Here in PA, at least in Allegheny county, I know that unclaimed bodies are usually used by med students and mortuary students.
Why should they be more or less allowed to be homeless than anybody else?
I’d actually buy a TV to see that.
You understand incorrectly, then. There’s no bureaucratic dance that’s going to wipe out the pending charge and the military will wait until the civilian judicial system id done with the person before processing an enlistment. Not so long ago, there was a case where a judge attempted to do this and it fell through because the military doesn’t play that game.
One of our sergeants when I was going through tech school said that especially during recessions, the military gets to be super picky about who it recruits. There is absolutely no benefit to accepting someone who is only joining to get out of serving time for a crime he committed when they could be recruiting folks with clean slates who are showing up at the recruiter’s office voluntarily.
If they have an untreated psychiatric condition, as a lot of vets do, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame it on them. I know it took a while to accept that war itself can cause these problems, and I’m sure there are still some veterans left who became alcoholics before that acceptance.
And it’s something that’s accepted medically, but not necessarily socially. There’s still a stigma attached to mental illness, PTSD, etc. and a lot of people don’t get the help they need even if it is available because of the perception of being “weak”.
Indeed, that is a big problem that the military is trying to deal with, institutionally. As it is, the tools and services are there to help (I don’t know how well they do, not having done any research into it, and not having any real personal need to seek them out, but they are there), the big problem is fighting the stigma to get people to seek it out.
On top of your normal run of the mill psychological issues that war, deployments, and the military in general can cause for some folks, you also have to deal with things like brain trauma, which itself causes psychological issues (think of the brain like a computer’s hard drive, and think about how giving the hard drive a good thwack might cause things to not work as designed anymore). Sometimes it can be hard to convince someone that they need to take time off work to see the doctor, both for concerns that they don’t want to appear weak or malingering, especially for less obvious things like internal brain injuries (“It’s just a headache, I’ll take some motrin and I’ll be fine.”).
But yeah, people who have served in the military, and then find themselves homeless, is not quite what the OP was asking about, unless I suppose the homeless person decides that three hots and a cot in return for being shot at or getting sent to far from home doesn’t seem so bad. I’m actually kind of curious now as to whether that ever comes up now.
I knew several former street kids - teenages who had run away or had been kicked out of their homes, due to abuse, religion, sexual orientation or any combination of the above - when I was in the army. They probably could have avoided the draft (not having a fixed address helps), but they chose to join anyway. Tough kids, usually.
I was going to ask around this morning..we had a volunteer day scheduled at my community garden, and one of the other guys used to head the Broward County homeless outreach program..and now helps run a non-profit doing the same thing.
But the weather SUCKS, so we aren’t going to the garden.
I’ll try to remember to ask next time I see him. I’ll ask a few of the homeless guys I know in the mean time, but that will be more anecdotal..
-D/a
The U.S. military is currently quite selective in their recruiting. One of my nephews, a Marine who’s done a tour as a recruiter, says that the Marines won’t take a high school dropout right after they pass the GED. They insist that such a person do one term at college so that they can look at his grades before they let this person join.
That’s the Marines, though… aren’t the Marines and Air Force a bit pickier than the Army and Navy? I bet the Army would take a kid with a high school diploma that’s couch surfing because he’s got no real place to live. I would venture to say that MOST of the kids who join the Army do it because they’re trying to escape a bad living situation.
How does the military feel about homeschooled kids? Anyone know?
A friend’s kid who was home schooled up through maybe 4th or 5th grade, and then eventually graduated from a public high school, was recently accepted to the Air Force Academy. His older brother, who was home schooled to 6th or 7th grade enlisted in the Air Force a few years ago, too. That’s probably different from somebody home schooled all the way through high school, but the Air Force certainly didn’t mind it for the earlier grades.
Sarabellum1976 writes:
> I would venture to say that MOST of the kids who join the Army do it because
> they’re trying to escape a bad living situation.
Cite? This doesn’t match my experience at all.
Serious question that occurred to me: If a homeless person tried to sign up, would the absence of an address to put down on the form technically disqualify them? Sure, they could make one up, and I recall back in Hawaii that the Waikiki Health Center, which did a lot of outreach, allowed the homeless to use them as a “home address” for job applications and the like. But if the field were to be left blank, how would that go down? And some of these people don’t even have ID proving who they are.
Quite a few homeless and chemically dependent veterans are suffering from PTSD that remained untreated. Hence, “what happened to them is their own doing” is incorrect and indeed, damaging. You damn the men who protected this nation for having a mental disability from their experiences.
Unless you think watching a buddy get blown apart doesn’t have an impact or killing other men doesn’t have an impact. Or watching families caught in the crossfire doesn’t have an impact or many other thousands of things that are experienced.
Erm, this is about homeless persons being in the military. Were that the case, they would NOT go to a “Potter’s field” or medical research.
There is this really large place called Arlington National Cemetery. There are also OTHER National Cemeteries that can be used, such as one close to his home of record.
That said, it’s beyond unlikely that a homeless person would ever be permitted to serve, as there is no permanent home of record, background checks would be essentially impossible, hence no clearance could be granted and many homeless persons have, a police record, drug use history or mental illness.
Though the mentally and physically healthy numbers of homeless persons HAS begun to swell during this economic depression, they’ve not increased THAT much.
Meanwhile, the military is beginning a draw down in strength, hence will be EXTRA picky on new volunteers and those accepted are typically having in excess of a year wait to depart to basic training.
One of the many thousands of contingency plans includes a TOTAL mobilization of the NATION to war. It’s a tapered scale, where the ENTIRE economy literally goes to a war footing (WWII was a NEAR total mobilization).
At the most extreme, younger teens are permitted to join and there were suggestions for under the most dire of conditions, even younger.
That said, by the time we reached THAT point, we’d have pretty much every able bodied adult armed and fighting, with most industries shut down.
As to the probability of that EVER happening, considering the current global conditions, it would be more likely for the sun to instantly turn red giant than for such a dire emergency to strike. Even the Yellowstone supervolcano popping its cork wouldn’t be dire enough for the young to be drafted.
There are no such thing as unclaimed military bodies. If there is no family to claim them, they get sent to a National Cemetery for burial, with the normal military honors.