Homeless Vets Sought Out by Uncle Sam for Rehabilitation

Rodolfo Skeete, a former Army paratrooper, vividly recalls the second time Uncle Sam came looking for him.

Last April, Skeete, 51, jobless and nursing an injured leg, had spent his last $10 to rent a room at the Weingart Center downtown to avoid being mugged on Skid Row, where he had spent three homeless months. At the center, a social worker from the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center in Westwood approached Skeete and offered him a chance to participate in a new rehabilitation program for the homeless.

“I got lucky, man. It seemed God put his hand on me and sent that guy there,” Skeete said.

Thus, Skeete became one of the first participants in an eight-month-old program in which social workers comb the streets of Los Angeles County looking for homeless veterans.

20 Sites Nationwide

The $15-million program, run at 20 sites nationwide, provides medical and psychological treatment for homeless veterans, who are estimated to make up between 18% and 30% of the homeless population in the United States. The Westwood facility, the only VA facility in Southern California offering the program, houses 29 veterans who live in rooms similar to college dormitories. The program also offers occupational training so veterans can return to the mainstream.

Westwood program coordinator Betsy Hardie said Congress created the program when surveys showed that a large number of veterans are living on the streets and need help, but who are either unaware of the benefits available or unable to get help because of physical or mental problems.

As a result, social workers search for homeless veterans at various Westside locations, at the Weingart Center and at the Long Beach VA Medical Center. “Rather than veterans coming to our front door or out of a hospital bed, we are now looking for them,” Hardie said.

The program has not yet returned any homeless veterans to a “normal” life; there hasn’t been enough time for them to complete therapy and training. Nancy Sadler, nurse facilitator for the program, said recovery usually takes at least eight months. But the indications look promising enough that Hardie expects to get money for an additional 35 beds next year.

A race track employee, Skeete became homeless after he aggravated an old leg injury he received in a parachute jump while stationed in Germany in the early 1960s. Unable to work, he collected disability pay until it ran out. Then, earlier this year, he wound up on the street begging for money. He points to the scar on his head where a crazed man on Skid Row hit him with a tire iron.

“I was getting pretty depressed. I never considered suicide, but I was pretty depressed,” Skeete said.

Doctors at the Westwood hospital operated on his leg. After he completes physical therapy, Skeete said, he hopes to return to work.

VA social worker Margaret Ronan said that finding homeless veterans like Skeete isn’t a challenge. “We knew that wherever there were homeless, there are going to be veterans,” she said.

The challenge comes in breaking through the veterans’ distrust. “I’ve found they’ll be rather frank. They felt in the past they’d trusted or reached out--even to the VA--and they weren’t helped,” she said.

Social workers maintain a regular presence at agencies that serve the homeless in order to build up a rapport with the veterans so they will accept help, she said.

One veteran, John Paul Jones, 40, said he’d tried for many years to get treatment for his legs at the Long Beach Veterans Administration Medical Center while he was living next to a dumpster across the street from the hospital. He said he ran into a wall of medical bureaucracy, and that the new Westwood program is a welcome change.