Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters

Serve your country, then be shit upon.

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http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041207-121848-6449r.htm

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters


By Mark Benjamin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL


Washington, DC, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

"When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that."

"I drove off in my truck. I packed my stuff. I lived out of my truck for a while," Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34, said in a telephone interview from a homeless shelter near March Air Force Base in California run by U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans.

Arellano said he lived out of his truck on and off for three months after returning from Iraq in September 2003. "One day you have a home and the next day you are on the streets," he said.

In Iraq, shrapnel nearly severed his left thumb. He still has trouble moving it and shrapnel "still comes out once in a while," Arellano said. He is left handed.

Arellano said he felt pushed out of the military too quickly after getting back from Iraq without medical attention he needed for his hand -- and as he would later learn, his mind.

"It was more of a rush. They put us in a warehouse for a while. They treated us like cattle," Arellano said about how the military treated him on his return to the United States.

"It is all about numbers. Instead of getting quality care, they were trying to get everybody demobilized during a certain time frame. If you had a problem, they said, 'Let the (Department of Veterans Affairs) take care of it.'"

The Pentagon has acknowledged some early problems and delays in treating soldiers returning from Iraq but says the situation has been fixed.

A gunner's mate for 16 years, Arellano said he adjusted after serving in the first Gulf War. But after returning from Iraq, depression drove him to leave his job at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He got divorced.

He said that after being quickly pushed out of the military, he could not get help from the VA because of long delays.

"I felt, as well as others (that the military said) 'We can't take care of you on active duty.' We had to sign an agreement that we would follow up with the VA," said Arellano.

"When we got there, the VA was totally full. They said, 'We'll call you.' But I developed depression."

He left his job and wandered for three months, sometimes living in his truck.

Nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and almost half served during the Vietnam era, according to the Homeless Veterans coalition, a consortium of community-based homeless-veteran service providers. While some experts have questioned the degree to which mental trauma from combat causes homelessness, a large number of veterans live with the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse, according to the coalition.

Some homeless-veteran advocates fear that similar combat experiences in Vietnam and Iraq mean that these first few homeless veterans from Iraq are the crest of a wave.

"This is what happened with the Vietnam vets. I went to Vietnam," said John Keaveney, chief operating officer of New Directions, a shelter and drug-and-alcohol treatment program for veterans in Los Angeles. That city has an estimated 27,000 homeless veterans, the largest such population in the nation. "It is like watching history being repeated," Keaveney said.

Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that as of last July, nearly 28,000 veterans from Iraq sought health care from the VA. One out of every five was diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the VA. An Army study in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 17 percent of service members returning from Iraq met screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder or PTSD.

Asked whether he might have PTSD, Arrellano, the Seabees petty officer who lived out of his truck, said: "I think I do, because I get nightmares. I still remember one of the guys who was killed." He said he gets $100 a month from the government for the wound to his hand.

Lance Cpl. James Claybon Brown Jr., 23, is staying at a shelter run by U.S.VETS in Los Angeles. He fought in Iraq for 6 months with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines and later in Afghanistan with another unit. He said the fighting in Iraq was sometimes intense.

"We were pretty much all over the place," Brown said. "It was really heavy gunfire, supported by mortar and tanks, the whole nine (yards)."

Brown acknowledged the mental stress of war, particularly after Marines inadvertently killed civilians at road blocks. He thinks his belief in God helped him come home with a sound mind.

"We had a few situations where, I guess, people were trying to get out of the country. They would come right at us and they would not stop," Brown said. "We had to open fire on them. It was really tough. A lot of soldiers, like me, had trouble with that."

"That was the hardest part," Brown said. "Not only were there men, but there were women and children -- really little children. There would be babies with arms blown off. It was something hard to live with."

Brown said he got an honorable discharge with a good conduct medal from the Marines in July and went home to Dayton, Ohio. But he soon drifted west to California "pretty much to start over," he said.

Brown said his experience with the VA was positive, but he has struggled to find work and is staying with U.S.VETS to save money. He said he might go back to school.

