On August 11 of this year the 2008 Fort Hood Presidential Town Hall Consortium is planning to host a non-partisan town hall event and while John McCain has agreed to participate in this televised event, you have not committed to participate.

The Army claims these soldiers have pre-existing mental illnesses or are guilty of misconduct.

By PraetorOne
If there’s any doubt as to what John McCain stands for–or should I say DOESN’T stand for?– one only has to take a look at his opposition to the Webb Bill for veterans. For those of you who missed this–and you’re God awful lucky if you did, John McCain has come out against [...]

IT WASN’T ALWAYS LIKE THIS
SHAME ON THE BUSH REGIME
By Kyle and Abraham
Believe it or not there was a time when we did NOT treat war our veterans like toilet paper. Today we allow our veterans, wounded or otherwise, to go homeless and to wait weeks or even months before they are declared disabled. [...]

per a WaPo writeup..signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey. Of course these are soldiers that are sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time..which is the bulk of them. As I noted in another post on the topic this weekend on troop strength, Bushie has promised to [...]

Friday night’s Bill Moyers Journal was an emotional roller coaster for me. The entire show was devoted to a documentary made by Phil Donohue and Ellen Spiro called Body of War. The subject of the documentary is Tomas Young, a soldier that was shot and paralyzed from the nipples down less than a week after [...]

NO REAL SACRIFICE: LIES, EXPLOITATION, AND MANIPULATION
By PraetorOne
Obviously I am too young to have experienced World War II directly, but I am well read on the topic and I have forged friendships with older people who did experience that war first hand.
One of the things I learned was that the American people were [...]

Of course we can hear the Social Darwinists even now: “Homeless veterans WANT to be homeless! Why should my tax dollars go to help people who WANT to live on the streets.” Yup. That sounds good to us. Who wouldn’t want to live on the streets during a Wisconsin [...]

By ReasonOne, Shakti, and PraetorOne
PART 3: HALF TRUTHS AND BROKEN PROMISES
Under normal circumstances it takes a number of a decades for a Veteran to go homeless, but in the case of veterans returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, the process by which past generations of veterans went homeless appears to be taking place at an [...]

Another part in the series by the writers from the Coalition for a Democratic America~Dusty
BY DoctorWho, Shakti, and Rachel
PART 2, Screwing Wounded Vets at Home and in War
When former Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld issued his asinine comment about how we go to war with the army we have not the army we want, [...]

Continuing from yesterday, another installment in Lives and Families Destroyed from those wonderful folks at the Coalition for a Democratic America, including Uncle Abe, Siren’s resident historian~Dusty
BY Abe, Donatra, PraetorOne, and Kyle
PART I: GETTING BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN WHEN YOU SHOULDN’T
In the early 1800s they called it “exhaustion.” In World War [...]

This FindLaw writeup cites the Veterans Administration as saying:

The Veterans Affairs Department estimates that on any given night last year, 154,000 veterans were homeless, about a 20 percent decrease from 195,827 in the agency’s 2006 estimate.
Although I am happy the numbers have decreased..the fact remains that even one homeless veteran is too fucking many. As [...]

In the Spring of 1993, I moved from Northern Minnesota to Grand Junction, Colorado. The move was to a different climate and a change of scenery and we thought we’d try the mountains; thought the fresh start would help us cope with the loss of our daughter-we were running from something. I had suffered [...]

This disgusting fact is brought to you by a new report which will be released tomorrow. From the AP writeup:
Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a [...]

Paul Reickhoff, of IAVA, has a piece up at HuffPo about the latest reports showing Walter Reed Army Hospital is still a quagmire and our wounded soldiers are still suffering. The 32 page GAO report is here for your viewing. Below a short blurb from Paul’s HuffPo writeup;

This latest report joins the increasing chorus [...]