Every night in America, about 70,000 veterans sleep on the streets. For 30 years, Gerard Thomas was one of them. A paranoid schizophrenic, Thomas took a long time to get back indoors after serving in a stateside military hospital during the Vietnam War.
Thomas goes to those places where he once slept, ate and hid throughout the Washington region and tries to find the homeless veterans.
Today, he has an apartment, a bike, a big desk he bought online and a three-computer workstation. He also has a mission. There are veterans fresh out of Iraq or Afghanistan who returned to find their personal world collapsed and a barren job market. Some of them need assistance to stay off the streets, Thomas says.
He interrupts himself to answer a call from a father of three who recently returned from a deployment and lost his home. Thomas, who works as a certified peer counselor to homeless veterans and mental-health patients with Pathways to Housing, pulls out the man’s case file. (“I am certified and certifiable,” he quips.)
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