COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Homeless in America: 1 in 4 are Vets
Associated Press
November 08, 2007
WASHINGTON
- Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States,
though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population,
according to a report released Nov. 8.
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly
veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into
shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with
finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans
from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its
programs specifically targeting homelessness.
The Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based
the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the
Census Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of
744,313 on any given night were veterans.
In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.
Some advocates say such an early presence of veterans from Iraq and
Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took
roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the
point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry
that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly
vulnerable.
"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the
mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth,
director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.
While services to homeless veterans have improved in the past 20 years,
advocates say more financial resources still are needed. With the
spotlight on the plight of Iraq veterans, they hope more will be done
to prevent homelessness and provide affordable housing to the younger
veterans while there's a window of opportunity.
"When the Vietnam War ended, that was part of the problem. The war was
over, it was off TV, nobody wanted to hear about it," said John
Keaveney, a Vietnam veteran and a founder of New Directions in Los
Angeles, which provides substance abuse help, job training and shelter
to veterans.
"I think they'll be forgotten," Keaveney said of Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans. "People get tired of it. It's not glitzy that these are
young, honorable, patriotic Americans. They'll just be veterans, and
that happens after every war."
Keaveney said it's difficult for his group to persuade some homeless
Iraq veterans to stay for treatment and help because they don't relate
to the older veterans. Those who stayed have had success - one is now a
stock broker and another is applying to be a police officer, he said.
"They see guys that are their father's age and they don't understand,
they don't know, that in a couple of years they'll be looking like
them," he said.
After being discharged from the military, Jason Kelley, 23, of
Tomahawk, Wis., who served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard,
took a bus to Los Angeles looking for better job prospects and a new
life.
Kelley said he couldn't find a job because he didn't have an apartment,
and he couldn't get an apartment because he didn't have a job. He
stayed in a $300-a-week motel until his money ran out, then moved into
a shelter run by the group U.S. VETS in Inglewood, Calif. He's since
been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.
"The only training I have is infantry training and there's not really a
need for that in the civilian world," Kelley said in a phone interview.
He has enrolled in college and hopes to move out of the shelter soon.
The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be
women, less likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to
have mental illness - mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said
Pete Dougherty, director of homeless veterans programs at the VA.
Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA's homeless programs have
a diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a
substance abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.
Historically, a number of fighters in U.S. wars have become homeless.
In the post-Civil War era, homeless veterans sang old Army songs to
dramatize their need for work and became known as "tramps," which had
meant to march into war, said Todd DePastino, a historian at Penn State
University's Beaver campus who wrote a book on the history of
homelessness.
After World War I, thousands of veterans - many of them homeless -
camped in the nation's capital seeking bonus money. Their camps were
destroyed by the government, creating a public relations disaster for
President Herbert Hoover.
The end of the Vietnam War coincided with a time of economic
restructuring, and many of the same people who fought in Vietnam were
also those most affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs, DePastino
said.
Their entrance to the streets was traumatic and, as they aged, their
problems became more chronic, recalled Sister Mary Scullion, who has
worked with the homeless for 30 years and co-founded of the group
Project H.O.M.E. in Philadelphia.
"It takes more to address the needs because they are multiple needs
that have been unattended," Scullion said. "Life on the street is
brutal and I know many, many homeless veterans who have died from
Vietnam."
The VA started targeting homelessness in 1987, 12 years after the fall
of Saigon. Today, the VA has, either on its own or through
partnerships, more than 15,000 residential rehabilitative, transitional
and permanent beds for homeless veterans nationwide. It spends about
$265 million annually on homeless-specific programs and about $1.5
billion for all health care costs for homeless veterans.
Because of these types of programs and because two years of free
medical care is being offered to all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans,
Dougherty said they hope many veterans from recent wars who are in need
can be identified early.
"Clearly, I don't think that's going to totally solve the problem, but
I also don't think we're simply going to wait for 10 years until they
show up," Dougherty said. "We're out there now trying to get everybody
we can to get those kinds of services today, so we avoid this kind of
problem in the future."
In all of 2006, the Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 495,400 veterans were homeless at some point during the year.
The group recommends that 5,000 housing units be created per year for
the next five years dedicated to the chronically homeless that would
provide permanent housing linked to veterans' support systems. It also
recommends funding an additional 20,000 housing vouchers exclusively
for homeless veterans, and creating a program that helps bridge the gap
between income and rent.
Following those recommendations would cost billions of dollars, but
there is some movement in Congress to increase the amount of money
dedicated to homeless veterans programs.
On a recent day in Philadelphia, case managers from Project H.O.M.E.
and the VA picked up William Joyce, 60, a homeless Vietnam veteran in a
wheelchair who said he'd been sleeping at a bus terminal.
"You're an honorable veteran. You're going to get some services,"
outreach worker Mark Salvatore told Joyce. "You need to be connected.
You don't need to be out here on the streets."
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of