Battling for better life |
| By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer Click byline for more stories by writer. First published: Sunday, April 13, 2008 |
| James Gray, 57 James Gray, an Air Force mechanic who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, has struggled with homelessness since returning from the war. Gray was born in Queens, grew up in Poughkeepsie and has stayed around Albany and Schenectady for 15 years. More than a year ago, on a cold and snowy night in Albany, his legs gave out. He had nowhere to go. Police and emergency personnel took him to the Stratton VA Medical Center. Once treated, doctors wouldn't allow Gray to return to the streets. He went to a VA homeless shelter run by the Saratoga County Rural Preservation Company in Ballston Spa. What led him to this place started in Vietnam. He lost a really good friend while fighting. He found the body in a river. "Vietnam was, for me, a bunch of body bags on a flight line -- bad memories," said Gray, who also was traumatized by war-related medical conditions and by protesters. "It was a sad and confusing time. I lost my innocence, grew up too fast, lost a sense of direction." Gray, a 57-year-old former aircraft mechanic, stayed with his mother before striking out on his own. Laid off from different jobs, he became overwhelmed with stress. "I wanted a regular life, but when I got back, my mind wasn't set up for that. A picket fence and 2.3 kids was out of the question," Gray said. "I became a rebel without a cause. I was looking at the U.S. different, everyone different." Though still unable to work, Gray has been sober for 15 months and, for the first time in decades, believes he has a chance at a satisfying life. "I'm coming to grips with myself, and that I am worthy of something other than the life I had been living." Luis Pagan, 48 Luis Pagan knows himself. "I'm an Army man. All I do is battle." Life has sometimes been a war for the 48-year-old veteran from Puerto Rico and Spanish Harlem. "I went into the Army to avoid family," said Pagan, who explained he had been abused and was undisciplined. He joined the military at the end of the Vietnam War, serving as a sergeant from 1975 to 1979. Drinking and drugs were readily available, and he dabbled. By the time he returned home, he was ready to start a family. He and his wife had several children in New York City. Then, about eight years ago, he lost a loved one. Pagan spiraled into the first of his three battles with addiction. Whenever life became unmanageable, he turned to alcohol or cocaine or both -- burning holes in his wallet and family life. "Every time I became homeless, it was because I was using," he said. He hit rock bottom when his daughter saw him getting high and cried. Pagan went to rehab the next day, Feb. 6, 2007, and sought help from the VA. He was sent to Bath and then Albany for housing and counseling. Pagan, who says he's been stone sober since, showed off his neat Room 202 recently at the Albany Vet House. As "house rep," he enforces the rules at the 28-bed homeless facility -- no smoking, no food and no women in rooms -- and assigns chores. His wife, children and mother are again speaking with him. He now works as a printing laborer. "I'm really happy with my life now," Pagan said. "But I'm not going to sit here and blow smoke. They say I have a disease called addiction. It's a battle everyday. But I'm tired of losing and I ran out of excuses. All I can say is I am going to work on recovery one day at a time for the rest of my life." Dellon Washington, 50; Michael Leahy, 40 Returning to civilian life after eight years in the military proved difficult for Dellon Washington, 50, and Michael Leahy, 40. For Washington, an Army veteran from South Carolina and Brooklyn, personal issues started in the military when he went drinking "with sergeants who were like father figures," he said. When he left the Army as a sergeant in 1985 after two overseas tours, he "felt like a robot." He was afraid of dying and sad about being separated from family. It was hard to identify himself, he said. Leahy, a 6-foot-5-inch Marine Corps sergeant who served from 1985 to 1993, left the Marines after a successful military career but found it difficult to reintegrate into civilian life. "It's a different world," said Leahy, an Orange County native who served in Hawaii and overseas. Both are now trying to piece together their lives at the Albany Vet House. "Want to see my room?" Washington recently asked a visitor he had never met. Room 400 is filled with a bed, TV, lamp and lots of paperwork, and the soldier is proud to show it off. Doing the little things are important to recovery and redirection, Washington said: keeping a room clean, having a grateful attitude. By talking with counselors and understanding what stresses him, Washington has found renewed self-esteem. He now works at the Stratton VA and realizes he has the freedom to make his own decisions. "You've seen where things can go," Washington said. "These people make you feel like you're worth something, then you start to think that you're worth something." Down the hall in Room 304, Leahy navigated the Internet and talked about arriving in Albany in September 2005 because he needed to re-evaluate what he was doing with his life. "I definitely chose to numb myself," which may have stemmed from unresolved childhood issues, he said. Surrender, acceptance and self-exploratio Michael Brown, 45 For many U.S. veterans, the 1980s were a quiet decade. Not so for Michael Brown, a Navy petty officer third class. The sailor from Auburn remains deeply affected by his years of service in Beirut and Grenada in 1983, two significant military actions that are sometimes overshadowed by Vietnam. Brown, 45, supported the invasion of Grenada, then patrolled and manned machine guns in wartime Beirut after radical Shiite militants bombed a Marine barracks in the Lebanon capital. Some 241 American servicemen died in the attack, and Brown witnessed coffins filled with the dead. "I learned a lot, but it scared the crap out of me," Brown said. Breaking down in tears at his temporary home at the Ballston Spa shelter, he said he saw "a lot of death." For years, Brown carried with him the symptoms of traumatic stress, soldiering on in civilian jobs despite feelings of guilt. He came to the area five years ago to accept a job at General Electric Co. in Niskayuna. Brown researched electrical insulations and voltage. He lived by himself in a Ballston Lake apartment. Then, in 2005, he hurt his back in a non-work-relate The ex-sailor is now undergoing mental health counseling. Helping hands The Stratton VA Medical Center funds a handful of independent contractors who provide shelter for homeless veterans: Adirondack Vets House, Glens Falls, nine beds Saratoga County Rural Preservation Company, Saratoga, eight beds Schuyler Inn, Menands, 60 beds Turner House Center for Veterans, Williamstown, Mass., nine beds Vet House, Albany (part of the Albany Housing Coalition), 28 beds |
4.13.2008
"It was a sad and confusing time. I lost my innocence, grew up too fast, lost a sense of direction."
