New Generation of Homeless Vets Emerge

ERIN McCLAM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080120/ap_on_re_us/homeless_on_the_homefront

Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room, where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.

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He is 28 years old. "People come back from war different," he offers by way of a summary.

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This is not a new story in America: A young veteran back from war whose struggle to rejoin society has failed, at least for the moment, fighting demons and left homeless.

But it is happening to a new generation. As the war in Afghanistan plods on in its seventh year, and the war in Iraq in its fifth, a new cadre of homeless veterans is taking shape.

And with it come the questions: How is it that a nation that became so familiar with the archetypal homeless, combat-addled Vietnam veteran is now watching as more homeless veterans turn up from new wars?

Just like Bill Kristol and Condoleezza Rice, there's nobody to blame and no way any of this could have been foreseen, because everybody got this whole war thing wrong.

Except, of course, the dirty fucking hippies, but who listens to them? I mean, gee whiz, it's not like there haven't been homeless veterans before. Bill O'Reilly says it's just a bunch of hooey, and who are you going to believe, homeless veterans or Bill O'Reilly? Choose carefully, because you might be a dirty fucking hippie who hates America and doesn't support the troops.

Okay, so this happens every goddam time. But it's not like these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were optional; we had to invade two countries that had never attacked us and were no threat to us. We had to treat the criminal act of September 11 as an act of war. Everybody said so, except the dirty fucking hippies and about 50% of the population.

How do we as a nation keep watching this happen over and over again? Because we're more addicted to the thrill of war than we are to our own well-being. We love the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Young men love going to war, and old men love that in young men. It should be a mandatory part of the military recruiting pitch, but it isn't. In a country where we mandate (or try to mandate) that women contemplating abortion should have to go through a bunch of anti-woman bullshit cobbled together by the fruitcake religious right, it's just ridiculous that we let young men and women sign away their lives to a crooked government with no more information than you get from a soda can.

To Hell and Back
The true WWII story of Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in U.S. history. Based on the autobiography of Audie Murphy who stars as himself in the film.

A friend had to talk him out of blowing his head off.