Mississippi's Veterans Face Tough Challenges

Published by Phoebe Judge on 11 Nov 2009 8:37am
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On this Veterans Day MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports on the struggles many of Mississippi’s veterans are dealing with on a daily basis.

There are more than 212,000 veterans living in Mississippi, and while many veterans return from service and integrate back into civilian life with no problems, thousands of others deal with a daily struggle. Louis Tanksley is commander of the Mississippi department of Veterans of Foreign Wars,

“They are just supposed to fall in, and people don’t understand when they don’t fall in, they can’t understand why they don’t they don’t comprehend why the guy has the problem that he is having.”

Julia Ann Claude is the Harrison county veterans service officer, and serves the largest population of veterans in the state. She says oftentimes veterans are so eager to jump back into daily life that they don’t take time to consider issues like post traumatic stress disorder,

“They don’t know it’s a problem that is the sad part. They don’t know they have that problem, and then when they are faced with it they really don’t know about how to go about asking for help.”

And that may lead to even bigger problems. The National Alliance for Homelessness estimates that there are 130,000 homeless veterans living in the United States, and more than 1500 of those are here in Mississippi. Melanie Willston with the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans says a number of factors play into the large figures,

“For instance you know being in a combat situation, ptsd, stressors, those types of thing, disabilities that weren’t properly treated when they came back from war. All of the things that may lead individually and combine and lead to homelessness are exacerbated by their military service.”

Soldiers are offered the opportunity to take a transition program when they come back from service which touches on a number of different issues they may face as vets and introduces them to the services provided by the VA, but the classes are not mandatory and many soldiers opt out of them.