Building a Dryhootch

Remember the hootch, the place that was as close to home as we were going to get until our tour was over, one way or another. Sometimes we shared the hootch (or hooch) with a buddy or two, or more; other times with that guy who annoyed us with the loud music, the bad jokes. But we became a strange family of sorts, some of us made it home, and we can still remember those that didn’t still laughing in our hootch, playing cards, giving us a hard time. And then we came home.

For most of us, we wanted to forget the whole damn thing happened. And the country was all too willing to oblige us. Some of us wandered to the VA, remembering the promise of a nation that said they’d take care of us, only to find more insults, and a prescription for our problems, “ get on, get over it.”

For me, I would deny my past; forget the whole thing had happened. For my hootch mate Jim, he headed to the hills in the Carolinas, smoked some dope, eked out an existence and told the world to go away. Others worked too many hours, drank too much, saw marriages fall apart; but hell, that was life, wasn’t it?

It would be over tens years after the war ended that someone in those hallowed halls in DC realized there was a problem. After all, over three times the number of soldiers, sailors, Marines and air men died at their own hands after the war as were etched in the official records of war. The homeless ranks were disproportionately filled with veterans, divorce rates were 2-3 times that of those who never went.

By the time these wizards realized there might be a connection between war and the internal destruction of those who served, most of us had gone underground. And those who years earlier suffered mistreatment and disrespect at the VA, would never go back again. Hell, if one was ambushed and survived, why go back to the same place and ask for it a second time?

Out of this was born the Vet Center, a place where the Vietnam Vet could go and talk to someone, another vet who had seen the s***, and found a way out. They were located away from the VA Hospitals; these experts figured some might not go back to the scene of an earlier crime. They figured right.

For thousands, these Vet Centers would save their life, offer them hope, and answers. It was like a hootch, without the mortar attacks. A place you could talk to some one who didn’t judge you, who had walked point, who could offer you a safe path out. If you only knew; that is, if you thought there was a problem, and that it had any connection with a war that was decades behind you.

I never saw it coming. I came home, went to college, started a family and the war was distant history. The nightmares, the smells of nam that came out of nowhere, I brushed off. It took over twenty years for my ghosts to reach out from the rice paddies; but by then the denial of my problems, my drinking were so large, I wouldn’t have seen a freight train coming at me at high noon when I stood on the train tracks. And my life, my problems would destroy others before I finally realized that I just wanted it to end, I wanted me to end because nothing made sense anymore.

But it was several Vietnam veterans and a Gulf War Marine who never judged me, who saw a brother in need and got me to the VA and a tremendous doc, Dr Bernstein, who had treated vets for PTSD at the VA for years.

It was not long after 9/11 when I was sitting with a nam brother at the “Bunker”, a vet hangout in southern Wisconsin. Great sandwiches, interesting memorabilia adorning every inch of the place, and the other patrons were others like us, veterans. We were the only ones drinking diet cokes at the bar, and wondered if you could do this without the booze.

And over the next months in PTSD groups at the VA, or after the AA meetings the discussion went on. And out of those talks was born the “Dryhootch”. A safe place where vets could once again find that brotherhood that we had felt once before, a time when we had been proud of who we were, when we were baptized by fire. Now it would be a place to reconnect with others who chose our path. It would be a place we could finally come home, or come home through. And we could do it without booze or drugs that destroyed our lives. And it could be a place where others could battle their demons, with the help of those who, as my buddy Joe would say, “had been to hell, and didn’t want to go back.”

The Dryhootch is centered around a coffee house, the new social gathering place growing in popularity in the past ten years. My daughters had worked their way through college at a coffee house and knew the in’s and out’s of the operation. First we tried to rent a building across form the Milwaukee VA, but life would intervene and the idea went on hold for several years.

By 2005, we found ourselves deep into another foreign war, where guerilla or terrorist tactics know no boundaries. Someone driving convoy, guarding a checkpoint, or patrolling a quiet neighborhood would be the next target, the next causality. And if our military men and women make it back home, they are quickly sent back for more tours. And the PTSD rates are going off the charts. The good news is, at least it’s a known diagnosis today; in our war, there was no such thing. Hence, no problem, no treatment.

But our military and VA today, as before, vastly underestimated the human cost of the war, and are scrambling to catch up. The politicians running the VA in Washington are disconnected at the hip from the caregivers being overwhelmed at our VA and military hospitals and clinics across the country.

Three years ago, a number of veterans in Milwaukee took notice that the VA was in negotiation with the City of Milwaukee and their well-heeled developers to sell off the historic lands and buildings at the Zablocki VA. Plans for a multi million-dollar office park and widened roads to get fans in and out of Miller Park were hailed as an economic boon to the area. What was disturbing, if not puzzling, was this was the same VA that closed Wood National Veterans Cemetery on these grounds decade’s earlier to new burials, for lack of land?

