Bush Takes Care of His Vets

"'I drove off in my truck. I packed my stuff. I lived out of my truck for a while," Seabees Petty Officer Luis Arellano, 34, said in a telephone interview from a homeless shelter near March Air Force Base in California run by U.S.VETS, the largest organization in the country dedicated to helping homeless veterans.
Arellano said he lived out of his truck on and off for three months after returning from Iraq in September 2003. 'One day you have a home and the next day you are on the streets,' he said.

In Iraq, shrapnel nearly severed his left thumb. He still has trouble moving it and shrapnel 'still comes out once in a while,' Arellano said. He is left handed.
Arellano said he felt pushed out of the military too quickly after getting back from Iraq without medical attention he needed for his hand -- and as he would later learn, his mind.

'It was more of a rush. They put us in a warehouse for a while. They treated us like cattle,' Arellano said about how the military treated him on his return to the United States."

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