Decades after the GI Bill transformed American society after World War II, another generation of veterans is returning home -- more than 800,000 as of last summer. What they find is quite different from the comprehensive benefits that once covered all the costs of an education, from undergraduate straight through Harvard Law. The current GI benefit covers just half the national average cost for tuition, room and board, veterans' advocates say. "It falls dramatically short," said Eric Hilleman of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Half of Vets Suffering Brain and Mind Injuries Go Untreated, But Pentagon Pretends Nothing's Going on...

A number of Democratic senators said they were appalled at e-mails showing Katz and other VA officials apparently trying to conceal the number of suicides by veterans. An e-mail message from Katz disclosed this week as part of a lawsuit that went to trial in San Francisco starts with "Shh!" and claims 12,000 veterans a year attempt suicide while under department treatment.

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Another e-mail said an average of 18 war veterans kill themselves each day - and five of them are under VA care when they commit suicide.

The email was disclosed Tuesday in a federal trial at a courthouse in Northern California, where two veterans advocacy groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the VA alleging that a systematic breakdown at the VA has led to an epidemic of suicides among war veterans. These groups claim the VA has turned away veterans who have sought help for posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and were suicidal. Some of the veterans, the lawsuit claims, later took their own lives.

Veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere who say they have systematically been denied proper medical care will get their day in federal court starting on Monday in San Francisco.

Some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries, a new study estimates.

A new report Thursday reveals that Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Peake told two Democratic senators his department will not help injured veterans register to vote before the 2008 election.

What this means is that many injured veterans still in VA hospitals who can't find means to register outside of their facilities will effectively lose their right to vote. Wounded veterans who have moved must re-register at their "new addresses" or file for absentee ballots in order to participate in the presidential and other elections.

THE DEATH OF PRIVATE SCHULZE reverberated far beyond Minnesota. Charles M. Sennott of the Boston Globe declared Schulze a "searing symbol of a system that...is vastly unprepared and underfunded to handle the onslaught of 1.5 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are returning home," and wrote that the "apparent failure of the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer him timely and necessary care" raised questions as to "how a serviceman with such obvious symptoms faced a wait for hospital care."