The Veterans Administration estimates there are more than 9,000 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that are currently homeless. Surprisingly, the majority of homeless veterans are women. Regardless of whether they are men or women, that is simply shocking and outrageous! The homelessness of those who served their country in combat should not be tolerated.
Here are the reasons veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq find themselves homeless:
__Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
__Inability to adjust to the unstructured life of a civilian.
__Unemployment.
__Failed marriages.
__Abuse of alcohol and drugs.
Fortunately there is a bright spot to this dark picture.
Veterans returning from the Vietnam War were ostracized , the result of a vilifying far-left campaign against the war and the soldiers who fought in it. You may not remember it, but those radicals - most of them upper-middle class college students and their professors - labeled our soldiers ‘baby killers.’ To our shame, many of those veterans became permanently homeless because no one, including the government, was interested in helping a bunch of ‘baby killers.’
Today our returning soldiers are not vilified. There is help available to our homeless veterans. The problem seems to be that most of our homeless veterans are unaware of this help or do not know where to get it. Our government and local authorities should make every effort to seek out each and everyone of those 9,000-plus veterans to inform them where they can get the help they need. Anything less is downright unacceptable and outrageous!
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