My father is a pacifist. In the 1950s, he was classified 1-W, conscientious objector, and served at a school for emotionally disturbed boys. He continues to speak out against violence of all types, including war.
 
Yet for nearly his whole career as a social worker, he worked in VA hospitals with veterans in the psychiatric units. For him, being a part of the system that enables war mattered less than helping people who needed help.
 
Perhaps more than most people who never spent time in military service, he understood how expensive war is, even long after a conflict is over.
 
 
Although in 1996 the Veterans Health Care Reform Act promised VA care for all vets, demand outstripped funding. In 2002, waiting lists were lengthy and some veterans had to wait six months or more for an appointment to receive care. In January 2003, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs halted enrollment for vets without service-connected illnesses and with incomes above 80 percent of the average income in their area.
 
More recently, poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have made the news. Likewise, the VA hospital in Seattle was cited for dangerous conditions on its psychiatric wards. The problem of a lack of funding is compounded by a lack of understanding of the extent of conflict’s psychological costs to service members.
 
Poor care at any hospital is outrageous, but the inability to care for veterans is especially galling, as it represents a broken promise.
 
 
It should go without saying that the cost of veterans’ health care is a cost of war, even if those costs are incurred after a military operation is over. As the saying goes among waitstaff, “If you can’t afford to tip, don’t go out to eat.” If our nation is not willing to calculate the long-term expenses of health care for military servicepeople, it shouldn’t be  signing them up.
 
The Fiscal Year 2008 budget allots $85 billion dollars in general veterans’ benefits. This is separate from the $585 billion Department of Defense budget (plus an estimated $20 billion in unbudgeted appropriation requests).
 
Perhaps it’s just a shell game to suggest that veterans’ health care be calculated in the DoD budget, but philosophically speaking, such a move would speak volumes. It would begin to show the true costs of maintaining a national military. However, many costs will never show up on any budget line: the emotional strain on veterans’ families, the sorrow of loved ones when a service member or veteran commits suicide, the hours of extra time that injured veterans must take to perform daily tasks—things my father saw daily for many years.
 
The costs we don’t have to bear ourselves are the costs we must not forget.

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