Reply #65: Heck, I'm a vet myself [View All]

USN/USNR; 1977 - 1998.

Wanna know how to "honor and appreciate me"?

Bring back good paying jobs - make the "working class" a working middle class again instead of indentured servants. The majority of vets, especially those who didn't retire as I did, don't have that MBA; they end up working the rest of their lives as shop managers, factory workers - you know, "honest laborers"...
Affordable housing - the VA housing loan is great - if you can find a house under $400K. Again; your average vet is still an honest laborer making an average of $25 - $50K a year on the job whis is considered lower middle class; in a lot of areas where Vets end up after their stint of duty, housing is far above the grasp of the average worker.
Inexpensive education and job training/re-education. Good community schools for the children, not just of the vet, but of the community around the vet's family.
Universal health coverage - especially increasing mental health and substance abuse clinics. Things that vets really need. Again, tied to the job. Most vets end up depending on the VA if there is no medical tied to their employment. And those who are increasingly caught in the trap of the working poor(making too much to recieve assistance, but not making enough to pay for it on their own) are beginning to be turned away because of "means testing".

That's how you thank a Vet. Not waving flags and chanting slogans. I don't want you to come up to me in the mall and say "thanks for the sacrifice of 20 years of your life"...that's just as genuine as it is when the 13-year-old says "sorry" after screwing up the same way for the 30th time.
I don't want the f**ing pedestal. I'm a human being, as good or as bad as the average citizen. And to tell y'all a secret that most of us vets understand; unless we're fighting on our own soil or fighting off an invading enemy, we aren't "protecting" the our way of life or our country any more than any security guard is at the mall. If we do a good job by managing to get through whatever political contreps that our government stepped into without incurring too many , we feel proud because we did that good job.
Blatant jingoism is just a way of using us vets as a cover while screwing people over.

I'm proud I served. My relatives that have been in the military and/or fought in wars are proud to have served. But after we've gone through what we had to do while we served, we're really not any more special to the US than that policeman, fireman, teacher, post-office clerk...get it?
Be glad we're home. Be happy we've taken the job. But don't abuse us by sending into unjust wars for failed policies, and then treat us like a spouse being cheated on as well as being beaten. That alternation between body blows and half-assed complementry apologies wear real thin after a while.

Honor the vets by providing jobs with livable wages, universal health care, low cost housing, and good education to all Americans. That's how you honor the sacrifices vets have made.

Don't just tell me I'm beautiful. That doesn't pay the bills, nor does it repay my service to the country.
On edit:
Oh, by the way - at least half the vets have never "been to war"; they may have supported a combat action or spent their career "supporting the peace" at a communications, training, maintenance, medical, or supply unit.
They were tools that were kept in case of trouble but never used. Does this make the sacrifices of their time and years of their life any less important than someone who had actually had been shot at and had shot back?
Perhaps this is why so many "armchair warriors", the Cold War rug-huggers and buttercups who spent their service safe out of harms way end up as right-wing hawks when it comes to other people's lives. They feel slighted that they spent their four to six years on base and weren't able to play "Audie Murphy" (and you know how he ended up) and actually understand what war is like - and suffer like the thousands of broken Korea era, Vietnam era, and now "Iraq era" Vets that are now reduced to living on freeway offramps because of lack of mental health care, good paying labor jobs, and affordable housing.

Haele