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I imagine most of you have been so tied up with elections that you have not had much time to plan Veterans Day coverage for Saturday. Here is a jumpstart for you.

Here's a brief history of Veterans Day and a letter from a witness of the first burial at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in November 1921.

The Ballooning Cost of VA Health Care

The Houston Chronicle reports:

New reports are showing another stunning surprise: the price of benefits and care for our returning veterans.

America spends $2 billion a year in disability payments for veterans of the first Gulf War. That conflict, which lasted about a month, produced around 200,000 veterans eligible for benefits. The current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan threaten to send home a far greater number of disabled vets, at a cost that will haunt Americans for decades.

So far, about one in five returning soldiers has been at least partially disabled, The New York Times reported. According to recent research by Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard economist Linda Bilmes, disability benefits for veterans injured in Iraq will cost $122 billion.

"To put it bluntly: We believe that most veterans from this war will file for disability compensation," Stiglitz said. "That projection is based in part on the first Gulf War, for which over a third of veterans filed.["]

The cost of war will include round-the-clock, lifetime care for thousands of soldiers with severe brain, spinal and other injuries. Tragically, there is an unusually high number of these veterans: Advances in body armor now allow soldiers to survive horrendous injuries that otherwise would have killed them. About 20 percent of injured veterans from the Iraq war have returned with such injuries to their heads and spines. In all, lifetime care for such servicemen and women will cost $35 billion.

Already, the researchers note, Veterans Administration hospitals are overwhelmed by returnees needing care. In the first quarter of this year, 144,000 Iraq war veterans have sought the health care they earned. That's 23 percent more than the government projected for all four quarters of this year.

Last month, USA Today reported:

More than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment, according to the Pentagon's first detailed screening of servicemembers leaving a war zone. (Related: Troops screened as never before)

Almost 1,700 servicemembers returning from the war this year said they harbored thoughts of hurting themselves or that they would be better off dead. More than 250 said they had such thoughts "a lot." Nearly 20,000 reported nightmares or unwanted war recollections; more than 3,700 said they had concerns that they might "hurt or lose control" with someone else.

These survey results, which have not been publicly released, were provided to USA Today by the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine. They offer a window on the war and how the ongoing insurgency has added to the strain on troops.

Overall, since the war began, about 28% of Iraq veterans -- about 50,000 servicemembers this year alone -- returned with problems ranging from lingering battle wounds to toothaches, from suicidal thoughts to strained marriages.

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Get Local

Find the nearest Military Order of Purple Heart chapter using this map. Who is in charge of Veterans Affairs in your area? Use this site to find state and local VA directors.

The U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs has lots of other great information. Here are some fact sheets to get you started:

Memorial, Burial

Title	Date	HTML	PDF	Word
National Cemetery Administration	Mar 2006	Web	PDF	Word
National Cemetery Facts	Jan 2006	Web	PDF	Word
National Cemeteries -- Historic Places and Landmarks	Aug 2005	Web	PDF	Word
Headstones and Markers	Apr 2005	Web	PDF	Word
How VA Establishes New National Cemeteries	Apr 2005	Web	PDF	Word
Military Funeral Honors	Apr 2005	Web	PDF	Word

Miscellaneous

Title	Date	HTML	PDF	Word
War Statistics (America's Wars)	Nov 2006	Web	PDF	Word
Records Center Fire (St. Louis, 1973) and Lost Records	Oct2006	Web	PDF	Word
Homeless Veterans Programs	Sep 2006	Web	PDF	Word
Facts about the Dept. of Veterans Affairs	May2006	Web	PDF	Word
Women Veterans Population	Oct 2005	Web	PDF	Word
Business Programs for Veterans	Aug 2005	Web	PDF	Word
VA Voluntary Service	May 2005	Web	PDF	Word
State-by-State Summary of VA Programs and Facilities	2004/2005	Web	N/A	N/A

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POW/MIA

On Veterans Day, let's also remember those who are POW/MIA. Here is an extraordinary state by state list of those who were officially designated MIA in Vietnam. How have families coped with the uncertainty for all of these years?

The Library of Congress also keeps a database that is searchable by the name of the MIA.

The National League of POW/MIA Families says on its Web site:

At the end of the Vietnam War, there reportedly were 2,583 unaccounted for American prisoners, missing or killed in action/body not recovered. As of September 1, 2006, 1,798 Americans are still so listed by the Defense Department, over 90% of them in Vietnam or in areas of Laos and Cambodia where Vietnamese forces operated during the war.

There are, of course, other MIA's from the 1991 Gulf War, Korea and World War II. You can get the names of and details about those soldiers from the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

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Grave Locator

To search for a specific person buried at a VA cemetery, just go here and enter the name of the person you are searching for.

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Veterans by the Numbers

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 24.5 million veterans in America in 2004. Nearly 2 million of them were women. And 9.5 million were older than 65.

Find more figures here.

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Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
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