I want to change this. I recently attended an event with Lindsey Sin. Sin is California Department of Veteran Affairs, Deputy Secretary for Women Veterans. She was wearing a small dog tag lapel pin that read “Women Proudly Served”, I focused in on the pin and immediately began thinking of the possibilities this little pin could do for encouraging more women to proudly wear this pin as a token of service to this great country. I began wearing the pin and was surprised how many veterans complemented me on the design and the overall idea.

Conway Jones Jr

One person in particular Mr. Conway Jones Jr. thought the pin should read “Women Proudly Serve” because he believes that women continue to serve even after they leave the military. I wholeheartedly agreed and after an in-depth and thoughtful conversation, he generously offered to donate $500 towards producing a new lapel pin.

On behalf of Swords to Plowshares and women veterans, I would like to extend a very special thank you to Conway Jones Jr., retired Air Force Colonel. Mr. Jones is currently a Commissioner on the Alameda County Veterans Affairs Commission. His enthusiasm and support continues to be an incredible inspiration.

We have identified a new and simple way to highlight women individually, to acknowledge them for their service and to connect women to the vast network of active women veterans in our local community.

Starlyn Lara
Ms. Lara served nearly twelve years on active duty in the US Army from 1995-2007, during her service she achieved the rank of Staff Sergeant (SSG-E6) and was assigned to multiple duty stations as well as deployments that included Bosnia during Operation Joint Forge and Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. She was awarded the Combat Action Badge and two Meritorious Service Medals for her service. She understands the impact of combat and the struggle to adapt to life as a civilian.

The VBA made a push to clear this backlog (claims that are over 125 days old are considered backlogged) by resolving to make decisions on claims that were over two years old in a two month period (this period started in mid-April 2013). During this time, the claims that were in the worst Regional Offices (Oakland is one of them) were moved and decisions on claims were made based on the evidence that was there or could be collected before the deadline. A decision would be made based on that…but it’s not a final decision. It’s a provisional one. You have up to a year to submit more evidence before that decision is finalized and can go to appeal status.

My claim was denied for all of my foot ailments. I injured it in basic training and it continued to degrade during my service. My records from basic training and my first deployment can’t be located, despite my lawyer’s best efforts. My records from my first two periods of active duty can’t be located and that my ankle conditions were pre-existing conditions. They were…my records show that I went to Iraq with a history of 3rd degree ankle sprains and that they continued when I returned. Why does this matter? The conditions are pre-existing from another period of my military service.

I do have a year to submit more evidence (if I can find it), but it is not an end to the backlog. The numbers are down, but these provisional ratings are still not final ratings (unless you want them to be). The problem? The VA is not giving Veterans the benefit of the doubt. I destroyed my foot and ankle in service to this country. I was pushed out of the door and not given sufficient information to make sure I was well. I know I have time to fix this, but it’s not right that I have to move heaven and earth to prove these things.

I’m going to take this evening to be upset, eat fried food, and watch shitty movies, but tomorrow, it’s war.

#EndtheVAbacklog

Dottie Guy
Dottie Guy is an advocate for veterans rights, an artist, and active member of the community. She is an Iraq War veteran who served in the National Guard and now serves as the Outreach Coordinator for Iraq and Afghanistan era Veterans at the Oakland Vet Center.

 

ABC News – A former member of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs has come out to say she’s now a woman.

Kristin Beck, formerly Chris, served 20 years as a SEAL and fought on some of the most dangerous battlefields in the world, but after she left the service she realized she wasn’t living the life she wanted.

“Chris really wanted to be a girl and felt that she was a girl and consolidated that identity very early on in childhood,” said Anne Speckhard, co-author of Beck’s biography “Warrior Princess,” which was published over the weekend. Speckhard told ABC News Beck suppressed that secret for decades, however, through the trials of SEAL training and the harrowing missions that followed, growing a burly beard as she fought on the front lines of American special operations.

Brandon Webb, a former SEAL who served on a different SEAL team than Beck, said that Beck’s reputation in the SEALs was a good one and said she was, by all appearances, the “consummate guy’s guy.”

But the book says that Chris “had considered living as the woman he felt himself to be for a very long time, but while he was serving as a SEAL he couldn’t do it.”

