Our nation has an imperfect record of honoring its war heroes — those who have worn the cloth of our country and made sacrifices of home and personal comfort to defend our freedom.
As a nation, we’ve become better at taking care of those sons and daughters of service since the shameful way they were treated after their return from Vietnam. But with new wars fought in new ways, we have to address their new needs with new tactics.
When we look back on this period in our history, it will show the highest population of amputees since the Civil War.
Traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress are just now being identified, with a rising rate of suicides among veterans and service members — as many as one a day.
Clearly, our war veterans need more than ticker-tape parades and streets named in their honor.
They need jobs. Education. Access to health care for their unique and sometimes debilitating injuries, including burns, amputations and the growing problem of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, the signature wounds of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Every November, we recognize Veterans Day as an annual opportunity to focus our energies on our military men and women. Unlike Memorial Day, which is reserved for honoring the dead, Veterans Day is an opportunity to celebrate the living.
We see it as a day whose spirit should last for the other 364 days of the year.
New York City is now celebrating its first-ever Veterans Week NYC, a comprehensive set of events to honor our veterans and military service members for an entire week. The celebration runs through Wednesday.
With tomorrow’s New York City Veterans Day Parade as its centerpiece, Veterans Week NYC 2012 marks the first time that both new and time-honored events — all devoted to celebrating, thanking and honoring our nation’s veterans and active-duty military personnel — have been organized under one comprehensive banner.
The events will include seminars, forums, concerts, tours, screenings, symposiums and special benefit galas.
Sponsors General Electric, Citigroup, Google, Veterans Advantage and the USO have all put time, energy and considerable funds into organizing programs that reach directly to veterans and their families. They provide not just a thank-you, but something as valuable as a job interview; assistance filling out paperwork to save their homes from foreclosure, or finding a child a path to financial aid for college.
Our veterans are a deep, broad and talented worker pool. Not unlike the “Greatest Generation” that returned from World War II to build a new nation, this group of veterans is skilled, disciplined and hungry for new challenges.
Having worked in remote parts of the world, in foreign cultures and with some of the most advanced technology and tools available, they stand poised to catapult our country forward at a moment when it desperately needs it. Their skills can play a role in writing a new chapter in our economic recovery.
This month, when you stop to thank a veteran for his or her service, take a moment more to ask how he or she is doing. Ask if you can help. Vets represent the less than 1 percent of us who protect our freedom. Perhaps you are a part of a similarly small fraction that might be able to assist them.
Gerry Byrne is chairman of Veterans Week NYC. Frank Taylor is an Air Force Brigadier General (ret.) and chief security officer for General Electric.