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Meredith Leyva's work with military families recently as led her to a troubling conclusion: Poverty is growing among the ranks of deployed service members, especially those who have been seriously injured in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"This spring our caseload of both military families and wounded warriors doubled," says Leyva, who is the founder of Operation Homefront, a Santa Ana, Calif., charity that helps military families through 31 chapters nationwide. And, adds Leyva, whose husband is a Navy physician, "We saw a significant change in the types of cases. We're now seeing many more complicated and high-dollar crises that are compounded by deployment after deployment."
Meredith Leyva, founder of Operation Homefront. (CinCHouse.com/Operation Homefront)
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Operation Homefront served approximately 1,700 families of wounded service members in 2006, Leyva says, and "over half and possibly more were living in poverty."
As for the 1.5-million-member military as a whole, however, little if any hard data exists on the extent of poverty in military families during the current conflict. Much of the government information on issues like food stamp use among military families predates the war.
Indeed, the financial health of military families can be a highly complicated and nuanced issue to analyze, even leaving aside the struggles of those dealing with catastrophic injury. "By any traditional measure of poverty . . . , military families are a lot better off than their civilian peers based on such things as age and education," says Joyce Raezer, chief operating officer of the National Military Family Association, a policy advocacy group in Alexandria, Va.
Still, she says some military families may be on the "financial edge," often because "they're young and financially inexperienced" and perhaps "prey for financial predators." Others may be strained by relocation demands that put them in temporary financial straits, she says
"My sense is that you don't have folks living in poverty so that day in and day out things are inadequate," says Raezer. "But it can be episodic, where they're strapped for cash because of the military lifestyle, financial inexperience and predators."
Most military families are ineligible for food stamps because the military housing allowance puts them over the eligibility threshold, Raezer notes.
Even so, in fiscal 2006 food-stamp redemptions at military commissaries rose about $2.3 million over the previous year, to $26.2 million. While it was not clear what caused the increase, three military stores affected by Hurricane Katrina and other storms accounted for more than 80 percent of the increase.
In May, U.S. Reps. James McGovern, D-Mass., and Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., introduced a bill that would expand spending for federal nutrition programs, including a provision that would exclude combat-related military pay from income calculations for food-stamp eligibility.
National Guard and active-duty families can feel financial strain differently. Lt. Col. Joseph Schweikert, state family program director for the Illinois National Guard, says "there are definitely families that go through financial hardships, sometimes due to deployments. But it varies from soldier to soldier, family to family. Some make more while deployed."
Nonetheless, at least 30 percent of Guard soldiers suffer a financial loss when deployed, he says.
Because the Guard offers a college-scholarship program, many young soldiers enlist, get a degree and then enter a well-paying career field. When they are mobilized, their pay may drop sharply. "It causes the family to go through a lot of hardships," Schweikert says, especially if the soldier doesn't have savings or a spouse's income to rely on.
Wounded soldiers and their families attend a get-together sponsored by the Texas chapter of Operation Homefront at Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. (CinCHouse.com/Operation Homefront)
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Still, he suggests, many Guard members can be more stable financially than active-duty troops. Guard soldiers tend to be older and to have established civilian careers. Moreover, a working spouse will not have had to uproot periodically from a job, as often happens within the active-duty forces.
"In active duty, a lot of time you have to transfer from base to base, and it's hard to establish a long-term career," Schweikert says.
Nonetheless, military families in both the Guard and regular forces may find it hard to avoid financial ruin, especially in cases of serious injury suffered in war.
When a soldier is deployed, a spouse may have to pay others to do jobs the soldier performed at home, such as mowing the lawn and maintaining the car, Leyva says. And if a soldier is wounded, she says, "his pay immediately drops while the expenses skyrocket." Often, a spouse takes leave from a job or quits altogether to be at the wounded soldier's bedside or to help the soldier through rehabilitation, spending long days or weeks away from home.
"Service members were never paid well," Leyva says, "but these extraordinary crises certainly overwhelm."
Leyva fears that poverty among veterans will skyrocket in the wake of the current war, as it did after the Vietnam conflict. "I think we're going to see a whole new generation of disabled veterans that are sort of the mirror images of the Vietnam veterans," she says. "It's as much about mental as physical wounds," she says, and it could lead to a new "generation of poverty."
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