Homeless Veterans

An Unincorporated Division of The Anonymous Anything Society August 21, 2013

Homeless Veterans: Another legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

According to the National Coalition for the Homeless and the U.S. Department of Veterans affairs, it is estimated that upwards of 200,000 persons who once served in the military services will be homeless on any given night in America.

Due to the transient character of homelessness, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans believes that there has been a gross undercount; that close to 400,000 veterans will experience being without a home sometime during the course of a year.

Due to the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, necessitating multiple deployments of the same personnel, there has been a surge in young veterans with chronic and protracted psychiatric illness. The words "Improvised Explosive Device" (IED) and "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" (PTSD) have become part of the national lexicon.

Never before has a means of maiming and killing caused as much intractable harm. For a thousand days, the heat, the smell, the blood, dismemberment and death was demanded once again from a new generation.

This time, it has also been estimated that three to four percent of homeless veterans are women.

There is something else. It is heart-rending to see a young person who has lost part of their body, but the military culture has changed little since World War One. When a solder in the trenches suffered rapid breathing, racing heartbeats, nightmares, depression and obsessive thoughts about suicide, they called it "Shell Shock." In World War II, General Patton called it "cowardice."

We tried to ignore the veterans of the Korean Conflict and we mistreated those who survived the horrors of Southeast Asia.

Now that the overburdened military and veterans hospitals begin to discharge those traumatized by the long conflict where our youth still continue to be expended, we can expect to soon see the parks, the open doorways, the alleys and the cardboard boxes, overflowing to the extent never seen before with the walking wounded.

Presently, the Veterans Administration has a limited number of shelters and a few two-year transitional housing units with the ability of housing only approximately 8,000 of those discharged. That will not begin to handle the record number of applicants.

We should expect that a huge number of those with severe PTSD will avoid treatment - and be among us.

If the Federal Government does not begin the process of addressing this challenge, other social service agencies will be soon forced to do so.

Philip Richardson, Observer and Storyteller

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