2025-03-30
22 分钟Hi, my name is Eli Saslow and I'm a writer at large for the New York Times.
I was on Facebook in early March after the latest round of government job cuts,
and I was looking at people telling the stories of what they'd lost.
One photo really stopped me.
It was a photo of a woman named Joy standing outside her house looking broken,
holding a piece of a steel hunk of a rocket that had left her with a traumatic brain injury in Iraq.
And the Post said that after 22 years of service to the country in various ways,
as a sergeant first class in Iraq, as a disabled veteran,
and finally as a fairly low wage entry level worker at the VA who was helping to plan veteran funerals,
hours earlier, she had been fired from that job with no notice and with no reason.
I wanted to write about what had happened and what was still happening to Joy Marver.
And that's the article I'm going to read to you in a moment.
So I went to Minneapolis and I started spending a lot of time with Joy and her wife,
Mickey Jo Carlson.
I went with her to her psychiatric appointment at the va.
I sat in the house with them during days where she didn't wake up or get out of bed until 2 or 3pm
because she was feeling down and depressed and confused.
I watched Joy check and refresh her email to see what was happening and to see
if she had gotten any more news from the va.
And during this time they were still living inside so much uncertainty.