[IP] No home for the brave?
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From: "Ted Dolotta" <Ted@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Another facet of the Iraqi fiasco.
I may be getting to be an old sentimental fool,
but I find this article incredibly sad.
Ted Dolotta
P.S. And despite the fact that Dan Barry is
something of a NY Times columnist, this
piece strikes me as fairly straight news
reporting.
===============================================
Home From Iraq, and Without a Home
April 24, 2004
By DAN BARRY
THIS is how Nicole Goodwin travels these days: with her
1-year-old daughter pressed to her chest in a Snugli, a
heavy backpack strapped across her shoulders, and a baby
stroller crammed with as many bags of clothes and diapers
as it can hold. When you are a homeless young mother, these
are the things you carry.
And tucked away somewhere are the documents attesting to
Ms. Goodwin's recent honorable discharge from the United
States Army, as well as Baghdad memories that are still
fresh.
Two months ago, she returned to Bronx circumstances that
were no less difficult than when she had left them three
years earlier; no yellow ribbons greeted her. Now, every
day, she soldiers on to find a residence where the rent is
not covered by in-kind payments of late-night bus rides to
shelters and early-morning rousting. All the while, she
keeps in mind the acronym she learned in the Army:
Leadership. L is for loyalty; D for duty; R for respect; S
for selfless service; H for honor; P for personal courage.
"And I is my favorite," she says. "It's integrity."
On Thursday morning, Ms. Goodwin wheeled her heavy-duty
stroller into the Lower Manhattan office of the Coalition
for the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that is trying
to help her. For the last couple of nights it has put her
and her nuzzling daughter, Shylah, up in a hotel.
"She needed a breather," said Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, its
executive director.
Ms. Goodwin, 23, has perfect posture and a steady gaze. She
graduated early from Morris High School in the Bronx, the
alma mater of another soldier, Colin L. Powell ("They made
sure we knew that," she says), then spent a couple of years
attending college classes sporadically and quarreling with
her mother.
One day in January 2001, she entered an Army recruiting
station and signed up, giving little thought to the chance
of war. "I needed to leave," she said. Life moved pretty
quickly after that: basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C.;
classes in supply support at Fort Lee, Va.; and then a
flight to Germany, where she was attached to Company B of
the 501st Forward Support Battalion at a post in Friedberg.
A relationship with another soldier ended after she became
pregnant, and in early 2003 she flew to the California home
of some friends from the military - the Bronx was not an
option, she says - to give birth in March of that year. A
few weeks later, she did the hardest thing she has ever had
to do: she left Shylah with her California friends and
returned to Germany to complete her service.
Four months after giving birth, Ms. Goodwin was sent to
Iraq. She served food rations at Baghdad International
Airport for several weeks, then spent a few more weeks at
the sports arena known as the Olympic Stadium, helping to
supply soldiers with things like toilet paper and small
armaments.
These are among her memories: "the mortar rounds, the
gunfights, the car bombings."
After nearly four months in Iraq, Ms. Goodwin returned to
Germany to finish the tail end of her three-year hitch. "I
wanted to get back to my daughter," she said, "but I didn't
want to leave Iraq."
Her Army career now over, Ms. Goodwin returned to
California to pick up Shylah, who looked "amazingly
different," and headed to the Bronx, where her mother, two
sisters and a 4-year-old nephew were now living in the
two-bedroom apartment in the Patterson housing project. "We
were good for a week," she said of her relationship with
her mother. "But after that. . . ."
Ms. Goodwin and her daughter moved in with a good friend's
mother, and she began planning her next step in life, one
that would provide more than the $250 a week she was
receiving in unemployment benefits. But a heated argument
abruptly ended the living arrangement, and late on April 6
- a little more than two months after being honorably
discharged as a private, second class - a war veteran and
her small child hit the darkened streets.
She pushed her stroller a few blocks to the Emergency
Assistance Unit, the city's flawed point of entry for
homeless families. She explained her situation to a staff
member who, she says, yelled at her for not having the
proper paperwork handy. "I killed her with kindness," she
said. "I've been yelled at before by the best."
"I got that attitude from Iraq," Ms. Goodwin added. "If
this isn't life and death, it's not that serious."
She filled out an application for transitional housing, and
after a while a bus arrived to take the Goodwins and other
families to a one-night shelter on Powers Avenue. She
thinks it was about 4 a.m.; she knows that Shylah's eyes
were wide open.
For the next several days, the Goodwins rode the city bus
of homelessness - two nights more at the Powers Avenue
shelter, and then several nights at the Skyway Hotel in
southeastern Queens - while the city determined whether she
was eligible for housing. Her life became a blur of riding
late-night buses, maneuvering the subway system, filling
out forms and comforting Shylah.
On April 17, the Department of Homeless Services denied
housing to the Iraqi war veteran on the grounds that she
could live with her mother. Beyond the overcrowding that
such a return would create (four women and two small
children in a two-bedroom apartment), she says that the
decision ignored the untenable situation between mother and
daughter.
Moving back was not an option, she said. Not an option.
MS. GOODWIN immediately reapplied, thus entering a limbo
world known as fast track, in which families who have
already been denied housing return within 48 hours to the
Emergency Assistance Unit to apply again, and to wait,
again, for that late-night bus to somewhere.
City officials say that under the fast-track process, the
applications of the recently rejected are expedited to see
whether any new information might make them eligible. But
according to Ms. Goodwin, fast track seems designed to
generate so much frustration that the applicant gives up
and goes away.
Two days into her fast-track odyssey, Ms. Goodwin got a
four-hour pass from the Emergency Assistance Unit - keeping
her application active - and made her way to the Bronx
Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The Department of Veterans
Affairs does not have housing for homeless veterans, but it
does have a comprehensive plan for homelessness that
includes assistance with employment and counseling.
Jim Connell, a spokesman for the Bronx center, said staff
members tried to find housing for the Goodwins. "They
started calling alternative shelters, but a lot of them
don't take women," he said. "One was full, another wouldn't
take a child." He added: "They were not particularly
successful."
Before the staff at the medical center could help Ms.
Goodwin further, Mr. Connell said, she had to leave
"because her pass was running out." But someone in Veterans
Affairs managed to call her cellphone and refer her to the
Coalition for the Homeless for legal help.
By last evening, officials in Veterans Affairs were vowing
to make sure that Nicole Goodwin receives the assistance
she needs, and Jim Anderson, a spokesman for Homeless
Services, was delivering the official city explanation.
"It is a disgrace that soldiers experience instability as
they return home and, sadly, hundreds of homeless vets
today call municipal shelters their home," Mr. Anderson
said. "That having been said, the facts support that this
particular family has an alternative to shelter."
A war veteran wearing a backpack, pushing a stroller and
carrying a baby stayed in another strange hotel room last
night, mostly because the city of her birth does not know
what to do with her. Welcome home.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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