Lynn Marine: 'Getting help shouldn't be hard'

Jim Eldridge, an East Lynn resident and Marine veteran of three tours in Iraq.

ITEM PHOTO / REBA M. SALDANHA

Lynn Marine: 'Getting help shouldn't be hard'
By Thor Jourgensen / The Daily ItemLYNN - After three tours in Iraq where he was wounded twice, Jim Eldridge returned home in 2006 to his family and, eventually, a job. He knew he was lucky, but he was also angry."I didn't have any options. Coming out of the infantry, my skills were very limited."He relocated from California where his wife, Kasey, lived while he served in Iraq to Lynn where his father, Lon, and mother, Susan, welcomed the couple into their East Lynn home.
Eldridge hoped he could follow his father into the city Public Works Department, but there was no job available. His father and city Veterans Director Michael Sweeney steered Eldridge to the River Works where a Vietnam era veteran interviewed him and offered the Marine sergeant a job."With me, it worked out, but a lot of others are not so lucky," Eldridge said.Eldridge wanted to be a soldier since the age of three. He joined English High School's Marine Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and headed for Parris Island and boot camp after graduating.

As a Marine, he learned to do his job and the job of the man or woman standing beside him. As a Marine sergeant, the people under his command stood when he walked into a room and did their jobs without him having to tell them what to do.
http://www.thedailyitemoflynn.com/articles/2008/01/30/news/news01.txt#blogcomments

I was born and raised in Massachusetts where I lived until four years ago. Now, living in Florida, I continue to do outreach work with veterans as a volunteer. After 25 years of focusing on PTSD, I can tell you that this is just the beginning of what is to come. Veterans face homelessness for several reasons. One is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as well as the other problems that come with it. When they want to kill off the symptoms of PTSD, many self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. We turn around and call them drug addicts and alcoholics because it's easier than figuring out why they weren't that way before they face the carnage of combat.

When they have endless nights of nightmares as real as what they went through and cannot get up off the sofa to go to work because they are so drained, we call them lazy and a bum, because that's easier than noticing the fact they were not lazy before they went. We also don't want to notice the fact while they were deployed they spent 24/7 on edge and on hyper alert. We don't want to face a lot when it comes to them and take the easy way out by blaming them for the changes in them.

Some end up homeless because they can't keep jobs while others because they cannot get jobs. It's not always PTSD problems. Do we put them at the front of the line out of gratitude for their willingness to lay down their lives for the sake of this nation? No, it's easier to find reasons to not hire them so that they don't "give us any problems" or end up being redeployed. Eldridge is right and it shouldn't be so hard but until people start to see them for what they are, it will remain hard for them. We have over 300 million people in this country yet less than 30 million are veterans and only about 17 million of them are combat veterans. You'd think the rest of us could at least take care of them but we don't. They are a rarity to us and it's about time we acknowledged exactly how much they have to offer us at the same time we acknowledge how much they need our help.



Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington