Because, quite a few of the current homeless veterans are suffering from untreated and undiagnosed PTSD.
Trust me, PTSD can royally screw someone up. To the point of either homelessness or prison. And for many years, the VA didn’t recognize that PTSD existed, partially out of congressional guidance and cost cutting reasoning.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-05-04-new-homeless_N.htm
You mean these homeless? The homeless nowadays include lots of people who once had good jobs and prospects.
Young men and women from the neighborhood around my downtown shop (the neighborhood ranges from blue collar to as poor as it gets) regularly join various branches of the military out of the homeless state. Usually, the kid has been couch surfing with family and friends until they get their diploma, but sometimes they have joined while living in a shelter either with their family or alone.
True, but for that to happen somebody has to identify the body as belonging to a veteran. Obivously a John Doe will still get sent to Potter’s Field.
They take a recruit’s fingerprints during inprocessing, at least for Air Force BMT. Presumably that all goes into a database that police could have prints checked against if it came to it.
I had lunch with a formerly homeless friend today, and asked him about this. He says he knows two or three people from the streets that joined the armed forces.
I asked him how they handled it if they didn’t have an ID - he said the recruiters walk them through a process, which includes fingerprints..specifically because it can lead to a positive ID through other databases.
*Second hand information, of course..
-D/a
I suppose the homeless could be drafted, in a situation like the Soviets faced circa November 1941 or the Germans faced circa March 1945.
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.
ZPG Zealot writes:
> Young men and women from the neighborhood around my downtown shop (the
> neighborhood ranges from blue collar to as poor as it gets) regularly join
> various branches of the military out of the homeless state. Usually, the kid has
> been couch surfing with family and friends until they get their diploma, but
> sometimes they have joined while living in a shelter either with their family or
> alone.
Does anyone have any actual statistics about what sorts of people join the U.S. military? Statistics, not anecdotes. If we’re just going to throw around anecdotes, we’re never going to get anywhere. The anecdotes given by Sarabellum1976 and ZPG Zealot are wildly different from my experiences. I work as a civilian in the U.S. Department of Defense. I’ve met many enlisted military over the past three decades. None of them resemble the descriptions given above.
In my experience, people who enlist in the U.S. military are passibly smart people who, had they grown up in an upper-middle-class family, would have definitely have gone to college. Their doctor or lawyer or businessman parents would have been pushing for them to go to college from the moment they were born. Instead, having grown up in a working-class or middle-class family (and rarely in a outright poor family), they didn’t get as much encouragement to go to college. They didn’t get absolutely perfect grades in high school (sometime because they didn’t work as hard as they should have), but they were smart enough to make it in college.
Sometimes they just didn’t know what they wanted to study in college. Sometimes they were just sick of school. Some of them were goof-offs in high school who didn’t even realize that they were reasonably smart people who could have done the work if they had tried harder. Sometimes, because no one in their family had gone to college before, it more or less didn’t even occur to them to go to college. Sometimes they were convinced by others that joining the military was a way to earn money for college. Some of them tried college briefly but didn’t work hard and dropped out.
None of them were homeless or in a truly bad living situation. Of course, this is just my experience, which may not be typical either. Does anyone have any real statistics about this?
Well, when I said “bad living situation” I suppose that I meant anything from outright homelessness, couch-surfing or abusive situations, to not having any education or skills that would allow one to move on, move out, become independent, and start out life on the right foot.
The military is kind of a fall-back for these kids. It’s a way to get somewhere in life if you don’t have more attractive options. That’s all I’m saying.
Or, less desperately, but probably more likely to pick up a homeless man, the British Navy for the last half of the 1700s and first quarter or so of the 1800s.
Sarabellum1976, I just spoke to someone who has been in the military recently, and he says that the sort of situation you describe is not common at all. Very rarely are they homeless. Rarely do they come from abusive homes. Sometimes they don’t know what they want to do with their life, but that’s not close to being in a bad situation. Their family isn’t treating them badly, but they haven’t thought through what they want to do in the future.
