The biggest tragedy in America today is the abandonment of our national heroes. We send our troops out to fight and when they come home they are left with nothing. Our government turns their back to them leaving them to fend for themselves. The amount of homeless veterans in this country is sickening. We as a nation need to protect them like they protected us. We as a nation need to fight for them the way they fought for us. We as a nation need to remember our heroes. Veterans have fought for this country for many gruesome wars. When our veterans returned from World War one and World War two, they were greeted as heroes. For example, Doc Hastings said “ we owe our world war 2 veterans-and all our veterans-a debt we can never fully repay.” …show more content…
It seems that the passing of time has not helped the suffering of many veterans. In fact, statistics show that 60,000 veterans have killed themselves. Also, in a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (2004), combat veterans “continued to die at greater rates and remained especially vulnerable to drug overdose and accidental poisoning”. This is due, in part, to the way in which the Vietnam War was fought and how veterans were dismissed, even scorned, by American society when they returned home. Unlike previous wars, the Vietnam War was a battle “that could not be won” and “whose warriors came home, not to honor and glory, but to taunts and demonstrations,” only to later be “spurned and neglected by a welfare program geared to returning heroes”. These soldiers had seen and experienced things so horrible, such as gunshot wounds, torture, captivity, loneliness, and depression, they could never be fully articulated. Their arrival home was often bittersweet because although they were grateful to leave the jungles of Vietnam, they had to quickly assimilate themselves back into a society that did not want nor care for them. Most importantly, they had to get to know their families again, perhaps even meeting their children for the first time in years: War had changed all of them.