Stand Down Event Provides Help for 90 Homeless Military Veterans : Social Services: More than 45 agencies work together to offer free counseling, showers, medical checkups, food and temporary shelter.

They came in waves as word spread among those who shuffle around Ventura and Santa Barbara counties homeless and hungry.

By Sunday afternoon, more than 90 homeless military veterans had showed up at Ventura College to take advantage of free counseling, showers, medical checkups and, perhaps most important, three square meals and a canvas roof.

“It’s the first time in 23 years that anyone asked me what my injuries were,” said a clean-shaven Mark Graves, who spent three years in Vietnam but fell through the cracks of the Veterans Administration when he returned to the United States.

“I felt like my own people were my enemies,” he said, looking back on years of rejection by those charged with caring for disabled veterans.

Stand Down, a “one-stop shopping tour” of legal, medical and other services for homeless veterans, attracted nearly 50 people to the temporary tent city when it opened Friday morning, organizers said. At least 40 more people turned up for the services before the tents were taken down on Sunday, the final day of the event.

“Whatever a veteran needs to break out of the cycle of homelessness, it’s here,” said Claire Hope, a Newbury Park software company owner who spent 14 months putting the benefit together.

More than 45 local, state and federal agencies combined to offer the wide array of services to those who asked for help, Hope said.

Other Stand Downs--whose name refers to a military team being placed from combat readiness to recreation status--were held in Long Beach, San Diego and Santa Monica, Hope said.

Volunteers plan to make the Ventura event an annual one. A tentative date for the next Stand Down has been set for next June.

Like many of those milling around the college football field on Sunday, Graves shoulders a marked distrust for all things governmental.

“Most of the guys were super-paranoid” about coming to the event, Graves said. “If I had to name one thing (to fear), it would be the government.”

For example, Graves said, he spent three years working his way up the ranks in the Marine Corps before being forced out for refusing to do counter-intelligence on his colleagues.

“They wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he said.

After a series of forced mental evaluations, Graves claims his superiors wrongly and deliberately reported him absent without leave.

“Then they offered me 10 years in Leavenworth or an undesirable discharge,” he said. “I signed the UD and lost all my benefits. My whole life was shot then.”

Graves said he left the Marines in 1971 with nothing but the clothes on his back, jungle rot on his feet, severed tendons in his hands, rotting teeth and a tumor in his throat. He said he spent most of the past two decades walking across the country, scavenging food and shelter wherever he could.

But after attending the event in Ventura, Graves said he was on his way to a Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles for a series of evaluations aimed at reinstating his benefits, including retroactive pay.

Scores of others also received legal aid, medical attention and other services at the event. They were also given the opportunity to settle outstanding warrants.

“I’m a free man,” Ray Fryman declared, as he packed up a duffel bag of donated clothes. “I did 15 hours of community service and now I’m a free man. I even got my papers.”

Dogged with a misdemeanor warrant resulting from a burglary charge, Fryman said he helped attract other homeless veterans to the Stand Down as part of his community work. He also helped dismantle tents and cots as the event closed Sunday.

The weekend respite from living in a van on the streets of Oxnard gave Fryman a newfound sense of perspective.

“A year from now I plan on being in my own place,” said the 24-year-old former soldier, who plans to enroll in a job-training program he heard about over the weekend.

“Instead of being the one to receive the help, I want to be the one giving it,” he said.

Stockbroker and Vietnam veteran Robert Delzell of Long Beach, another Stand Down organizer, said the Ventura College effort directly saved at least one man’s life.

Delzell spoke quietly of a man he had just treated who left him a note late Sunday thanking him and others for their help.

“He’s just lost his home and his job, and he was on his way to his storage locker to pick up his gun,” Delzell said. “But he saw something on a poster about Stand Down and decided to come. Then he chose not to kill himself.

“He thanked probably everyone who was here.”