Please be careful lumping them all together. You asked for opinions. How about some facts. As recently as 2024, 5% of the homeless were veterans and 20% of male homeless folks were veterans. There are a lot of heroes out there, cold and hungry, and they cannot do anything about it because of the train wreck in their heads. They are not lazy drug addicts.
Yep! However, there is one vast, impregnable, and insurmountable obstacle that stands between those veterans and a better life. It's themselves. A large portion of Vets have a mindset for service and sacrifice that has no off switch regardless of their personal situations. I've dealt with a few homeless vets personally and they all do the same thing in the first sentence or in the first 10 seconds when offered help. They point to someone else and say "They need it worse than me." They would say it if they were naked in a blizzard. They would say it if they hadn't eaten in 3 days. It breaks my heart to see brothers in arms suffer, but to force them to do something they don't want to do when they've given so much already, would break it more. The hard truth seems to be that some troopers die quick on the battlefield, some die from unseen wounds after the battlefield through drugs, booze, or their own hand, and some die through the slow grind of time, loss, and remembrance. I do know one thing for certain. There is no glory in war, no winner. Only pain and suffering for everyone it touches. I don't know the answer and maybe there isn't one.
