Saturday is Veterans Day. Do you know where your veterans are? Chances are you don’t.
All told, there are a few more than 11,000 veterans in Hampshire County, less than 7 percent of the total population. If you discount Northampton, where a large number of veterans live on the grounds of the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Leeds, we’re pretty hard to find.
Across the state and nation, the number of veterans is expected to shrink from about 27.9 million in 1995 to 17.4 million in 2024. That decline is even sharper in New England, which has the second fastest decline in veteran population in the nation, with only the greater New York-New Jersey region experiencing greater decline.
How about anyone currently serving? Do you know anyone on active-duty?
Today, less than 0.5 percent of the population serves in the armed forces. Since 9/11, more than three million men and women have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, freely volunteering to serve, fully aware of the risks of their choices, many serving on multiple deployments.
In my adult lifetime, I’ve seen unprecedented public support for those who have served. In opinion polls, a vast majority of civilians say they support service members and say they thank a service member for their service when they see one. But, for the most part, the American soldier is out of sight and out of mind.
Pew Research Center surveys have shown a growing divide between military and civilian life. Several things stood out in one survey of post-9/11 veterans:
On the positive side, the post-9/11 generation is enormously proud of its service — 96 percent say they’re proud of having served. Ninety-plus percent also talk about the rewards of service in such terms as the military making them more mature, about being taught teamwork and gaining skills.
But the same group by a large percentage, 44 percent, said that they had difficulty readjusting to civilian life. When asked the same question of pre-9/11 veterans, only a quarter, 25 percent, reported that.
Thirty-seven percent of post-9/11 veterans say that whether they’ve been officially diagnosed or not, they have suffered from post-traumatic stress. Just 16 percent of pre-9/11 veterans report the same.
When asked if the American public understands what it means to serve in the military and both its rewards and burdens, eight in 10 who serve say, no — the public, they say, doesn’t really know much about us.
That’s something that concerns me and other members of a group of social service providers and experts. Called the Western Massachusetts Veterans Outreach Project, we’re troubled by the challenges faced by veterans who fundamentally feel isolated from the communities where they live when they return home from service.
Working off a set of recommendations from a statewide survey of veterans in 2017, project members are looking to implement strategies to better connect veterans to community resources and anticipate future needs. A big challenge is building awareness within the civilian medical and behavioral health care community of the elevated rates of physical and mental health problems among veterans caused by military service.
The group has sponsored several training sessions for community-based providers. But too few know about the sessions or show up when invited.
“We need more people, particularly in medical care and in human services, to know and to thereby be sensitive to military culture, and to understand how such things as military-related post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, military sexual trauma, and the like can significantly alter the effectiveness of their care,” says Larry Cervelli, of Chesterfield, the project coordinator . “We need these providers and other community leaders to know where veterans can seek follow-on care, whether it’s the VA, their local municipal veterans’ services director or a community behavioral health program.”
The project needs help from the community. It could use funding for a position to help maintain a website to identify points of entry for veteran care in our region. Creating and keeping current a database of veteran care within the community would be a gold mine.
At a recent meeting, the group discussed the idea of seeking a graduate student among the area’s colleges who could engineer a much-needed system of care that spans local, state and federal government and non-profits.
Such a system doesn’t currently exist, “and it’s readily apparent that it’s needed,” says Cervelli.
Talk to most in uniform today and especially those who have returned from a deployment and they will tell you that there is a fundamental disconnect between those who serve and the general public. They are two separate worlds in terms of culture.
Nationwide, maybe the answer for re-establishing a unified culture is some type of compulsory service. Not a draft for the military, but some mandatory period of some kind of service, whether it be a modern day version of the Civilian Conservation Corps or AmeriCorps VISTA, the national service program that works to alleviate poverty. We need to get back to what it means to serve.
If that’s too pie-in-the-sky considering the current political climate, then let’s do something locally that can leverage the wealth of knowledge in our community and our area’s strong sense of civic duty.
If you know someone who can help — someone who has the talent and drive to help us reach the less than 7 percent of those who have served — please call Cervelli at 413-582-9507. It would be the perfect way to honor veterans on Veterans Day.
John Paradis, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, lives in Florence and writes a column published the second Friday of the month. He is a veterans’ outreach coordinator for VA New England Health Care System, and can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.