Combat zones exist in many different places. For Joe Leal, the founder of the Vet Hunters Project, an all-volunteer group of veterans who have made it their mission to track down homeless comrades, the battlefield is a lone soldier living in his truck in the wake of a home foreclosure, or a veteran living in a dark, deafening homeless encampment secreted under a freeway.
“You know the expression ‘never leave the fallen behind’?” Mr. Leal said one recent afternoon, barreling down the highway in his typical style after spending the morning on the phone calming a distraught vet. “Homelessness is the equivalent of leaving a buddy on the battlefield. They’re heroes in the shadows.”
The group, which takes an aggressive “911 attitude” to homelessness, fans out to America’s forgotten places — bridge underpasses, dry river beds, bus stop shelters, even the concrete pads of subdivision houses that were never built. Started in 2010, the “vetwork,” as Mr. Leal likes to call it, now has 20 chapters around the country, with 113 active volunteers in California alone, who subsidize the work out of their own pockets. In an article Thursday, I write about the project’s work to with homeless female veterans, who are going without housing at higher rates than male veterans.
Among the ranks of the project’s volunteers are military families with spare housing and deployed soldiers who make their empty homes available to homeless vets while they are away.
Mr. Leal, who is something of a human Eveready battery, started the project in memory of his friend Master Sgt. Kelly Bolor, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2003. He and Mr. Leal served together in Iraq, where Sgt. Bolor, who was of Hawaiian descent, “would pull out his ukulele and sing to us when we were down,” Mr. Leal recalled.
Mr. Leal has had his own brush with homelessness, living in shelters with his family as a child — often separated due to restrictions on children — and then in public housing in Ontario, outside Los Angeles. “I watched my father do his best to make sure everything was O.K.,” Mr. Leal said of David Jimenez, the stepfather who raised him. Mr. Jimenez was killed by a hit-and-run driver when Mr. Leal was 25 years old.
Mr. Leal orchestrates much of the project out of the 115th Combat Service Support Battalion in South El Monte, where he is a reservist. “Soldiers won’t tell you their problems,” Master Sgt. Barry Marshall observed of the challenges of reaching homeless veterans. “It’s suck it up and drive on.”
Although the project encourages homeless veterans to seek help with the Department of Veterans Affairs, it can act on a moment’s notice, Mr. Leal said, because he and his cohorts have established relationships with city and county agencies serving the homeless as well as community organizations.
When the husband of one of their clients, Monica Figueroa, returned from multiple deployments, including Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq, the couple wound up homeless, living with their son amid oil and solvents in an auto-body shop owned by his family. They called Mr. Leal, who found them an apartment through Inland Temporary Homes, a community organization in San Bernardino that provides temporary housing and support services for homeless families.
First Sgt. Steve Kreider, now a reserve adviser stationed at the Middletown, Conn., Reserve Center, was one the project’s first volunteers. He participated in a cross-country bike ride in 2011 that was a fact-finding mission and an effort to raise public awareness. “That really opened up our eyes,” Sergeant Kreider said. “You think this only happens in New York or Los Angeles. But when you get to Kansas and see a homeless vet, you realize ‘holy moly,’ this is a bigger problem. It’s a travesty.”
The project helps out with official homeless counts, including one for the state of Connecticut and another for greater Los Angeles. In a count in Connecticut last February, accomplished with the help of 70 cadet volunteers from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, the group located 25 homeless veterans. “They often won’t have a photo I.D.,” Sergeant Kreider observes. “But if you ask them for their DD214, their honorable discharge order, 90 percent of the time they’ll have it. It’s a matter of pride.”
Thus far, the project is financed by the volunteers themselves, operating on a budget of some $50,000. Mr. Leal has about 2,000 volunteers and counting, enlisting even nonveterans living in homeless encampments in the cause. The group will sometimes intervene with car payments, traffic tickets, medication and other aspects of daily life that can sometimes become tipping points into homelessness.
“We don’t accept defeat, ma’am,” he explained after a characteristically long day in the field. “That’s not an option.”
Related Story: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home
At War Blog: Group Seeks Out and Helps Homeless Veterans
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At War Blog: Group Seeks Out and Helps Homeless Veterans
