When I lived in D.C., one of my favorite spots in the city was the west end of the National Mall, where the war memorials reside. In the pre-dawn hours, when I would go for my run, these landmarks were especially powerful. In the quiet, the rising light, they always served as stark reminders of the cost of the life I took for granted.
I can’t remember the first time I met Davis, except that it was on such a run. He was always dressed in the same clothing – faded jeans and old duty boots, a t-shirt and a worn field jacket. I stopped to tie a shoe one morning and he warned me off a particular path because of some suspect guys down the way. Part of the reason I ran so early in the morning was to avoid suspect guys, so I wasn’t entirely sure about the intelligence but I stuck to the street anyway.
When you see someone like that, you place a face with a voice, they become something more than just the background through which you observe the city’s failings. I started to see him more often. I suppose the safer thing to do would have been to ignore him altogether, but I am my father’s daughter and I cannot walk away from a good story. He never asked for money, anyway, he didn’t appear interested in panhandling or maybe he just waited to set up his operation until there was a better demographic, more uncomfortable tourists crowding the sidewalks around him.
It started to rain one morning, hard, and I looked for shelter. I ducked into the same entryway he’d occupied, and I ended up buying him coffee and a breakfast sandwich. He told me he’d served in Vietnam, that most of who he considered family was up on the wall and while he’d come back physically most of him had never really come back at all.
The story stayed mostly the same over the year or so I would (almost literally) run into him. He would never take money from me, though he was always glad for coffee, something to snack on. He never intimated that he had a physical address anywhere, and I never asked. Some mornings we would talk politics, some mornings we would talk about the war, some mornings we would talk about what it was like to grow up in Flyover Country.
He became part of the city, to me. The last time I saw him, a few days after 9/11/01, he came the closest he ever had to hugging me, a brief squeeze on my shoulder and a few murmured words about how glad he was I was alright. A few weeks after that I stopped seeing him in all the usual places, and a few months after that I was gone from D.C. for good.
“All this meaningless flag waving,” he said in one of our last conversations. “Just to keep anyone from feeling guilty or responsible about this madness. Just means more kids are going to die. At least in my time, with the draft, everyone had a horse in the race. Money could still save your ass, sure, but at least the folks in the middle couldn't ignore what was in front of their faces.”
There are over 21 million veterans in this country, whose collective experience encompasses over seventy years of combat and peacetime operations. Many of them are my family, my friends. We are, as a nation, doing horribly by them. About 13% of the adult homeless population are veterans. Two-thirds of our nation’s homeless veterans served our country for at least three years, and a third were in a war zone. On any given night, over 62,000 veterans are on the street, homeless. These veterans can’t find affordable housing, they can’t find jobs, and many of the factors that complicate their search for the same are compounded by PTSD and substance abuse issues for which they cannot find treatment or assistance. The VA system is already swamped.
We don’t spit on the soldiers that come home from war anymore. We learned our lesson from Vietnam in that regard. No, we love to trot out our soldiers for photo shoots in this country. We like to wave flags and deliver wonderful, inspiring speeches full of platitudes, expressions of gratitude for service and sacrifice so many of us will never know. But all these words without action, magnets on cars without boots on the ground, aren’t we really just metaphorically spitting on their service all the same?
Maybe, maybe not. There are without question people for whom the magnet on their car is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they do to try and serve this specific population. But on this Veteran’s Day, maybe we could all start identifying ways to thank our nation’s veterans in ways that carry a little more weight than a status update or a Tweet, a bumpersticker or, you know, a blog post.
Let Congress know that the VA needs adequate funding, and that access to quality healthcare, including mental health care that addresses PTSD, is critical. Interested in a more active approach? Here are some places to start.
