BRETT QUINZON did two tours in Iraq before leaving active
duty in May. Originally from Minnesota, Mr Quinzon now lives in Thomaston, a
small town around 65 miles south of Atlanta. A grey December morning found him
filling out forms in Atlanta’s large veterans’ hospital, seeking treatment for
depression. Since returning from Iraq, he says he has “more anger issues”, and
finds himself “more watchful and on-guard in public situations” than he was
before he deployed. That is not unusual: many soldiers return from the
battlefield with psychological scars. Between January and May, as he prepared
to leave active duty, Mr Quinzon applied for hundreds of jobs. The search
proved difficult: like many veterans, he enlisted right after high-school, and
lacks a college degree. But persistence paid off. He is now an apprentice at a heating
and air-conditioning company, and is being trained as a heavy-equipment
operator.
Not all recent veterans are so lucky. Around 800,000
veterans are jobless, 1.4m live below the poverty line, and one in every three
homeless adult men in America is a veteran. Though the overall unemployment
rate among America’s 21m veterans in November (7.4%) was lower than the
national rate (8.6%), for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan it was 11.1%. And
for veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it was a staggering 37.9%, up from
30.4% just a month earlier.
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