He says that the situation that I describe is probably true of most people who enlist in the U.S. military. They are at least passibly smart people from reasonably happy homes. Most of them are clearly smart enough that they could make it through college if they were motivated. The worst thing that their families may be saying to them is “Isn’t it time you figured out what to do with your life?”.
It was easy to find statistics on race and education levels for the US military, but I turned up little on economic status of recruits. According to the DoD, though:
“On the socioeconomic side, the military is strongly middle class, Gilroy said. More recruits are drawn from the middle class and fewer are coming from poorer and wealthier families. Recruits from poorer families are actually underrepresented in the military, Gilroy said.”
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/demographics.htm
Ok, but why should that mental illness (PTSD) that has been left undiagnosed or untreated be more or less important than a non-veteran’s undiagnosed and untreated mental illness? If you wan to blame congressional guidance and cost cutting for the illness not being diagnosed, that’s why people were turned out of institutions.
I don’t understand why it’s more tragic for a person who has served to be homeless than one that hasn’t.
Chowching, I think it would be difficult but not impossible. Your homeless recruit will have to be fit and able to pass a drug test and medical at some stage of the process. They can’t have outstanding law issues and a many types of law trouble would put them out of the running immediately. They would need to pass an aptitude test so they probably need to have a knowledge equivalent to completing middle school. (WAG) Many banches of service like artillery or engineering need higher scores. They need to successfully fill out forms fully, dotting the I’s, crossing the Ts, so they need to put something in the address line. Pretty sure you also need something for next of kin. In the US you might be able to communicate exclusively by E-mail but I got all my appointments by mail.
Your recruits chances would be made or broken by the recruiter, I think. A sympathetic or desperate recruiter would help the recruit with their special requirements where one dealing with a heap of recruits would probably not make the extra time.
Having jumped through all these hoops then your recruit needs a space in the military to go into. I have no idea what this situation is like in the US, In New Zealand where I am there are currently more applicants than spaces. It took me about a year to get on a basic course. The recruits who had the best portfolios would be put forward by the recruiters to fill the regional quota. The best way to jump the queue was to score well on the fitness tests and indicate you were a responsible member of the community e.g head boy of the school or something.
Finally, security clearance will be required at some stage. You need to give out heaps of personal information and references.
There aren’t many homeless people in NZ. In a place like NYC, I think they would probably be more prepared to deal with homeless people and might have procedure to help suitable ones in.
Note all those hoops to jump through in the first paragraph. Through all that, you have to convince the recruiter that you are a worthwhile find. A fair percentage of non-homeless people fail, and they would have it far easier.
Jaguars! writes:
> They would need to pass an aptitude test so they probably need to have a
> knowledge equivalent to completing middle school.
It’s possible that in New Zealand you mean something different by middle school than we do in the U.S., but just getting through middle school wouldn’t be sufficient in the U.S. You have to be a high school graduate. As I said in a previous post, you can’t be someone who dropped out of high school and then later took the GED (General Equivalency Degree), which is a test that is supposed the equivalent of making it through high school, unless you then also went to college for at least one term. You would also, just like anyone else wanting to enlist, have to take the military aptitude test.
That was based on the difficulty of the aptitude test and the pass rate of the people who did it with me (It was marked on the spot) Thinking about it, They would need some really basic algebra e.g “solve X+4=7” which isn’t always taught until the first year of high school.
But your post reminded me - They scrutinize your qualifications as well, and you need all that information. Not having any high school qualifications would be bad for your application but not a killer - e.g the guy who dropped out really early and has been in a trade for ten years. As far as I know, there is no equivalence tests in NZ; If you want equivalency, I think you can take the same tests as the highschool kids.
It’s my impression that dropping out of high school and then becoming skilled in some trade is not sufficient for enlisting in the military at all. It won’t even do if you take the GED and pass it. (Although a community college will probably accept you with a GED.) You have to actually pass all the high school courses. You can take them through night classes possibly. If you pass the GED, they want you to do a term in college so they can look at your grades.