By Sam McClain
“Thank you, Jesus,” Veteran Caesar Hill, who served on two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers from 1977 to 1983, kept repeating those words in his sleep during his first night in a homeless shelter, after two weeks on the street during the winter of 2004.
Earlier that year, after working in the Chicago Department of Human Services and another agency, Hill lost his job in a system wide layoff. He then used up all of his savings in six months during a fruitless job search. He gave up most of his belongings and started sleeping in his car.
After a police officer twice urged him to seek help, he went to the Lakeview Community Shelter, where he stayed for a month. His life dramatically improved when he moved to the Lincoln Park Community Shelter for a year—because it was a safe place, he said—to rest, catch up on his nutrition, and work as a substitute teacher in the Chicago Public Schools.
“The life-saving hand up that they offered me—coming up that dark, jagged, slippery, rough side of the mountain, ascending from the unknown, the zone of darkness, homelessness—I greatly appreciated it,” Hill said.
Across the U.S., one in three homeless individuals are veterans, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. And the federal Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that 260,000 vets are homeless at some point during the year (130,000 at any given time).
“This is a national disgrace,” said Hill, who now serves as the community liaison at St. Leo Campus for Veterans and is on the consumer commission of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness. “Here are military men and women that have put themselves in harm’s way, and then they come home after ample service and find themselves in another war—a war on poverty.”
Homeless vets are mostly male (96 percent) and come from poor, disadvantaged communities, according to the VA. Forty-five percent suffer from mental illness, and 50 percent have substance abuse issues.
According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, homelessness among vets is caused by a complex set of factors affecting all homeless persons: an extreme shortage of affordable housing, livable income, and access to health care. In addition, many vets are living with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and substance abuse, paired with a lack of family and social support networks.
During his 2008 campaign and transition into the White House, President Obama emphasized “zero tolerance” for homelessness among veterans. A VA summit in Washington, D.C., November 3-5 promised to focus on interagency collaboration and community partnerships in order to end veterans’ homelessness within five years. Legislation in Congress would provide $200 million annually for supportive housing, including case management, as well as 20,000 rental vouchers for very-low-income vets.
The most effective programs for homeless and at-risk veterans, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, are community-based, nonprofit “veterans helping veterans” groups. These programs feature transitional housing along with the camaraderie of living in structured, substance-free environments with fellow veterans who are succeeding at bettering themselves. Because government money for homeless veterans is currently limited and serves only 1 out of every 10 who are in need, it’s critical that community groups reach out and provide support.
Peer support programs work because no one but a veteran can understand what a soldier or sailor has endured. Much like Alcoholics Anonymous, people with PTSD need to learn from others who are similarly afflicted how to live without self-destructive behavior, said David Rogers, executive director of Vet Net.
An offshoot of a group of veterans who have all had PTSD, Vet Net has worked toward better benefits for vets for over a decade at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago. It’s been funded by the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs to set up 20 veteran support groups, starting with Chicago and its collar counties. On November 11, Veterans’ Day, Vet Net will start another group at StreetWise.
Veterans need peer support, Rogers said, because “war is a unique thing with its own set of rules, non-rules, and soul-changing experiences on the battlefield. The average person, Joe Public, hasn’t a clue unless [he has] been there, done that. You will not get the soul-changing experience by watching a John Wayne movie.”
World War II movies with people dying in “sanitary” ways, “fighting to the last man,” are just “propaganda.” “They didn’t show all the body parts lying around, the triple amputees, the people burned over 70 percent of their bodies, the maggots in the wounds—the realities of war,” said Rogers, who served in a combat support hospital in Yokohama, Japan, during the Vietnam War.
He remembers feeling “hopeless and impotent” when wounded soldiers came in and he knew he could only say kind words or hold their hand. He then had to write letters home to the soldiers’ families.
Years later, while working as a fire department paramedic, PTSD set in and he had to leave his job, eventually becoming homeless.