“For years Chris had turned off his sexuality like a light switch and lived as a warrior, consumed with the battle — living basically asexual. For Chris the other SEALs were brothers and in the man’s man warrior lifestyle, even if he had wanted to entertain sexual thoughts, there really was never any time to be thinking too much about sexuality,” the book says.

After her retirement in 2011, however, “Now seemed the right time to go for it — to make his body match his identity — or at least start by dressing like a woman in his regular life.”

Speckhard said Beck first announced her decision to friends online with the declaration “No more disguises” and the book describes her going out to gay bars in Florida as a woman.

Beck is currently on hormone therapy in preparation for sexual reassignment surgery and generally wears long hair, make-up and women’s clothes, Speckhard said.

In the book’s Preface, Beck said she wrote the book “to reach out to all of the younger generation and encourage you to live your life fully and to treat each other with compassion, be good to each other, especially in your own backyard (where it be high school or your community).”

Source: ABC News, June 3, 2013, by Lee Ferran

In the 1980′s the Valencia Rose was the first venue to house Gay comedy. Many up-and-coming performers began their careers at the Rose, including Whoopi Goldberg, Doug Holsclaw, Lea Delaria, Marga Gomez and local politician, the then “mother of gay comedy” Tom Ammiano. In the 90′s the place to be for Gay comedy was Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint which launched the careers of Margaret Cho, Mark Davis, and Scott Capuro. In the 00′s QComedy held our torch and in the 10′s the Hella Gay Comedy Show put a new twist on Gay comedy.

On June 23, the Hella Gay Comedy Show very proudly welcomes the new voices of Bay Area LGBT stand up comedy, all funny and representing every aspect of the rainbow!

Hosted by Yuri Kagen and featuring:
Ariel Smith
Carrie Avritt
Rich Hutchison
Kevin Shaller
Karinda Dobbins
Sharon Birzer
Zack Pedersen
Morgan
Rachel Gill
Tammy Powers

Where:
1772 Market Street
SF, CA 94102
415 371 9705

When:
June 23, 2013
Show @ 8:00pm

10$ Cover
21 & Over
No Drink Minimum

More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/455225371224425/

Medill Reports – At first glance, Vietnam veteran George C. Clark’s drawing of the dog seemed cute, with its bright eyes and floppy ears.

“We had a bunch of little dogs that used to hang around the compound, scrounging for scraps and things,” Clark, 69, said of his time with the U.S. Army in 1968.

A closer look at the piece revealed a more macabre story.

“One of the dogs showed up and he had a human hand in his mouth that he was carrying around,” Clark said in describing his artwork. “Apparently he had scavenged it off the battlefield before the bodies were buried.”

Clark was one of the artists featured at Saturday’s opening of “Tenacity and Truth: People, Places and Memories,” a yearlong exhibit from the permanent collection at the National Veterans Art Museum in Portage Park. The show includes photography, paintings, sculpture and digital multimedia by veterans about their service, which ranges from the Korean War to the more recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“[Art] is a way to process some of the stuff you carry around in your head for years and years,” said contributing artist Bill Dugan, who served in the Air Force as a lab and morgue technician during the Vietnam War. “The garbage, if you think of [those experiences] as garbage. But it’s not really garbage, because it’s one of the things that made me into what I am now.”

Many of the attendees were veterans and family members of veterans, some of whom considered themselves “the furthest thing from artistic” but found the collection compelling.

Hilario Pena, 66, came to Chicago from San Antonio to see his son Patrick, 41, who surprised him with a visit to the exhibit.

“I look at all these, and I can’t say that I didn’t get a little choked up on some of it,” he said. “And then others, I just said, ‘I know that. I can see that.’ I’ve seen that look. I’ve looked that way.”

Pena served with an Army artillery unit in the 1st Air Cavalry Division during the Vietnam War, including, he said, as part of the Tet Offensive in 1968.

“The day he got home from his honeymoon, his draft notice was waiting for him,” said Patrick Pena.

Other visitors came to learn more about the therapeutic potential of art for veterans. Retired Air Force Col. Marian Sides is a past president of the Aerospace Medical Association. She said she is researching treatment options for post-traumatic stress.

