Funeral Services Honor Contributions of Homeless Veterans

They died alone on city streets or in other marginal circumstances, but in a solemn funeral service Monday replete with military honors, eight homeless veterans were eulogized as “these servants of God, these servants of our country.”

For most of the eight, officials had been unable to locate a relative or even a friend to be handed an American flag “on behalf of the president of the United States and a grateful nation.” Local veterans and other volunteers acted as stand-ins to receive the carefully folded flags that had moments earlier draped the caskets.

“Behind each of these deaths, there is a tragic story,” said stand-in Richard Rogers, a retired Navy master chief petty officer.

The funeral was part of an agreement between the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and a nationwide funeral services provider to end what the head of the department called a national disgrace: veterans dying homeless and forgotten and without an expression of thanks from the nation they served.

The federal government estimates that veterans make up 3% of the homeless population and that male veterans are 1.3 times more likely to be homeless than their non-veteran counterparts. For women veterans, the figure is 3.6 times higher than non-veteran women.

Because of its military bases and military tradition, San Diego is thought by officials to have a higher percentage of veterans among its homeless population than the national figure.

One study suggests that 2,000 veterans are living on the streets of San Diego, many within a few blocks of the military bases where they once served.

Four years ago, the Houston-based Service Corp. International, the nation’s largest provider of funeral services, began offering no-cost funerals to homeless veterans under its Dignity Memorial brand name. The then-president of Service Corp. International, Jerry Pullins, is an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam.

While veterans are assured of burial in a national or state cemetery, there was no government program to provide services or to ensure that officials seek to determine the military status of people who die while homeless.

The program has expanded to 11 cities. Of 215 veterans nationwide who have been honored, 82 were in San Diego; most of the funerals, including Monday’s, were at Glen Abbey Memorial Park and Mortuary in suburban Bonita.

“It’s just the right thing to do,” Bill Branson, a retired major general in the Army Reserve and a former funeral industry executive, said from his Missouri home. Branson is co-founder of the Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program.

Monday’s service was the largest number of veterans honored at a single funeral, officials said. Possibly due to the recent flu outbreak, a larger than usual number of homeless veterans have died recently, officials said.

The San Diego County program is supervised by the Vietnam Veterans of San Diego and the office of the county public administrator that routinely handles cases of homeless deaths. Several local veterans groups provided contingents and a Navy chaplain provided a eulogy. Burial was at the Riverside National Cemetery.