Their mission: rescue vets from the streets

Out near LAX, a dozen military veterans man a war room, strategizing day and night. Their mission is to bring other vets in off the ledge, to gather them up from the streets and shake the dust off them.

With a budget of just half a million dollars a year, the team of “wild cowboys” is intent on saving lives, says the general of the nonprofit National Veterans Foundation -- an Alabama-raised, Lebanese Catholic Vietnam vet named Floyd “Shad” Meshad.

Meshad used to have a big job at the West L.A. Veterans Affairs complex, but he’s a guy with no patience for bureaucracy, so he had to get out, way back in the 1980s, and start his own thing.

His outfit runs a crisis hotline and bushwhacks through bureaucratic jungles for weary vets. Twice a week, his crew heads out to Venice, Hollywood and skid row in a big white van stocked with provisions, fishing for soldiers sleeping on cold pavement and in damp ivy beds. They feed them, befriend them, console them and sometimes talk them into housing.

“I’m going through a lot of depression,” Vietnam vet Vince Sylvester recently told Meshad’s platoon at a park in Hollywood, saying he still hasn’t gotten over the loss of a combat buddy who died “in my arms.”

Sylvester said he was shot in both legs in Vietnam and had been homeless for three years until getting an apartment three months ago. He won’t go to the VA unless he has to, Sylvester said. It’s too much of a runaround.

On Hollywood Boulevard, Vietnam vet Rex Baker leaned on a cane as he panhandled. He said he’d been homeless for four years, but wouldn’t dream of going to the VA and standing in line for services.

Meshad and his staff get this all the time. For a lot of soldiers, going to the VA is less appealing than going back to boot camp, even after they finally admit they need help.

It’s not that the VA doesn’t have good people doing great work, Meshad said, and he applauds the vow by agency chief Eric Shinseki to bring all homeless veterans in from the cold in five years.

The problem, as Meshad sees it, is that the VA is too big, too bureaucratic and too overwhelmed. And we haven’t yet hit the anticipated wave of banged-up vets coming off multiple combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Five years to end homelessness?

“They couldn’t do it in 40 years,” said Meshad, even if there weren’t a national hunger for smaller government. Calls to his office have surged in recent months, Meshad said, with 63% of them coming from vets who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Michelle Wildy, chief of community care at the West L.A. VA, said her staff works hard to reach out to vets with physical and mental problems, including the homeless. But that gets complicated.

Typically, a returning soldier wants to get on with life instead of going to the VA, Wildy said. Many don’t want to be labeled with the stigma of a mental health impairment, fearing it might get in the way of finding a job. With others, it takes “months before they begin to fall apart,” said Wildy, so the wave will be coming soon.

When vets do fall apart, Meshad said, they don’t want pamphlets and forms. They complain about long waits just to see someone who might be able to refer them to a doctor sometime in February or March. So Meshad rescues those he can, cutting red tape and calling in chits, trying to convince soldiers the VA can help and teaching them how to play the game.

“I play my cards,” said Meshad, who has learned how to speed up a medical appointment or demand a bed for someone in need.

Meshad went to the gym for a workout recently and met an employee named Wendell Guillermo, a 25-year-old, two-tour, Purple Heart Iraq war vet who couldn’t sleep more than 45 minutes at a time. In his recurring nightmare, a suicide bomber is trying to kill him. Guillermo had a VA doctor, but he wasn’t getting any better.

Meshad hired Guillermo on the spot. That’s the kind of guy he wants working for him -- someone who knows what other vets are up against. And when Guillermo begins to unravel, Meshad calls on his own counseling experience to help call him back.

Guillermo was so impressed with Meshad’s abilities, he brought in a buddy just back after four combat tours, a 28-year-old guy named Freddy Cordova. Cordova was an angry, amped-up soldier with nerves rubbed raw. Meshad didn’t just help calm him.

He hired him.

“It took me six months to get in to see a psychiatrist,” Cordova said of his frustrations at the VA. And even then, the doctor told him he didn’t have post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that isn’t always easy to come by no matter how many “kill or capture” missions you’ve been on.

Santa Monica Mayor Bobby Shriver told me the city has identified 22 severely impaired veterans living on its streets. “We have tried to get the VA to come in and look at these people, and by and large we have failed,” he said.

It took Shriver and other public officials six years to have one of three abandoned VA buildings opened up this summer as a shelter to temporarily house such vets.

Six years.

I’d like to hear Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Henry Waxman, who jointly announced the opening of that facility, explain why it takes so long to do the obvious, and whether it will take a total of 18 years to open all three buildings, even as more vets set up camp under palm trees.

And even as Shad Meshad and his wild cowboys charge out onto the domestic battlefield, bringing the troops in one at a time.

steve.lopez@latimes.com