Stand Down helps homeless veterans

As Congress voted Friday to extend cash compensation to veterans, Salt Lake advocates of homeless veterans were busy on the front lines of their ongoing battle to help vets have a life back home.

Both the House and Senate approved different versions of a bill extending the current law of providing a one-time $1,000 Welcome Home bonus and an additional $500 for each subsequent return home following deployment.

More than 200 post-deployment vets, many of them homeless, received medical care, food and contacts with about 25 outreach and social service providers during the eighth annual daylong Homeless Stand Down at the George E. Wahlen VA Medical Center.

"With the mandate to do more for our vets, particularly now with the goal to end homelessness in five years, we've been trying very heard to reach out to those, especially the ones who might have a hard time asking for what they need," said Darin Farr, special projects coordinator for the state Department of Veterans Affairs, as the final few duffel bags full of food, clothes and survival gear were handed out. "We are trying to make things a little better."

A little better can be a lot, said Sharon Hatch, a Vietnam-era veteran who has lost her mobility to fibromyalgia and last week lost her two-bedroom house to foreclosure.

"We sold off what we could, but it's pretty hard to go from two bedrooms, a garage and a place to put your things to having one room," she said as she rolled her wheelchair to the shuttle bus.

"I come up here three or four times a month, and came here today for the first time (for the stand down), and it helps to know that people care," she said. "It makes the difference some days."

The care that veteran Robert Nelson finds at the VA "has meant the difference between getting by and stepping in front of a bus. I was ready to do that several times," he said, noting that his post-traumatic stress disorder from working at the Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego during the Vietnam War ran deeper than he realized and didn't affect him until years later when family problems hit.

"You know, I thought I was OK, but when things fell apart at home, I went downhill fast," Nelson said. "I think things I held over since then just hit me head-on, and I pretty much lost everything. People think a divorce maybe shouldn't be that big a deal, but anyone who's been through it knows it's as traumatic a shock as anything."