We should always honor our veterans, not just on Veterans Day.
As of Nov. 8, ironically around Veterans Day, a technological glitch has robbed 82,000 deserving veterans of their promised aid from the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA).
The VA is an organization dedicated to providing veteran services which can take the form of health care, education and training, employment help, pension, housing assistance and life insurance. Specifically, this particular promised financial support was part of the GI Bill, which aims to help veterans pay for college, graduate school or training programs.
Although the glitch itself was accidental, the payment delays are the results of dispiriting carelessness. By creating a Forever GI Bill in 2017 that included additional benefits for veterans such as the removal of the eligibility expiration date and more money for various awards, President Donald Trump alarmingly created a backlog without upgrading the VA’s technical capabilities to accommodate the new bill. When Trump taxed the VA’s 50-year old computer system, it crashed to create a catastrophe with an estimated 360,000 veterans not receiving full payment, as reported by NBC News.
To add insult to injury, this technological malfunction was not a mistake made by Trump but rather a symptom of a poorly organized VA. For one, after Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Opportunity Curtis Coy retired from the VA in 2017, the department unwisely cut the position entirely. As a result, there is currently no one communicating directly to veterans or lobbying to higher officials about organizational issues. The lack of a position so integral to communication speaks volumes to the internal state of a program that is supposed to be giving back to those who have served our country. Adding onto this pressing matter are the 45,000 jobs in the VA that remain vacant. Ultimately, these internal issues highlight a disheartening neglect for our veterans.
While the VA’s staffing problems clearly show a lack of care for our veterans, the military budget remains the national focal point as it grows larger than ever. The U.S. Senate voted June 18 to increase the 2019 military budget to $716 billion, an $82 billion increase from 2017. This upward trend correlates with America’s trigger-happy attitude to hastily place soldiers in battle-scarred areas such as Iraq and Syria. Veterans rightly deserve to have a portion of this cash influx. A country so eager to improve the current military must not forget those who have served in the past.
Though combat veterans may not be serving in active duty, their battles are not over when they return home. Unfortunately, most encounter a handful of mental problems because of the traumatic nature of war. The Research and Development Center for Military Health Policy Research reports that 20 percent of the veterans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from either major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that veterans make up 20 percent of national suicides. The responsibility of the VA is to prevent these very tragedies, but the organization falls short because of irresponsible government neglect. If the government actually cares about veterans as much as they care about recruiting active-duty personnel, these veteran misfortunes would likely cease to exist.
Those who have bravely made sacrifices for the U.S. should be remembered and celebrated, not discarded and forgotten. Asking people to serve their country is already enough; they should not have to deal with a slew of issues back home. The government must stop asking its citizens what they can do for their country and instead look back to those who have already given up everything.