Veterans left homeless due to state budget cuts

This is moving day. Michael Seamands’ cramped home for the past five years is no longer his. The landlord, the state of Georgia, says he has to go.

He has packed cleaning materials, clothes, the model airplanes he assembled in the quiet afternoons at the Georgia War Veterans Home domiciliary.

The Lawrenceville resident accepts the moving orders with the stoicism you’d expect from someone who patrolled the Vietnamese jungles 36 years ago. Some things you cannot change, Seamands said; you get your orders and head out.

“It was good here,” said Seamands, 58, an Army veteran who served in Vietnam from 1970 to 1971. “It was safe here.”

The domiciliary’s closing is proof that few programs are safe from state budget cuts in this cramped economy.

On Aug. 1, Gov. Sonny Perdue sent a memo to the state Department of Veterans Services, which operates the home. It ordered the agency to devise plans to cut expenditures by 6 percent, 8 percent and 10 percent for the rest of this fiscal year and the next.

The department took a “real, real hard look” at its domiciliary care here, said Len Glass, the department’s assistant commissioner for administration.

The program, he said, cost the state $2.7 million annually. By cutting it for the rest of this fiscal year — it ends June 30, 2009 — the department would deduct $1.7 million from its $25 million budget. It would represent more than a 10 percent reduction for the next fiscal year, he said.

Officials also looked at other numbers. The 81 residents, Glass said, represented far less than 1 percent of the state’s total veteran population, estimated at 760,000.

In late August, Glass came to the domiciliary and delivered the news: The men, who’d fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, had to find a new home by the last day of November.

“It was a very difficult decision for us,” he said. “Nobody disliked this more than we did.”

‘All about money’

The domiciliary occupies two floors of the Pete Wheeler Building, an X-shaped structure a couple of miles south of downtown. Its foyer is a reminder that residents earned the right to be here. Glass display cases contain Nazi uniforms, medals and other paraphernalia that returning servicemen brought back to Georgia after World War II. Its walls feature patriotic signs, paintings and news clippings from decades ago.

It was the sort of place Seamands needed when he arrived in June 2003 after a divorce and job loss. Residents had to be war veterans who had a medical problem but did not require nursing care. The building was quiet, the food OK. And it was free.

“This place was pretty packed,” said Seamands, declared 40 percent disabled after he broke his back in 1974 during an Army night-training patrol. “I was extremely relieved to find this place.”

Seamands, who said he was homeless for a year before coming to Milledgeville, settled in one of the domiciliary’s single rooms. It was just big enough to accommodate a bed, 21-inch TV, folding table, various snacks and household goods. He moved to “a penthouse suite” when one became open.

The “suite” covers about 145 square feet. It features a bedroom and an adjacent room where Seamands has spent the past few years assembling models of World War II airplanes, military vehicles and boats. He also has a passion for crossword puzzles.

The room is proof that he is a veteran and proud of it. His alarm clock looks like a Willys jeep; it wakes Seamands with “Reveille.” On the bed’s bookcase headboard is a model troop truck, so lifelike it appears to have trundled off a dusty road.

The space has served him well, Seamands said. It was quiet, the sort of place preferred by someone who’d tracked Viet Cong in the leafy dark.

When he learned the domiciliary was closing, Seamands said, he was “stunned.” That made way for anger, which lingers.

“It’s all about money,” Seamands said.

Everyone has found a new home; on Friday, few were left. Some moved to more intensive care facilities at the veteran’s home. Many more are gone, aided by state and local agencies in finding new homes.

Seamands has an apartment about two miles north of his old quarters. With two bedrooms, “it’s huge.”

Seamands will dip into his disability pension to pay $119 of the $370 monthly rent. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs subsidies will pay the rest, he said.

Friday, Seamands was ready to go — he thought.

He paused and took in his safe place with a fond glance — the models, the boxes waiting to be moved, the jeep that will play “Reveille” in another place.

“It will be OK,” he said. “I’ll have to make that new apartment my safe zone.”