NEW YORK – Ten years after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, an army of shell-shocked veterans began reporting to homeless shelters.

Now those desperate ranks are being joined by veterans of conflicts where the guns are still blazing – the Iraq and Afghan wars.

And social workers fear the trickle of stunned soldiers returning from Baghdad and Kabul has the potential to become a tragic tide.

“The Iraq vets are showing up now, and asking for help now,” said Yogin Ricardo Singh of the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Black Veterans for Social Justice. “What surprises me is how young they are.”

Like the Vietnam vets before them, many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. But this time, it’s not just the front line troops who are fighting demons.

“In Iraq, everyone was susceptible to roadside bombs, not just the combat troops,” said J.B. White, an Iraq vet who runs the HOPE for New Veterans program for the Manhattan-based social service agency Common Ground. “Everybody is exposed to trauma there.”

Many of the returning vets said they were surprised how quickly they slid into the streets. “I was proud to be a Marine, I felt I did my part,” said former Sgt. Ralph (R.L.) Marcelle, who served in Tikrit and has been crashing on a friend’s couch for several weeks. “I can’t believe I’m living like this now.”

Also, for the first time, there are women in the ranks of the homeless vets.

Nationwide, about 1,200 veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have already sought help from homeless-service providers, but only about 200 were “actually homeless,” said Peter Dougherty of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

And some, like a 24-year-old Brooklyn woman who asked to only be identified by her first name, Vanessa, have children.

“When I came home, I had nobody to help me,” she said. “I would find myself riding the train all day, staying at the McDonald’s all afternoon, trying to waste time. It was hard on my son.”

“What we are finding through outreach programs are a number of veterans who are living marginally,” said Dougherty. “Places like New York, where housing costs are high, can be very tough.”

Singh, an Army veteran, said many of the 30 Iraq war vets he’s working with are victims of broken promises.

“The Army recruits kids from the poorest neighborhoods and promises to teach them job skills and send them to school,” said Singh. “The reality is that for a lot of young people coming out of the service now, all they know how to do is be soldiers.”

By the time they arrive at Singh’s door, most have exhausted their signing bonuses, gone through their savings and are deeply ashamed.

“Soldiers are not conditioned to ask for help,” Singh said. “To them, it’s like admitting failure.”

Others arrive after having burned bridges with family members who could not handle – or understand – why they were falling apart.

“I’d be sitting at a table having dinner and would just start to shake all over,” Brooklyn native Henry Gomez, who enlisted in the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks and lost his family when he returned home, wrote in a statement for his social worker. “I found the normal things like driving a car difficult. I was swerving around Coke cans in the street when I was driving (because of the fear of explosives)!”

The Iraq and Afghan vets are still just a fraction of the nearly 200,000 veterans who are homeless on any given night. But they are not being stigmatized the way the Vietnam vets were.

“It’s a very different climate from the post-Vietnam days,” said Rosanne Haggerty, president of Common Ground. “There is broad consensus that we should be helping the soldiers.”

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)



QUEENS DAD CRIPPLED BY WAR FORCED TO FIGHT FOR FULL PENSION

Former Army Spec. Milton Rojastibana came back from Iraq with a crippled right shoulder and a head full of horrible memories. But it was nearly ending up homeless that gave him the scare of his life.

“I don’t ever want to be begging for anything,” said the 35-year-old.

Rojastibana immigrated to Queens, N.Y., from Colombia in 1990 and enlisted a decade later to get an education.

He said he was fighting near Fallujah, west of Baghdad, in 2003 when he was badly shocked by an exploding circuit-breaker box. He was sent home and the Veterans Administration classified him as 60 percent disabled, his right arm useless.

Unable to work and unsure what to do, Rojastibana lived for a while with a sister, then a brother. He pined for his wife, who waited in Colombia while he was overseas. He struggled to make it on a $973-a-month disability check.

“I was close to ending up in the street,” Rojastibana said.

With the help of social workers, he found an apartment he could afford in Corona, Queens. He sent for his wife, with whom he has children. He began campaigning to get reclassified by the VA so he could get full disability benefits.

His brother now serves in Iraq, and Rojastibana says worrying about him has revived bad memories. “Normally, I am a calm person but because of the (post-traumatic stress) sometimes I feel like a killing machine.”



VET WHO LOST ID CALLS N.Y. TOWN WITHOUT PITY

The road to Ralph (R.L.) Marcelle’s ruin is paved in lost documents.

An immigrant from Trinidad, Marcelle enlisted in the Marines a year after arriving in Brooklyn and served for eight years – including a stint in Iraq.

So when he lost his wallet, which contained his green card and Social Security card, he didn’t fret. He’d served his adopted country with honor. He was a sergeant. He thought his veteran’s ID card was proof enough he was an American.

More than a year after he got out of the service, Marcelle is broke and bitter. He and his frail mother are bunking in the living room of a friend. He thinks the only way he can escape his predicament is by re-enlisting – even if it means going back to Iraq.

“The Marines are the only people who recognize anything I’ve done in my life,” said Marcelle, 30. “My veteran’s ID card is the only ID I have. Out here in the civilian world, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

Lacking proof that he is a legal resident, Marcelle couldn’t land a steady job or get unemployment benefits.

Marcelle figures it would cost about $270 to replace his lost IDs, but he doesn’t have the money.



IRAQ HAUNTED CITY’S STREETS

For six months, former Army Pfc. Herold Noel wrestled with his demons in the back of a Jeep Cherokee. He would park in a quiet corner of Flatbush, Brooklyn, stretch out in the back, and “then the nightmares would start.”

“I had a buddy who lost his leg over there right in front of me,” said Noel, 26. “I saw a baby decapitated when it was run over by a truck. I relived that every night.”

But Noel said it’s not the Iraqi horrors that embittered him, it was returning home to Brooklyn and finding himself on the street. “I feel like I did all this for nothing,” he said.

Just 19 when he enlisted, Noel came home in 2004 to a wife and three kids, but with no job skills. Adding to the anguish, Noel was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

For a time, the Noel family lived with in-laws, sleeping four to a bed. After Herold Noel was turned down by the city housing agency, he began sleeping in his SUV while his family crashed with other kin around the city.

Noel’s plight became the subject of the award-winning documentary “When I Came Home” by New York filmmaker Dan Lohaus. An anonymous donor, moved by Noel’s story, offered the vet a Bronx apartment and paid a year’s rent. Noel’s wife and one of his kids live with him now. He is back in school. As for the Jeep, it was towed for nonpayment of parking tickets. And the bitterness lingers.


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