If you would have told me I would be running a Veterans charity when I left the service I would have laughed at you in 2006. 2007 had a surprise for me I never saw coming. I was living in a camper hoping I could afford the fuel to pick up my kid for the weekend and still have enough left to buy some peanut butter to feed him for two days. You may wonder how that happens to a retired Special Forces soldier who began service as a young Ranger private, I retired in pay grade E9 with over 26 years of service. It happened because the green machine lost my retirement paperwork. It wasn’t very problematic until my savings were gone.
State says I don’t qualify for unemployment because I have a pension. My have a pension verses supposed to have a pension arguments fall on deaf ears. So no help came from unemployment.
If things weren’t complicated enough, I was medically retired for injuries received in combat as determined by my medical evaluation board. This is important because I was dealing with many medical issues at a VA hospital an hour from my camper, the VA is billing me for health care, my claim took 3 plus years to wrap up so for a long time I am not even being reimbursed for mileage nor receiving a VA disability check.
The many months long process to correct it although painful, was educational. School of hard knocks is a powerful educator. I learned firsthand how the injured young troops land in civilian life. I promise you it is not an enjoyable experience. Maybe I should have reached out to food pantry or something. But this would all be straightened out any day I always thought, so I never did. Now I am in great shape, 100% VA with SMC, full pension with CRSC and the back pays were life changing when they arrived. With all this said, let me shift gears from the life experience that landed me here to why and how I got here.
My medical situation left me with a busy appointment schedule. Custody lawyer was draining my savings faster than an 18B drains a beer glass and I needed something to do with my down time. I started volunteering at a local church food pantry. This shift is important because now I am also learning from other people’s hard knocks. But I want to know what I am doing so I start reading studies on food insecurity as being hungry is called. But the world seems to focus on food insecurity like that is the problem. Poor target folder preparation with that description. The glaring fact is it is a malnutrition issue not a calories issue. We have tons of malnourished obese people in this country. Obesity is a calories issues and there a very few obese people in the homeless camps I visit regularly. First health symptoms to arise from malnutrition are cognitive function issues like concentration problems and difficulty processing thoughts, that also contribute to emotional outbursts that often manifest as anger or tears. Next up is the immune systems abilities wane.
Seemed to me that, a disproportionate ratio of the people in the food pantry line were Veterans or Veterans spouses. Veterans make up 7.1% of population according to last statistic I remember reading. So why are a 1/3 of my clients Veterans? In fact it seems every male over the age of 30 is a Veteran. I didn’t make a spreadsheet to confirm this or a fancy pie chart or bar graph, I just started taking the Veterans off to the side and talking with them. I learned quickly everyone I spoke to was in that line because a service related injury or illness was causing work disruptions. I started using the lessons I learned figuring out the service connection process for myself to help the food pantry line Veterans with claims submission informally. It was a frequent enough problem I became accredited as a claims agent. I am now claims agent #44976 with the VA if you ever need help with a claim reach out. Apparently my interest in helping the veterans caught people’s attention down at the food pantry.
Knock, knock, knock I hear at my door, in the dark about 9pm. I am out of the camper by now and live half a mile down a dirt road in middle of the woods. I am not born and raised here, I know almost nobody—who the heck is at my door—at night? Turns out it is a volunteer from the food pantry, she has a homeless Veteran with her and is making both a passionate and emotional plea for me to help him. The humorous part is she doesn’t tell me he is homeless or what she wants me to do for him for at least 5 or 10 minutes into the emotional plea. So I am standing there confused about what she is there for and wondering how in the hell she found my house in the first place. When she finally tells me she wants me to help this homeless Veteran, I am taken aback. I had never helped a homeless person with anything more than a sandwich or a couple bucks when I saw one on a corner begging. I had no idea how to help this homeless veteran. I told her meet me at the food pantry the next day and we’d try to figure something out.
The ensuing days found me in homeless camps for the first time in my life. Once I saw the camps I couldn’t turn my back on the veterans in the Camps. That first Camp visit was probably in early 2008 or 2009. Since that time the problem out grew my ability to help alone, I reached out to a friend from C/1/1 SFG tony Cross doing counseling for Veterans and first responders in 2011 and said hey how about we see if we can’t help with this larger Veterans integrating civilian life problem together and start a 501 C 3? We are going to talk about what we learned about the challenges they face in a minute. Equally we need to talk about something it is not right up front.