I can’t remember the first time I met Davis, except that it was on such a run. He was always dressed in the same clothing – faded jeans and old duty boots, a t-shirt and a worn field jacket. I stopped to tie a shoe one morning and he warned me off a particular path because of some suspect guys down the way. Part of the reason I ran so early in the morning was to avoid suspect guys, so I wasn’t entirely sure about the intelligence but I stuck to the street anyway.
When you see someone like that, you place a face with a voice, they become something more than just the background through which you observe the city’s failings. I started to see him more often. I suppose the safer thing to do would have been to ignore him altogether, but I am my father’s daughter and I cannot walk away from a good story. He never asked for money, anyway, he didn’t appear interested in panhandling or maybe he just waited to set up his operation until there was a better demographic, more uncomfortable tourists crowding the sidewalks around him.
It started to rain one morning, hard, and I looked for shelter. I ducked into the same entryway he’d occupied, and I ended up buying him coffee and a breakfast sandwich. He told me he’d served in Vietnam, that most of who he considered family was up on the wall and while he’d come back physically most of him had never really come back at all.
The story stayed mostly the same over the year or so I would (almost literally) run into him. He would never take money from me, though he was always glad for coffee, something to snack on. He never intimated that he had a physical address anywhere, and I never asked. Some mornings we would talk politics, some mornings we would talk about the war, some mornings we would talk about what it was like to grow up in Flyover Country.
He became part of the city, to me. The last time I saw him, a few days after 9/11/01, he came the closest he ever had to hugging me, a brief squeeze on my shoulder and a few murmured words about how glad he was I was alright. A few weeks after that I stopped seeing him in all the usual places, and a few months after that I was gone from D.C. for good.
“All this meaningless flag waving,” he said in one of our last conversations. “Just to keep anyone from feeling guilty or responsible about this madness. Just means more kids are going to die. At least in my time, with the draft, everyone had a horse in the race. Money could still save your ass, sure, but at least the folks in the middle couldn't ignore what was in front of their faces.”
There are over 21 million veterans in this country, whose collective experience encompasses over seventy years of combat and peacetime operations. Many of them are my family, my friends. We are, as a nation, doing horribly by them. About 13% of the adult homeless population are veterans. Two-thirds of our nation’s homeless veterans served our country for at least three years, and a third were in a war zone. On any given night, over 62,000 veterans are on the street, homeless. These veterans can’t find affordable housing, they can’t find jobs, and many of the factors that complicate their search for the same are compounded by PTSD and substance abuse issues for which they cannot find treatment or assistance. The VA system is already swamped.
We don’t spit on the soldiers that come home from war anymore. We learned our lesson from Vietnam in that regard. No, we love to trot out our soldiers for photo shoots in this country. We like to wave flags and deliver wonderful, inspiring speeches full of platitudes, expressions of gratitude for service and sacrifice so many of us will never know. But all these words without action, magnets on cars without boots on the ground, aren’t we really just metaphorically spitting on their service all the same?
Maybe, maybe not. There are without question people for whom the magnet on their car is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they do to try and serve this specific population. But on this Veteran’s Day, maybe we could all start identifying ways to thank our nation’s veterans in ways that carry a little more weight than a status update or a Tweet, a bumpersticker or, you know, a blog post.
Let Congress know that the VA needs adequate funding, and that access to quality healthcare, including mental health care that addresses PTSD, is critical. Interested in a more active approach? Here are some places to start.
The Department of Veterans Affairs
The Fisher House Foundation
The Wounded Warrior Project
The Pat Tillman Foundation
USO
United We Serve
Blue Star Families
Operation Appreciation
National Coalition for Homeless Veterans
and more, just a phone call or Google search away.
Happy Veterans Day. Thank you, to all who served or are serving. Thank you.
The Fisher House Foundation
The Wounded Warrior Project
The Pat Tillman Foundation
USO
United We Serve
Blue Star Families
Operation Appreciation
National Coalition for Homeless Veterans
and more, just a phone call or Google search away.
Happy Veterans Day. Thank you, to all who served or are serving. Thank you.
