Becoming homeless

I had heard too many stories from our homeless veterans about the things they were going through on the street and no matter how much I tried to understand, I haven’t had the same experience they would be having. I also had wrote this down originally in a journal that I kept while I lived homeless. That journal was stolen with the backpack I had, right at the tail end of my homeless experience. That backpack had almost everything I was keeping on me while I was living homeless including cellphone, digital recorder and clothes. I had lots of pictures of homeless veterans on that cell and recordings and it was all gone in an instant. I wrote down what I could easily remember in another journal of VETERANch ideas that I had in my SUV and I am transcribing it from there to here. What I needed was the experience that homeless veterans were going through exactly because just showing up and giving out food and water was not giving me the perspective that they had. Many people I knew thought it was crazy or unnecessary for doing this but when I put my mind into doing something, I would not give up based on personal wants or comforts and only a few close people understand why I am the way I am.

I kept my apartment but I wanted to see how long it would take to save enough money to get a veteran on their feet if they were living clean on the street. I know living clean is not the general way living on the street happens but I was doing this to ideal standards. I kept my apartment also because I had a pair of cats and I went there daily to feed, refresh water and clean the litter but that was basically it, unless I took one of the homeless veterans there to do laundry and grab a diet mountain dew until those ran out. I paid all my apartment utilities and rent as usual and kept my job managing marinas. I fed myself as any other homeless guy would who did not have a refrigerator…. one fast food happy meal at a time. I actually gained weigh at the beginning but once I started eating cleaner, I lost weight. I lived in and out of my GMC and on the nights where it was too cold or too rainy, I slept inside it, cold and miserable. Most nights, I slept in my tent or right under the stars. Luckily, I lived by a state park that had campgrounds and put my tent right on the edge of where beach sand met brush, bushes and vegetation. I can not remember how many times I was woken up because I was caught in a torrential Florida downpour and my tent leaked and for some reason, no matter where I moved inside the tent… it leaked right on my head.

First thing I noticed was that it was so hard to save money while I was homeless and I had a stable job but maybe it would not be as hard if I was not paying rent and utilities on my apartment. It probably equals or levels about the same if you account that homeless veterans are either gig working or panhandling change while they are homeless and not have a stable income. I figured out what it took to rent an apartment and saving two thousand dollars for first month, security and utility deposits took me just at six months of living out of my truck and eating out of a bag, to have enough saved for a one bedroom apartment.

The only time I questioned myself why I was doing this? was during cold wet weather and once Florida got humid in the spring it became hard to sleep when you are hot and sticky from humidity. I had a perfectly good air conditioned apartment with running water and electricity, a soft bed, television for gaming and a couple cats that were just waiting on me as soon as I had saved enough. The temptation to go home was huge but I put my mind to doing this, so my stubborn ass was doing it.

One of the biggest complaints I heard from any of the homeless was about the amount of thievery of their personal belonging that happened constantly and homeless people were almost all guilty of doing the same thing they complained about with the exception of most homeless veterans. Homeless veterans tend to stay to themselves more and protect or hide their valuables and personal paperwork if they are not dragging it along with them. I finally experienced my stuff being swiped during my last two weeks out there and that was when my backpack was stolen that had one of my old cell phones, digital recorder, clothes and notebooks of my writings. It happened as I had taken a hard nap on the beach and was using my pack as a pillow. Whoever snatched it, probably grabbed it because my head was not using it as a pillow that I regularly had been doing. I can not imagine not waking up if someone lifted it from right beneath my head. I was more mad at myself for letting it happen than was mad at the person who had stolen it because I had lost so many pictures of the homeless veterans and video of them. I will not take pictures of the homeless veterans unless I get permission and most of the new veterans do not trust people are not trying to use the pain of being homeless to further their own personal gains and it is not what I want them to think about us.

