The cost of war is great, and it is far more than the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on planes, tanks, missiles and guns.
The cost of war is more than 6,800 service members who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost of war is caring for the spouses and children who have to rebuild their lives after the loss of their loved ones. It’s about hundreds of thousands of men and women coming home from war with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, many of them having difficulty keeping jobs in order to pay their bills. It’s about high divorce rates. It’s about the terrible tragedy of veterans committing suicide.
The cost of war is about supporting family caregivers for disabled veterans. It’s about 2,500 young men and women who would like to start families but are unable to do so because of war wounds.
The bottom line is that if we are going to send people off to battle, we must understand what the war experience means to their lives and do everything we can to make them whole when they return. If we can’t do that, we shouldn’t be sending them into war in the first place. That’s the contract we have with the people who put their lives on the line to defend us.
Sen. John McCain and I recently introduced legislation that addresses some of the significant problems facing the Department of Veterans Affairs. In a rare note of bipartisanship, the Senate passed our bill by a vote of 93-3. It is now in a conference committee with the House.