Bringing It All Back Home (26 page)

It has haunted me to the point where I felt it was an omen. That's why I couldn't keep a family—because I destroyed one.

After breaking up with his third wife in 1993, he became homeless, living at the Borden Avenue Veterans Shelter in Long Island City, Queens.

Homelessness among Vietnam veterans became a major public issue in the 1980s, though there had been homeless Vietnam veterans living on the streets of New York City since the 1960s. As the problem gained national visibility, the New York City Office of the Comptroller published
Soldiers of Misfortune: Homeless Veterans in New York City
in 1982. The report found that as of that year there were as many as ten thousand veterans living on New York City streets, accounting for an estimated one-third of the city's homeless population. On average they were in their late thirties. The causes varied, of course, but the report pointed to both unemployment and underemployment and a lack of low-cost housing. Another explanation offered was that veterans were less likely to have completed their education than their peers. The report also cited stepped-up discharges from mental hospitals as a contributing factor. In 1982 unemployment in the city was running at 9.5 percent, while 11 percent of Vietnam-era veterans were out of work. The picture was much worse among minority veterans, who were suffering an unemployment rate of almost 25 percent. The housing market in the city changed dramatically between 1970 and 1981, too; the report estimated that 321,000 apartments had disappeared, mostly in low-rent buildings.
4

Partly as a result of public pressure created by this report and the opening of Vietnam memorials in Washington, D.C., and later New York City, in 1987 New York City opened the shelter on Borden Avenue, the country's first for homeless veterans. The community fought the shelter unsuccessfully. Located in an industrial building near the Queens-side entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, the shelter would house some of the estimated twenty-seven hundred homeless veterans already in the New York City shelter system. It was never a particularly welcoming place. It was originally designed for 275 occupants, but its population quickly ballooned to over 400. The city initially promised that veterans would receive both health care and job training on-site, but those services did not materialize for some time.

In February 1988, Bernard Edelman, then director of the Office of Veterans' Affairs for Mayor Edward I. Koch, reported that among the 400 residents at the Borden Avenue shelter, 80 percent were black, 15 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent white. Fifty percent were Vietnam-era veterans, and 20 percent “ex-offenders.”
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In 1988, the Veterans Administration additionally opened a drop-in center on Ryerson Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which contained an examination room, a lounge, and a kitchen.
6

The effort was only partly successful, as estimates of the number of homeless Vietnam-era veterans continued to climb. The press frequently cited statistics asserting that one-quarter to one-third of America's homeless were veterans, and as late as 1991 some estimated that the proportion of Vietnam-era veterans among the homeless ran as high as 50 percent.
7
Sweat was among them.

On August 7, 1993, Steven Zadarala, a forty-two-year-old homeless veteran sleeping on the cot next to Sweat's at the shelter, was stabbed in the chest.
8

I seen him and he was changing colors. I saw him going into shock now because he couldn't even talk, you see. I had to get him to the floor so he wouldn't run. I finally flipped him down to the floor. I truly didn't really, really think that this guy was going to make it, [but] I started giving him mouth-to-mouth and trying to stop the bleeding and all of this at the same time. Once I got up to take a breather myself, and my man, who we called him Sarge, he jumped down there and he told me, “Sweat, he needs mouth-to-mouth again”; that's all I remember. And then when I went back down to give him mouth-to-mouth the second time, we got his pulse back, but it was real faint. So then, naturally, we're waiting and waiting on this ambulance. I didn't know that much time elapsed, but it was something like fifty-something minutes before this ambulance came.

Why did it take all this time? Because it was a shelter? You understand, it's nobody important, just a bunch of veterans; you understand me—they're drug addicts and misfits and everything else. We wasn't real people. We wasn't nothin'. So they didn't get there for about fifty-four minutes.

Zadarala died. Police arrested Milton Vasquez, another Borden Avenue shelter resident, for the murder. Sweat recalls:
He ran and tried to flush a knife eight inches long down the commode. The police got the knife, got everything.

The incident brought Sweat to a mental breakdown.

I started flashing back. All I could think about was how I killed these people. That just kept piling in my mind as I was trying to get his blood off of me. They had me in the shower. Then the police came in and told me they were going to take me to the hospital. So they took me. And in a way that was the best thing that ever happened to me because they took me from there to people who I feel helped me. They put me in the VA on Twenty-Third Street, and they left me there for five months and twenty-three days. That was a lot of time to be locked up—not knowing what to do in there. Finally, that's when they sent me to Lyons, New Jersey, and then from there they sent me to Martinsburg, West Virginia, which is a long-term hospital. And that's why I thought I would never get back to New York.

While Sweat was living at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center, a residential care facility, a friend told him about Black Veterans for Social Justice, an organization that offers treatment and social assistance for veterans from all wars. Founded in 1979, BVSJ aims to fill in the gaps left by the Veterans Administration.

One important service the organization provides is supportive housing for veterans. Sweat himself now lives in a BVSJ-owned building.

That's why I belong to the Black Vets for Social Justice, because this is the only place that has said these words—that we have served too. We have these problems of war sickness, of socializing, of our behavioral patterns; we have problems and you shouldn't just look at us as just guys in the ghetto. You should look at these soldiers of war as collateral damage.

Sweat had no desire to remain permanently at a Veterans Administration facility. Instead, he wanted to live as independently as he could. In BVSJ, he found a group that would help him move from dependence to independence by stressing the twin values of mutual aid and self-help.

I came to this organization because of what it stood for. And what it stands for is to unite blacks and other veterans, all veterans, in a united way to give us the benefits which we've never really received as being veterans. “Yes, we served too.” That's our motto.

Within Black Veterans for Social Justice, that's the key word: “justice.” We need justice. As you know, in our society of America, the black man and woman do not receive justice. So yes, there are organizations that must be formed to [fix] the injustices that have happened to us over the generations being here in America.

