Subject: FW: Homeless Iraq Vets Showing Up at Shelters Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 09:47:12 -0600 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD02014201CE@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Grossman, Zoltan C." <GROSSMZC@uwec.edu>
Homeless Iraq Vets Showing Up at Shelters
By Mark Benjamin, United Press International
Tuesday 7 December 2004
Washington, DC - 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 (PTSD) 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.