And for those who had been to war, we knew this VA and others would soon be overwhelmed by our new brothers and sisters, and they would need every building they had. But Milwaukee was part of a larger national effort by the VA to sell off land and buildings to raise cash for a budget they had deeply miscalculated. Our in-country Navy brother said it was as if they were selling off pieces of the ship to keep her afloat, until there wasn’t any ship left. Others saw the VA moving to privatize treatment, outsourcing us all to the HMO’s taking over the landscape.

So the Voice of the Veterans Community was born, a loose group of vets from over twenty veteran organizations who fought a guerilla war of sorts against a well funded and heeled City Hall with a deal many considered a slam dunk. In the end, the VOVC showed that you could beat City Hall and the VA, as in early 2007 the City withdrew their plans.

Now the VOVC went from deal buster to find partnerships with those who cared to bring treatment back to the buildings and grounds dedicated to the veteran who put themselves in harms way for a country that promised to heal them and their wounds. The first joint Veteran & VA Mental Health Task Force in the country looked at how war trauma was treated and what could be improved. A multipoint recommendation was issued early this year, and the Veterans and VA agree the two priorities’ would be a women’s trauma treatment center at Zablocki, as there was no one in the Midwest.

The second recommendation was a Veterans Community Center where vets could once again find strength in the camaraderie of each other to share a joke, ask advise, or get help. The VA offered space in one of the old historic buildings on the VA grounds in Building One. The first floor was the site of the old post office. Now a shambles, you can see the high windows, the tin ceiling, and realize the beauty of this space in its time. This would be the perfect place for the gathering place, the Dryhootch Veterans Coffee House.

We also had the entire basement of the building, and a basement it is; old, dirty, wood floors in places; a dump for old equipment. But it had windows in many rooms and opens out to what promises to be a great outdoor sitting area. This would become the meeting rooms for AA, PTSD groups, veteran organizations who needed a meeting place, or a seminar location for the Vet Center, the VA, the state Department of Vet Affairs, etc., to offer assistance on programs and benefits.

We continue to meet with the VA Mental Health Team who has offered support and a program to train vets to be peer-to-peer counselors. As before, our vets returning home still feel the scourge of any diagnosis that involves mental health. If they are still in the military, it could affect their career. Or they may fear, rightly so, it could affect job chooses in the private sector. At the Dryhootch they can sit down with vets who have run the gauntlet and can offer real world advise. The vet can sit in on PTSD or AA meetings and see if the problem is deeper then he/she thought, or if these sessions can bridge their way home. It is a place where family members can meet with others to help their veteran find their way back home. What will change when they come home, why, and how they can help? We will also offer job hunting networks, a place to create a resume, search for jobs, and find resources in the numerous agencies offering help they perhaps never knew existed. Steve House of VVA said at a recent meeting, Dryhootch is what the Vet Centers started out to be, a place of vets helping vets. A place for holistic treatment to go beyond what pills cannot do, heal the soul.

Besides being a place of healing, it is also a social space. We found a coffee house owner who strives to help nonprofits to roast our coffee beans. We got to have great coffee, and have some fun, So, we named our coffee to keep the spirit of inter-service rivalry that permeates many our conversations. We got Marine Mud, Army Bunker Brew, Air Force JP4, Navy Destroyer, Coast Guard Seizure, and yes, VA Transfusion. One vet suggested we add “Loose Lips Latte” and the beat goes on. We will have poetry night, movies night, and music night by vets. A Veteran art festival in the summer would exhibit what a veteran’s soul can express. An outdoor patio would offer a healing and social space in the middle of the beautiful wooded grounds of this location.

And Dryhootch is more then Milwaukee, the concept works wherever there are vets in need. The government has not provided enough Vet Centers in any state. In Wisconsin many of our new vets are from rural areas where National Guard units are located. So a Dryhootch in Northwest WI could help vets who cannot drive to the Vet Centers in Green Bay or Milwaukee. A Dryhootch in Chicago, or Atlanta, etc., can bring this message, this healing to other veterans in communities across the country.

Dryhootch is a veteran owned nonprofit, the board requires that a majority be veterans, but includes family members, doctors, vet counseling professionals etc. Our lease for Building One is winding its way through the VA bureaucracy as we begin to spread the word and raise funds to rehab this one hundred year old plus building.

So we need the community help to open our doors. Funds to buy the materials, equipment, and supplies. We need help from carpenters and plumbers who can give their time, companies to donate equipment, etc. Come to our website at www.dryhootch.org to find out how you can help and what Dryhootch offers to veterans from every generation.

This is our opportunity as Vietnam Veterans to give a legacy of how a country should never again treat it’s warriors. That we, as Vietnam Veterans truly live the words, “never again shall one generation of veterans abandon another.” These words through Dryhootch will live on long after we are gone. Please help us, help them.