- November 18, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
Army veteran Alfredo Ortiz said his war didn’t end when he left the service in 1992. “It’s just a different kind of war, coming home," he said. “Just a different war.”
Ortiz, a Texas native who first came to Florida on a vacation in 2000 and never left, has been homeless since he lost a construction job in 2006, he said. He was one of dozens of homeless veterans who turned out at the Palm Coast VFW’s first Homeless Veterans Stand Down event Saturday, where local and national organizations helped homeless veterans access services like housing assistance and health care and handed out clothes, sleeping bags, food and haircuts.
Ortiz was there for help accessing medical services. He hasn’t gotten medications he’s been prescribed since 2010, he said.
Mike Cornell, director of community engagement for the Volusia-Flagler Coalition for the Homeless, said events like stand downs can be vital for helping homeless veterans who aren’t willing to walk into a place like a Department of Veterans Affairs office.
“The most vulnerable ones, the people who really need help — the hard ones —they’re not in your office,” he said. “The hard folks are the ones that don’t come to the VA. I was one of those folks.”
Cornell was medically discharged from the Army in 1993 as a result of injuries from a helicopter crash in 1991, he said.
“For me, I’d gone through some pretty traumatic stuff,” he said. “And I was physically and emotionally broken. For about two years I was at Walter Reed. Then, on and off for 14 years, I was on the streets. I was in the camps. I never went to the VA. I thought, ‘These people did this to me.’ My thinking was skewed.”
It can be especially hard for veterans — who’ve internalized the dignity and pride of military service — to be in a position of vulnerability, of having to ask for help, he said.
But in Cornell’s case, someone reached out to him. Cornell said he was in jail in Ocala when a military social worker, Dr. Virginia Baxter, rapped on the plate glass of the cell and said, “You served your country. And if you want it, I am going to serve you.”
That was in 2007, Cornell said. He got into a housing assistance program and got a job, then an associate’s degree and a bachelor’s in psychology. He’s working on a master’s in social work.
“That day, I said, ‘I’m going to spend every single day I can to be that person who knocks on the door,’” he said. “Because they can still be all they can be. They just need somebody to be there for them.”
Palm Coast VFW Stand Down Committee co-chair Cathie Nacci said the the VFW plans to continue the event in future years. She was inspired to help organize it after attending stand downs in other counties with her husband Lorenzo Nacci, a Marine Corps veteran and past commander of the Palm Coast VFW Post No. 8696.
Lorenzo Nacci said that for veterans who come home from war with post traumatic stress disorder, it’s especially hard to access services.
“One thing that comes with the PTSD is that you segregate yourself from people,” he said. “You’re like an ostrich; you bury your head in the sand.”
So when Cathie Nacci suggested holding a stand down in Palm Coast, the couple went right to work, reaching out to the county and organizations like the Salvation Army to coordinate the event.
They started working on it in October, and in December, with the Volusia-Flagler Coalition for the Homeless, held a 24-hour count of local homeless people, searching for encampments and finding six hidden in wooded areas behind department stores and gas stations in Palm Coast.
Many of the people there were veterans, Cathie Nacci said.
She started a dialogue, visiting periodically to tell people about the stand down. Sometimes she tried to help on her own, once buying a pair of boots for a man who needed shoes, and on another occasion buying a jumbo-sized bag of dog food for a young homeless man with a dog.
The VFW’s Stand Down committee distributed about 500 fliers about the event.
By about 10 a.m. Saturday, 20 homeless veterans had showed up for the event — often brought by volunteers from local organizations — and more were expected later.
They picked up olive drab military surplus backpacks and sleeping bags, got haircuts, and signed up with organizations offering to help them secure medical care or find housing or employment.
Throughout the long preparation for the stand down, Cathie Nacci said, it was difficult to see veterans in such hardship, “but I felt good that we were going to be able to help, to do something. Tomorrow is when I sit down and cry,” she said. “But even if we help just one veteran, that’s a reward in itself.”