Advocates said seeing homeless veterans from Iraq should cause alarm. Around one-fourth of all homeless Americans are veterans, and more than 75 percent of them have some sort of mental or substance abuse problem, often PTSD, according to the Homeless Veterans coalition.

More troubling, experts said, is that mental problems are emerging as a major casualty cluster, particularly from the war in Iraq where the enemy is basically everywhere and blends in with the civilian population, and death can come from any direction at any time.

Interviews and visits to homeless shelters around the Unites States show the number of homeless veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan so far is limited. Of the last 7,500 homeless veterans served by the VA, 50 had served in Iraq. Keaveney, from New Directions in West Los Angeles, said he is treating two homeless veterans from the Army's elite Ranger battalion at his location. U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans, found nine veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in a quick survey of nine shelters. Others, like the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training in Baltimore, said they do not currently have any veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan in their 170 beds set aside for emergency or transitional housing.

Peter Dougherty, director of Homeless Veterans Programs at the VA, said services for veterans at risk of becoming homeless have improved exponentially since the Vietnam era. Over the past 30 years, the VA has expanded from 170 hospitals, adding 850 clinics and 206 veteran centers with an increasing emphasis on mental health. The VA also supports around 300 homeless veteran centers like the ones run by U.S.VETS, a partially non-profit organization.

"You probably have close to 10 times the access points for service than you did 30 years ago," Dougherty said. "We may be catching a lot of these folks who are coming back with mental illness or substance abuse" before they become homeless in the first place. Dougherty said the VA serves around 100,000 homeless veterans each year.

But Boone's group says that nearly 500,000 veterans are homeless at some point in any given year, so the VA is only serving 20 percent of them.

Roslyn Hannibal-Booker, director of development at the Maryland veterans center in Baltimore, said her organization has begun to get inquiries from veterans from Iraq and their worried families. "We are preparing for Iraq," Hannibal-Booker said.

 

it happens every war.

 

well...the airforce is overmanned, the army is undermanned. i have no idea about the rest. the airforce gets paid the best and has the best benefits i think though. there are lots of army guys/girls/families on welfare as it is, without even having gone to war. it's a shame...we've got musicians, jocks, and politicians making shitloads of money...but when it comes to the people with some of the hardest jobs, they get shit: military, firemen (my dad's a chief), police, TEACHERS! Ridiculous. And no vets should be on the street.

 

Sounds like a typical case of money mis-management to me. When you are a wounded veteran, you USUALLY (98% of the time) get retiree pay, along with disabled veterans pay. I know someone who got back from the desert, had headaches, and got discharged, medically. He still gets the free medical. He gets 75% of E-5 pay along with disablility pay. FOR HEADACHES!

Not to mention people make between 5000-7000 a month while in iraq.

 

I had thought of that. I was reminded of the guy down here who was milking his being in the airforce for all it was worth. He has a house in Tampa but was TDY in Georgia and managed to come back home every 2-3 weeks. He was apparently neglecting his bills though, one in particular that became big news here. He hadn't paid his home owners association bill. Only 200 a year. Considerably less than most. The association put a lien on his house and he went the news. The article and tv news stories made it seem like he'd been deployed the whole time, and poor thing COULDN'T pay his bills. And the poor HOA vice president (I know her from my airforce wives site) was made to look like a greedy bitch. She even started getting harassing phone calls afterwards. One guy called and told her she was the scum of the earth for trying to kick this man out on the street and treating our servicemen so badly (her own hubby is in Iraq right now!). But the fact is he'd already neglected this payment in the past as well, so he has a history of it...and it's not like he had no funds. The vp noticed shiney new car out in front of his house at one point during all this...after they'd asked repeatedly for the payment. AND, these guys are told, numerous times, that whether they're home, TDY, or deployed, they are responsible for keeping up with their bills...some way or another. Like if Andrew gets deployed next year, his mom, since she's still a cosigner on his account, will probably take control of his bill payments...although I think he has most of them paid automatically or whatever. Anyway. The point is, when these guys go over there, they are supposed to have SOME WAY of taking care of their finances back home. Some neglect those finances, and they have to face the consequences just like if they'd been home. The reason I was reminded of this guy down here, is because of the way the news made him look like this poor guy who had no choice, and made the HOA out to be a horrible greedy entity with no heart and no caring for our poor troops. The guy was in Georgia for christ's sake. Anyway. The news is so biased it's not even funny. The paper and station down here didn't even bother to tell the HOA vp's side of the story even though they knew it. Yes of course it's a shame and disgrace that so many are coming home to nothing, but honestly I do think some of them just might be to blame. I don't know...but I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of these guys anyway, are so young...a lot of them have horrible money management skills. Then they get shipped off for months, even years. It's bound to happen to some of them just from neglecting their own funds.

