"These are guys who are pretty much going straight from deployment to the streets," added Rachel Feldstein, associate director of New Directions, a residential care centre for homeless veterans inside the VA complex in West Los Angeles. She says veterans of the Iraq war are becoming homeless much more quickly than Vietnam vets.
While about half of the estimated 400,000 homeless veterans served during the Vietnam years, Feldstein said most did not usually become homeless until nine to 12 years after their discharge.
Already, she said, Iraq war vets are living on the streets of Los Angeles, getting seriously addicted to drugs and falling into criminal behaviour, she said.
Firm estimates of the number of homeless Iraq war veterans are hard to come by. In June 2005, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans reported the number of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) veterans seeking assistance from community-based homeless services
providers had exceeded 400.
The group Veterans for America, formerly the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, estimates that 10,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are now living on the street."What's unique about the men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan is that they're not able to integrate with their family," Feldstein said. "They've seen horrible things. They've been in horrible places and their family can't relate. And so you become homeless in the last place you lived."
Activists concerned about increases in the number of homeless veterans argue for greater federal investment in affordable housing and social services. Of particular concern is the wait for mental health care, which can run as long as six months.
A recent study by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government found that by the time the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end, there will be at least two and a half million vets. Because of that, the Harvard study concluded, Congress will have to double the VA's budget simply to avoid cutting services.
http://ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=38137
I'm sure that more yellow magnets can address this.
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