Meanwhile support for the Troops appears to be skin deep.

Homeless Gulf war Vets you say. Must be Gulf war I vets, and sure, while tragic, some guys just can't seem to get it together and their bennies run out. Oops, were are not talking about GWI vets, but Operation Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom vets. Thanks to Rorschach for the tip. I do wonder why the Moonie Times is carrying this story.

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters

By Mark Benjamin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Washington, DC, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

"When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that."

"I drove off in my truck. I packed my stuff. I lived out of my truck for a while," Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34, said in a telephone interview from a homeless shelter near March Air Force Base in California run by U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans.

Arellano said he lived out of his truck on and off for three months after returning from Iraq in September 2003. "One day you have a home and the next day you are on the streets," he said.

Thanks for your service, now please just go somewhere else and stay out of sight. We've got real "still-fighting" troops to support. Now I just need to remember to pick up some of those chinese made support the troops ribbons, 'cause I wouldn't want anyone to think I was anything but a proud war mongering fool.

In Iraq, shrapnel nearly severed his left thumb. He still has trouble moving it and shrapnel "still comes out once in a while," Arellano said. He is left handed.

Arellano said he felt pushed out of the military too quickly after getting back from Iraq without medical attention he needed for his hand -- and as he would later learn, his mind.

"It was more of a rush. They put us in a warehouse for a while. They treated us like cattle," Arellano said about how the military treated him on his return to the United States.
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A gunner's mate for 16 years, Arellano said he adjusted after serving in the first Gulf War. But after returning from Iraq, depression drove him to leave his job at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He got divorced.

Thanks for the service buddy, but now that you are useless to the war machine just sod off already, and please stop complaining, like someone owed you sonething.