“People can reach a breaking point when the physical stress and the demands on them are coupled with the trauma of the whole environment,” she said. Sides said she saw such breakdowns when she served as a field commander for a medical evacuation helicopter unit during Operation Desert Storm.

“There needs to be an intervention to help [veterans] deal with that,” she said. “Here, in the museum, it’s art.”

The act of creating art is an alternative form of communication that’s important for catharsis and recovery, said Donna Betts, assistant professor of art therapy at George Washington University.

“Traumatic experiences tend to be stored in the nonverbal part of our brain,” Betts said in a phone interview. “When you engage in an activity like art making, it’s a nonverbal activity, and the act of making an artwork is conducive to accessing that nonverbal part of your brain.”

By sharing art in a group setting, especially with a group of peers with common experiences, participants can feel safe, which is key to their progress, she said.

“In recreating their trauma narrative in a safe environment, [veterans] can experience healing by regaining control over what’s happened to them by telling the story through the artwork and having the safe space to talk about it with a trained art therapist,” Betts said.

Museum executive director Levi Moore said that the artwork has civic value in addition to the personal meanings its visitors discover.

“If you would like a realistic look at America from a historic perspective and a current perspective, key issues, everything from gender equity to drones to racial equality to international relations, you can learn that here through art,” he said.

Moore said that by exhibiting so much from the museum’s permanent collection, staffers can develop additional exhibits that travel throughout the country and that can reach audiences through technology online.

“I want as little of our art in storage as possible,” he said. “I want it out.”

Giving the museum’s collection wider exposure and encouraging other veterans to find ways of expressing themselves offers the best chance for helping more veterans come to terms with their experiences, attendees and artists agreed.

“Maybe a story you have is going to trigger something in someone else’s mind that they will be able to vent, so that they can get it out of their system,” said Hilario Pena. “The more you talk about a bad situation, the less power it has over you.”

Most of the veteran artists said they hoped other veterans would consider finding ways to talk about their service.

“Art is redemptive,” said Clark. “It was just a very liberating experience to do my individual memoirs of the war.”

Larry Dermody, 69, of Chicago, served in the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1964, “a very good year to get out,” and has three grandchildren in the U.S. Marine Corps. He found himself moved by the wall of photographs from the Vietnam War. “I just wonder what’s going on in the minds of the person that’s taking them, and also what’s happening on the other side, outside the picture,” he said.

Source: Medill Reports, May 28, 2013, by Esther Bergdahl

This year, Guy is one of the artists participating in a one-night art exhibition presented by Shout!, an initiative to support female veterans in the Bay Area. Primary organizer Star Lara asked Guy to submit a photo to an event that, in its fifth year, will include several different media — photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, writing, and music — made by 22 vets. As a result of Lara’s outreach efforts, this year’s event has grown so much that she had to turn artists away.

Lara is the Women Veterans Coordinator at Swords to Plowshares, a nonprofit that helps veterans transition back to civilian life. Leaving the military in 2007 after serving on active duty for 12 years, she knows the hardships of adapting, particularly those that affect women. As more women enlist, she explains, the gender-specific problems become increasingly defined. Female veterans now represent the fastest growing homeless population, yet they seek help through Veteran Affairs at far lower rates than men do.

Issues also stem from public perception. People understand what it means when they see a man with a military pin, but Lara often hears the question, “Is your dad in the military?” Society resists the idea of a female veteran.

And when civilians do know about a woman’s military service, another problem arises: the tendency to reduce all aspects of her persona to her veteran identity. For Guy, the exhibition provides an opportunity to showcase another side of herself. Though her life revolves around veterans — she works at the VA — she is also a photographer, and her photography does not directly address military service.

Guy snapped her Shout! photo at Bay to Breakers a couple of years ago when she stumbled across a woman in a top hat and fake moustache shouting into a bullhorn next to a man wearing a polar bear mask. It is a quirky image one could find in few places besides San Francisco. “I embrace the ridiculous stuff,” says Guy. “Being in the military, there’s not much room to celebrate that. You’d never see somebody walking around in a mask like that, unless it meant trouble.”

