Back From The War ... And Into Homelessness

The report this past week confirmed what veterans’ advocates have been saying for some time: one quarter of the homeless are veterans! While this came as a shock to many people, anyone of age at the time of the Vietnam War would not have been surprised at all.

In the 1960s and 1970s we saw returning veterans discarded by the government that had placed them in harm’s way. Many returned strung out on heroin and were completely unable to adjust to life at home. As homelessness became a national phenomenon in the 1980s, we often saw the face of the Vietnam War veteran staring back at us on the streets of the USA.

Yet few of us stop and realize that the mistreatment of veterans is not just peculiar to Iraq or Vietnam. After each major military conflict, with the possible exception of World War II, soldiers who were drafted or enlisted in the context of a patriotic fervor, returned home to a society that rarely knew what to do with them and, sometimes depending on the nature of the conflict, found them to be an embarrassment. The years following World War I are an example of this. Veterans, including a great uncle of mine, returned from the war scarred for life physically and/or psychologically, yet the government was unwilling to step forward and assist them in achieving any degree of normalcy.

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