When my older brother Ben (he was really my cousin - my mom's sister's son, but we all grew up pretty much together and so he became more of a brother to me than a cousin) returned from Nam in the mid 70s, he was a terribly damaged man.
He had always been a hellraiser; prior to Nam he'd ridden his Harley with a local scooter gang and partied hard, fought harder, then partied some more.
He could slam down more beers than any man I've since met. He had a regular habit of getting snockered and then coming home, waking me and his other brother David up (I was the youngest; David died from a freak heart attack in the late 80s)) and regaling us with his adventures.
Since Ben was the oldest male in our household (my mother had sent my dad packing when I was 3 and my Aunt had lost her husband in a car accident before David was born) he was kind of our only real role model.
I'm not sure how much of what he used to tell us about his exploits was true but I do know a couple of things that definitely boosted his credibility. For example, one night he came busting in, woke us up in a hurry and had us grab a pair of pliers and a flathead screwdriver. Still half asleep, we did as we were told and met him in his room. Apparently Ben had just gotten into a pretty serious fight down by the Sunoco gas station and had cut some dude in the face pretty bad with the neck of a broken beer bottle.
The cops were now looking for a "Benji with braces" so Ben had us yank a full set of uppers and lowers out of his mouth with those pliers and screwdriver.
The next morning,"Benji" didn't have any braces and therefore, couldn't have been the guy who sliced the face off of the man at the gas station the night before.
The second incident sent him to Viet Nam. Ben and a couple of dipshits he was running with decided to rip off a gas station. They broke in, stole some piddly crap and a few dollars, then burnt the station down to cover their tracks.
Apparently torching the station didn't quite cover all their tracks and they all ended up getting popped for arson, breaking and entering and grand larceny. The DA offered my brother a deal; prison for a looonnnggg time or Viet Nam.
Ben spent most of his time as a grunt "in the bush" and loaded helicopter gunships from rice paddies in the meantime. He didn't often talk about what he did there during those first years when he came home; he mainly stayed drunk as hell and fought with his first wife Wanda on a regular basis.
One night a couple of years after he returned from Nam he showed up at our house drunker than hell. He woke me and my brother David up and told us he wanted to look at some pictures. At first we thought he was just crazydrunk - it wasn't uncommon for him to get to that point - and we told him we weren't really interested in looking at family photos at 3am, thank you.
He whispered in his raspy drunk voice that these weren't pics like we'd ever seen before. That caught our interest since we were still pretty young teens, and we thought he had some nudie pics he was gonna share with us.
Turns out he had smuggled some photos out of Viet Nam by placing the film rolls in shoe polish cans.
We sat that night in his room upstairs, barely able to speak or breathe as he showed us sights from his "tour." We looked at those photos into the very wee hours, trying to imagine what it must have been like to cut the ears off another man and wear dozens of them as a necklace, what it must smell like when bodies rot while stuck in trees from the flechette darts that pinned them like broken rag dolls to the trunks 50 feet off the ground; how a man can cut off another man's penis off and shove it into the victim's own mouth to choke to death on it; what must go through your head while your buddies cut the breasts off of an old woman and play kickball with them; and how it is that someone can shoot a woman and a child between the eyes for trying to barter a higher price for a watch (my brother was wearing said watch that night and proudly displayed it, telling us that in the end, he got it at a "real discount") and then come back to the states and try to act "normal."
I will never forget the atrocities of war I witnessed that night in my brother's room. This wasn't television, it wasn't news media, it wasn't someone else's pictures. These were taken by my brother and he not only took them, he participated in much of the horror in those pictures. He should have been prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But if he was to be prosecuted, so too would ninety percent of the sunofabitches that served with him.
Most of us will never hear about this kind of shit when our brothers and sisters return from Iraq (would you tell anyone if you did shit to another human being like my brother did?) but you can bet your ass that there are going to be plenty who participated in similar atrocities. These are young boys and girls, caught up in a surreal, hellish experience that none of us could ever possibly imagine unless we were standing right next to them in the heat of the moment.
When they return you can rest assured many are going to have problems, addictions, mental health issues and a host of other troubles that we're going to have to address, whether we know what happened to create them or not.
My brother Ben had a lifelong alcohol and drug addiction, couldn't hold a job, went through three different marriages that all ended because of domestic violence. He'd been shot, stabbed, sent to prison for DUIs and ran someone over in a fit of rage, all after he returned from his service to our country. Maybe he should have just taken the prison sentence instead of going to Nam.
He died from a cocaine overdose on his 60th birthday this summer.
I know he's happier now, regardless of whether he's gone to heaven, hell or just stopped existing alltogether......
Smiling does a body good
