Waging Battle Against Demons

A new wave of homeless veterans is struggling to cope

by Erin McClam and Sarah Palermo

Left, veteran Peter Mohan cries while speaking about a friend of his who was killed in combat in Iraq.

NEW HAMPSHIRE–Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room in Leeds, Mass., 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. And 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 wait for his wife to leave in the morning, draw the blinds and open up whatever bottle of booze was closest.

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 he lost 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.

In the 1970s, Ralph "Chuck" Woodruff fell into the same cycle when he returned home at 21 from the Vietnam War.

At 17, Woodruff, who now lives at the Veterans Victory Farm in Fitzwilliam, enlisted in the Navy, hoping to avoid being sent into the jungles with a rifle in his hand.

After three years of combat, he returned home and tried to finish the few remaining high school credits he needed to fully enroll as a college student.

"It didn’t make any sense to me. I was dealing with children," Woodruff said of how his 21-year-old self saw the 17- and 18-year-old students in his classes. He lasted 10 days in the summer school program before dropping out.

For years after leaving school, he wandered the country, picking up jobs as a chef in California and Florida, far from his native Massachusetts.

"I would get a job at a restaurant, and just find a lonely waitress, be real nice to her and move in with her," Woodruff said. "When either the job or the relationship went bad first, I’d just throw my stuff in a bag and leave."

Despite three marriages – attempts to settle down – the pressures of a normal family life were too much for Woodruff after the war.

And he began drinking.

In his third marriage, Woodruff said he was happy, and thought he "finally got it figured out." But again, the pressures of staying in one place, this time tied to his two young daughters, drove him deeper into alcoholism.

"I was drinking more and more as the years went by and as the pressures of being married and having two young children built. I withdrew in my self, drank more and didn’t pay the proper attention to my family," he said.

Eventually, Woodruff realized he was "just steps away from becoming a street person," and he decided to seek help from the Veteran’s Administration. He has been in three or four different government programs for vets, and calls the Fitzwilliam Victory Farm a "godsend."

But as one generation of soldiers seeks help after decades of struggling, the cycle is beginning again.

As the war in Afghanistan plods on in its seventh year, and the war in Iraq in its fifth, a new cadre of homeless veterans is taking shape.

And with it come the questions: How is it that a nation that became so familiar with the archetypal homeless, combat-addled Vietnam veteran is now watching as more homeless veterans turn up from new wars?

What lessons have we not learned? Who is failing these people? Or is homelessness an unavoidable byproduct of war, of young men and women who devote themselves to serving their country and then see things no man or woman should?

After years in Alcoholics Anonymous and various government programs and clinics, Woodruff still doesn’t have the answers to those questions.

"I don’t know the correlation between being in the service and living like I did," he said.

He managed to stay off the streets only because he was accepted to the Victory Farm project, and that allowed him to break the cycle of substance abuse, he said.

When he was living in Boston or other cities, he could easily retreat into his own thoughts, focus on himself and drown in alcohol and drugs.

"There was a bar and liquor store on every corner. An escape route was always there," he said.

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

The Civil War produced thousands of wandering veterans. Frequently addicted to morphine, they were known as "tramps," searching for jobs and, in many cases, literally still tending their wounds.

More than a decade after the end of World War I, the "Bonus Army" descended on Washington – demanding immediate payment on benefits that had been promised to them, but payable years later – and were routed by the U.S. military.

And, most publicly and perhaps most painfully, there was Vietnam: Tens of thousands of war-weary veterans, infamously rejected or forgotten by many of their own fellow citizens.

Now it is happening again, in small but growing numbers.

For now, about 1,500 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been identified by the Department of Veterans Affairs. About 400 of them 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 of them homeless.

In that time, usually a period of years, 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 down.

How – or perhaps the better question is 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, identifying homeless veterans and trying to help them get over addictions.

"It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself and everyone around me. 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 in 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.

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. And that stress by itself can trigger substance abuse.

Some advocates say there are also some factors particular to the Iraq war, like 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, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown the signs much earlier.

That could also be because stress disorders are much better understood now than they were a generation ago, advocates say.

"There’s something about going back, and a third and a fourth time, that really aggravates that level of stress," said Michael Blecker, executive director of Swords to Plowshares," a San Francisco homeless-vet outreach program.

"And being in a situation where you have these IEDs, everywhere’s a combat zone. There’s no really safe zone there. I think that all is just a stew for post-traumatic stress disorder."

Woodruff, who fought some of the same demons these newest veterans face, hopes the soldiers do right by themselves, he said.

"You can get support like I’m getting, but the bottom line is: Don’t allow yourself to begin to resent people … if they don’t understand what you’ve had to do," he said.

He recommends 12-step programs, even to veterans who are not struggling with substance abuse, because "they’re good, honest, fair steps just for life itself … you don’t have to be a drunk to follow those steps."

"I would tell (returning veterans) they’ve gotta be strong and realize that they have to do it themselves … You have to find the inner peace yourself, nobody can give it to you … It is your responsibility to reach out or look for what you need."

"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. You’ve been separated from loved ones and friends. The camaraderie between troops is very extreme, and now you feel vulnerable."

"We’re hopeful that five years down the road, you’re not going to see the same problems you saw after the Vietnam War," he says. "If we as a nation do the right thing by these guys."