Take Care of Veterans, Whatever It Takes

If this means nothing to you then please make sure you work through Memorial Day Weekend. No cookouts, parties or parades and whatever you do, do not go to a cemetery where the dead are honored.

When July 4th comes, don't hang out a flag since you must not care how we ended up the "land of the free and the home of the brave." The Bill of Rights and the Constitution would have been nothing more than words on paper had it not been for the Patriots risking their lives to deliver on what the Founding Fathers wrote down. You should avoid any celebration of this day as well since you must not care about the price paid for it.

When Veterans Day comes just keep going about your regular business looking for sales so you can save some money, giving no pause to the men and women who risked their lives for your sake.

If you are a politician and this means nothing to do then don't show up to say how much you care when clearly, you haven't cared enough. While you may worry about votes against you and the death of your political career, they worry about their lives and the death of friends. They put their trust in you when you voted to send them into combat and you abandoned them. It is as simple as that.

Take Care of Veterans, Whatever It Takes

Matthew Boulay
Leads the National Summer Learning Association
Posted: March 21, 2011

Eight years ago this week the first Marine died in the war in Iraq.

James, a private, grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania and enlisted in the Marine Corps straight out of high school. He was assigned to an infantry unit and sent to northern Kuwait to take part in the invasion of Iraq. Feeling depressed and overwhelmed, he walked into a plastic porta-john at the edge of base camp, chambered a single round in his M16, and shot himself in the head. He was 19 years old.

I never met James and I didn't know him. But we served in the same battalion of light armored vehicles and I was thirty yards away from that porta-john. I remember hearing the shrill crack of a single rifle shot and I remember seeing his blood gush from beneath the door of the porta-john, forming a dark crimson pool in the Kuwaiti sand.

War is ugly and harsh and painful. War stories, especially the true ones, should remind us of the terrible toll that war inflicts on young men and women.

Today there are no monuments to James, no scholarships in his honor, no schools named after him. He died in Iraq but he didn't die in combat. We, as a nation, don't really know how to deal with the increasing numbers of veterans who struggle with the invisible wounds of war - post traumatic stress disorder, major depression, and traumatic brain injury.

The terrible reality, of course, is that war rages on for the veteran long after he or she has come home. The statistics are sobering. The military lost more troops to suicide in 2009 and 2010 than it has lost to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the country's largest Army base, Fort Hood in Texas, 22 soldiers committed suicide in 2010. And a recent study found that female veterans commit suicide at three times the rate of young women who have not served in the military.

These young men and women are not cowards. They served their country with honor and distinction. They and their families made enormous sacrifices. And the struggles faced by today's generation of young veterans are no different than the challenges faced by veterans of previous wars. Readers of the bestselling new book Unbroken, for example, will recognize the terrible symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that Louis Zamperini struggled with after coming home from World War II. The Department of Veterans Affairs reports that more than 6,000 veterans commit suicide every year. That is an average of 18 veterans every day. The vast majority of these suicides are committed by older veterans who served in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War.
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Take Care of Veterans, Whatever It Takes

There is a sickening disconnect in this country. No one seems to care about the two million veterans Afghanistan and Iraq have created any more than they care about the other 22 million or so more already neglected. All the talk right now in about Libya but news reports from Iraq and Afghanistan ended when the American people didn't want to watch them. The interest in Libya will die off soon enough and they can all go back to paying attention to Charley Sheen while few pay attention to who is a lot more important to the future of this nation just as they were to her past. The eye opening fact is that no matter how much we ignore them, no matter what their service has put them through, they would do it all over again for thankless people celebrating a weekend off.