Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez recently visited U.S.VETS-Long Beach, spoke with veterans, and dug into our newest program to reach Iraq and Afghanistan veterans before they struggle with PTSD. Read his latest column about his visit and the important role U.S.VETS in playing the veteran community.
Here is an excerpt from Lopez’s column entitled: Standing up for injured vets – U.S. VETS, an L.A. nonprofit, is doing a job the military, to its shame, refuses to do.
I went to see Peck last week in Long Beach, where 545 formerly homeless vets live and get job training, addiction treatment and other services from U.S. VETS. Peck said the demand for services nationwide is bound to grow dramatically, given thousands of multiple deployments to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there’s no way the Department of Veterans Affairs will be able to answer the need…
Peck says an estimated 20% of all vets will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but only 40% of those afflicted will seek help. Crunch those numbers, and it means roughly 250,000 vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will go untreated. And that will translate into thousands of fractured families, lost jobs and more homelessness.
So Peck and his staff have come up with a new program to help stem the tide. Beginning in January, they’ll be going to college campuses and into the streets in search of vets who need help but either don’t know it or don’t know where to turn. U.S. VETS is building a network of contacts on local college campuses, where several thousand vets in Greater L.A. are taking advantage of the new G.I. bill.
U.S. VETS will use outreach workers and a clinical psychologist and make use of its partnership with the Long Beach VA Medical Center’s medical and psychiatric teams. Adam Renteria, one of the outreach workers, is the perfect example of whom U.S. VETS wants to go after. Renteria survived the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 but came home shell-shocked.
Read Lopez’s entire column, here.
