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memorial day
We Salute, Then We Abandon: The Betrayal of America’s Veterans
We’ve built a system that honors veterans with ceremony but abandons them in practice. The Trump administration’s spending priorities only make this worse.
May 27, 2025
The draft notice came on May 28, 1968—just a few days after high school graduation. He’d been working nights at the mill since February, saving up for a car. It was the first big thing he’d ever bought: a 1969 Pontiac Firebird, deep blue, four-barrel V8. He didn’t even have plates on it yet. His plan was to spend the summer driving—county roads, lakeside highways, maybe as far as Colorado if the money stretched. That was the future, as far as he could see it: a car, a road, freedom.
He figured he’d be back in a year or two. He felt certain of it—sure that the country asking for his service would still be there to welcome him home.
His uncle helped him bring the Firebird out to the farm and back it into the barn. They threw a tarp over the hood like they were sealing something up for safekeeping. When he returned, he thought, he’d pull it off, turn the key, and drive like no time had passed.
At the same moment funding was being clawed back from veterans sleeping in cars, Congress was being asked to greenlight unprecedented new spending on weapons, drones, and missile systems.
What he didn’t know—what no one tells you in the recruiter’s office or in the grainy footage of presidents giving speeches—is how long it takes to feel like you’ve really come home. Or what it feels like to live in a country that thanks you for your service but resents having to keep its promise.
That Firebird was sold 20 years ago to cover a surgery Veterans Affairs (VA) wouldn’t pay for. The barn’s long gone too. And now, in his 70s, the man who once covered that car with a tarp sits at a kitchen table with a blinking laptop and a stack of printouts, trying to navigate a benefits portal that feels like it was built to confuse him. He clicks through broken links, resubmits forms, dials numbers that go to voicemail. He’s not afraid of war anymore. He’s afraid of being forgotten. Of being told there’s no record of his claim. Of finding out too late that the service he relied on has been quietly defunded.
This year, Memorial Day arrived with its usual rituals—flag-raising, wreath-laying, the half-mast slow choreography of remembrance. But beneath the ceremony, something else is happening. Just days after taking office, the Trump administration launched a freeze on federal financial assistance across dozens of programs, including those housed within the Department of Veterans Affairs. Memo M-25-13 ordered agencies to halt disbursements for any grant or aid program considered inconsistent with the administration’s values. No list was released. No criteria published. By 5:00 pm the following day, payments were to stop.
The impact on veterans was immediate and severe. More than 44 VA-supported programs were effectively frozen overnight. The Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF)—a backbone initiative that helps tens of thousands of veterans each year stay housed through rental assistance, case management, and emergency aid—was halted. The Grant and Per Diem (GPD) program, which funds transitional housing, peer mentorship, and reintegration for unhoused veterans, was put on hold. Legal aid clinics that help veterans resolve fines, access overdue benefits, and prevent evictions had their funding suspended or marked for review. Suicide prevention programs lost staffing and stability. Hotline response times lengthened. Providers pulled back outreach. Veterans called in, asking the same questions over and over: Is my housing still covered? Is the program still running? Will anyone still pick up the phone?
In many cases, the people on the other end didn’t have answers. Some had already been laid off.
After a wave of lawsuits and public outcry, a federal court issued an injunction. The memo was withdrawn, but the strategy was not. The administration made clear that programs centered on housing, reintegration, climate resilience, or “nontraditional” care models would remain under scrutiny. Meanwhile, federal officials quietly sunsetted the VA Servicing Purchase Program—a pandemic-era mortgage relief tool that allowed the VA to purchase delinquent loans and offer more affordable terms to struggling veterans. Over 5,000 veterans avoided foreclosure because of that program. There was no press release. No transition. Just silence.
Then Trump proposed the largest defense budget in American history: over $1 trillion for 2026. It was a stunning figure, even in a country accustomed to massive Pentagon spending. But what made it feel grotesque was the timing. At the same moment funding was being clawed back from veterans sleeping in cars, Congress was being asked to greenlight unprecedented new spending on weapons, drones, and missile systems. A trillion for war. But nothing for the woman calling a crisis line after her motel voucher runs out. Nothing for the outreach team trying to find a veteran living under an overpass. Nothing for the caseworker explaining to yet another caller that the check might be delayed.
This isn’t about belt-tightening. It’s about priorities. And those priorities have consequences.
Across the country, nonprofits that deliver VA-funded services are shrinking. Some are shutting down. Others are operating with skeleton crews, working double shifts to prevent people from falling through the cracks. Suicide rates among veterans remain stubbornly high—nearly double the civilian average. Women veterans, now one of the fastest-growing homeless populations in the U.S., are bearing the brunt of service gaps and shelter closures. In cities like Phoenix, Cleveland, and San Diego, outreach teams report rising waitlists, rising anxiety, and rising numbers of veterans returning for help they were once stable enough to no longer need.
The policy is abstract. The harm is not.
This isn’t about a man and his Firebird. It’s about the distance between what we say and what we do. It’s about the uncomfortable truth that we’ve built a system that honors veterans with ceremony but abandons them in practice. A system where aid is conditional, where services are quietly withdrawn, and where the paperwork is designed to wear people down.
We do not honor the dead by abandoning the living. We do not preserve freedom by gutting the systems that make it real. And we do not fulfill our patriotic duties by breaking the promises made to the very people who upheld them.
Memorial Day has passed. But the test it asks of us—who we are, what we stand for, and who we stand with—remains.
So the question is this: Will we salute once a year and forget by Tuesday? Or will we become a nation that matches its pageantry with policy, its slogans with service, its rhetoric with resources?
