Louisville, Ky. – This Veterans Day the nation is remembering our servicemen and women.  With the latest technology, severely wounded soldiers are surviving and living longer, but some of those same Veterans say they feel forgotten. 

Most of the memorials are reserved for the dead, but living Veterans are coming home, and they need help.  Troops are coming home alive now more than ever before, and while that is great news, it also comes with a high price tag to care for them.

It’s hard not to honor the dead-the Veterans who gave their lives for this country-but it can’t come at the expense of the living.

Andrew Horne’s a Louisville lawyer, a marine and an Iraq War Veteran, so he’s seen it first hand.

“I didn’t lose any troops there, I lost a lot of Iraqis.”

Whether they’re military or medical, advances in technology mean lives spared on the battlefield.  Only one in ten soldiers injured in Iraq dies.  That is the lowest rate in U.S. war history.  But ironically, it’s created an unprecedented problem: more numbers than perhaps ever before of seriously wounded soldiers coming home.

Louisville’s Congressman, John Yarmuth, says the figures are set to be staggering.

“It’s going to be a huge challenge for us, we’ve had estimates that the cost of treating the Veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan will reach a trillion dollars.

But right now, he and the rest of Congress are trying to beat back presidential budget cuts, which would take money away from Veterans care.

Though America may never be able to repay them for their service, war Veterans say that the country can’t afford to forget it, either.