Six on History: War Veterans and Memorials
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"When the encampment dubbed Veterans Row was emptied last week, dozens of tents, tarps and flags disappeared from San Vicente Boulevard. But moving 40 or so people onto the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus is a minimal step forward: An estimated 3,900 veterans live unhoused in Los Angeles.
That number, which has remained essentially unchanged since 2015, makes L.A. the epicenter of unsheltered veterans in the United States. It remains the case after years of promises — such as Mayor Eric Garcetti’s 2014 pledge to end veteran homelessness or the 2016 master plan to create 1,200 supportive housing units on the VA grounds, which is 95% incomplete and might not be done until 2031.
Other regions haven’t stalled so badly. Nationwide, the population of veterans experiencing homelessness was cut nearly in half between 2009 and 2019. Three states — Connecticut, Delaware and Maryland — and 82 communities report having functionally eliminated the problem, meaning a permanent housing solution is typically available for veterans within 90 days
To find out, I led a group of researchers who followed 26 unsheltered veterans starting in August 2019. We interviewed them monthly for a year to see what was barring vets from getting a permanent place to live.
Richard, who’d been a jet mechanic in the Air Force, was 56 and living next to the West L.A. VA campus gate when we met him. “Every time someone says they can do it, they don’t. ... So, I just don’t even get my hopes up for it,” he told us. Others said they were “done fighting the system” or thought it would take “a miracle.”
Only three of the 26 vets we followed obtained permanent housing during the next 12 months. Nine never made it indoors for more than two weeks. Fifteen got installed in temporary housing at some point, including five in hotel rooms through Project Roomkey, an emergency pandemic program.
It was clear that VA outreach programs fell short. The men and women we recruited for our study all were within walking distance or a short bus ride of the VA in West L.A., but two-thirds were getting assistance from non-VA service providers or no help at all. While the VA operates a Welcome Center on campus and holds events around the county, the veterans we spoke to said those programs don’t provide a clear pathway to housing.
“I am just so surprised that there aren’t vans that come around and offer shuttle service [to the VA],” Shandra, then 42 and an Air Force veteran, told us in early 2020. “I am just surprised that there aren’t people that are willing to meet you to help you navigate through some of these difficult phone calls and paperwork.”
When our study began, the VA’s homeless outreach team consisted of five individuals responsible not just for all of Los Angeles County, but also parts of adjacent counties. They had no medical or behavioral health expertise. They carried no mobile technology that could, for example, confirm a person’s status as a veteran. Nonprofit-led outreach teams were far more numerous, but they weren’t connecting veterans to VA services.
The kind of housing offered was sometimes a stumbling block. Some veterans turned down shelter that they deemed unsafe or that couldn’t accommodate their families. Others ran afoul of rules — such as curfews or sobriety — and cycled back onto the streets. One missed curfew at a Project Roomkey hotel after our study concluded; she wound up back on the streets living in a van.
Pushing veterans to address mental health, employment or substance use problems before they get permanent housing is counter to the VA’s stated “housing first” philosophy. Yet one vet living in his car said that after a drug-use relapse he was kicked out of a residential treatment program on the VA campus. Other veterans complained of being told “to put in more effort” to qualify for something permanent.
It’s easy to think that anyone living in a vehicle or tent would accept whatever housing is offered, but it is rarely so simple. Shandra’s spouse had immigrated illegally; they were wary of shelters demanding a lot of information. Ralph, a Navy veteran who was 51, preferred staying near a library in Hollywood to a short-term housing program on skid row, in part because of his PTSD. “The noise level, the energy level, the constant law enforcement, paramedics, helicopters — that’s just too overwhelming for me,” he said. “They should not be housing veterans in skid row.”
L.A.'s shortage of affordable apartments made the VA’s rent vouchers difficult to use in the private housing market. Reggie, an Army veteran, was 48 and homeless for the first time when we met him. He got a voucher but couldn’t find a landlord who’d accept it within the 120-day time limit. His voucher expired.
In a recent survey, 87% of American adults said more should be done to support U.S. veterans. A similar percentage said they’d pay additional taxes to make it happen. Local passage of Proposition HHH and Measure H also reflect the depth of this sentiment. Moreover, Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to invest $7.3 billion in the next year to address the state’s homelessness crisis.
So the core problem today is not a shortfall of money or public will. It’s that the VA and other organizations do little to identify vulnerable veterans, they don’t effectively follow through or cross coordinate, and they have too little housing to offer. In the end, veterans become indistinguishable from the tens of thousands of other unsheltered individuals in the county, and no one is held accountable for their care.
