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New Wars Raise Familiar Specter Of Homeless Veterans

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By ERIN McCLAM, The Associated Press

Published: January 20, 2008

LEEDS, Mass. - Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room, where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.

There was a happy homecoming, but then an accident - car crash, broken collarbone. Then a move east, close to his wife's new job but away from his best friends.

And then self-destruction: He would gun his motorcycle to 100 mph and try to stand on the seat. He would pull out his gun, a .45-caliber, semiautomatic pistol. He would lovingly clean it, or just look at it and put it away. Sometimes place it in his mouth.

"I don't know what to do anymore," his wife, Anna, told him one day. "You can't be here anymore."
Peter Mohan never did find a steady job after he left Iraq. He lost his wife - a judge granted their divorce this fall - and he lost his friends and his home, and now he is here, in a shelter.

He is 28 years old. "People come back from war different," he offers by way of a summary.

This is not a new story in America: A young veteran back from war whose struggle to rejoin society has failed, at least for the moment, fighting demons and left homeless.

A Familiar Spiral

For as long as the United States has sent its young off to war, it has watched as a segment of them come home and lose the battle with their memories and scars, and wind up without homes.

For now, about 1,500 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been identified by the Department of Veterans Affairs. About 400 have taken part in VA programs designed to target homelessness.

The 1,500 are a small, young segment of an estimated 336,000 veterans in the United States who were homeless at some point in 2006, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Still, advocates for homeless veterans use words like "surge" and "onslaught" and even "tsunami" to describe what could happen in the coming years, as both wars continue and thousands of veterans struggle with post-traumatic stress.

People who have studied postwar trauma say there is always a lengthy gap between coming home - the time of parades and backslaps and "The Boys Are Back in Town" on the local FM station - and the moments of utter darkness that leave some homeless.

In that time, some veterans focus on the horrors they saw on the battlefield, or the friends they lost, or why on earth they themselves deserved to come home at all. They self-medicate, develop addictions, spiral downward.

How - or perhaps why - is this happening again?

"I really wish I could answer that question," says Anthony Belcher, an outreach supervisor at New Directions, which conducts monthly sweeps of Skid Row in Los Angeles for homeless veterans and tries to help them get over addictions.

"I'm like, wait, wait, hold it, we did this before. I don't know how our society can allow this to happen again."

Mental illness, financial troubles and difficulty finding affordable housing are generally accepted as the three primary causes of homelessness among veterans, and in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the first has raised particular concern.

Disorders Appearing More Quickly

Iraq veterans are less likely to have substance abuse problems but more likely to suffer mental illness, particularly post-traumatic stress, according to the Veterans Administration. That stress by itself can trigger substance abuse.

Some advocates say there are also some factors particular to the war in Iraq, such as multiple deployments and the proliferation of improvised explosive devices, that could be pulling an early trigger on stress disorders that can lead to homelessness.

While many Vietnam veterans began showing manifestations of stress disorders roughly 10 years after returning from the front, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the signs much earlier. That also could be because stress disorders are much better understood now than they were a generation ago, advocates say.

Others point to something more difficult to define, something about American culture that ultimately forgets them.

This is not necessarily deliberate negligence. Perhaps because of the lingering memory of Vietnam, when troops returned from an unpopular war to face open hostility, many Americans have taken care to express support for the troops even if they solidly disapprove of the war in Iraq.

But it remains easy for veterans home from Iraq for several years, and teetering on the edge of losing a job or home, to slip into the shadows.

"War changes people," says John Driscoll, vice president for operations and programs at the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "Your trust in people is strained."

The VA spends about $265 million annually on programs targeting homeless veterans. As Iraq and Afghanistan veterans face problems, the VA will not simply "wait for 10 years until they show up," Pete Dougherty, the VA's director of homeless programs, said when the new figures were released.

'On High Alert, All The Time'

These are problems defined in broad strokes, but they can cascade in very real and acute ways in the lives of veterans.

Take Mike Lally. He thinks back now to the long stretches in the stifling Iraq heat, nothing to do but play cards and count flies. He thinks about crouching in the back of a Humvee watching bullets crash into fuel tanks during his first firefight.

It was a little maddening, he supposes, every piece of it, but Lally is fairly sure that what finally cracked him was the bodies. Unloading the dead from ambulances and onto helicopters. That was his job.

"I guess I loaded at least 20," he says. "Always a couple at a time. And you knew who it was. You always knew who it was."

It was in 2004, after his second tour in Iraq with the Marine Corps, that his own bumpy ride down began.

He would wake up at night, sweating and screaming, and during the days he imagined people in the shadows - a state the professionals call hypervigilance and that Mike Lally calls "being on high alert, all the time."

His father-in-law tossed him a job installing vinyl siding, but the stress overcame him, and Lally began to drink. A little rum in his morning coffee at first, and before he knew it he was drunk on the job, and then had no job at all.

And now Mike Lally, only 26 years old, is here, booted out of his house by his wife, padding around a Leeds shelter called Soldier On, trying to get sober.

Soldier On is staffed entirely by homeless veterans. A handful who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, usually six or seven at a time, mix with dozens from Vietnam. Its president, Jack Downing, has spent nearly four decades working with addicts, the homeless and the mentally ill.

Next spring, he plans to open a limited-equity cooperative in Pittsfield, Mass. Formerly homeless veterans will live there, with half their rents going into individual deposit accounts.

Downing is convinced that ushering these veterans back into homeownership is the best way out of the pattern of homelessness.

"It's a disgrace," he says. "You have served your country, you get damaged, and you come back and we don't take care of you."

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