-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Back From the War, Into Homelessness
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:45:32 -0500
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Back From the War... and Into Homelessness
The African World
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.,BC Editorial Board
November 15, 2007 - The Black commentator, Issue 253
http://www.blackcommentator.com/253/253_cover_african_world_back_from_war_homelessness.html
The report this past week confirmed what veterans' advocates
have been saying for some time: one quarter of the homeless
are veterans! While this came as a shock to many people,
anyone of age at the time of the Vietnam War would not have
been surprised at all. In the 1960s and 1970s we saw
returning veterans discarded by the government that had
placed them in harm's way. Many returned strung out on heroin
and were completely unable to adjust to life at home. As
homelessness became a national phenomenon in the 1980s, we
often saw the face of the Vietnam War veteran staring back at
us on the streets of the USA.
Yet few of us stop and realize that the mistreatment of
veterans is not just peculiar to Iraq or Vietnam. After each
major military conflict, with the possible exception of World
War II, soldiers who were drafted or enlisted in the context
of a patriotic fervor, returned home to a society that rarely
knew what to do with them and, sometimes depending on the
nature of the conflict, found them to be an embarrassment.
The years following World War I are an example of this.
Veterans, including a great uncle of mine, returned from the
war scarred for life physically and/or psychologically, yet
the government was unwilling to step forward and assist them
in achieving any degree of normalcy.
This recurring situation is what infuriated me in the lead up
to the illegal and immoral US invasion of Iraq. At the same
time that the Bush administration was fanning the flames of
war hysteria with misinformation, half-truths, fear and calls
to patriotism, it was simultaneously cutting back on funds
for the Department of Veterans Affairs. At a moment when
soldiers needed assurance of US government support, should
they return injured or otherwise facing adjustment issues
(including needing assistance in finding housing, jobs and
psychological/emotional counseling), the Bush administration
was quietly cutting back; some would say, cutting the soon-
to-be veterans adrift.
I have found myself wondering each time the US - and
especially the Bush administration - beats the drums of war,
why and how we so easily forget this history, and
particularly the disposability of the citizen soldiers after
they have served the objectives of whomever happened to have
been in power.
Given the racist reality of the USA, it should come as no
surprise that the crisis of the veteran becomes the
catastrophe for Black and Latino veterans. I saw this after
Vietnam and I am seeing it again with Iraq. But even in
Black America, there are few voices speaking up for the
veteran. Perhaps we simply think that the issues they face
are just another variant of those which we all suffer. While
there is a truth to this, such a view is nevertheless
unacceptable. Particularly in an environment of dramatic
Black opposition to the US aggression against Iraq, we have
to make sure that we do not transfer our hostility to the war
to hostility toward the veteran.
This totality necessitates a Black veterans' movement that
reaches out to other Black veterans, provides a leading voice
against the war and all future plans of aggression and also
becomes a means to help our community focus our collective
opposition to the war. It necessitates as well as advances
the demand that the government take care of those it was
willing to sacrifice for a lie.
Let's hear the voice of the Black veteran!
[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher,
Jr. is a labor and international writer and activist, a
Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies and the
immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum.]
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