What Causes Homeless Veterans? Essay Example

Some Causes of Veteran Homelessness

There are many epigrams that would fit this subject. The poet Walt Whitman, working as a nurse during the American Civil War (1861–1865), later wrote “The real war will never get into the books” (Whitman). About a century later, the historian and WWII combat veteran Paul Fussell, in a bow to Whitman, wrote “Nor will the Second World War, and ‘books’ includes this one,” adding “One could say . . . not that it’s ‘unknowable,’ but that its full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological frameworks that we have inherited from the liberal era” (Fussell).

Now what on earth does that last comment mean? Probably it means that war not only makes many soldiers and civilians physically damaged, it can make them insane, sometimes beyond cure, and Western civilization — one big long liberal era — doesn’t really know how to process that outcome. When I was in high school, a friend of mine in JROTC said he had been shown a documentary about combat that showed how soldiers were actually killed in battle, and their actual injuries — missing noses, lips, and genitals. But none of the other students were shown that film. There was no ideological framework for that kind of mass education.

You would think that would have changed by now. And in a way it has, to the extent of being able to view all kinds of documentaries about war injuries on YouTube.com (Powell and Vedder). But they are not routine, required classroom-viewing to supplement a Western Civ 101 textbook. This is unlike, say, the Apaches, who boy and girl alike from early childhood were brought animals to torture, and later were allowed to practice on human captives (Grant). The point is that many of “us” — members of Western Civilization — who go to war will often go as strangers to the realities and consequences of battle, which adds to the psychological stress of being in a battlefield environment, which in turn intensifies the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare). And so veteran homelessness is about physical injury, insanity, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — and promotion. But they don’t necessarily go together or apply to everyone — one does not necessarily follow the other. Today roughly eighty percent of homeless veterans are junior enlisted personnel, as opposed to senior enlisted and officer ranks (NCHV). Thirty percent of Vietnam vets, twenty percent of Iraqi vets, and about ten percent of the Iraq/Afghanistan vets suffer from PTSD.

Education has a lot to do with outcomes.  After all, the surgeons shown lecturing in the referenced video are less likely to suffer from PTSD, or at least become homeless because of it.[1] And yet, as one website puts it:

“Company Grade Officers (Captains and below) are generally believed to be impacted by PTSD about the same way as their combat GI’s. But the officers in the rank of Major and above experience war from a different vantage point . . . The Commanders generally lived their lives in a very structured, orderly environment. Therefore, [they] have a low incidence of . . . aberrant behaviors that might involve the police. . . [but] “All pay-grades suffer PTSD. It is just that senior officers don’t readily admit to it. ” (Carey)

Both Generals Ulysses S. Grant and George Armstrong Custer during the Civil War, and Dwight D. Eisenhower during WWII, saw major combat or its direct consequences (Eisenhower’s case) but never showed outward signs of PTSD. (Custer was probably too self-centered to feel anything but his own ambition, and Eisenhower, following orders, was always close to but behind the lines of battle.) One vital factor may be that officers must nearly always be direct combat leaders in the field of battle in order to achieve permanent promotion beyond a battlefield commission — Generals Eisenhower and George Marshall being two rare exceptions. The lack of major combat operations is what kept Eisenhower a Major for sixteen years between the two world wars. An earlier lack kept George Marshall a First Lieutenant for nine years. Enlisted personnel have much less of a career stake in combat. They can get their initial rank through “time in grade” (although that gets harder the higher you go). But “To promotion — or death!” was George Armstrong Custer’s vow (which ultimately became “and death).” In exchange for this risk, officers have more control over themselves and (critically) others: a different stress.

Mass veteran homelessness among the ranks is as American as apple pie, but that is at least partially because economic contractions — recessions or depressions or even brief dislocating booms as the case may be — have followed our wars. One form of trauma follows another. The years immediately following the American revolution were so economically devastating that our culture seems to have developed an amnesia about it — maybe it is another example of something “inaccessible to the ideological frameworks that we have inherited from the liberal era.” The Civil War brought the financial Panic of 1873 that set off a national moral panic about tramps. Many of the tramps were Civil War vets, presaging the development of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, said by some to have been started by demobilized WWII servicemen psychologically unfit (obviously) for a return to normalcy. The end of the Great War (1914–1918) brought a now-forgotten but serious economic downturn that lasted about eighteen months, although Congress had passed the Soldier’s Rehabilitation Act of 1918, indicating a growing commitment to veteran welfare. But during the depression of the 1930s, things got so bad for veterans and their families that they formed the “Bonus Army” and marched on Washington, D.C. to demand an early payment of a promised bonus-payment in 1945. Former Marine Corps General Smedley Butler encouraged their protest, but Army General MacArthur and Army Major George Patton, both later to become famous during WWII, led the forces to expel the ragtag vet-army back to wherever they came from.[2] Hell’s Angels aside, most veterans of WWII did far better than their fathers and grandfathers. An expanding economy, the GI Bill, and many veteran benefits helped ease the transition into the civilian world. That pattern held with the Korean War to about 1965, when popular culture turned against the Vietnam war. President Lyndon Johnson’s guns-and-butter economy also began its nearly decade-long slide into inflation and job loss. Vietnam vets seemed to take the brunt. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans also began to fare poorly when the bottom re-fell out of the economy in 2008.

Both Vietnam’s and today’s vets share another aspect of modern war: how helicopters and jet-transport created the psychologically jarring experience of being in a battle one day, and being home almost literally the next. Cellphones and email made battlefield-to-bedroom communication routine. Advanced battlefield medicine transformed formerly fatal or handicapping wounds into physically survivable ones, enabling many to undergo rehabilitation and return to work relatively quickly. In earlier wars, such wounds, when they did not kill, would have required lengthy stays behind the lines, providing a psychologically critical snail-mail buffer-zone between war and home — as unappreciated as such buffers no doubt were.

War is not healthy for children and other living things, said a famous Vietnam-era bumper-sticker. That pretty much says it all. The next war will produce more homeless vets.

Works Cited

Carey, John E. Peace and Freedom Global Future. 7 March 2009. Website. 27 April 2014. Extremity Injuries in Wartime. Perf. Powell and Vedder. 2013. Video.

Fussell, Paul. Wartime. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Grant, Richard. American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Book.

Hartley, Dorothy. Lost County Life. New York: Pantheon, 1979. Book.

NCHV (National Coalition for Homeless Veterans). 2013. Website. 27 April 2014.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Ling, Nicholas, 1604. Play.

Whitman, Walt. Prose Works . Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892. Book.

[1] But there are exceptions. William Minor, a Civil War surgeon in the Union army, went permanently mad from his experience and ultimately ended up in an English insane asylum after killing a workman. Yet, an educated man, from his cell he eventually became a leading contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary.

[2] Congress eventually relented and paid the vets their bonus early.