<p>I hate wars. I have always thought the Iraq war was a mistake. And it's heartbreaking to see how badly the men and women who have been in that hell are being treated.</p>
<p>"AP-WASHINGTON - Strained by war, recently discharged veterans are having a harder time finding civilian jobs and are more likely to earn lower wages for years, partly because of employer concerns about their mental health and overall skills, a government study says.</p>
<p>The Department of Veterans Affairs report, obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, points to continuing problems with the Bush administration's efforts to help 4.4 million people who have been discharged from active duty since 1990.</p>
<p>The 2007 study by the consulting firm Abt Associates Inc. found that 18 percent of the veterans who sought jobs within one to three years of discharge were unemployed, while one out of four who did find jobs earned less than $21,840 a year. Many had taken advantage of government programs such as the GI Bill to boost job prospects, but there was little evidence that education benefits yielded higher pay or better advancement...."</p>
<p>The situation for veterans is terrible. Suicide is at an all-time high for soldiers. </p>
<p>I feel like this is a repeat of the Vietnam situation. Veterans come home, discover they are not welcomed. Many became homeless because they had no employable skills in the rapidly changing economy.</p>
<p>A REAL GI Bill would go a long way toward helping. The so-called "benefits" nowadays have no muscle. Today, they actually pay people to find ways of shafting our returning servicemen and women:(. I hope our next president will be bothered enough by the status quo to push for real change.</p>
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feel like this is a repeat of the Vietnam situation. Veterans come home, discover they are not welcomed. Many became homeless because they had no employable skills in the rapidly changing economy.
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<p>There are some significant differences between what Vietnam vets came home to and what Iraq vets are coming home to. One big difference is that it often happened that Vietnam vets found they were blamed for the wrongness of the Vietnam War when they got home. They got quite the opposite of a hero's welcome. They were often socially shunned.</p>
<p>No one blames the wrongness of the Iraq War on our vets -- or at least far, far fewer do.</p>
<p>The one tremendously egregious point in all this is the rhetoric used to justify continuation of the war -- "we must support our troops" -- stops when they actually really need our support. I don't know these people can live with themselves: sending the soldiers to a stupidly conceived war and basing the justification for the war on lies and then forsaking them when they return home.</p>
<p>Remember Bush dodged the draft in the respectable way of the time for Vietnam. And Cheney took numerous deferments. Thus, never having seen war up close, it was all too easy to send others to commit it, suffer from it, be maimed or killed by it.</p>
