Salon.com > U.S. Veterans

Major hurdles remain to end veteran homelessness

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:40:00 +0000

CHULA VISTA, Calif. (AP) — Arthur Lute's arduous journey from his days as a U.S. Marine to his nights sleeping on the streets illustrates the challenge for the Obama administration to fulfill its promise to end homelessness among veterans by 2015.

Lute has post-traumatic stress disorder from the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. He spent years drifting through jobs, two years in prison for assault, then 15 months sleeping in the bushes outside the police department of this city south of San Diego.

Today, he lives in a $1,235 a month, two-bedroom apartment in a working-class neighborhood. The federal government pays nearly 80 percent of the rent and mostly covers the cost of medicines for his depression, high blood pressure, and other health problems. State-funded programs pay for doctor's appointments for his 6-month-old son and therapy for his wife, who he said is bipolar.

Lute receives a Social Security check and food stamps. A Department of Veterans Affairs case manager communicates with him regularly and helps avert crises, like when Lute's electric bill jumped in an August heat wave and he couldn't afford diapers.

Sweet boy taken from her arms

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:59:00 +0000

A late afternoon sun pushed long shadows across the streets of North Danville, Vermont, where Susanne Muller had been running errands. Groceries. Auto parts store. Library. The last stop was the post office, to mail a package to her son Ian. She’d sent more than a dozen already in the short time he’d been in Afghanistan, along with 30 pounds of cheddar cheese donated by Cabot and several boxes of jerky and smoked meat from Vermont Smoke and Cure. But this package could wait. Her phone battery had just died, and she couldn’t bear being out of contact, should her husband, Clif, or any of her other six kids need to reach her, but mostly if Ian called.

She’d last spoken to him on Sunday, five days earlier. “It’s so good to hear your voice,” she had said. “I was worried about you.” She’d never told him that before. Of course she felt it; worry consumed her, and she barely slept. But she didn’t want to add to his stress, and she wanted him to feel he could share anything with her. Two days earlier, when Ian told them he’d gotten his first kill, during the March 3 firefight, she had tried to sound supportive, even let out a little cheer.

Colleges offer veterans classes to ease transition

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:15:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — The students in the Saturday morning class trickle in and, as they introduce themselves around a table, reveal far more intimate biographies than just name and hometown.

One confesses to demons he struggles to control. Another says he's here to find a community. "Forgive me," an Iraq war veteran begins haltingly. "I have to use notes. I have a brain injury."

The students are participants in a veterans writing seminar at George Washington University, where for two days they immerse themselves in the basics of the craft and learn how to plumb for therapeutic and creative purposes their experiences in places like Iraq, Bosnia and Vietnam. The class is a non-credit weekend seminar open to veterans and their relatives, but the university plans to soon adapt the model into a for-credit semester-long course for student veterans.

The seminar is part of a trend of veterans-only courses offered at colleges and universities, part of a concerted effort to cater to a population that tends to be older, more experienced and farther removed from the classroom than traditional undergraduates.

Ex-GOP Sen. Larry Pressler on supporting Obama: “Veterans were very offended” by Romney

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Larry Pressler served as Republican senator from South Dakota for 18 years, and another four in the House, but today endorsed President Obama’s reelection. Pressler, who was the first Vietnam vet elected to the Senate, has dedicated much of his time since leaving Congress in 1997 to helping disabled and homeless veterans, and says he thinks they would be worse off under a Romney administration. A moderate, Pressler voted for Obama in 2008 -- the first time he voted Democratic -- saying he was deeply concerned with the rightward shift of the Republican Party. He wrote an Op-Ed in the Huffington Post today explaining why he thinks Romney, who gave a major foreign policy speech today, would be an unfit commander-in-chief.

R.I.P. American veterans halls

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Michael Chirieleison, whom nobody calls Mike and everybody calls Mickey, is 63 years old. When he was 18, he was thrown out of the Green Beret, for fighting. Unfazed, Mickey volunteered for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, with which he would serve in Vietnam. “I thought it’d be like Italy or something,” he says of the war. “It turned out to be something completely different.” Today, Mickey is commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5195 on Van Brunt Street, in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Sal Meglio, a big, gray-haired man in silver wire frames, who once filled glass bottles with tea and sold them for whiskey on the Japanese black market—and who also works the bar at Post 5195—sometimes calls Chirieleison Mick. Smoke has so graveled Sal’s voice that his words emerge sounding squeezed, as if his diaphragm has relinquished them grudgingly. As if from a man gut-shot in battle. When he shouts, “Mick-ey! Phone!” above the din of the bar, one has the sense of a mortal emergency in progress.