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Anti-Empire
The SakerA bird's eye view of the vineyard
Public InquiryInterested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
Voltaire NetworkVoltaire, international edition
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homeless vets international |
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 Monday July 04, 2005 05:56 by juan wesley livingston - veterans helping homeless veterans juan8w1 at bellsouth dot net 1609 co rd 81 prattville ala 36067 3343580695
 we are located in prattvile alabama and we are just getting started we are trying to help the homeless vets in the surrounding area and around the world like alot of the people involved with this i am a veteran and it hurts my heart wheni see our fellow vets with no place to calll home or sleeping in the streets , and or eating from the trash cans these are men and women who have served there country with honor and just for some reason couldnt seem to just blend back into their lives . we want to with your help of course provide them with an alternative which will consit of first getting them off the streets and getting them to the local va hospitals and providing them with a place to stay we have a building with a facility |
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Jump To Comment: 1U.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.
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