Vets as “Urban Warriors”
I’m sure you’ve read about the terrible death toll and of the rising violence in Chicago over the last few weeks. There have been 171 homicides so far this year and over 1300 wounded in the city. In comparison, there have been 34 US deaths in Afghanistan this year.
The Stars & Stripes writes about a group calling themselves “Urban Warriors” on the mean streets of Chicago. It’s a group of veterans from the most recent wars who try to connect and commiserate with youngsters there as folks who have been under fire;
[Eddie] Bocanegra and his co-director, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, started designing trauma-based treatment programs a year ago across the city. By the end of the year, they will have served 400 youths and 100 parents. Urban Warriors was launched in Little Village but will expand into South Chicago at the end of the summer.
Vets chosen for the project, after two rounds of interviews, indicated a willingness to work with at-risk youths. They also suffered stress from having served. And many, having grown up in Little Village too, talked of their own scrapes with trouble or of having family members involved in violence. One, Alberto Boleres — who survived a roadside bomb near Tikrit, Iraq, in 2007 — had been shot in Chicago.
Organizers of Urban Warriors also saw a critical benefit to the veterans — providing a sense of purpose, something many who leave the military crave but struggle to find, they said.
Category: Veterans in the news
Well, I hope they at least teach the kids to shoot properly. Too many innocents are being hit by lousy shooters.
Gun control means being able to hit your target, right?
I am certain that if it is given a chance it will help at least a little bit. But with the deaths as they are it is going to take a complete crackdown on the thugs and to quit letting them out of jail because they are “good boys”…
It will also help the Veterans as it gives them others to share and work with to take their minds off of what happened to them.
It is amazing that Chicago is more deadly than Chicago…
And the libs want to blame those of us that are law abiding citizens and not the punkasses that are the cause of the problem…
“providing a sense of purpose, something many who leave the military crave but struggle to find, they said.”
So true. I struggled with that and to some point still do do struggle with it. You can take the guy out of the Army, but you can’t take Army out of the guy. As servicemembers we always will miss that sense of purpose that the military gave us.