Published: March 24, 2009 04:43 pm      

WE THE PEOPLE: Veterans storm the Hill

When young men and women risk their lives and sacrifice both physical and mental health for their country, a grateful country should at least provide them with shelter, food, and health care. But there is a lot of hypocrisy between what some windbag says on Veterans Day and what the country actually does for veterans. After the horrors of the battlefield, they have to fight a second war when they come home. As one army psychiatric nurse said, civilians need to stop asking “What was the hardest part about being over there?” and start asking “What is the hardest part of being home?”

A delegation of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans went to Washington recently and spent a week educating our leaders on the most pressing issues facing today’s troops and veterans: better screening for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain injury, correct implementation of the new GI Bill, and above all, the need for advance funding for veterans’ hospitals. Under the current system, the VA budget remains uncertain each year until the annual appropriations bills are passed. This makes it difficult for hospitals to begin hiring personnel and to plan long-term infrastructure projects, forcing the largest health care provider in the nation to ration care. Approving the VA health care budget one year in advance would supply timely and predictable funding. In the face of this surge of veterans from across the country, Congress rapidly responded, introducing legislation to provide advance appropriations for the VA.

Every major veterans’ organization in America is on board with the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. The young vets led, and in the coming weeks other generations will follow, demonstrating that 25 million veterans of all generations stand united behind this effort.

It is unconscionable that veterans have to fight these battles, but we have a long, sorry history of leaving veterans to fend for themselves. In 1781 veterans of the Continental Army marched on Philadelphia to demand pay they had been denied and were run out of town for their efforts. One of the most disgraceful events in our history occurred in 1932. Unemployed, their families hungry, 20,000 World War I veterans (known as the Bonus Army) descended on Washington and requested that Congress pay the bonuses it had promised. President Hoover called out the army, and they were fired on, tear-gassed, and their cardboard city burned. Two veterans were shot to death, a thousand injured by gas, an eleven-week-old baby died, and an eight-year-old boy was partially blinded by gas. Perhaps it was to wipe out that ugly memory that the veterans of World War II received a generous GI Bill of Rights. The Vietnam vets, on the other hand, came home to find that the same government that had sent them into an immoral and fruitless war now wanted to forget about them.

We tend to ignore anything that makes us uncomfortable. But attention must be paid. When our soldiers come home from war they shouldn’t end up sleeping under a bridge or waiting six months to see a doctor.