By Bill Rauch
Being a military veteran and homeless for the holidays in Beaufort is dispiriting. Maybe it’s tucking in the kids in the backseat of your car parked for the night in the Walmart parking lot. Or sleeping alone under a bridge. Or overstaying your welcome at a Buddy’s place.
We say these things should never happen to those who have served our country, but all too often that dream is ephemeral.
For “Snipe” it meant staying with his wife and son in his house for which he had missed numerous mortgage payments … without heat, electricity or water.
“When I say we had no food, I mean with no electricity for the refrigerator you can’t keep food,” he explained to me last week.
For “MP” it meant being jobless and feeling helpless and dangerously depressed while bunking in with his wife and child at his mother-in-law’s place where increasingly he felt that he was a burden.
The stories of MP and Snipe are real stories. Because each of these veterans of U.S. military service spoke to me on the basis that I would not use their names, I have for the purposes of this column assigned to them these noms de guerre.
MP served a five year tour in the U.S. Army as a military policeman. In the months prior to his discharge he was assigned to an active zone where live fire was commonplace. As it does with many, the regular, dangerous and jarring events there caused for him later recurring anxiety and depression.
Yet he was proud, too proud at first to seek help. Finally, with the desperate helplessness dominating his mind, MP reached out to his former platoon sergeant, whom he trusted. The sergeant urged him to register with the Veteran’s Administration (VA).
“I didn’t want to,” MP told me last week. “There were so many others, I thought, that deserved the care more than I did. I didn’t want to get in front of them in the line.”
But it turned out to be a good thing MP did that day for himself and his family. His VA Coordinator put him in touch with S.C. Works, the South Carolina state agency that coordinates the efforts of several state social service agencies to help match employers with prospective employees.
MP went over to S.C. Works’ offices on Castle Rock Road in Port Royal where he met with the Military Coordinator there, Michael Haskins. Haskins took on his case and it wasn’t long before MP had himself a good job as a manager at a local fast food restaurant. The distraction of the constant calls on MP’s attention that the job provides, and knowing his family is taken care of has, MP told me last week “mitigated his depression.” And the regular paycheck has made it possible for him to move his family into their own place where they can be together as a family this holiday season.
Snipe served six active duty years with the U.S. Coast Guard as a Damage Controlman 2nd Class followed by four years in the Coast Guard Reserve. The son of Marines and a Beaufort High graduate, there is no missing Snipe’s independent and self-reliant streak.
After his discharge, Snipe went out on his own, maintaining and repairing refrigerators at the seafood packaging houses and then at the fast food joints that proliferate on all of Beaufort’s major thoroughfares. He’s was good, and it went well. Snipe got a mortgage, bought a house, moved his wife and child in, and began his pursuit of the American Dream. Then came COVID.
“Every one of my customers closed down. Everyone was scared of the virus,” Snipe explained last week. “They say you should have about two years’ savings saved up. I paid my mortgage for about two years, and then I was out. The lights went off, and they cut off the water. At a certain stage you say to yourself, ‘You know what Snipe, you need help.’ That’s when I went to S.C. Works.”
This holiday season Snipe’s got a good job as a maintenance man. The heat, the lights, the water and the refrigerator are all back on at his place, and he’s tussling with the bank over how to get his property out of foreclosure.
“That S.C. Works is the best government entity I have ever seen,” Snipe said to me last week. “Mike and the entire crew tucked away there on Castle Rock Road will put you to work. If you want to pay your bills, if you want to work, they’ll get you work.”
Bill Rauch was the Mayor of Beaufort from 1999 to 2008 and has twice won awards from the S.C. Press Association for his Island News columns. He can be reached at The RauchReport@gmail.com.
