Project Seeks to Inform Homeless Veterans of Aid Opportunities

Many homeless veterans are unaware of government benefits available to them, so recently the Weingart Center on skid row started an outreach program to inform the former soldiers of programs they can use.

Drug rehabilitation, housing opportunities and health benefits are high on the list of what the Weingart workers tell clients, many of whom are Vietnam-era veterans.

The lead foot soldier in this campaign, Barry Nelson, is someone who knows plenty about being a homeless veteran. For five years after he left the Army in 1986, he lived in what he calls his “cardboard condo” in Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“I was drinking the wine list from hell,” Nelson said Thursday in his office at the center, a 700-bed transitional housing and social service complex in the heart of skid row.

In 1991, Nelson was ready to seek help. He asked a friend where he could go for his alcohol and crack cocaine problem. “In one motion, he lit his crack pipe, pointed across the street and then took a long, slow hit off the pipe,” Nelson said. His friend had pointed to the Harbor Lights, a Salvation Army drug rehabilitation center. “I walked over there and have been clean ever since.”

Although many veterans are unaware of the benefits, many others who are aware are too worn down by drugs to care, Nelson said.

“So many are so hopeless that it is hard to get them to even apply,” said Janet Larkly, a Weingart program director who estimates that 20% of the 600 beds at center are taken by veterans.

Other veterans have such a deep distrust of the federal government that they prefer to use only their Los Angeles County benefits, according to Nelson. “Some people just don’t want anything else to do with Uncle Sam,” Nelson said. “They were promised the world, and they got nothing.” Nelson, who is married with two young children, now lives in his own apartment in South-Central Los Angeles. “I tell these vets where I came from and where I’m at now, thanks to some programs. It may not seem like much to some people, but to me, it’s the world.”