Another Shout! artist, JoAnn Martinez, has only recently begun to experiment with military subjects. For her second year in the show, she has submitted comics derived from dialogues she has heard within the female veteran community. By undertaking this new comedic mode of art, she hopes she can not only share a creation she’s proud of besides her family and work (she started the nonprofit Women Veterans Connect), but also communicate a digestible message to the non-veteran community. “Instead of complaining, let’s laugh about it,” she says.

Not only do Martinez’s comics convey a therapeutic levity, but they also contain an expressive subtext; they are printed on homemade paper created in response to the Combat Paper Project, in which workshops instruct veterans how to create paper pulp from their shredded military uniforms.

Extending the practice beyond Shout!, Martinez is seeking female veterans to submit stories about their uniforms for a Shotwell Paper Mill limited-edition book created using the same fabric-turned-paper method. So far, the stories range in tone, some reflecting a similar lightness to Martinez’s comics; one woman tells how after she painted her toenails, the Iraqi heat melted the polish and she had trouble removing her socks.

Lara has also participated in the project, an experience she found restorative in part because it involved breaking down and reclaiming an object laden with intense experiences, but primarily because of the work’s collectivity. After talking with fellow female veterans while their hands were busy cutting, she says, “It was no longer about the trauma that brought you to the table — it was about what you took from the table.” (The Combat Paper Project also inspired Lara’s contribution to this year’s Shout!, a piece that involved her “painting the shit out of” her last uniform.)

Though Lara does not consider herself a fine artist, Shout! presents an opportunity to share the voice of her small group within a greater context. In the Women’s Building, a hub of action in the Mission, the event will enact her idea that women veterans comprise a subset of larger existing communities and should be reached as such.

Lara says that without focusing on trauma, without involving policy, services, or outreach, Shout! offers a chance for artists like Guy and Martinez to declare, “I am a woman and a veteran, and here’s how I express myself.”

Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 8, 2013, by Laura Kerry

When she left the Navy after two years in 1996, she did not think of herself as a veteran.

“I didn’t serve for very long,” she said. “There’s a lot of people who have served for 20, 30 years. And my little, measly two years? And I didn’t serve in combat.”

When the slow breakup of her marriage to a verbally abusive fellow sailor led to bouts of joblessness and homelessness in the early 2000s, Barlow didn’t turn to the Department of Veterans Affairs for help.

This disconnect — along with a lack of gender-specific services and programs for former female servicemembers — kept many women away. But it also triggered the VA to start changing the way it serves women and learning more about how to help.

Barlow has benefited from the steps the VA has taken — in partnership with private groups and other government agencies — to find innovative solutions to address their needs.

When a new housing project with the private Del Norte Development Corp. opened last year in Denver,  Barlow and her two children were among the first to move in.

After years of insecurity, Barlow was happy and thankful to have a home. Then she heard about a women-only housing  project by the same developer to be completed early next year in Denver being built with vets in mind.

Homeless female vets are more likely than their male counterparts to be living with their children, so Barlow believed that her 14-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son would have more playmates in a women-only complex. And she had seen female vets who were victims of sexual abuse who were uncomfortable in the building where she had found a home.

“It’s really traumatic for these women to be around men,” Barlow said.

While she has no plans to move, she calls the women-only project “a wonderful idea.”

‘A difficult population to track’

Homelessness among vets overall is decreasing, according to the VA Homeless Initiative, but concern is growing about homelessness among female vets.  The VA says the percentage of female vets grew from about 6 percent of all vets in 2000 to more than 8 percent today, and is expected to top 14 percent by 2035.

Already, women make up nearly 11.6 percent of the vets of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn.

A 2003 study cited by the Service Women’s Action Network found that female vets are four times more likely to be homeless than women who have not served or men who have. The numbers, though, are hard to pin down.

“It’s a very difficult population to track,” said Katy Otto, spokeswoman for the Service Women’s Action Network, an independent advocacy and support group. Some women, like Barlow, don’t connect with the VA as serving female veterans, and others reject the label of being homeless.

Barlow said she never lived on the streets. She said she moved from state to state, living in her own apartment when she could manage, staying with friends at other times, and once with her father. She eventually divorced her husband, then started and ended a relationship with another abusive man.