Though his PTSD hasn’t gone away, creating support groups keeps it from destabilizing Rogers’s life. “To be in a position to create these oases where people can actually talk about things they bring home that are problematic, that open the door to the soul, [is] a blessing to me, my therapy.”
Vietnam veterans can often feel like failures, “the champion of the lost cause, the big lie.” They can spiral down into homelessness because “once you have lost your friends in being part of man’s inhumanity, experienced yourself in your primal state, you can just be disillusioned to the point where the only way you can get to sleep is to drink yourself to sleep or dope yourself up with pharmaceuticals or street drugs,” he said.
For StreetWise, Vet Net will set up a full service center that will be able to connect veterans and their families to all the services they might need, from housing to legal representation, whether from the VA or state or private sources.
“We want to give them something more than a doughnut, give them the opportunity to regain their lives, the opportunity to reclaim their spirit—the gift of life and peace with your soul.” Caesar Hill said that veterans need “a place to live, to hope, rest, heal, and learn.” Stable, long-term living arrangements are essential to the rehabilitation and transition of veterans from homelessness to self-sustainability, he said.
After his year at Lincoln Park Community Shelter, Hill entered the supportive housing program at Heartland Human Care Services, where he spent another year, spending 30 percent of his income on rent. But his income from teaching over the summer didn’t allow him to live on his own, so he returned to the Lincoln Park shelter for six months, until he learned about St. Leo Campus for Veterans. He moved into St. Leo’s and stayed for a year and a half before he was offered a job at the residence as community liaison.
St. Leo’s offers long-term transitional housing exclusively for veterans and provides wraparound services for its residents. Besides 141 units of housing, it features a community-based outpatient clinic, outpatient primary-care services, job training, computer access, a workout facility, and meeting rooms. St. Leo’s personnel provide case management, job development and job skills training, mental health services, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation meetings.
St. Leo’s also houses an extension of the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. Located in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, at 7750 S. Emerald Ave., St. Leo’s and its veterans’ clinic are able to serve a large portion of Chicago’s veteran population on the South Side.
“St. Leo’s wants to get people back into the normalcy of society,” Hill said. However, it’s the only supportive housing of its kind for vets in the country.
The residence was initiated under the federal Homeless Veterans Assistance Act of 2001 as the first of five such projects in the nation. To date, however, it’s the only one completed, in large part due to the donation of the former St. Leo the Great Church, convent, and elementary school by the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago; other partners included the VA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Financing also came from Illinois Affordable Housing tax credits, the Illinois Housing Development Authority, the Federal Home Loan Bank affordable housing program, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, and the Chicago Community Trust.
Biayonka Clayborne, who enlisted in the Army in November 2000, faced housing difficulties of her own when she was discharged in 2003. Trying to cope with the end of her military career, she suffered from depression, separation anxiety, prescription medication abuse, drinking problems, and family troubles, all while attending classes at Truman College and working two jobs. As her housing situation became more precarious, she reached out for help but found it difficult.
“I’m an honorably discharged veteran. I should not be in this situation,” she said.
In addition to personal pride, she explained, many veterans don’t seek help for conditions such as PTSD because of opportunities for future service. So even if they’re suffering from psychological problems, they won’t go to a VA hospital because they’re afraid of losing opportunities for monetary gain byre-upping for service—whether National Guard or Active Reserves.
Female veterans face even more obstacles: many VA hospitals don’t offer obstetric or gynecological services, even though the number of female vets is growing. As of September 2007, women comprised 7.4 percent of all veterans; the largest group served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only 44.2 percent of those vets has signed up for health care with the VA, which started a separate women’s health center in 1994, but Clayborne wasn’t able to get obstetric treatment at her VA hospital in 2004.
The number of homeless veterans far exceeds available housing opportunities, but with this month’s VA summit and proposed legislation in Congress, there could be a movement to fund more residences such as St. Leo’s.
“Consider the rain,” Hill said. “It’s a drop and then another, and it forms a puddle of care. It runs off into a brook, it runs into a stream, to a river, to an ocean of humanity that touches every shore. This can be done.”
Reprinted from StreetWise
Photo from sneakerdog
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