When Johnny Comes Marching (Homeless) by Ken Smith - HTML preview

Chapter 29: The Bank Robbery

Every day at the shelter at ten in the morning there was a huge influx of vets. These were vets who lived in other shelters for the most part, and they comprised the three hundred or so who came every day for lunch.

The lunch program wasn’t something that was funded by any grant, as the state gave us money only for those who lived in the building. The state paid us $2.42 per day per vet, and we needed to serve each vet breakfast and dinner from that money.

You couldn’t even go to McDonald’s with that budget, and so we supplemented.

We sent work crews every day to the wholesale food distributors and offered our services for anything that they could give to us. We worked for our food.

The produce wholesalers would give us stuff just before it was spoiled and I can remember working with the large frozen food distributors and offering to clean out freezers and walk-ins for anything that they could give to us to feed those who came to our shelter.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we had an eye clinic that taught medical students by giving eye exams to homeless vets, and twice a month we had the largest law schools bring their senior students, under the guidance of a practicing attorney, to help with any legal issues that any vet presented.

In order to sleep in the building you needed to give four hours a week back to the shelter. It was your payment for what you got. These volunteer hours were monitored and if you wanted to come into lunch every day, you also had to work. There was KP (kitchen police), a daily clean-up crew, a latrine crew, and trash needed to be dealt with every day, and then the whole cycle needed to be reset for dinner later that day.

There were all kinds of people coming and going this one particular day and intake was busy and sick bay was busy and of course there were also AA and NA meetings that were being conducted.

So all in all, the place was wicked busy.

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We also had crews that would stop the traffic outside our building most days as we swept the street and conducted a police call (military term for picking up trash) and we had deals with the local doughnut shops and restaurants around our neighborhood to come and take whatever food they had that was extra when they closed every night.

As a result, the lunch menu was never the same two days in a row.

Nobody ever went hungry and I have fond memories of some hotel meals from conferences that were cancelled or weddings that were called off and banquets that cooked more than they could use.

This one day in the late spring we had our doors open, the windows on the ground floor were open and it was busy. Homelessness is migratory and it was busier in the spring and summer months than in the winter.

The usual staff was working and the place was humming right along.

The eye doctors had a waiting list of vets sitting in chairs along the wall and it was a day for the lawyers so we had more than our usual amount of traffic. At the same time, vets were showing up from Florida and other warm southern states as the word had spread to head to Boston for one of the only vet shelters in the nation. I was checking on the mess sergeant in the kitchen on the first floor and his needs when I came around the corner into the dining room area and saw three or four Boston cops, all with guns out, turning right, then left then right again.

Holy shit I thought, they have guns out.

Just then my radio went nuts.

Command one, command one, come to the front desk right away.

I saw the cops looking at me and so I walked around the corner to the front desk and holy crap, there were like a dozen other Boston cops with guns out.

“Can I help you?” I said to one who looked to be in charge

“Did someone just run in here?” he asked.

I looked at the front desk officer of the day and said “Well?”

“Not really, sir, I mean we’ve been busy, and of course people come and go, but nobody ran in here, at least I don’t remember anyone running in here.”

“Why? What’s going on?” I asked.

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“Someone just robbed the bank right around the corner and the teller put in a dye bag and we thought, well, sorry, we thought he might have come in here.”

This guy was just getting ready to leave with the other cops when the front desk guy says, “You know, there is that guy in sick bay; he had the trouble with the transmission fluid all over his hands.”

Now, transmission fluid is red and the cop looked at me and I looked at the door to the sickbay and we both started walking that way. The cop opened the door and here was a guy, no shirt on, no shoes, just blue jeans, with two medics trying to wipe off what they were told was transmission fluid.

The cop said, “FREEZE!”

And it was like in the moviesnext thing I knew, two cops had this guy handcuffed and they were walking him out the door.

“What the hell happened?” said the medics.

“The guy robbed a bank and got the dye pack all over him. You two nitwits were treating him for exposure to transmission fluid.”

An hour later some detectives approached me and they said, you know, the guy isn’t a vethow’d he even get in here?

Good question, I replied.

From that moment on, no matter what happened, before you were let into the building we made sure that you were a United States military veteran.

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Chapter 30: Time to Move OnAnd New Ideas

I remember the exact day I decided to call it quits.

After working at the shelter for nearly ten years, I was burned out. Working with homeless veterans is richly rewarding and at the same time extremely exhausting.

Much had happened during those formative years at Court Street, both on the job and in my private life. I had gone through a divorce that was somewhat contentious. I have not written about my children or my family but all of these factors contributed to my difficult decision that enough was enough.

There had been newspaper stories about the EPA, stories that I wasn’t a vet, stories that I overspent the shelter’s budgets, stories I was a fraud and a con man, and on and on. I know what happened at Court Street and how hard it was to get this shelter on its feet and those who were there know what happened and how hard we worked. I have always held my head high about what I did, and why I did it.

