Over 600,000 of those people have been treated at medical facilities of the Veterans Administration. Countless more are suffering from ailments and injuries like undiagnosed head trauma, post-traumatic stress, depression etc. More than half of the people who are homeless in the US are veterans, many of them veterans of the latest of America's endless string of wars.
It is common to hear politicians and corporate media hacks talk about how America's veterans and active-duty troops are "defending our freedoms."
This is really a load of bull.
It does no disrespect to Americans in uniform to state the truth that America's freedoms have never been threatened by Afghanistan's Taliban, any more than they were threatened by tinpot dictator Saddam Hussein, and even the terrorists who have bombed American buildings or downed American planes never threatened our freedom for a second. Any damage to American freedom--and there has been a lot of damage done since Sept. 11, 2001--has been done by our own government, and by ourselves, not by outsiders.
We need to stop referring to November 11 as Veterans Day, and get it back to what it was originally--Remembrance Day--a day to contemplate the horror and futility of war.
We Americans need to stop blindly praising people in uniform, and instead start asking what those men and women could be doing if they weren't sucking up valuable tax dollars, and if they weren't going over to desperately poor Third World countries and blowing up tens of thousands of innocent people who are just struggling to survive.
Let's just take Afghanistan. This landlocked country, one of the poorest in the world, has about 28 million people, not counting the three million refugees living in Pakistan and Iran. 42% of those people survive on an income of $1/day, or $365/year. The rest aren't much better off.
The US has, thus far, spent $364 billion dollars on the war in Afghanistan, according to the National Priorities Project ( http://www.costofwar.com /), about half of what has been spent to date on the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
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