She turned to shelters, she said, ticking off the stays on her fingers until she decided they were too numerous to count.

“We went through a lot of shelters. We sure did,” she said. “I was really grateful when we got this place.”

Founding Odyssey

The low-cost housing developer behind the women-only project, Jim Mercado, was approached by neighborhood leaders when a community theater was planning to move out of an 86-year-old school. The neighborhood did not want the historic building  to sit idle.

Mercado came up with the idea of turning part of it into a resource center for female vets and connecting the space to a new block of apartments.

A formal roundbreaking ceremony was held on Veterans Day for the Del Norte project, which will have 36 apartments — up to half designated for veterans. Mercado said he had consulted on other projects for veterans and learned that women were rarely specifically targeted for help. His research also convinced him that vulnerable women vets needed more than housing.

For help, he turned to Carol Lease, executive director of a Denver organization called The Empowerment Program. It formed in 1986 to support women in trouble, including women recently released from prison.

Lease will oversee drug and alcohol counseling, job training and other services for women at what Mercado calls the Odyssey Family Residence.

“It’s helping women take control of their lives,” said Lease, who expects that the female vets at Odyssey will be suffering from drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, likely aggravated by sexual abuse.

The VA says one in five women treated at its hospitals report military sexual trauma, defined as sexual assault, repeated threatening or sexual harassment. That compares to one in 100 men — a dramatic example of how the military experiences of women and men differ.

These women are often abused by men who served alongside them or were their superiors; many suffer out of fear without seeking counseling.

“We’re really looking at hard-to-serve homeless women veterans,” Lease said. “We’re going to be working to make sure that women’s needs aren’t glossed over.”

Lease plans to hire female veterans who have experienced homelessness or other crises to work with the women at Odyssey, saying they can be role models and beacons of hope.

She has sought advice from female vets, including Kathryn Wirkus, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who founded the support group Women Veterans of Colorado in 2010. Wirkus, like Barlow, had trouble thinking of herself as a veteran when she left the military. She retired in 2006 after 27 years.

“I truly did not know that I was a vet,” she said. “I thought only men, and men who had served in combat,” had earned that designation.

One of the things Odyssey can do, Wirkus said, is raise awareness among the public and among female vets about the contributions of women who have served and the challenges they face when they leave the military.

Months before Odyssey was to be open, Lease was getting phone calls and emails from women seeking apartments. Mercado has spoken to local businesses about training and jobs for the women. The neighbors, many of them Hispanic, are enthusiastic about the project, Mercado said.

Hispanic families have long looked to the military for careers and education, said Mercado, who is Hispanic and a son and nephew of World War II veterans.

“There’s a lot of respect for what these women have been through, and a lot of respect for what the military means,” Mercado said.

New strategies to help

Some Odyssey residents will likely pay their rent with vouchers from the Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program.

Under the program begun in 2008 and known as HUD-VASH, veterans can get help with rent from HUD, and health and other services from the VA.

Barlow learned about HUD-VASH at a municipal social services office, and that led her to her apartment — one of 27 in a complex built by Denver’s private Del Norte Development Corp.

She, her children and a cat moved into the furnished three-bedroom, two-bath apartment last March. And she’s enrolled in community college, saying she may go into social work.

Susan Angell, executive director of the VA’s Veterans Homeless Initiative, said HUD-VASH was an example of new strategies that can help women, particularly those with children.

“We didn’t always have the capacity to help the children,” she said. “Our mandate is to serve the veterans.”

HUD-VASH and another new VA program,  Supportive Services for Veteran Families, provide flexibility. Under SSVF, the VA awards grants to private groups that provide help in various ways to low-income vets.

The first grants under SSVF were offered in September 2012. In all, $60 million in grants was allotted in the first year. That will increase five-fold starting in September 2013.

“Those are such good programs for homeless women veterans,” Angell said. “And their children can be served under these programs.”

Barlow’s advice to other women who have served who are struggling to find help?

“Make sure you tell them you’re a vet.”

Source: Stars and Stripes, May 1, 2013, by Donna Bryson

But there is another face of mental illness in the U.S. Armed Forces, and it’s a female one.

Certainly, far fewer women than men join the armed forces. And until very recently, women were formally banned from combat. But plenty of women veterans are dealing with the unexpected aftereffects of military service.

