by Edward Moses

Created on: December 31, 2010   Last Updated: January 02, 2011

FAREWELL TO CLAY, Does anyone really care?

“In life he had nothing: no money, no home, no family. In death he had a full-dress honor guard, prayers from a holy man and tears from grateful strangers. Thomas Allen Clay, a Minnesota native, Vietnam veteran and man of the streets, was buried in full military tradition Friday at the South Florida National Cemetery west of Lake Worth, the area's only veterans cemetery.”

The above statement introduced an excellent article written by the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel reporter Robert Nolin in a recent edition of the newspaper*. A well-balanced, sensitive and informative article, it dealt with a topic which, as a society, we have been trying to ignore for a very long time but yet continues to grow with each passing year.

Mr. Nolin, in a precise and accurate assessment, described the situation in the following terms:

“Clay represents a larger problem: One in four homeless people are veterans, but given the fluidity of their existence, hard figures are elusive. Estimates of their numbers nation wide, range from 107,000 to 250,000. Various groups peg Florida's homeless vets at between 8,600 and 19,000. Whatever the statistics, they are a presence in Florida, the state with the third largest number of veterans.”

Other authoritative sources have confirmed these statistics in a number of studies. The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans estimates that in any given night more than 200,000 Homeless Veterans walk the streets. Even the official Government estimates (U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs) place the numbers at 131,000 in any given night and approximately twice that number experience homelessness over the course of a year.

Many causes have been ascribed to this abnormally large percentage of the homeless population. Clearly social isolation, unfortunate economic conditions and inadequate housing opportunities all play a major role in its etiology as well as the gross inability of the V. A. system to respond to the enormous demands. But equally important, is society’s ambivalence to the peculiar needs of these unfortunate people and its desire to ignore them by consigning them, and isolating them to its rubbish heaps that is the homeless population.

Some of the causes among returning veterans that have a high correlation with homelessness are Mental Health problems resulting from Post-traumatic Brain Injuries(TBI) or Stress Disorders (PTSD) causing significant impairment in normal

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