What is a Veteran

Granny, Gadfly and I don't get many comments on our posts these days but I do still get emails from readers now and then. The following is from an email I received.

What Is a Veteran? Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye. Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg - or perhaps another sort of inner steel: the soul's ally forged in the refinery of adversity. Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem. You can't tell a vet just by looking. What is a vet? He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn't run out of fuel. He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel. She - or he - is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for 12 solid months in DaNang. He is the POW who went away one person and came back another - or didn't come back AT ALL. He is the Quantico drill instructor that has never seen combat - but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other's backs. He is the parade-riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by. He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean's sunless deep. He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket - palsied now and aggravatingly slow - who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come. He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being, a person who offered some of his life's most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs. He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known. So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say Thank You. That's all most people need, and in most cases it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded. Author Unknown ......................................................................... Excerpt from "Sacrificed For Empire", march, 2007 Veterans Day 2004 - World War II veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor, Houston James, emotionally embracing Iraq War veteran, Marine Sgt. Mark Graunke, Jr., who lost a hand, leg, and eye when defusing a bomb in 2003. "I have posted the above photo before and will probably post it again. It is a poignant reminder of the cost of war and what we as a nation owe our warriors. This old veteran of WWII Pearl Harbor and the young Iraqi War marine symbolize the generations of men and women who have gone off to war at the behest of our government, served honorably and well, and all too often were ignored once their service was completed." Comments: Farnsworth68 said... Thank you. Sunday, September 27, 2009 1:16:00 PM Worried American said... You are very welcome, Farnsworth. And THANK YOU!! Monday, September 28, 2009 12:12:00 AM Spadoman said... Thanks. Monday, September 28, 2009 5:32:00 AM Worried American said... Spadoman; thank you for visiting us and Thank You. I have commented on your blog. I don't visit you often but always enjoy your traveling narratives. Tuesday, September 29, 2009 8:26:00 PM Spadoman; thank you for visiting us and Thank You. I have commented on your blog. I don't visit you often but always enjoy your traveling narratives. Tuesday, September 29, 2009 8:26:00 PM Spadoman said... No, Thanks to you. Remember THIS Saturday, October 03, 2009 5:15:00 AM Worried: Do check out Spadoman's link above. Excellent piece.

704,000 People Homeless

That figure is low. If you read the article, it expresses my first thought. "What about the people who don't seek shelter? They're homeless too". According to the article, they're not included in the total. It would be much higher if they were but they live under the radar and aren't easy to track.

I've worked most of my adult life and I'm here to tell you that for most of it I was one or two paychecks away from homelessness myself. Now that I'm retired and raising the girls, that hasn't changed. We live payday to payday and get to hear morons like Johnny Appleseed tell us what leeches we are.

I have a suggestion for my blogging partners. We could start a new blog consisting of excerpts from our hate mail. On second thought, that would give them far more attention than they deserve.

I'll just consider the source and ignore it.

Here are a couple of articles from USA Today regarding homelessness. The first is a breakdown of the numbers.

704,000 sought shelter

19% are veterans

65% of the adults are men

23% are children, half of whom are younger than 5

45% are blacks

Source: Department of Housing and Urban

Development

And here is the main article. Click on the post title (I haven't done that in a while) to read the entire page of USA Today.

HUD gets new view of who's homeless

Study a 'huge leap' in understanding problem, chief says

By Wendy Koch
USA TODAY

A groundbreaking survey of homelessness being released today found that 704,000 people nationwide sought shelter at least once in a three-month period.

Families with children accounted for one-third of those seeking emergency shelter or transitional housing between February and April 2005, the most recent period studied, according to the report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The rest were individuals, mostly adult men. Nearly half were black.

The count covered only those seeking shelter, not people living on the street, so the total number of homeless people would be higher.

"This first-of-its-kind study is a huge leap forward in our understanding of not only how many people are homeless, but also what their needs are," HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson says. The report says, for example, that at least a quarter are disabled.

HUD, which briefed USA TODAY on the report Monday, says it is the most comprehensive government estimate ever of homelessness. Previous counts looked only at the number of people homeless on a given day or week.

The three-month figure � equal to the population of South Dakota � is an estimate based on a sample of 80 communities. It will serve as a baseline for annual reports to Congress and may be expanded to include people living on the street.

Martha Burt, a homelessness scholar at the Urban Institute, says the new database has shortcomings. For example, it has limited information about the health of those seeking shelter, and she thinks future versions will have trouble tracking those living on the street.

HUD's report also cites a previously reported one-night survey of hundreds of communities in January 2005. That survey found 754,000 homeless people, including 45% who were living on the street. USA TODAY published its own estimate of 727,000 in October 2005, based on earlier tallies.

The three-month count found that on an average day, 335,000 people sought shelter, but more than twice that number sought shelter at least once during the entire period.

Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania who co-wrote the HUD report, says it's unclear whether homelessness has increased or declined, because past estimates were done differently.

He says poverty among blacks, who are more likely to live in urban areas, runs deeper than for other groups.

Culhane says families with kids have remained a steady one-third of the homeless, and he says government needs to do more to provide housing, such as expanding rent subsidies.

One of every three homeless kids has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, such as post-traumatic stress, by age 8, says Ellen Bassuk, a psychiatrist who is president of the National Center on Family Homelessness.

"They have trouble sitting still and learning in school," she says.

Nine of 10 homeless mothers have been victims of violence, often domestic, she says.

Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless welcomes the new count but says more housing and shelters are needed as well as a focus on the root causes of the problem. He says homelessness "can happen to everyone."