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Imagine spending the prime years of your youth surrounded by death, destruction, and anger and to have those things not only be caused in part by you but aimed towards you. Imagine watching orphaned children being used as soldiers send to end your life while you are there trying to fight for theirs. Imagine feeling perhaps a great calling to defend and honor your country, to fight for the freedom of the soil you feel runs through your veins. Imagine being young and in need and having your very country fill your heart with the hope of it's endless promises of your fulfilled future in return for just a couple of years of your time. Now imagine you have survived this hellish nightmare called war and return home to the country you have given your youth, innocence and faith to and discover that for everything you gave to your country; your country has nothing to give to you. And then to furthermore discover that since you spent your youth in battle and not in books that the job market sees you as nothing more then a one time fallen hero with nothing of sustenance to offer it. You turn to your country for aide and it turns a blind eye to you. Now what will you do? How will you eat, live, sustain yourself if you cannot gain employement?

This is the problem that countless American veteran soldiers face every day, year after year and generation after generation. The United States Department of Veteran Affairs estimates that on any given night in American 200,000 US veterans are completely homeless. That means that roughly 23% (as of 1999 US government estimates) of all homeless people sleeping in streets, alleys, under bridges and anywhere else in the United States at one time or another in their lives proudly wore their country's uniform and serviced their country at war. Of these homeless US veterans, nearly half suffer from some sort of mental ailment or illness as a result of the situations they faced at war. Almost 90% of these homeless heroes received Honorable Discharge for the service due to an injury or illness that was a direct result of their service. According to that same VA estimate, another 225,000 US veterans are incarcerated at any given moment in time and housed within the US jail system. Upon release, the majority of those go on to become homeless.

Another problem facing many war veterans is deportation. That's right, despite their one time illegal immigrant status, undocumented men and women are given temporary citizenship so that they can fight for

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