Last month, as plans were made to dismantle Veterans Row, U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough pledged to house 500 more of L.A.’s unsheltered veterans by the end of this year. Let’s hope he succeeds. But even if he does, there will still be more than 3,000 local veterans waiting for a home."
Sarah B. Hunter is a senior behavioral scientist at the nonpartisan Rand Corp., and director of its Center on Housing and Homelessness in Los Angeles.
"AROUND MIDDAY ON August 15, the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, was told by an adviser that Taliban fighters had entered the presidential palace and were looking for him room by room. This was not true, but Ghani, aware that ousted presidents do not have long lives in his country, hurried himself and his wife to a military helicopter and fled for Uzbekistan. Without time to fetch any personal belongings, he left Kabul in plastic sandals and a thin coat, according to a Washington Post account of that day.
This defeat could have been an opportunity to rethink the logic of America’s war machine. That’s what defeats often do: They force you to reconsider the destructive tendencies that got you into the hole. One of those tendencies has been a nearly ceaseless rise in military spending that has little popular support. Even before the fall of Kabul, opinion polls consistently showed that only a minority of Americans think that the U.S. should spend more on its defense — just 26 percent in a survey conducted by Gallup in February. And on the day that the U.S. got out of Afghanistan, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the lone member of Congress to vote against the invasion in 2001, called on Republicans as well as Democrats to finally reconfigure the nation’s spending priorities. “Now is the time to shift our investments away from endless wars and toward addressing human needs,” she said.
Guess what happened?
That was the legislative prelude to Lee’s call for new priorities. Two days later, on September 2, the House Armed Services Committee met to consider the military budget, and as expected, an amendment was introduced by the ranking Republican to match the Senate increase. This set off a debate in which one of the strongest backers of the plus-up was a Democrat, Rep. Elaine Luria, a former Navy officer whose Virginia district includes the naval station in Norfolk.
“In one word, we can sum up the ‘why,’ and that’s China,” Luria said. “We are ending our longest conflict of 20 years, but more than ever, the world is watching what we do here today. … Right now there are malign actors who seek to attack us and do us harm.”
This has been a reliable power move over the decades: When one threat fades away, another seems to come along at just the right time. The so-called war on terror is a spent force, but now there is China, which devotes two-thirds less to its defense than the U.S. and is not known to be planning any 9/11-style attacks on the homeland — but is having a conveniently timed “Sputnik moment.”
In the end, the committee voted 42-17 to increase the budget, with 14 Democrats joining 28 Republicans. The committee spent far more time debating critical race theory (about two hours) than the amendment to cut the budget (about 30 minutes).
“It’s as if we have learned nothing from the past 20 years,” said Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat from California, during the debate. She noted that rather than pumping money into the military, more resources could go toward diplomacy, education, infrastructure, and public health. “That is what will determine if we are competitive with China, not whether we have one more F-35 that even the Pentagon says they don’t need,” she concluded.
These soldiers also spent decades trying to clear their name.
The segregated regiment—which took the nickname the Borinqueneers, honoring the Indigenous Taíno name for their homeland—went from being heralded by General Douglas MacArthur for battlefield bravery to having 91 soldiers court martialed and jailed in 1952.
After intense public pressure, the Army quickly pardoned them, later blaming incompetent Army leadership, poor military tactics, racism and organizational prejudice for the events that landed the soldiers in the brig.
The findings of an internal Army investigation provided some vindication for the soldiers, their families and for Puerto Rico’s pride. But many died waiting for the broader exoneration that would truly clear their names in the history books.
“It’s a proud day for all those whose lives they saved and whose freedom they defended,” said President Barack Obama at the 2014 White House ceremony awarding the once-vilified regiment the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s top honor. “You’ve earned a hallowed place in our history.”
Those words from the president, and that redemption from the top, took more than 60 years.
READ MORE: Why Isn’t Puerto Rico a State?
The Borinqueneers are best known for their fighting in the Korean War (1950-53). But the regiment of Puerto Ricans existed half a century before that.
After losing the Spanish American War in 1898, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines to America. A year later, Congress authorized the U.S. military to form the Puerto Rico Battalion of Volunteer Infantry, comprised mainly of men from its newly acquired territory.
During WWII, its soldiers won a Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars and 900 Purple Hearts for combat in Europe. But it was their impressive maneuvers in an Atlantic Fleet joint training exercise for the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, back home in Puerto Rico after the war, that propelled the 65th to Korea’s front lines.
