Respect, care and the debt we owe to veterans

Twice a year in Downtown Morgan Hill – on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day – local Vietnam vet Eddie Bowers organizes a ceremony at our own war memorial in the median of Monterey Road near First Street.  
Twice a year, 25 to 30 people show up to honor the fallen servicemen who have come from our community. The ceremony usually lasts about 20 minutes, includes the singing of some patriotic songs along with a recitation of every name on the memorial.  
It is also usually met by more than one questioning look from passing motorists.  Mr. Bowers, the vet largely responsible for building the memorial, puts this event on without much fanfare and without much publicity, so it could be that these motorists and many people of our community just don’t know that this event regularly takes place.        
So, after the ceremony this last November, I started to wonder, if many people don’t know about our own local ceremony to honor our vets twice a year, what else do we not know about our veterans?  
For example, most people probably don’t know that our returning vets face an unemployment rate about a point and a half higher than our national average – currently it’s 9.7% for veterans. Most people don’t know that in today’s military, the biggest killer is not combat related deaths, but suicide.  
The difficulty in readjusting to civilian life for a combat vet is of such an insurmountable burden to some, that sadly many opt for taking their own lives. Most people have no idea that administration after administration claim that they will do better for our vets, but year after year the back log of benefit applications at the Veterans Administration just keeps growing.  
At the beginning of December 2012 there were over 880,000 claims pending at the VA, up from about 400,000 in just 2009.  And with the final pullout from Afghanistan not expected until 2014 this problem is only expected to get worse.  
One recent case I read about detailed the ordeal of one vet’s family to secure benefits he needed for nursing care.  After two years of paperwork and runarounds on his claim, this WWII vet was finally granted the assistance he had earned – three months after he died.  Sadder still is that even with this large number of claims the VA estimates that about two-thirds of veterans in need of some kind of care, either physical, and in most cases psychological, are not getting the care at all. Many others silently suffer never receiving help or waiting decades to avail themselves of the benefits they rightly deserve.  
The good news is that, as is usually the case where our government fails, there are private citizens, like Eddie Bowers in our town, who will pick up the slack. As a nation we have seen an explosion in private charities since 2001 that cater to the needs of our returning veterans.
According to CharityNavigator.com there are now more than 100 major nonprofit groups working for our troops, veterans and their families.  Many of these groups offer housing, counseling, education, and job related services for our vets and their families.  
So, with Veterans’ Day having just past and the next Memorial Day being five months away, why raise this issue now? A simple gesture I witnessed following the latest downtown ceremony might illustrate why.  
After attending the ceremony with my father, who is a Vietnam vet, I decided to take him out to breakfast.  We were sitting in Just Breakfast waiting for our check, my dad wearing an old Army jacket, when our server came up and gave me the bill that was about half of what it should have been. With one arm filled with plates and the other holding a coffee pot, she nodded in the direction of a young man sitting directly behind us, and said that my father’s breakfast had been paid for by this total stranger. That is respect.  That is the kind of respect and attention that all our vets deserve from our government, and from us as a citizenry and not just every May and November.  
That is why I raise the issue now.  Because for what our veterans have done, and for what our service members continue to do, there can never be an untimely reminder to us of the debt we owe to them and of the respect and care that they deserve.  
                      
Author Jeff Nunes is an attorney at Rusconi, Foster & Thomas, APC in Morgan Hill. He is a graduate of Live Oak High School and lives in Morgan Hill with his wife and two children.