 

I imagine it is diffucult to take care of your finances while halfway across the globe, especially those that don't have bank accounts or some sort of automatic bill-pay. The military should offer something like that, so there is less of a problem once our soldiers get home.

 

We are forced to have bank accounts. The only way we get paid is direct deposit. If you dont have a bank account in basic training they make you take an account with bank of america.

Also, we have people who are paid to take care of our finances when were gone. I personally just do auto-pay on everything.

 

So what could the real problem be then? Money mis-management? Nothing to go back to? I know a lot of these folks just rent apartments and not all have families. I always feel terrible to see veterans homeless, and we have a lot of them. They should be among the most respected and cared for in our society.

 

They weren't sent out on some la de da camping trip. They were exposed to the heavily traumatic environment of all out war. There is a vast difference to being TDY to some duty station still in the states and being sent into real battle. They then went untreated for various psychiatric/physical problems and shuffled off back into the civilian world. The fact is that most ex military who've never even seen war still have a period of social and mental adjustment back into civilian life. Untreated psych problems can lead to a variety of outcomes, financial mismanagement being on of those. I mean c'mon, how can you compare some guy with headaches or some guy drifting between Georgia and Florida to someone who's been through the grinder in Iraq? imo, it's just grasping at straws.

 

I was saying that the guy with headaches was a vet that was in the desert. He got out because of headaches (ones that made his body go numb, and cause him to lose his vision at times). He still got out got medical and got paid. I just dont think the whole story is being told on all accounts. Most of the time (the airforce) has classes that help you find a job 6 months prior to your discharge. Also they help deprogram you if you need it.

 

Do all branches of the military operate like that? I have been told that the air force is the best to go into if you want to do military service, I can suppose there are reasons for that. Does the army get the same help they give for the airforce?

Sorry if these seem like stupid questions, but I really have no idea having never been in the service myself.

 

They all get the same kind of service. The only difference in the services is the Jobs we do. Airforce get a little bit more pay on some things, but we all share the same benefits. I guess because were all DOD employees. Some people are just bad with money though.

Most of the time when people get screwed though are when they screw up. You can get booted for doing bad things. Then your SOL. Most of the time though the people who are booted get out with no benefits or anything. But you have to screw up pretty bad to get kicked out of the army and the marines.

 

Well let's approach the situation logically.

We know 1/4th of America's homless are veterans. What percentage of all American's in general are military veterans?

If the answer to that is around 1/4 then the number of our homeless that are veterans likely has nothing to do with their military service. If less than 1/4 of all American's are veterans, then the amount of homeless veterans is something that should be scrutinized, and an indication that there is some connection to their treatment by the military.

I did some searches, but was unable to come up with any type of ratio or percentage of Americans in our current population that have served in the military. Anyone else have an idea what the numbers are?

Edit:

After some more research it seems that there are appox. 25.5mill living veterans in the US currently. The US population is appox. 295mill

That means that about 9% of the current population are military veterans (and even less war veterans).

So we have about 9% of the total population being veterans, and 25% of the homeless population are veterans.

That is a pretty large gap...and a definite indication of a problem.

Sources for my numbers:

http://firefly.angelcities.com/VetAH.html

and

http://www.census.gov/

 

Until I returned to grad school, I was a therapist, mostly for people with Post-traumatic stress disorder (sometimes called "shellshock" when people have been to war). People with severe trauma issues - ESPECIALLY those related to war - have an extremely difficult time returning to "everyday life" after trauma. Some individuals experience flashbacks in which they believe the trauma is occuring again - some become completely incapable of working due to constant fear and anxiety - some truly "lose it" and become the folks you see muttering to themselves on the streets. These problems are SERIOUS - and if the military is providing shoddy second-rate care afterward (which I suspect is true, since budgets are constantly being cut everywhere, and also because trauma in particular needs to be addressed by a specialist with experience, not just some random military "counselor"), it makes perfect sense that vets would make up such a large percentage of the homeless population.