On the way, the soldiers took the nickname Borinqueneers.
Korean War: Distinguished Service Earns MacArthur’s PraiseSoon after arriving in Pusan, South Korea in September 1950, the 65th Infantry became known as a “well led, well trained and highly motivated” unit in various battles in the muddy hills and brush during Korea’s harsh winter.
By the end of the 65th’s first year in Korea, it had suffered 1,510 casualties while killing 15,787 enemy troops and taking 2,169 prisoners, according to the Historic Review on the 65th Court-martial: Report by the Department of Army's Center of Military History.
General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the U.S.-led United Nations forces early in the war, wrote in 1951 that the 65th‘s soldiers showed “magnificent ability and courage in field operations. They are a credit to Puerto Rico, and I am proud to have them in my command.
But in the fall of 1952, the unit’s fortunes changed. Chinese troops launched major offensives against two U.S.-held outposts defended, in part, by the 65th: Outpost Kelly in September and Jackson Heights a month later. The Borinqueneers suffered heavy casualties. Dismal troop morale sank further.
After the carnage at Outpost Kelly, unit commanders cut the Puerto Ricans’ rice and beans rations, stripped the Borinqueneers nickname off the unit’s vehicles and had a soldier hang a “I Am A Coward” sign around his neck. They ordered the men to shave their mustaches until they could prove they were “real men” in battle.
Deeply insulted and facing what most thought was a suicide mission, dozens of soldiers refused orders to retake the Jackson Heights outpost. The Army quickly court martialed and convicted 91 of them for desertion and disobeying orders in December. All were dishonorably discharged. Sentences ranged from one to 16 years of confinement at hard labor.
“They treated us…like we were worth nothing,” Raúl Reyes Castañeira, the youngest of four brothers who followed their father’s footsteps into the 65th Infantry, told Univision’s Aquí y Ahora newsmagazine show. “And we were giving our lives. So many young men there just dying. It was terrible.”
Public Blowback Prompts an Internal InvestigationThe Army tried to keep the court martials quiet, but soldiers’ homebound letters and the local press blew the story open in January 1953. Puerto Rico’s government, Congress and the public demanded answers.
Army officials told Congress that the rotation of new, inexperienced soldiers and officers into the regiment—and their inability to speak English—led to the failures and court martials. Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens used the point about the language barrier to justify pardoning all those convicted, overturning their sentences and reinstating them in the Army.
A subsequent internal investigation listed many other problems, including inept leadership, a severe ammunition shortage and military tactics that needlessly increased casualties. The 65th suffered 806 casualties in just those two months defending and attempting to retake the strategically questionable Kelly and Jackson Heights outposts.
The investigation also blamed “a command environment guilty of ethnic and organizational prejudice,” both on and off the battlefield.
An Affront to Puerto RicansInvestigators pointed out that the commanders who had court martialed the Puerto Rican soldiers had on other occasions opted not to prosecute white soldiers for abandoning the battlefield. Rather than use the moment to reform the 65th or fix certain practices, commanders chose to punish the battalion.
The probe also highlighted a double standard in how commanders treated and evaluated Puerto Rican officers and white officers and other instances of ethnic or racial prejudice in the Army’s command structure.
For cultural historian Silvia Alvarez Curbelo, the court martials that tarnished the 65th’s reputation were not seen on the island as isolated cases of discrimination. Rather, they posed an affront to Puerto Rican identity as U.S. citizens at a time when the island was ascendant, having elected its first governor four years earlier, had just ratified its constitution that year, and was close to ending a five-year wave of mass migration to the U.S. mainland.
“The Puerto Rican soldier performance was also an affair of dignity…a mixture of pride, courage, bravery, self-respect and patriotism,” says Alvarez Curbelo, a professor of communications at the University of Puerto Rico.
That’s why soldiers still alive today say that true redemption is important—not just to clear their own names, but for Puerto Ricans to collectively remember the sacrifices made. During the Korean War, also known as the "Forgotten War," some 61,000 Puerto Ricans served in the U.S. Army, 48,000 of them recruited on the island. With 743 dead and 2,318 wounded, Puerto Rico suffered one casualty for every 660 inhabitants, more than double the rate for the continental U.S.
Norberto Rivera, a Borinqueneer who survived the Kelly Outpost bloodbath, told Aquí y Ahora he welcomes the Congressional Medal of Honor as a salve to those days he remembers with much nostalgia and pain.
“I think the credit, the recognition, should go to those men who never made it back home,” Rivera said."
