Vet John had been there the day the city cops had descended on their makeshift camp under the Brent Spence Bridge in Covington Kentucky right across the river from Cincinnati, rousting the homeless there and throwing away all their belongings however meager they were in an effort to rid the newly developing riverfront of “unsightly and possibly dangerous” vagrants. Nobody can look at the homeless and like what he sees. The city thought that the image of these castaways living under a bridge abutment was counter-productive” to creating a user-friendly place where the city could showcase itself to money-bearing consumers so they were tossed, rousted and what few things they had managed to accumulate were thrown away, including clothing and sleeping gear needed to weather the severe winters we often get here in the midwest.

Some of you may remember the piece I wrote two years back on Memorial Day Under the Bridge; same guy, same event. If you havent seen it let me know and I will send it to you as a two part mail.
Since that time Vet John had hung around the area because as he said pickins are good” and you could usually see him and some of his group panhandling near the sports stadiums during games and events. On more than one occasion I stopped to talk to him, passed him a pack of smokes and listened while he told about the many places he had been and some of the things he had seen. He was able to laugh about some of them, some of them caused glints of tears in the corners of his eyes.

I asked him once, why they called him “Vet John” and he told me it was because he had been in the military a long time ago, but he was slow to add any details. Street people are not trusting souls and it wasnt easy to pick his story apart; getting little grains of truth here and there mixed into the wilder stories he was fond of telling. Vet John had been a Marine and had served in Vietnam, that much was solidly truthful, a vet can read the truth in another vets eyes, whatever else he was and had been was vague and nebulous at best but when he spoke on rare occasion of his time as a Marine his eyes lit with a hard edged pride and he seemed to lift himself a bit straighter and taller on these occasions.

He would tell you that he had served up near Con Thien and had been at Khe Sahn when the seige was at it’s height. He knew things that only a veteran of those fights would know. I was convinced that, at least this part of his life, was something he was proud of and remembered, maybe remembered too well. His common-law wife that he just called Sally or Sal would hold his shoulder as he talked, laughing too loud at the funny things and hugging him when he stopped in midsentence or his gravelly voice failed him and he stuttered to a painful and uncomfortable stop.

Vet John wasn’t happy with his life, that couldn’t be a surprise considering the place he found himself in. It was Vet John and four others who filed a class-action suit against the city of Covington Kentucky for destroying their goods. A local good samaritan had replaced the homeless’ sleeping bags and clothing. He was also one of the “ringleaders” of the group that set up camp once again under a bridge abutment, this time under the Fifth Street ramp to the expressway on the Cincinnati side of the river. Even though homeless, he was still a leader. He and his homeless friends spread out their sleeping bags under the shelter of the pilings, erected a big paper sign that said “Don’t turn your back on the homeless, we are not invisible” and somehow came by an American Flag which was also displayed there in the dim light under the bridge. Some generous person actually paid for a portolet to be put on the site for sanitation.
Last month the city of Cincinnati hosted an event called Tall Stacks and old fashioned riverboats gathered here in a week long festival taking people on river cruises and making an estimated 65 million in profits. Obviously, the city didnt want a bunch of bums and panhandlers irritating their paying consumers so the homeless had to go again. This time the city was more respectful and kinder letting this group which had grown to around twenty people gather their things and move along on their own. The city didnt care where they went as long as it wasnt out in the public’s eye.

Four days ago Vet John and his wife died. As the local newspaper reported “. and the ex-Marine who talked a lot about ‘Nam died Saturday night in a house that wasn’t theirs.” ( byline: Jane Pendergast, Cincinnati Enquirer). Vet John and his wife burned in their sleep in an abandoned building fire, the city will no longer have to concern itself with these two street people, that’s the feeling going around the top end of the city administration, “sad but they won’t be missed” seems to sum it up best. They were disposable people.
You hear a lot from the locals here about it: things like “Yeah, that was bad but so what?”, and one of my favorites “ No big deal, they were bums and losers, no loss” and this chills me. Are we a people become so callous that the loss of human lives is “no big deal”? We can hear of a tragedy and weigh the loss based on whether these victims were worthy and acceptable?
Yes we can. Yes we do. Every day.

We have become so self aware that many of us measure others’ worth first and foremost. If its a full-blown tragedy people send money to the families of the children killed in automoblie accidents, survivors of shootings and the families of the 911 victims but take a cavalier attitude when it comes to the invisible or unacceptable people. They were bums and losers remember, and somehow less deserving of our sympathy and grief than say a mother of two kids who died in a school shooting somewhere.

Vet John would never have been invited anywhere, he was raggedy and smelled bad. Except for a few sparse moments no one ever took any interest in John or the others living there in the underbelly of the city except to run them off and get them away from decent and respectable people, “bad for business” you know. But John had stories he could tell and lessons he could pass along if anyone had ever bothered to ask him. Buy him a six pack and some Marlboros and he would talk about stuff, distant lands, fierce battles, friends killed and missing, a life gone wasted, and how he and his wife had coped with living on the streets for more than ten years. Not once, I repeat NOT ONCE did John ever blame ‘Nam or the Marines for his life on the streets. He’d say “...well, I have a really bad temper and got a couple of arrests on my sheet, can’t get no job and I’m too damned old now to change.” He’d talk of having few chances in life but accepted that he had been the architect of this and laid no blame outside himself. He even laughed about some of his minor scrapes with the law, chuckling to himself as he told of one arrest where he slapped a female cop and got maced by her six back ups. Man, I thought I’d fallen headfirst into the chili pot!”
All this is gone now, all that he is and knew and owned. Lost and who cares? Vet John will go into a pauper’s grave with few acknowledgements and fewer mourners. There will be no Honor Guard and no flag draped casket, his final resting place will be marked by a small aluminum sign stating his name, date of death, and a case number from the local coroner’s office.

We SHOULD care but some of us can’t get past the “living on the streets” thing. Some of us only see the ragged bum and loser that sits quietly holding a cardboard sign at the interesections of our cities and we don’t, or won’t see what is under that worn out covering. Do we feel sheltered and safe when we turn away and roll up the windows of our cars? Do we feel vindicated because he was a bum, he drank cheap booze and lived out in the open? Should we really just dismiss this whole thing from our reality and pretend that it’s not important?

It irks me and darkens my soul that men who served their country honorably and bravely should never have a place to lay their head in comfort and peace while we pony up money to rebuild a nation that is swimming in oil and is well capable of rebuilding their own country or at least paying for it’s restoration. We have our priorities mixed up when a vet dies this way. How many shared apartments could 87 billion dollars buy here at home? And you know, I find myself asking if we are going to live to see this next generation of American veterans also living under a bridge someday soon. What’s to prevent it? The VA is a tangled mess and few social service agencies are willing to work with the hardcore homeless, setting unobtainable goals and demanding accurate paperwork from people that dont even have a mailing address to receive these accurate papers demanded by the workers in their climate controlled and distant offices.
No veteran should ever lack for a place to call home no matter what reason brought him to this unenviable end, none, not one.

Do you feel a twinge of sorrow that a man who once stood tall to serve his nation died in an abandoned house because he had no other place to go, because he had to hide from the cops and the people who would turn him in for trespassing on private property. Maybe you should...... maybe we all should. Vet John made his life such as it was and asked nothing much beyond some change for food and a short bottle of Mad Dog to take the edge off and let him be happy in a stupourous sort of way. It should be something that we hate and despise that there are people out there like him, many many people like him and many are veterans. He was a veteran.....and he was my brother too, I will miss him.
For the record: he was a United States Marine, his real name was Gerald Cash Farewell my brother, you are not forgotten.