Veteran or Victim?

The headlines read: Veterans are more likely to be homeless. Vets make up a quarter of the homeless but are only 11% of the general population.

This is part of a general movement to identify soldiers and veterans as victims. It began with John Kerry's Winter Soldier movement. They distributed fliers to parents claiming that being drafted would turn their innocent sons into drug-addicted murderers. This has evolved. Now veterans will spend a lifetime trying unsuccessfully to adjust to civilian life. This ties in with the liberal assertion that the only people who join the military are poor minorities who have no other choice. Micheal Moore made this a major point of Fahrenheit 9-11. Kerry was referring to this when he told a group of college students that if they dropped out they would get "stuck in Iraq" (he tried to claim that he was referring to President Bush who has a Harvard MBA).

How seriously should we take this new study? The details are not available yet but I can see one immediate flaw. They compared the proportion of homeless veterans to the proportion of veterans in the general population. This is guaranteed to inflate the proportion of homeless veterans. Why? Because most homeless and men and most veterans are men. By comparing two groups that are mainly men to the general population you throw the proportions off.

According to the article, veterans are 11% of the population. Assuming that 10% of veterans are women (I will admit up front that this is a guess) and assuming that half the population if men (it's actually lower than 50%) then veterans make up 20% of the male population. If 20% of the population makes up 25% of the homeless then the numbers no longer seem seem so alarming. For a real apples to apples comparison I would have to know the proportion of the homeless who are women but you get the idea.

Buried deep in the article and glossed over is an important point - there are 50,000 fewer homeless veterans now than 20 years ago.

2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.

That seems like good news.

Something else that is never stated - most of these veterans never saw combat. Between Viet Nam and Iraq we only had a few major combat operations. Only one a few involved ground fighting, mainly the Gulf War and Somalia and that was limited. That's what made me question these figures in the first place. I work with a lot of veterans. None of them seem damaged by their military service. In fact, that's where they received the technical expertise that qualified them for their current job.

When I was growing up and most veterans were from WWII the feeling was that having served made you a better man. That was back when we had respect for the military.