As a participant at BVSJ, Sweat has run the organization's Veterans Action Group for many years. He describes it as
a group which was formed by veterans for veterans. It exists today at 665 Willoughby and also 22 East 119th Street, where veterans come together and we relate to each other all kinds of situations that may approach us as veterans. To receive veterans' benefits … to just enlighten each other and hearten each other in our tribulations. It's a group that all veterans are welcome to come to, not just blacks. Not just [men], but all people can come to it. We open our doors to everyone.

Here I am—sixty-two years old and left the war when I was nineteen years old, taken care of by Uncle Sam for eleven, almost twelve, years. So from that time that goes to show you that for all the other years, I was out here suffering; that's what I'm trying to do now—to slow the suffering down of other veterans, and move right on.

Sweat was elected chair of the board of directors at BVSJ in 2010. In that capacity he pushes forward the organization's aim of aiding people like himself. And he struggles every day with the impact of Vietnam on his life. In his mind, life since then has been a kind of cosmic payback for what he did as a “boonie rat,” a soldier in the bush, for twelve months nearly forty-five years ago.

Once you commit the murder of war, you can never forget that. War is that, murder. Someone will die. I was so young that I did not understand what I was doing. I didn't only destroy human life and destroy villages, but I also destroyed myself. I suffer now from post-traumatic stress disorder and the situations, the missions, the air assaults, just the killing fields itself, remain vivid and in me forever. It's not a day that goes by that I don't think of or have a flashback or a thought about Vietnam, about the incidences, about the missions, or about just the simple smell.

It's the truth that I want to explain. It's what holds me back from being a whole man. It's—it's the guilt—it's the killing, it's the not caring about human beings at that one little time, that year, that just keeps coming back and back.

13

LONG ROAD HOME: NEIL KENNY

It's long been recognized that combat can have profound psychological consequences for soldiers. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has argued that the problem can be traced as far back as the
Iliad
, where the wrath of Achilles follows the death of his beloved Patroclus. In the nineteenth century, soldiers affected by combat were said to have “soldier's heart.” In the aftermath of World War I, their condition was identified as “shell shock,” and during World War II as “combat fatigue.” Until fairly recently, these conditions were considered to be short-term; the assumption was that symptoms showed up immediately and faded relatively quickly.

In 1988 the journal
Science
reported that fifteen to twenty years after the end of their service in Vietnam, veterans of that war were more than twice as likely to suffer “serious psychological problems”—alcohol abuse, major depression, and anxiety—as soldiers who did not serve in Vietnam.
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The recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder by the American Psychological Association in 1980 was, by the mid-1980s, provoking what the writer Leslie Roberts called a “seemingly intractable debate on how to prevent it,” as well as a discussion of “which veterans should be compensated.”

The Centers for Disease Control spent four years and $23 million conducting analytic interviews with some fifteen thousand veterans. In all, the health of about seven thousand Army veterans who served in Vietnam between 1965 and 1971 was compared with that of about seven thousand Vietnam-era noncombat veterans. The study concluded that about 14 percent of Vietnam veterans were having problems with alcohol abuse or dependence, as opposed to 9 percent of noncombat Vietnam-era veterans.

The New York City resident and Vietnam veteran Neil Kenny was eventually diagnosed with PTSD in 1995, twenty-six years after he left the Marine Corps.

Kenny speaks with what New Yorkers would recognize as a Lower East Side accent. A commanding presence, he is only about five feet eight inches tall and by his own admission sixty pounds heavier than he would like to be. His rigid bearing still contains traces of his military background. At sixty-three years old, his hair remains full and dark, and his face has retained a boyish appearance.

A self-described survivor, Kenny lived through a difficult childhood, thirteen months of service in Vietnam, and years of alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression. He was eventually diagnosed with disabling post-traumatic stress disorder, and his story is one example of how the symptoms of the syndrome can shape a life without destroying it.

He remains vigorously active and is ebullient, witty, and engaged as he communicates. While his symptoms have alienated some, including other veterans, he works hard to maintain his equilibrium. Some days, he says, he wakes up in a homicidal mood and it is best not to cross him. Overall, it's best to become a member of his squad, or as Alice, whom he calls his
bride of twenty-five years
, puts it, to be “inside the wire.” If Kenny considers you a “friendly,” you will be all right.

Not that there isn't plenty of venom to go around. In recent years, Kenny has begun to joke,
I don't have PTSD. I just have an anger problem.

Neil Joseph Kenny was born on March 13, 1949, and grew up in the Governor Alfred E. Smith Houses, a New York City public housing project built in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Proposed by Mayor La Guardia in 1943, the project housed 1,780 apartments with room for 6,850 persons.
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Designed by the architectural firm Eggers & Higgins, which, coincidentally, was owned by the father of his fellow veteran Richard Eggers,
3
it was a remarkably safe place to grow up, Kenny recalls.

I had Chinatown. I grew up with blacks, grew up with Hispanics; it was a mixed neighborhood, which I didn't think was really a bad thing. It really wasn't. I grew up in a time when people could leave their doors open, when you lived in a project and things really weren't happening. We all got along; we all got along on the Lower East Side. I'm a kid from the Lower East Side. I have fond memories of living in the projects.

Even as a child, Kenny dreamed of being a soldier.

One of the things that I've always had memories of, and sometimes it comes out to me in dreams, is I always had—I always played soldiers, always. I was always—it was an always thing.

While he remembers the Lower East Side projects as being safe, there are also memories of deprivation, violence, and even death. The family was poor, and Kenny can recall times when there was nothing to eat. Sometimes the family couldn't pay the rent because of his father's drinking. There was a lot of alcoholism in Kenny's family, and drinking would become part of his story, too.