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Homeless Iraq Vets Showing Up at Shelters
By Mark Benjamin
United Press International
Tuesday 07 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 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.
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