I think it's kind of offensive to suggest that these people are ending up on the streets because of "money mismanagement." Plenty of people mismanage their finances and don't end up homeless.

 

Thanks for posting this, Pressed Rat. It's funny how this kind of stuff isn't reported in the mainstream media, and so the ignorant population continues buying the whole 'glory' image of war. It's actually pretty sickening, that people are still duped into the military, and then once they are out, the military leaves them in the cold.

 

I don't want to sound offensive, but at least you admit that the military basically 'programs' or brainwashes you.

 

We' not trying to be offensive. I think it's horrible that so many vets from Vietnam ended up on the streets and I think it's just as horrible that so many of our Iraq vets have been following suit. We're just supposing that SOME of them may be having normal issues with their money management. We all know it happens, and as unfortunate as it is, some of the people who can't manage it well enough, end up going poor (my ex's mom comes to mind...she almost had her and her kids out on the streets the way she did things). The guy I mentioned from Tampa was just an example of such mismanagement (which he'd probably have done if he'd been in Iraq as well), AND it was mainly an example of how one sided news stories can be about such things. Like I said before, they made him out like he HAD been to Iraq and COULDN'T pay his bills, and like the HOA was being so evil to him and NONE of it was his own fault. That wasn't the case at all, but they published it anyway and got everyone in Tampa in an uproar over it. I was just throwing out the example as a possibility.

I know going to war can be horrible and can change a person, take a long time to get over when you get home. I've heard about it from the other wives, whose husbands had been over there. And PTSD is horrible and can be very debilitating, and I can CERTAINLY believe that the military doctors aren't giving them enough care for it and other things. I have never been to a military doctor of course, not being married into it yet, but all the women on the airforce wives board I go to have had PLENTY of bad experiences with them. There were a couple of really good experiences that a couple of the girls had, but the doc they visited then was usually once a civilian doctor first for quite a while. I don't know WHY military docs are so bad, but apparently they are.

 

I never intended that to be taken from my message. De-programming, is when we are told what we can and can't talk about after we leave. It deals with classified information that you may have come accross during your tour. Also during the transition from military to civilian isn't that big of a deal. We are able to leave base, its not like were in prison.

Not to mention also, many people join the military because they already have preexisting financial problems.

 

True enough on the transition for the average military member who doesn't see combat. The classes for the transition are beneficial to many. Still, you're right, there are quite a few (peacetime, non-combat veterans) that get out and still have no clue. Many of them are just young and never experienced the responsibilities of life in the first place. They join and everything is taken care of, basicly. ie... direct deposit along with no rent(barracks living), no utility bills, no family to feed, no medical/insurance issues, free food (comrats or meal passes), etc... but that's not really the militaries fault because they are given classes. They're still just young and dumb when they get out.

The issue here though, really, is untreated combat veterans which is a whole different ball of wax. Although there are actually some very good doctors in military medicine as well as enlisted individuals who are very knowledgable and diligent in treatment, it's what happens in the process. The good doctors may never see the patient or the veteran is rushed through the process in order to expedite discharge. Also one of the basic tenets of military psychology that differs greatly from traditional psych is a core ideal of treatment in order to re-introduce the patient back into combat. It's quite common that a combat soldier be sent back to medical for psych evaluation because they simply can't perform. The job is then put upon psych to help convince them to return to the battle. Think about that for a moment. it's quite ugly because it's not really treatment, it only really serves to further excacerbate the problem. Then, the enlistment is up, they're shipped stateside, given a brief evaluation, and discharged to face a serious psych crisis all on their own. It's also why you see alot of military guys that go into the psych field developing their own problems and never re-enlisting after their first term. To use psych methods to convince someone to re-enter a traumatic situation, that it's ok , has it's toll on the 'providers' too.