First time in history average Veteran is better educated then their civilian counterpart. The volunteer military and the associated enlistment requirements have raised our average education level. How many NCOs do you know with college degrees up to an including graduate degrees? Yes we still have some draftees out there, but they are not the majority, even many draftees went on to college or trade school after the military. So the number, of uneducated draftees who need financial literacy classes to survive as civilians, still alive are a huge minority that does not represent the average in my experience. Teaching troops separating from service how to balance their check book and why they should have a retirement account definitely won’t prevent homelessness and probably won’t keep them out of life crisis. If your goal is to help the ones that will be successful anyway be more successful, I am clapping for you, good job. If you want to keep your 18B out of my homeless shelter or from hurting themselves with that type approach, not going to help BIG swing and a miss.
I tell you this story because several of our brethren want to help struggling Veterans also and have reached out for advice. Life is too short to learn everything the hard way. Maybe some of my lessons as an individual and our lessons as an organization will save you a headache. Or better yet maybe they will motivate you into action to find even better ways to help.
Things started to happen I didn’t plan for. Word of mouth about the way I handled claims resulted in an initially slow but steady stream of veterans coming to me for help with disability claims. Combined with my unwillingness to look away from the homeless Veterans has grown the efforts over the years from an individual Good Samaritan action into a 501 C 3 with four core programs. We helped less than 100 Veterans in 2012 the year we received our 501 C 3 status from the IRS. Eleven years later in 2023 those four programs combined to help 3,443 Veterans in six states. The growth has been staggering at times to sustain, especially through the COVID years.
Through, by and with the locals is the Special Forces way to accomplish our mission to Free the Oppressed using FID and UW. I was fortunate to witness its resulting outcome during the response to 9/11 in Afghanistan. Wish I could tell you Tony and I made a business plan to run the organization on a through, by and with model, but we didn’t. We had a plan formatted straight out of ST 101-5 and the Student handout from SWC for mission planning. That plan didn’t mention a UW operations model converted to charity efforts anyplace. Guess what happened? The community rallied to the cause, they became our funders, our referral sources and our work force. Auxiliary, underground and gorillas sound similar as comparisons?? It just unfolded that way, maybe by chance or maybe professional habits, but probably by path of least resistance.
We as a community are much better educated, much more resourceful and much more determined than our conventional counterparts. Common sense would suggest we would have avoided some of the struggles Veterans face as civilians. My experience is that we don’t. Two Special Forces soldiers have lived in the Major Paul Syverson Veterans Sanctuary. One was a SSG 18E the other an 18Z. I know of three other formerly or current homeless SF veterans that I couldn’t bring in. I know one other, a Major no less that benefitted from our homeless Veterans resources in another way. I also had a CPT helicopter pilot and a LTC infantry officer live at the facility. This is not a problem that is only facing privates. We are not immune to the homeless Veteran problem by Branch, nor by rank. If our best and brightest service members are having trouble, no wonder our lower enlisted are struggling in the transition.
The list in my head of our brothers who have hurt themselves is much longer than the homeless list. We are not immune to the Veteran suicide problem. We are not immune to the addiction problem. We are not immune to constant conflict at home problem. We are not immune from the getting fired at work unemployment problem.
I believe circumstances upon discharge are oppressive in many ways for our Veterans. So oppressive our representation in the homeless community; and suicide statistics are grossly out of proportion to our representation in the population as a whole. I call the struggles created by this perceived oppression as the war at home. Where is our De Oppresso Liber representation in fighting the war at home?
What we are is the informal leaders who create military change. The conventional forces use our tactics, our equipment and uniform modifications very soon after they witness our use of same. Why; because they look up to us and trust our insights. I do not believe the way the nation handles Veterans crisis will improve until WE as the SF community set an example worth following for the rest of the Veteran community. I say that because the Veterans will need to fix these problems. There is a horrible void of people who wore camouflage in laboratories and people wearing lab coats in foxholes. Again I encourage our people as individuals and our chapters and maybe even national to consider if we think it appropriate to be more involved in fighting the war at home.
At VALOR we fight the war at home with four programs. They are Resilient Warrior, Hope for the Homeless, Holiday Meals and Veterans Unstoppable. We staff the efforts primarily with volunteers. We fund the efforts primarily with individual donors, along with grassroots efforts like motorcycle rides, spaghetti dinners, raffles, a golf tournament and our annual Patriots Ball.
To learn more about VALOR's programs, visit our website!
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