The Washington Post reports that 18% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are unemployed. While the Veterans Administration has stepped up programs to help vets find work, 18% remains a staggering number. I can always look at this as a glass half full (fooled?) possibility and imagine that without the VA programs (for example, the Coming Home to Work program), it would be dramatically worse, maybe 36%. I’ll let your own personal experiences with the VA be the lenses through which you view it. Either way, nearly one out of five American Veterans, cannot find work.
One of the characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is afflicting the victim with a sense of worthlessness. This is connected with a characteristic common to all of us: We need to have meaning in our lives. Most veterans, peace-time or war time, had experienced significant meaning in their roles as service members. Whether it is combat, humanitarian missions, keeping a flight-line clear of obstructions, or being called out to fight forest fires (or called way to late to offer assistance in a hurricane), the man or woman has given of themselves to a cause that is much greater than themselves as individuals.
In these acts veterans had found intense personal meaning (and sometimes that is discovered only upon further reflection). What they do really matters. What their buddies do really matters. And they all put it on the line to ensure the mission is done. This is why soldiers protect their buddies in an almost feral way. They had bonded in something that provided great meaning. Surveys have repeatedly shown that most front-line troops don’t fight for a national foreign policy or vague terms like victory. Rather they fight for each other and it promotes extraordinary caring and heroism, it promotes mean. We pray that the missions they are used up on are those which promote the common good. And, thanks to the U.S. Constitution we can debate that point and not be deemed as non-patriotic or not supporting the troops.
Where does unemployment mean in regards to PTSD? Men and women come out of an environment in which they constantly had meaning and worked for goals greater than their individual selves. Military service will do that to a person. For all of its other traits, it does give a person a sense of meaning and purpose, a chance to put others before themselves, something which popular American Culture abhors.
A soldier returns from meaningful experiences where lives and high value equipment turned on their performance to one where they can’t get a job selling tires, hot dogs, and other mundane essentials to American life. They go from being a worthwhile member of the Team to an individual who cannot find work. The system tells them they are worthless because no one will hire them. It is made even worse by the persistence of our current recession.
PTSD inflicts a sense of worthlessness on its sufferers. This is further exacerbated by unemployment. The human person goes from being incredibly relevant and necessary to being incredibly irrelevant and shown to have no value in American society. This sense of worthlessness will promote depression and isolation. These are an ugly spiral that destroy one’s own appreciation of their self-worth. If the PTSD monster gets you in that situation it becomes even harder to climb out and attempt to readjust to “normal” life.
Veterans Unemployment is a Moral Issue. Creating jobs for veterans is not simply an economic necessity with the happy by-product of lower welfare rolls and a wider tax base, but it is a moral issue where the people we trained and deployed need to know they will not end up homeless (20,000+ homeless Iraq war vets), on welfare if their lucky, and made even more vulnerable to the soul killing effects of PTSD.
The Washington Post Article can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033102586.html?hpid=sec-business
Information on the Vets Coming Home to Work program can be found at http://www.vetsuccess.gov/cominghome/
Semper Pax, Dr. Z