I wanted to talk to the homeless veterans and hear their experiences to find answers to why they were homeless and why they were not in shelters or programs. I met some amazing homeless veterans while I was out there and they were all around characters. It is hard to get homeless veterans to trust or talk to you if you are not a veteran yourself and they do not trust easily. I had ten homeless veterans that I had almost daily interactions with. Jo-EL, John, Legs(who had none), SteveM, Dave went by Davey, Zee(think it was for Zachariah), W B, (never heard him called anything but that), P P(Pog Pete), Mikaela and David were always together. These were just the ones that lived local but I met every age range and war era of homeless veterans. Most of the homeless veterans I met were Cold War and Gulf War veterans but I ran across veterans from Global War on Terror to Korean War veterans. The sadness that I felt when I met a Korean War veteran who was in his eighties, barely able to stand, let alone walk, living on the street. It is indescribable and hurt me to my soul and it still hurts thinking about it now. I had also heard about World War II veterans living on the street but never had met one in the area I live. At least half of the homeless veterans I have met are dead now as I type this and when I hear that, it is usually many months after and from another homeless veteran I have met. We should be ashamed of ourselves. and our government even more so. These men and women have given the world the freedoms we enjoy daily and we can not even make sure they do not die cold and alone on the street. Beyond pissed and beyond saddened does not even come close to the way it makes me feel.

I asked if any of them had a history of problems with alcohol? 9 out of 10 had problems with alcohol abuse but one of them would not drink at all, 6 out of 10 had illicit drug use problems, almost all had complained that they thought the VA was over-medicating or miss medicating them and only one was not sure that any of the medication worked, 5 out of 10 thought they had or had at some point, an opioid addiction. Everyone said a series of bad decisions led to them being homeless and drugs or alcohol was one of the bad decisions. Most did not want or did not know how to stop or they hadn’t tried any of the drug and alcohol programs that the VA or county had currently. The longer the term of homelessness, the better the chance that they had been in a program before and had failed or been kicked out of one. Another of my questions to everyone was this, If there was a living ranch type program like VETERANch, would you go, make the effort to stay clean so that you could get back to a stable living situation? All of them, every single homeless person I asked answered YES and notice I said person and not just veteran. I explained the goal and the general premise of VETERANch and all of veterans were more than interested. Every one of them said they apply right then If I had a place like I was describing to them. Even if they hated the cold and loved the beach, they were more than ready for a program like the one I was talking about. Every veteran that I had met while I was out there, I tried to get healthy, clean and clothed. They were constantly asking me how I could be homeless if I was taking them to Wal-Mart or target for toiletries, underwear, socks and stuff to put in backpacks? When I told them I had an apartment and I was doing this to find out exactly what they were going through living on the streets. I was jokingly asked, are you sure it isn’t you that needs the mental health? When I would take them to do laundry at my apartment, we went through my closet for shirts and the stuff I was not wearing anymore and by the end of those six months, I didn’t have any clothes I didn’t wear left. We would meet up at the jetties across the street from my work or the shopping center and take the bus to the drop off next to the marina I work at so they would know where they could go and get a shower and change. If they wanted to show up at 9 A.M. to do some work at the marina, I would pay them to clean the place up, and do light work. At the end of each night, we would go our separate ways and I would go down to Henderson beach campground where I was staying. I tried to get the homeless veterans to go to the campground because I had zero problems with police trying to move me like they did to them and it was a 45 minute walk on the beach to get to work. I would also ask the homeless veterans about their moving patterns like summer or winter migrating but most of them had moved from the northern states in the winter to here or farther south for some but most found this area good to them all year, even though it got unbearably hot in the summer months for me, they took it on just fine. Even though, I really was not homeless, homeless and I had a stable income so I did not have the need to panhandle to meet my basic needs of food and water, I can not properly explain why I felt the embarrassment that I felt during the whole homeless experience but it was probably more like ashamed and if I felt that shame and embarrassment, surely they did too. Unlike most of our homeless veterans in my area, I also could use my vehicle to stay in during the rougher weather and I could clean up while I was at work. To this day, I still pay homeless veterans who show up to my work to do work and let them clean up and then get them a meal before I give them a backpack full of supplies.

