Robert L. Terrell

May 2004

Robert L. Terrell

Back to Street Spirit…

The mainstream U.S. news media are filled these days with adulatory stories and iconic images of the nation’s warriors. Much of the reportage focuses on the men and women of the military as they execute their grim assignments in the killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Notwithstanding the small cache of photographs of flag covered coffins released in late April, the vast majority of the stories and images present the nation’s soldiers as invaluable, heroic role models. The propagandistic, video footage of Private Jessica Lynch distributed to the world’s news media in the wake of her apparently staged rescue from an Iraqi hospital room is representative.

The footage presented Ms. Lynch’s rescuers as courageous, fearless and totally dedicated to the mission of saving an injured, endangered comrade from a heinous fate.

Subsequent reports from Private Lunch and other sources that contradict the U.S. Government’s official version of her rescue have done little to alter the mainstream media’s insistence on presenting the military in an heroic manner. Patriotic, embedded, flag waving, uncritical, adulatory journalism was also on broad display recently in the immediate aftermath of the death of Specialist Pat Tillman, who was killed while on patrol in Afghanistan.

Photographs of Tillman, who turned down a lucrative contract with a National Football League team to become an Army Ranger so he could participate directly in the so-called War on Terrorism, were splashed across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and magazines.

Television and radio stations across the nation repeatedly broadcast news stories and documentary footage that emphasized Tillman’s warrior spirit, whether in a football or military uniform. Such reportage is regularly augmented with stories and images of soldiers being greeted by ecstatic family members upon their return to the United States from foreign military assignments.

Typically, the stories and photographs produced during the carefully choreographed episodes involving returning troops are presented in the heroic mode. The soldiers are polite and proud.  Their spouses and children are respectful and proud.  The journalists who record their breathless, I am-so-glad-you-are-still alive-and-here-for-me, embraces invariably exude pride. Such news reports generally end with shots of the soldiers strolling arm-in-arm with their giddy family members toward the vehicles that will take them back to civilian life.

At that point, for all practical purposes, the news media, the government and the general public, lose all significant interest in the soldiers.

They have done their duty.  They are on their own. Any significance they have to war and the nation’s long term best interests has come to an end.  As a result, the news media swarm off in search of other, more newsworthy, targets of opportunity.

Unfortunately, for many veterans the most trying period of their lives begins almost immediately after they saunter arm-in-arm out of the journalistic frame and into their own private versions of hell. Statistics laboriously gathered by those tasked with caring for veterans, homeless ones in particular, consistently indicate that far too many of them become haunted, tortured victims of their memories of war. As a result, they suffer emotional, physical and financial collapse.

The least lucky ones, those without families or social support networks, commit suicide, or end up in mental incitations, or jails, or prisons, or cold, windswept street corners reeking of cheap liquor and begging for free food and spare change. My first memories of homeless, limbless, begging veterans are rooted in childhood.  Whenever I was taken downtown in any of the small Detroit-area cities in which I grew up, I would see old, unshaven men begging on the streets.

What I did not know at the time is that most of the men were veterans of World War II.  Many of them were alcoholics, and virtually all of them conveyed the impression that they were broken, abandoned human beings.

I was excruciatingly aware that many of them had missing limbs.  Thus, it was not unusual to seem them scooting about on small padded, wooden platforms perched atop small wheels scavenged from roller skates.

Some of the old, broken, sad-eyed veterans sold pencils.  But most often, they sat quietly in front of begging cups, waiting patiently to hear the tinkle of a few coins tossed in their direction by anonymous passersby who rarely took the time to speak to them. As I grew older, I watched the ages of the broken beggars change as their population expanded to include younger veterans from the Korean War. During recent decades, the streets of cities across the nation have been flooded with veterans from other wars, including the Cold War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, anti-drug operations in Central and South America and Gulf Storm.

Given the nation’s current imperial activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems appropriate to note that within a relatively short period of time a new flood of hapless, haunted men and women will appear on the nation’s streets.

The size of the impending street level tragedy heading in our direction can be partially discerned via statistics that describe the current population of homeless veterans.

For example, even though no branch of the Federal Government is entrusted with the task of keeping up to date and accurate numbers on the number of homeless veterans, reports issued by the Veterans Administration indicate that on any given night approximately 300,000 veterans are sleeping outdoors.

