“I'm just an ordinary person who served.”

Homeless vets:

Six months after her return to the United States, [Nadine Beckford] lives in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, sharing a room with eight other women and attending a job-training program. Her parents live in Jamaica and are barely making ends meet, she says.

"I'm just an ordinary person who served. I'm not embarrassed about my homelessness, because the circumstances that created it were not my fault," says Beckford, 30, who was a military-supply specialist at a U.S. base in Iraq, a sitting duck for around-the-clock attacks "where hell was your home."

It was a "hell" familiar to [Herold Noel] during his eight months in Iraq. But it didn't stop when he returned home to New York last year and couldn't find a job to support his wife and three children. Without enough money to rent an apartment, he turned to the housing programs for vets, "but they were overbooked," Noel says.

…In New York, the family ended up in a Bronx shelter "with people who were just out of prison, and with roaches," Noel said. "I'm a young black man from the ghetto, but this was culture shock. This is not what I fought for, what I almost died for. This is not what I was supposed to come home to."

If you can and want to help, you can contribute to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans here or find local places to volunteer or donate items or money here. If anyone is working with another organization you recommend, please let me know and I’ll add it to the post.