Homeless veterans seek boost in funding, services

The veterans often battle drug and alcohol problems or mental illness.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Darryl Boyd exudes strength from the shaved head crowning his 6-foot-5, 235-pound Navy veteran's body to his T-shirt's image of bulging biceps pulling a forearm free of shackles.
But look more closely, and you see the shirt's message: "Freedom from Active Addiction." Listen more closely, and Boyd speaks of a life filled with weakness: homelessness, alcoholism, crack addiction, mental illness, rejection by his family.
"Every time I'd get a fleeting glimpse of reality, it was depressing," Boyd said.
Many of the estimated 500,000 homeless among the nation's 27 million veterans share parts of that reality. More than two-thirds of homeless veterans battle drug and alcohol problems, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and nearly half contend with mental illness.
This year, they are mustering to win more respect from Washington and the public at large. A federal panel on homeless veterans presented its first recommendations in July, urging more mental health funding and improved service by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Reaching out to the streets
Veterans groups also are urging more help for former military personnel out on the streets. Among their leaders is Chuck Haenlein, a retired career Army officer and president of the board of the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans.
Haenlein also is president of the private, not-for-profit Hoosier Veterans Assistance Foundation, which houses 127 homeless vets in houses, apartments and a detoxification center in Indianapolis. Its annual budget is less than $1 million, including 30 percent from federal grants.
In June, the foundation created a new program allowing 40 veterans to stay in four- to eight-bedroom houses as long as needed while they attend a rigorous substance-abuse counseling program and receive medical care, if necessary, at the nearby Roudebush VA Medical Center.
Drug or alcohol abuse in a homeless shelter typically means eviction back to the streets. But the new program takes a different approach. It requires drug tests, but backsliders get sent down the street to a 50-bed treatment facility. They receive the second chances they need.
"There's a lot of baby steps, and sometimes a few steps backward," Haenlein said.
Groups like Haenlein's are sprinkled across the country, in many cases working with local VA hospitals to provide a continuum of care that includes medical wards, detoxification centers, transitional housing and job training. The VA in August awarded up to $8 million in per-diem payments to 44 programs in 25 states.
Mistrustful
Veterans are not immune from the conditions that lead to homelessness, including joblessness, a shortage of affordable housing and a shrinking public safety net. Many homeless vets no longer trust the government, not even the VA, said Ron Conley, immediate past national commander of the American Legion.
"The country as a whole turned their back on them ... so they've kind of dropped out of society, a large part of them," Conley said.
Surveys show that veterans overall tend to have higher incomes, better educations and lower poverty and unemployment rates than the general population, but they also have a higher rate of homelessness, the VA says. It estimates that about a third of homeless adults are veterans, mostly men.
"It's not just homelessness itself. It's alcoholism. It's drug addiction. It's mental health," said Bob Rogers, a VA social worker who helps mentally ill homeless vets get subsidized housing and clinical help.
Congress passed the Homeless Veterans Comprehensive Assistance Act in December 2001. It required the VA to provide more help for homeless vets and those at risk of becoming homeless, and to speed up their benefits claims. The law also prompted the creation of a 17-member VA Advisory Committee on Homeless Veterans.
The panel presented its first annual report in July, delivering recommendations in 30 areas. They include increasing to $100 million the total amount the VA delivers to local agencies serving homeless vets (the statutory limit is $75 million) and working with the Defense Department to counsel servicemen and servicewomen at risk of homelessness.
Veterans groups also are taking up the issue. The largest, the 2.8 million-member Legion, named a task force in January to lift the profile of homeless vets and create more programs to serve them.
In Pennsylvania, Conley heads a Legion corporation that houses 20 vets in eight homes. Since 1987, 350 veterans have passed through their doors.
"Whoever thought we'd still be involved in it 15 years later, but here we are," Conley said.
Success story
Vietnam vet Michael Williams, 53, drank his way out of a home and onto the streets of Indianapolis eight years ago. He spent a year sleeping most nights under bridges. A fellow ex-Marine found him half-drunk outside a mission and took him to a Salvation Army detox center. He cleaned himself up and began a series of jobs serving those he left behind on the streets.
Williams joined Hoosier Vets last year and treks to missions and his old haunts, persuading homeless vets to re-enter society.
"When you're in that kind of insanity, you can't even see the light at the end of the tunnel," Williams said.
Boyd has been there. He enlisted in the Navy in 1982, working as a radioman on a submarine tender.
After his shipmates learned he was gay, he tried to take his life with 60 pain pills.
The Navy discharged him in 1986, and Boyd worked as a barber. His mother threw him out when his crack habit nearly cost her her home. He lived on the streets of Indianapolis for more than a year, working as a prostitute and contracting HIV. He bounced in and out of rehab programs.
The turning point came last year. He moved into a mission and completed a VA drug rehabilitation program. He found a job moving skids of textbooks for a college and took real-estate classes on the side. The 12-step spirituality of Narcotics Anonymous resonated within him.
He hopes to pass his state realty exam in January and pursue a goal of buying properties to create transitional housing for homeless veterans.
Said Boyd, confidently pointing to his shaved head, "I've got a plan going on here."