The tragedy at Fort Hood may strike Americans as a singular, incomprehensible horror. But the shock of the killings may recenter Americans’ perspectives on the quieter challenges that befall military men and women every day, even when they’re stateside.
Countless soldiers are returning from the battlefield to a world that seems alien to them, and a hostile economy often impedes their reintegration into civilian life.
According to federal data, unemployment for post-9/11 era veterans in the past year has surged past of the national rate, to over 11 percent.
Despite the military’s promises of upward mobility, unexpected hardships pushes many vets into a devastating downard spiral. For some, being back home doesn’t mean having one. The Washington Post reports that, according to federal data, “Roughly 131,000 of the nation’s 24 million veterans may be homeless on any given night, and about twice as many are homeless each year.”
The advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) says the real number of vets who have experienced, or risk falling into homelessness, is likely much higher than official statistics. “In early 2008,” the group reports, “foreclosure rates in military towns were increasing at four times the national rate,” as veterans have become lucrative prey for subprime lenders.
Economic problems are aggravated by the psychological trauma that burdens many young vets. A 2008 RAND study estimated that about one in five Iraq and Afghanistan vets suffered from mental health issues (including PTSD or depression). The VA system, meanwhile, lacks the resources to provide adequate treatment and counseling.
Extreme poverty may relatively rare among veterans, but the problems that drive it are common. and commonly ignored. The IAVA’s study on veteran unemployment found that many soldiers trying to regain a financial foothold are held back by the tumult of military life and a lack of job security.
• Many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans leave the active-duty military only to find that their skills are not understood by civilian employers….
• National Guardsmen and Reservists, who typically serve in the military part-time, are seeing their civilian lives disrupted by multiple combat tours. Many reservists returning from combat are not being promptly reemployed, or are not receiving the pay, pensions, health care coverage, and other benefits that they are entitled to. More than 40 percent of reservists lose income when they mobilize.
In an IAVA report on women veterans, Jennifer, an Iraq vet, reflected:
“I came back to a crushed small business, therefore no job and no income, nowhere to live. I didn’t expect to have this much struggle getting back on track.”
While the military is often viewed as an economic leveler for people of color and women, the diversity of today’s veterans also exposes them to racial and gender barriers in the job market. Women veterans come home to face a $10,000 pay gap between them and their male colleagues. Such obstacles may overlap with the impact of sexual trauma, a largely hidden scourge in the armed forces, along with a general lack of women-centered social services under the Department of Veterans Affairs.
After the government reported striking unemployment data for veterans in March, former military linguist Kayla Williams wrote at VetVoice about the hurdles she and her husband ran into when she was trying to transition to a new job and he was trying to “process out”:
Within a few weeks, we began to worry how we would be able to pay our bills. Swallowing our pride, we both applied for unemployment benefits. The amount was almost shockingly low — we could not survive on our combined benefits, even with Brian’s military retirement pay and final salary, and began charging our groceries on credit cards. Qualifying for unemployment was itself a time-consuming, paperwork-dense job. My husband, still recovering from the physical and psychological effects of his [traumatic brain injury], struggled unsuccessfully to fulfill the requirements properly, and we later had to repay some of the benefits he had received.
This week, VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced a five-year initiative to combat veteran homelessness, which includes new funding for medical and social services, along with more long-range measures like assistance for veteran-owned businesses and education grants. On the grassroots level, the IAVA is pushing for stronger job-training programs for veterans, particularly in the green jobs sector.
But while such measures are critical, they attest to the deeper blindspots that society develops in times of war. The core problem isn’t an issue of bureaucracy or inadequate funding; it’s the country’s delusion that Washington can keep waging brutality abroad while ignoring the economic and social toll on American communities. As vets struggle to resettle themselves as workers and citizens, they reveal the battle scars that follow all of us home.
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Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