Veterans do not need ceremony. They need care. They need consistency. They need housing. They need healthcare. They need legal aid. They need a country that doesn’t ask them to prove again and again that they are worth helping.
And they need it now.
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War No More: Veterans Reflect on the Meaning of Memorial Day
This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people, and its environment.
May 26, 2025
This Memorial Day weekend, Veterans For Peace is calling on its members and friends to reflect on the gravity of the day, whose official purpose is to “honor all those who died in service to the U.S. during peacetime and war.” Veterans For Peace chooses to honor ALL who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians. Our hope is that a sober accounting of the casualties of war will mitigate against the tendency to turn Memorial Day—like Veterans Day—into a patriotic celebration of U.S. militarism.
We remember the words of President Dwight Eisenhower, who during World War II, was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe:
“War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.” He also famously stated, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps General Smedley Butler took it a bit further:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the loss of lives.
Veterans For Peace is deeply familiar with the pain that emanates from the loss of those lives. We have lost too many friends in wars in foreign lands, and in their aftermath at home due to suicide and service-related diseases. We have spent countless hours with Gold Star families mourning the loss of their loved ones. We also recognize that the “enemy” killed by our bullets and bombs had family and friends who loved them too. Their pain is no different than ours.
Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over 7,000 U.S. service members have died in the wars following 9/11. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that more than 8,000 U.S. “contractors” have lost their lives in these conflicts. These hidden deaths reflect the U.S. government’s deception regarding these wars and its disregard for those who perish in them.
The more than 15,000 deaths mentioned above do not account for over 6,000 veterans who died by suicide each yearbetween 2001 and 2022, totaling more than 145,000 people, as documented by the nonprofit Stop Soldier Suicide. Veterans face a 58% higher risk of suicide than non-veterans. While military contractors experience many of the same mental health challenges as veterans, reliable suicide and mental health statistics are not available.
We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature.
Civilian casualties are much greater. We must acknowledge that in modern warfare, it is civilians who make up the bulk of the dead and wounded. The number of civilians killed by the violence in the post-9/11 wars is staggering. Brown University estimates the low end of opposition deaths at 288,923 and civilian deaths at 408,749. The total number of direct violence-related deaths is estimated to be 905,000 people. And even more people die after the wars ends.
A May 2023 Brown University study estimated that there are 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths, with a total death toll of 4.5 to 4.7 million people in post-9/11 war zones. As we mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, we will not forget that 3 million Vietnamese died in that unjust and unnecessary war, most of them civilians.
Endless war and suffering persists today, with tens of thousands dying in conflicts that are fueled by U.S.-supplied arms and “intelligence.” The U.S. was an instigator of the terrible war in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of young soldiers have perished. The U.S. continues to provide bombs and political cover for the unspeakable genocide in Gaza, where estimates of civilian death range from 50,000 to over 100,000, with an even greater number of life-altering wounds. A generation of young Palestinian amputees and double and triple amputees will be a sober reminder to the world for years to come.
Another victim of war is the U.S. economy, which is greatly distorted by the ever-ballooning military budget, now proposed to reach One Trillion Dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) a year, even as essential social programs vital to poor and working class families are being gutted.
The “modernization” of nuclear weapons is included in the budgets of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, totaling an estimated $946 billion over the next decade, and harkening a no-holds-barred era that could too easily lead to a nuclear war. Eighty years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is high time to put an to end to war before it puts an end to human civilization. War must be universally deemed obsolete, illegal, and unacceptable.
Wars will not end, however—and nuclear war will not be averted—unless there is a sea change in the thinking of the U.S. people and our political leaders. We must abandon the military doctrine of seeking “full spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe. We must embrace the emerging multipolar world and take our place as one nation among many. We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature. As the Vietnam-era poster reads, “War is not good for children or other living things.”
This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people and its environment. Rather than exalting war, we must come together to abolish war once and for all.
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Memorial Day Is a Day for Remembering the Victims of War
We remember all those who our sociopathic, delusional leaders told us were "the enemy." We remember the multitudes of women, children, the old, and the sick they obscenely wrote off as "collateral damage." We don't forget them.
May 27, 2024
Members of Veterans For Peace remember America's war dead not just once a year, but every day of our lives, with the solemnity they deserve, not the crass commercialism Memorial Day has become.
We remember the war dead and the far greater number of wounded with missing limbs and the even greater number living with invisible, lifelong devils and injuries in their heads.
We remember the lost contributions they could have made to society that they literally bottled up or destroyed in the epidemic of suicide rampant among veterans.
We remember the domestic violence caused by their devils. We remember their children whose lives were more painful and less joyful than they could have been because of those devils. We remember the way the pain echoes through generations, refreshed by each new war. We remember how our communities and our nation are so much less than they should be because of this underserved burden.
We remember all those that our sociopathic, delusional leaders told us were "the enemy." We remember the multitudes of women, children, the old and the sick they obscenely wrote off as "collateral damage."
We remember our innumerable brothers and sisters of Mother Earth who were killed and wounded: the birds, the four-legged, our family in the seas, the trees and life-giving plants destroyed without thought, the crops and animals that sustain human life.
We remember the billions of people who go without clean water, education and health care because war has stolen the money.
This year we also remember the few winners in what Marine Corp General Smedley Butler called the racket of war, the elite who delight in telling their puppets in government to order up another one. And we remember the winners’ mantra, "Even losing wars make money."
We remember all the losers of that racket, too; we remember each one. We do not remember some and ignore others. Nor do we glorify warriors or war because there is no glory in war. On Memorial Day we remember all the folly and all the costs of war.
We remember what Jeanette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, said as she voted against declaring war in 1917, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
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