Here are two women veterans’ stories. Each is coping with a different (but related) mental disorder while serving in the military.

After Mary, 40, was sexually assaulted by a fellow service member, the resultant post-traumatic stress symptoms combined to make her life hellish. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trauma resulted in a psychiatric diagnosis—in her case, post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to the National Center for PTSD at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs:

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can occur after someone goes through a traumatic event like combat, assault, or disaster. Most people have some stress reactions after a trauma. If the reactions don’t go away over time or disrupt your life, you may have PTSD.

A person with PTSD may go into a fight-or-flight reaction in response to seemingly harmless stimuli like the sound of a car starting or the sight of a door opening.

““I haven’t been terribly quiet about what happened to me, but I do not disclose that I have PTSD. If I did, I fear I would lose my current position within the service and ultimately, be removed from the service.””

Mary is still in the military. She is stationed CONUS (within the continental United States), and she works in the field of health. She’s reticent about details: “I haven’t been terribly quiet about what happened to me, but I do not disclose that I have PTSD. If I did, I fear I would lose my current position within the service and ultimately, be removed from the service.”

She says, “PTSD is insidious; it creeps up on you. First, you may experience a moment of panic when you are in a crowded area. For most of ‘us,’ Wal-Mart is a PTSD nightmare. You may startle easy, way too easily. You’ll never be able to sit with your back to a door or respond in a ‘normal’ manner to someone who catches you off guard. If you don’t relive the experience during the day, your psyche ensures that you work through your issue at night in the form of sheet-tangling, sweat-soaked nightmares that no one should have to endure. These are the nightmares that wake you from the deepest sleep and cast a dark gloom over the whole of the next day.”

She says that for military service members like her (as well as for veterans), the best PTSD support groups are the ones that are closed to civilians. She adds, “Sometimes, there’s things only another service member can understand.”

When asked if she’d still join the military if she had the opportunity to do it all over again, Mary says, “Yes. I’m willing to bet the majority of us would all answer yes.”

What Trina remembers the most about her bout with severe depression was that nobody else in the Navy seemed to notice.

Trina joined up when she was 20 and spent nine years in the Navy. Among other things, she worked on diesel engines as part of her long-term goal to become a professional mechanic. But she tells TakePart that by the end of her service she was “sick of all the ruthless competition just to get promoted. You couldn’t trust anyone.”

She adds, “Also, it was destroying what little mental health I had left.”

According to the Veterans Administration:

Many symptoms of depression overlap with the symptoms of PTSD. For example, with both depression and PTSD, you may have trouble sleeping or keeping your mind focused. You may not feel pleasure or interest in things you used to enjoy. You may not want to be with other people as much. Both PTSD and depression may involve greater irritability. It is quite possible to have both depression and PTSD at the same time.

As Trina tells it, the darkness crept up gradually, eventually affecting her military service. She says, “I went from doing my work, and always looking for more, to doing absolutely nothing and finding ways to not be around, including being gone for two afternoons because I couldn’t face anyone. I was a teacher at our tech school at the time and was known for always being there for the students and helping them out. Suddenly, I avoided all of them. When I did end up in the hospital, everyone was shocked. My Chief even told my parents that he had no idea.”

After a hospital stay to treat severe depression, Trina returned to work. She says she tried to educate her fellow troops about the reality of mental illness, but felt they didn’t listen. And at least one higher-up was particularly insensitive.

Trina tells TakePart, “About six months later, I heard someone very high in our chain of command talking loudly about how a student was faking wanting to kill himself so he could get out of the school.”

Today, Trina is a 31-year-old student in college, using her GI Bill benefits. She discarded her dream of becoming a mechanic and instead seeks a future in the corporate world. She tells people the Navy “literally” drove her crazy.

“It upsets me that mental conditions still aren’t taken seriously, from my experience,” she says.

Even so, Trina is glad she enlisted: “Although it was bad in the end, I still feel that joining was a great choice. Nothing can beat the life experience one gets while serving in the military. I have met some great friends and gained experience that you can’t get anywhere else. The discipline has stuck with me even on the outside.”

