Veterans in US homeless

FE Team | Published: November 17, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Ripan Kumar Biswas
It was a beautiful sunny morning and I was waiting to cross the street at central park south and six Avenue, Manhattan, New York. A city bus moved in front of me was carrying a U.S. Marines ad: 'We don't accept applicants, we accept commitments.'
Right before noticing the ad, I read an article in the New York Times about the veterans, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and are now homeless.
Marking the Veterans Day on November 12 and the 25th anniversary of the dedication of "The Wall," the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C, President George W Bush recently honoured U.S. troops past and present at a tearful ceremony in Waco, Texas, for four Texans who died in Iraq. "In their sorrow, these families need to know and families all across the nation of the fallen `need to know that your loved ones served a cause that is good and just and noble," Bush said. "And as their commander in chief, I make you this promise: Their sacrifice will not be in vain."
A total of 62007 US soldiers, so far, lost lives in Vietnam and Iraq. More than 9 million soldiers were deployed in Vietnam (1965-1975) while 1.5 million in Iraq (2003-2007). Average age of soldiers killed in combat was 23 in Vietnam and 27 in Iraq.
According to the US Veterans Affairs Department (VA), the country is bracing for a new surge in homeless veterans in the years ahead.
Although according to the department, around 196,000 veterans of all ages were homeless on any given night in 2006, a decline from about 250,000 a decade back, they have for long accounted for a high share of the homeless. Veterans account for 26 percent of the homeless on any given day of whom more than 11 percent of the newly homeless veterans are women who served in the combat zones.
One in three Iraq veterans are facing mental-health issues or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; nearly a quarter of all U.S. troops serving in Iraq are coming home with problems requiring mental health or medical treatment while 18.7 percent of Vietnam veterans have been suffering from a stress disorder.
Witnessing a large amount of the once warriors in different homeless shelters, Phil Landis, chairman of Veterans Village of San Diego, a residence and counselling centre, called for taking immediate steps to avoid allowing the problem to grow into a disaster.
Roughly 40 percent of the hundreds of homeless female veterans of recent wars have said they were sexually assaulted by American soldiers while in the military. Meanwhile, an army investigator has recommended a court-martial that could lead to the death penalty for each of four infantrymen accused of raping a 14-year-old girl and killing her and her family in March, 2006.
"To live there, to survive there, I became angry and mean. The mean part of me made me strong on patrols. It made me brave in fire fights. I do not ask anyone to forgive me today. I don't know how that would be possible after what I have done", said the American soldier James P. Barker, 23 after hearing the 90-year sentence in prison against him for conspiring to rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and kill her and her family.
In relation to the same rape and murders, 24-year-old Paul Cortez was sentenced to 100-year imprisonment on January 22, 2007 while Jesse V. Spielman, 23, was sentenced to 110 years in prison on August 3, 2007. During the hearings, Cortez expressed remorse and cried and said that he didn't want to do this. They didn't want to take lives of four innocent people.
Besides mentalhealth issues or post traumatic stress disorders, poverty and high housing costs also swell the number of homeless veterans. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, among one million veterans who served after the Sept. 11 attacks, 72,000 are paying more than half their incomes for rent, leaving them highly vulnerable.

The writer is based in New York andcan be reached at the
e-mail: Ripan.Biswas@yahoo.com