Today's Veterans Have a Tough Trip Home

It was a simple request, Sylvia Lippe said.

The young woman needed help paying her rent, and with transportation.

The woman was a recently discharged military veteran, said Lippe, a counselor with Family Service of Morris County. The young veteran was one of 2,500 New Jersey service men and women who had been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan  over the past year.

She soon will be joined in the transition from military to civilian life by thousands more troops as most of the U.S. military personnel stationed in Iraq and 10,000 veterans from Afghanistan return home by the end of the year. They will be followed by 23,000 more serving in Afghanistan by the end 2013, as the Obama administration winds down the decade of combat.

For some it will not be an easy transition.

This week, Patch takes a look at the lives of Morris County's service members and veterans, for our special report, Morris and the Military.

The Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers, all volunteers,  are true 1-percenters.

One percent of the U.S population is directly involved in fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said John  Franklin, chief executive officer of the United Way of Northern New Jersey.

“While military families are strong, the stresses that arise when a family member is called upon to serve can be great,” Franklin said. “This war is much different than in the past.”

We sent them to Afghanistan in 2001 and to Iraq in 2003.

The fought and died in the alleys of Fallujah, on the roads near Baghdad, Kirkut,  Kabul, in Helmand Provence. The tracked down Saddam Hussein and killed Osama bin Laden.

Officials from Morris County nonprofits that are providing support for the veterans in the form of housing and transportation assistance, child day care, job searches and training, medical help and mental health counseling are expecting that the need for those services will grow as more military veterans are discharged.

Chief needs are for housing, jobs, and mental health services—especially to address post-traumatic stress disorder for combat veterans, and to aid in readjustment to family life, they said.

The issue in New Jersey is complicated, those officials said, because roughly half of the New Jersey service members are in Army Reserve or New Jersey National Guard units, some of which saw multiple tours of duty. As they return to their former lives, they find that some aspects may have changed.

The New Jersey National Guard suffered one of its worst times on June 7 and 8, 2004 when four members of the Third Battalion 112th Field Artillery unit headquartered in Morristown died in combat in Baghdad. They were the first New Jersey Guard members to die in battle since World War II.

Michael Armstrong, chief executive  officer of , the Parsippany-based provider of veteran housing and counseling services, said the number of Army Reserve and National Guard members presents the possibility that they are older, with families. Their jobs may be been lost in the soft economy. They could be without the skills to get new jobs, he said.

“The entire situation is compounded by  the generally bad economy,” Armstrong said. “The are fewer jobs available. Veteran unemployment is about 15 percent. It is not an easy transition to civilian jobs. It is really staggering.  Unemployment factors in all else—family and home.”

The situation is also complicated, Lippe said, by the increasing numbers of Vietnam-era veterans seeking help, especially mental health counseling.

“They are retiring, and with more time on their hands, appear to be thinking more about their military service,” Lippe said.

In 2009 the United Way created the Front Line Fund to help pay for needed services. The goal, with its partner Leadership Morris, a group affiliated with the Morris County Chamber of Commerce, is to raise $100,000.

The fund was an outgrowth of an efforts dating back to 2007, when the county’s business community pledged its support for hiring veterans. That start was followed in subsequent years by a joint effort by the county’s nonprofit community,  government agencies, business community and the leadership at Picatinny Arsenal to formalize plans into a community covenant. The return in 2008 of 3,000 New Jersey soldiers galvanized the effort.

On Nov. 13 a March for Military Families raised $30,000 for the Front Line Fund, and Leadership Morris has committed to raising an additional $10,000. In two years, the Front Line Fund has raised $70,000.

Since last year, the fund helped 60 military families get counseling through Family Service of Morris County, based in Morristown. Twenty-nine families received counseling for issues including post traumatic stress disorder, and 12 others which received financial assistance to avoid foreclosure, evictions or to pay for food and utilities.

The fund also supports specialists at NJ 2-1-1 call centers trained to address the needs of returning soldiers and their families.

Another key issue is the need for legal services, Armstrong said.

“A lot of veterans have lots of minor violations that impact their  ability to get aid or move forward,” he said. “They have to get these settled to move on.“

An unresolved motor vehicle violation can stall an effort to get help for a mental health issue, for example.

To that end, Community Hope, through its Hope for Veterans Program at Veterans Administration Hospital at Lyons, joined in September with the law firm  Lowenstein Sandler, the Lowenstein Center for the Public Interest, and the Legal Services of Northwest Jersey, with funding from Merck & Co., to provide free legal services for veterans.

Often veterans do not have permanent addresses, Armstrong said, and are unaware of legal papers sent to them. This makes resolving issues concerning driving privileges, disability claims, or credit difficult, he said, and that in turn affects the veterans’ ability seek work or permanent housing.

Legal help has been provided to 36 veterans so far.

Armstrong said the recent veterans benefit from the apparent ability of the general public to separate its feelings about the military service members and its feelings about the wars, politics and other issues.

That is a change from the Vietnam War, in which he served, Armstrong said.

“Now people are differentiating between the war and the warrior. Not so in Vietnam,” he said. “Vietnam soldiers returned to hostile environments, aimed at  both the war and warrior. Both were condemned.”

But there are many underlying issues, Armstrong said.

“Many of these troops were in combat situations and had multiple military tours,” he said. “That is very stressful.”