Off The Cuff

Vets Come Home Wounded…Lose Jobs, House, Family

Posted by: From Arkansas in Are You Kidding Me?, Give Me A Break, It's A Rant, Shame of America on Sep 29 2007

Welcome back!

Right away, I thought that this should show up in my category called “Shame of America”. It is a shame. Men and women of the United States military are being asked to risk their lives for this country and for each American. When they get wounded, they have an expectation of being taken care of as a benefit of being in the military. That is as it should be. We need to take care of our own.

The problem is that more and more soldiers are surviving and coming home wounded. This makes it more difficult to take care of them. Apparently, it did not occur to anyone that if you make better armor, they survive the experience. So, now we have many vets coming home to real problems AND their disabilities as well. Wives leave the husbands. The mortgage is due and there isn’t any money.

Just as an example, one young man came home wounded. Now, he cannot keep suicide thoughts out of his head, can’t pay his bills, can’t find or keep a job and is about to lose his home to the bank. This particular soldier was there at the Pentagon on Sept. 11th. He helped bring people out from the wreckage, held a woman in his arms as the flesh fell off her body. He has nightmares of that. He tries not to relive Iraq or the bomb that blew him out of his bed and injured him.

He has an adjustable home mortgage which, as you may know, is going to go up now. His home is not worth the amount of money he has in it so he cannot sell it. The bank will take it if he cannot find a way to pay on his loan. The payments on his home exceed the money he receives for his service to the country.

There’s more but you get the idea. And what does the government do about it? They passed that bill that gives the returning vets all the medical help they need. The problem is that it is now costing more to do that than there is money for the program. Weren’t they farseeing people? Isn’t this a shame? It is. It is a Shame of America. We need to take care of our own while not bankrupting the country in the process. There has to be a way.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!