There are times in everyone’s life when you just know its time to turn the page. That time for me came and I accepted it. I had done what I could do, built what I could build, and I know I left 17 Court Street in good shape, and that others could come in and continue the battle.

I have always been fascinated by technology and computers and I consider myself to be somewhat of a savant about how things work in cyberspace. Like many of you, I live everyday on the net, checking email, going to news sites, and I even have my own website at kensmith93.com.

I left Court Street with no real plan or place to work, and found myself in a series of consulting jobs and technical sales jobs, and yet I always kept my focus on the veterans community.

During the last eight years I worked for a national veterans non-profit as its chief technology officer, and recently left to find another challenge. As I look around I see the stars are aligning again as they did in the late 1980s, with lots of veterans returning from war suffering from PTSD and few services to help. If we don’t get in front of this problem with proactive intervention, or if we let happen to this generation of Iraq and Afghanistan 174

veterans what happened to the Vietnam veterans, than we didn’t learn anything. We will once again have a large surge of veteran homelessness and a surge of suicide (which has already started), and a slow degradation of self-esteem that will affect another generation and their children not yet born.

We’ve been at war for over ten years now and tens of thousands of veterans have come home and are now experiencing PTSD first hand. Not only does PTSD affect the veteran, but it affects his mom, dad, wife, girlfriend, kids, and friends. For female veterans who have PTSD the condition is even more challenging as there are fewer resources for them to turn to.

I recently came up with the idea of a one-stop toll-free national veterans hotline. The idea is one that is simple and yet complicated.

Simple because it would consist of one phone number that a veteran, a family member of a veteran, or a friend of a veteran could call nationwide and get the most up-to-date information on almost any subject related to veterans.

Kind of like a veterans 911.

Complicated because it requires hundreds of folks who care and who can volunteer two hours a month to man the phones.

It wouldn’t be a counseling hotline nor would it attempt to offer anything other than good quality intel on where to get benefits for veterans near to where the caller was located, what services the veteran was entitled to, and where to apply for special educational opportunities.

The idea would be to have this hotline staffed with volunteers.

The volunteer could be you. The reader.

To be a volunteer you wouldn’t need to be a doctor or a nurse, a social worker or clinician, but just you, Joe Doe American. If you care about our veterans and would like to find a way to help, this would be it.

I imagine that a volunteer would go through an online training program of a couple of hours, interacting with instructors and learning how to answer the questions of the caller and how to log into a website and make any notes needed for any subsequent follow up.

The volunteer would need a computer, of course, but nowadays most everyone has one.

Each volunteer would need to commit two hours per month of their time, and using some 175

fancy-schmancy SIP-Trunked PBX technologies, calls would be routed to the next available volunteer at the time of the call, right to their home phone or cell phone.

I can imagine tens of thousands of calls per year from veterans and the families of veterans, and each caller would be given the same information as the call before them as all the volunteers would be reading from the same knowledge base of information. I see a huge developed database driven by zip code that outlines all of the benefits and services for any veteran as one of the keys to success.

This is not just a fantasywe’re building it. You can visit the website at veterans911.com

I can clearly envision this toll-free hotline service, and I know that if this service were built, veterans, friends, and family members of veterans and others would use it. I just don’t think that the government can build something like this right nowI don’t think it has the know-how or the where with all.

Now in certain parts of the country something like this is being tried right now. I know New Jersey is way out in front of the rest of country in using a hotline, but I’m talking about a huge, nationally based Veterans 911 that would service the whole country, not just one state or a region.

You wouldn’t need to be a veteran to want to help.

I also think that the combat support group that I attended twenty years ago was critical for me in learning about ways to deal with PTSD.

Harold Russell said, “You feel sorry for the man with no shoes, until you meet the man with no feet,” and that would be the core concept. John Wilder facilitated this combat support process for me and others, but he was smart enough to get out of the way when the real healing happened, veteran to veteran.

I think that hotline callers could be told benefit information and then offered a way to join an ongoing support group in a virtual conference room in real cyber space. This support group meeting would be something that each of the new veterans would feel comfortable with and I am sure wives of veterans would have their own group and moms their own group, too.

So, I guess, once a veterans advocate, always a veterans advocate.

I will leave you with some contact data that you will also find on my website.

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Lastly, I want to thank my wife for allowing me the uninterrupted time to write this book, and to my kids, each who has given me gray hair, but who also have given me love and admiration and a reason to keep doing what I do.

Thanks to my mom and a special thanks to Granma Lee Lee and Rocky, for your support of my bride.

Thanks to my sisters who each had a hand in who I am;

And to my God, who judges me everyday on what I am and what I do, I ask for your grace and help in this next phase of my life.

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