The Veterans Administration also estimates that  more than 500,000 veterans are homeless on U.S. streets at some point during any given year. The significance of that number might be best understood within context of the fact that approximately one out of every four homeless persons in the United States is a veteran.

The 1999 report issued by the Interagency Council on Homelessness provides a particularly troubling statistical profile of the multiple tragedies being experienced by veterans, who are frequently “collateral” victims of the nation’s longstanding obsession with empire, war and conquest. For example, the report indicates that 67 percent of the male homeless population in the U.S. served  more than three years in the military, and that 33 percent of them were stationed in a war zone. The report also indicated that a significant percentage of the nation’s homeless veterans are deeply troubled human beings. Unfortunately, there is little indication that the vast majority of those who need assistance are receiving it.

This if patently clear to anyone who reviews the data regarding  systematically inadequate emotional and medical services provided veterans. In addition to normal factors such as the nation’s catastrophic shortage of affordable housing, “a large number of displaced and at-risk veterans live with lingering effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and substance abuse, compounded by a lack of family and social support networks,” This assessment was provided by the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which currently serves as the nation’s largest provider of homeless services, is a source of limited assistance to approximately 100,000 veterans each year. Nonetheless, the Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledges that more than 80 percent of the nation’s homeless veterans are not provided any assistance.  The amount of money spent by the Federal Government on homeless veterans is limited to only one in 10 of those in need, according the the Department of Veterans Affairs.

One of the most important results is that human beings who have served this nation as best they could, for better or worse, are being left to suffer and sometimes die of neglect on the streets. Many of those who temporarily escape death on the streets suffer horrendous health problems.  Homeless veterans are particularly susceptible to hepatitis C, diabetes, prostate cancer and HIV/AIDS, according to a 2002 report on homeless veterans in the state of California.

The report, which was sponsored by the California Veterans Board, estimated that there are approximately 55,000 homeless veterans residing in shelters or on the streets of this incomparably wealthy state.  That is almost 20,000 persons more than were on the streets of California cities in 1994.  Moreover, it is quite clear that the number of homeless veterans in the state of California will continue to rise as troubled veterans of the wars currently underway in  Afghanistan and Iraq muster out of the military and head  to the streets. Veterans organization are in a bind where this problem is concerned.  On the one hand, they are committed to the my-country-right-or-wong line of thinking.  But on the other hand, their members and spokespersons are excruciating aware that something akin to neglect and abuse is being accorded those who once wore the uniform. “The fact that there are homeless veterans is a national disgrace,” asserted the authors of the 2002 report on the state of homeless veterans in the state of California. “To allow veterans to live under bridges and in back alleys is shameful.   “People who put their lives on the line for others deserve to be honored and treated with respect.” The fact that many veterans don’t tend to be honored or treated with respect after they have served their purpose on whatever battlefield they were deployed to in order to sustain or expand the U.S. empire engenders massive problems for the men and women so used.

For example, more than a quarter million veterans are incarcerated in the nation’s jails and prisons. Veterans are more likely to be in prison for violent crimes than non veterans. They are also more likely to be imprisoned for committing sexual assaults or homicides than other prisoners.  In other words, as indicated, many veterans are deeply troubled human beings. Unfortunately, there are numerous relatively easy to understand reasons why the sources and depths of their alienation and despair are routinely ignored by guardians of the status quo such as government spokespersons and the mainstream media. One might cite the case of John Mohamed, the  veteran at the center of the horrendous reign of terror orchestrated in the Washington, D.C. area a year or so ago.

Although the brutal killings executed by Mohamed and his teenage protege engendered a huge amount of reportage and commentary, little or no attention was devoted to the manner in which his experience in the military may have been responsible for his abhorrent behavior. The state is obviously more intent on executing him that trying to determine whether his mental instability is the product of his military experience.

The mainstream media, which tends to be dominated by an embedded perspective and primitive inclinations to engage in shallow, patriotic boosterism, has demonstrated less interest in this aspect of this tragedy than in the prospect of the state executing the teenager  John Mohammed trained to function like a military sharpshooter.

One wonders whether John Mohamed was ever assigned a place in a military cordon of the sort currently being used to maintain the perimeter of the deadly noose that the U.S. military is currently drawing tight around the citizens of Falluja. One also wonders how many of the young men and women participating in that deadly assault will be seen during the years immediately ahead as “collateral damage” from a vicious, wrong-headed war that did not need to be fought.