had started couldn't be carried on at the same
level by the Marines who took over after the civil
affairs battalion left.
They had to help people identify to work projects
when they saw what I had.
They were going, oh we don't have anybody can
do this.
So they tried to get me extended.
Were you frustrated that there
wasn't somebody with your skills there waiting to
take over for?
Oh yeah, yes I was.
I was, I don't, I'm one of those people
that hates to just drop something to say here you
go. Kauragan and a number of her comrades have been
in the unit since Desert Storm.
Iraq has been the toughest, toughest by
far deployment I've ever done.
I was in Kuwait 13 years ago and that one was
completely different.
Everybody was happy we were there.
The government had not collapsed.
They still had their money, their
facilities were still there.
And in Kosovo, there the fighting was over
and her unit could deal directly with the people.
And she says they had help.
In Kosovo I was going out and talking to the people.
I was actually dealing with aid associations.
Catholic Relief Service was there.
You had United Nations Mission
in Kosovo, UNHCR, they were all there.
So we actually had all that help
from the international organizations.
We didn't have any of that in Iraq.
The boy did we need it.
Units like the 432nd had to do the job pretty
much on their own.
There were 1700 civil affairs personnel in Iraq
at one time.
Usually we don't deploy that many
civil affairs personnel at any one time but we
had an entire country to take care of this time.
Having an entire country to take care of, that's what the
military personnel at Kauragan, McCoy, keep in mind and they've
been doing so for 95 years.
We'd like to thank the personnel here at Fort
McCoy for accommodating our visit this week.
We leave you tonight with a look at another rarely seen area of
the state.
Thanks to one of our viewers, Harv Nelson of
Washburn. Mr.
Nelson just happened to have his
camera rolling when the steel head trout migrated up the
Su River in Bayfield County.
We thank him for sharing his video
with us and with you.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
Good night.