Another question I had for them, was why were they on the street and not in a shelter? The answers were generally the same as I always had heard before. Lack of shelters in the area or knowledge of the locations. During the time I did this, there was not shelters in the area unless it was a winter cold weather shelter. The other thing that I had heard more than I wanted was that there were a few sexual predators in the shelters in the area they had traveled from because the government and city run shelters could not turn them away. The homeless veterans I met had knew they would have future problems in shelters because predators would not be turned away and because most of them had kids and could not listen to predators compare stories of conquests. This problem is not just a civilian shelter problem because I heard veterans shelters have it too. Check the bureau of prisons website and you will see how many veterans are in prison for a type of sex crime. The most negative and hate filled comments I got on the VETERANch Facebook page were about those statistics and were from people getting butt hurt because they did not want to believe the statistics and I was framing veterans in a bad light. None of the homeless veterans wanted any thing to do with the homeless shelters that had predators staying there and I can not say I blame them for it. I was told of all the problems that the homeless veterans had with shelters and some of it was the adjustment of living around civilians who did not understand that veterans have lived a scheduled and structured life before and have very specific routines to their life and needed personal space that can not be intruded upon. Most shelters also have a zero tolerance policy about drugs and alcohol and not being sober when checking in. If you break those rules, you had a single chance and if you were caught sneaking drugs or alcohol in, they didn’t just make you leave, they would not let you come back. I had heard about some shelters giving chance after chance but from what I gathered, those were church based shelters. Most of the homeless veterans that I met, had heard of or had been in a VA shelter program. Those VA programs were very much the same as a zero tolerance shelter for alcohol and drugs and when and if you got caught abusing, they booted you from the program and would not readmit you. At VETERANch we will have a zero tolerance stance on drugs and if you got caught abusing them, we do not want to boot you, but to get you into a rehab and keep your spot open to come back to, as long as you complete that program. If you are not willing to go to rehab to get help, then we have no other option but offer your spot to someone who does want to get better and back onto their feet and become a stable member of society. The kind of system we are building only works, if you are willing to put in the work to get better and financially stable. There will not be an alcohol ban but we will have a system where we use non alcoholic beer when we are sitting around going over the day. We do not want them to feel left out or alienated for having alcohol problems and want them to feel like they can be part of the group.

For every question I asked, I was asked at least one back about VETERANch. How come Montana or why not here? The horses was my number one reason. Everyone knows horses can take heat. Just look at our desert and high desert states. Horses are everywhere but in high humidity and higher temperature states, not so much work can be done when you are looking at using PTS therapy horses. Horses like humans, have trouble when heat stroke can be an issue. Montana is cooler and drier in the summer months and in the winter, colder and snowy but if you have a horse breed that can tolerate colder weather, you can do therapy year round. For us, we are looking at Norwegian Fjord horses for their tolerance to people, therapy and colder weather.

My last questions that I had to homeless veterans whom I gained trust, usually had to deal with the law enforcement issues they had experience with. Most homeless veterans had been to jail for drug or alcohol related issues like public intoxication, theft and assaults. The first is pretty self explanatory and none of the veterans held a grudge or bad thoughts towards the police who were just doing their jobs. They sometimes would report theft because someone had stolen their packs but more often than not, they did not. Theft is probably the biggest problem a homeless person has to deal with and that is throughout the whole spectrum of homeless population. Not that there is much value of the items stolen because they are homeless in the first place but personal pictures and paperwork that can not be replaced is invaluable to the person who has their stuff stolen. What I heard from the veterans that were homeless was, if someone had asked for something, they would probably just have given it to them. As I stated earlier, it even happened to me. Sometimes it was the business they were camped behind clearing out the tents and garbage but if they did that, they usually put them in a separate bag on top of the dumpster but that depends on the level of empathy the people cleaning up things have. Physical altercations have become a worse problem in the last few years as the level of mental health problems the homeless have , has increased. This seems to be from the lack of a good mental health outreach programs. Most homeless veterans have at least a blade on them to defend themselves but when they have interactions with law enforcement, that can be a problem. Our county sheriff and city police departments have a pretty decent rapport with the homeless veterans and help out when they can. They have brought food, blankets, shoes and socks down to the homeless and defuse a lot of problems and do try their best to keep tabs on them. If I can’t find the homeless veterans for a few days, I just ask the deputies and sooner or later, one of them will have a location for me.

After six months of being homeless, I had enough money saved to go home but my experience out there made me more determined to make VETERANch happen. With the money I had saved, I paid the costs of the IRS 501c19 paperwork and Montana non-profit business paperwork to start VETERANch.

Today, I basically still have the same questions and conversations with our homeless veterans as I did while I was out there but now with the location of my second job in the afternoon, they know where they can find me at the marina and Vapor Master if they need food or water. Everything that I buy is from the funds from the second job and then at night after work, I go check on them a last time to see if everyone is fed and doing alright.