It’s hard to think of Jay Briseno as lucky. He is one of the most severely injured soldiers to return from Iraq alive.
In June 2003, Briseno was shot in the back of the neck while serving as a civil-affairs specialist with his Army Reserve unit in a Baghdad marketplace. His spinal cord was severely damaged, leaving him paralyzed from the chin down.
The 22-year-old veteran from Manassas, Va., has lapsed into a coma and had two heart attacks. And three years after being shot in the line of duty, he requires a ventilator to help him breathe and a feeding tube for some of his nourishment.
But he is alive, and he’s living in a house extensively modified to accommodate his needs.
Thanks to Serving Those Who Serve, an initiative aimed at attending to the housing needs of critically injured military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, the doorways in Briseno’s parents’ house have been widened, the bathroom has been rebuilt to provide wheelchair accessibility to the shower, the electrical service has been upgraded and a backup power generated has been installed.
Serving Those Who Serve is part of Rebuilding Together, the nation’s largest volunteer-based home-repair and rehabilitation program. Every year, more than 225,000 people donate their time and effort to fix and modify the homes of low-income owners through more than 240 affiliates nationwide. About 9,000 houses will be redone this year.
But the special initiative for severely injured service personnel is a “massive” undertaking, “way outside the realm of what we normally do,” according to Rick Simon of Countrywide Financial Corp., parent of the giant mortgage company and a founding sponsor of the program.
So, only five homes have been remodeled under it. And that’s hardly enough to accommodate the most severely injured of the 19,345 soldiers wounded in the Middle East.
The statistics are pretty gruesome. As of June 30, according to the Defense Department, nearly 9,000 of the wounded have not been able to return to duty. Six percent have required amputations (as compared to 3 percent in past wars). Sixty percent of those treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington suffer from traumatic brain injury.
But, there are other places servicemen and servicewomen can turn for housing help. One is Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit founded in 2004 by Taunton, Mass., contractor John Gonsalves. The organization builds new housing and adapts existing ones for severely disabled vets.
Gonsalves’ group has completed six projects, and has 13 more in various stages of construction–again only a drop in the bucket. While the organization is “starting to draw corporate donations,” most of its funding has come from private sources.
“We’re always looking for money,” says the contractor, who was given a medal of honor by the Daughters of the American Revolution last month for his work on behalf of veterans. “The attention we get from the media brings in money, but it also brings more inquiries from veterans.”
Some states also provide for their veterans. And the federal Department of Veterans Affairs provides grants of up to $50,000 to cover up to half the cost of building or modifying homes for returning GIs.
Actually, the DVA administers two types of Specially Adapted Housing grants, one for vets who are confined to a wheelchair and another for those who have been blinded in both eyes or have lost one or both hands. In both cases, the goal is to provide a barrier-free home so the vet can experience a level of independent living.
The SAH program is almost as old as the DVA. It was started in 1948, four years after Congress created the agency. It has provided $581 million in seed money to help 32,450 returning service people live more comfortably.
Between 2000 and 2005, though, the program has provided $103 million in grants to 2,277 vets. “We generate a lot of eligible veterans during any period of conflict,” says Keith Pedigo, director of the DVA’s Loan Guaranty Service. “But the program hasn’t been this busy since Vietnam.”
The good news is, the SAH program has unlimited budget authority, according to Pedigo, so it “can serve as many vets” as need it. And a grant can be used in combination with any similar state or volunteer program. It can even be combined with a loan to cover the difference between the total cost of the house and the grant.
“We’ve been [combining benefits] a lot more lately so veterans can get the best of all,” Pedigo says.
When a vet files a claim for disability compensation under the SAH program, the agency determines whether he is also eligible for a grant. If so, the vet is notified immediately. But if he decides not to take advantage of the program right away–say, he has a house or his family has made the necessary modifications–he can use it later.
The average age of a vet taking a grant is 59. “We have a lot of veterans with disabilities from previous wars whose wounds weren’t sufficient to warrant a grant when the injury was incurred,” Pedigo says. “But as they’ve grown older, their situations have worsened. If you lose a leg to diabetes years after serving in Vietnam, for example, you qualify because we presume the disease was a result of something experienced in Vietnam.”
(Of the 25 million living veterans, three out of four served in a war or official period of hostility. About a quarter of the nation’s population, some 70 million people, are potentially eligible for DVA benefits and services because they are veterans, family members or survivors of veterans.)
The program has a litany of requirements–this is the government, after all–but the DVA works closely with recipients to make sure the funds are used appropriately and to prevent an unscrupulous contractor from taking advantage of the vet. “A lot of contractors are not that comfortable or that well qualified to do this kind of work,” the housing administrator says.
And several states offer benefits to their veterans. Maryland is one that allows a 100 percent property-tax waiver for totally disabled vets. And California offers low-cost home improvement and modification loans of up to $150,000. In Alaska, vets get a 25 percent discount on land purchased from the state. Illinois provides housing grants to disabled vets who lived in the state when they entered the service, up to $15,000 for those who are paraplegics. And Pennsylvania offers home modifications grants to all residents, not just veterans.
For more information about the DVA’s Specially Adapted Housing program, contact an SAH agent at your local DVA office or call the Veterans Service Center at 800-827-1000. Serving Those Who Serve can be found at www.Rebuildingtogether.org; Homes for Our Troops at www.homesforourtroops.org.
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You may write to Lew Sichelman at realestate@tribune.com. Sorry, he cannot make personal replies.