Source: TakePart, April 16, 2013, by Sara Benincasa

Ramirez was a private in the Army when she was raped by her physical therapist, a major, at Fort Sam Houston five years ago. She said when her superiors were alerted to the assault, her sergeant brought in criminal investigators.

Ramirez was interrogated; the major was not.

“They started accusing me of, oh, well, sometimes people — women — make things up because they want to go home.”

Ramirez lives in San Diego and she is homeless. As a female veteran, she is a member of the fastest growing homeless population, according to a recent report by the Department of Housing and Urban Planning.

Audio:

Homeless female veterans are a growing population in San Diego, one of the largest military cities in the country.

After her assault, Ramirez went AWOL and lived in motels neighboring the base in Texas because she didn’t want to fight the investigation and didn’t think she would get any help from the military after the assault.

“I just felt attacked by them, unsupported, because nobody likes it when you go up against their superiors, so I left.”

That was in 2008. Five years later, at age 32, Ramirez, a San Diego native, is now staying at the St. Vincent de Paul Village in downtown San Diego after spending the last five years on couches, parks and the street.

Maria Mustacchio is the house manager at AMIKAS, a transitional home for female veterans in San Diego. She said the homeless situation for women leaving the military will only get worse.

“With downsizing, the sequestration and San Diego being such a huge military base, we are going to see a rise in homelessness because [women] are not going to be adjusted. They are not going to be able to find jobs, which in our economy, is already hard enough as it is.”

AMIKAS was set up in 2009 for those reasons, Mustacchio added, as a place for female veterans to “get stabilized and catch their breath.”

Ramirez still has not been able to find a single job since leaving the military despite trying for everything from Jack-in-the-Box to various online employment services.

“I haven’t had much work experience. That also affected it. I was going to get that in the military. I was going to be a nurse.”

She said her military background also works against her.

A month after going AWOL, Ramirez turned herself in to the military police. She was asked to sign away her Veterans Affairs benefits and given an “Other than Honorable” discharge. She didn’t ask any questions. And she was never deployed.

“They all ask about military history and I have to be honest and answer ‘yes.’ But to have an ‘Other than Honorable’ discharge doesn’t look great.”

Yolanda Sidoti oversees homeless programs at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in La Jolla. She said they are not seeing an increase in homelessness in returning female veterans in San Diego. She added that it is difficult to separate the issues between men and women that lead to homelessness.

The Medical Center focuses on “their economic needs, their family support needs, their educational needs … all of the things that will help resume a regular lifestyle as quickly as possible,” she explained.

Ramirez, though, said that the rape led to depression, and later, homelessness.

“It was very difficult for me, I was very depressed after that. I really wanted to be in the Army and I was like, ‘now what do I do? Now what?’”

One in eight female veterans surveyed at the VA Medical Center in 2011 said they suffered military sexual trauma, according to the Women Veterans program manager.

Source: KPBS, April 3, 2013, by Khushbu Shah

5th Women in Military History Week: Honoring Women in the Military
When: Saturday, April 13th, 2013
12:00 to 3:00 PM
Where: Twin Towers United Methodist Church
1411 Oak Street, Alameda, CA 94501

It is with great privilege and pleasure to announce, that this year’s Keynote Speaker is Lindsey Sin, California Deputy Secretary for Women Veterans Affairs and Guest of Honor Starlyn Lara, Women Veterans Coordinator at Swords to Plowshares.

“Women who serve in the military are not honored enough, there aren’t enough places and groups that do it, it’s the right thing to do.”
- Carolann A. Wunderlin, Women in Military Event Honorary Co-Chair, Air Force Veteran

The ceremony is followed by a luncheon, exclusively for the women, to provide an opportunity for resource sharing, professional networking, and to connect with one another in a supportive community setting.Please wear the uniform of the day or appropriate civilian attire. If you would like to bring a piece of memorabilia from your service years, there will be a display table provided for these treasures.

Registration for the luncheon is required as seating is limited. You may RSVP no later than March 29 online or by calling 888-548-4944. No same day registrants, please.

Update: Registration for the luncheon has been extended. The new deadline is now April 3. If you are interested in volunteering for the event, please email Kathy Dieden at kdieden@yahoo.com.