{"id":39242,"date":"2014-01-10T12:43:44","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T17:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=39242"},"modified":"2014-01-13T07:14:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-13T12:14:34","slug":"ltc-living-in-his-van","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=39242","title":{"rendered":"Colonel living in his van"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of dozen readers have sent us this link to the story<\/a> of former-Colonel Robert Freniere who retired a few years back and has been unable to find much work lately and he’s living out of his mini-van;<\/p>\n

So Freniere, a man who braved multiple combat zones and was hailed as “a leading light” by an admiral, is now fighting a new battle: homelessness.<\/p>\n

“You stay calm. That’s what we were trained for when I went through survival training,” he said recently in King of Prussia, where he had parked his blue minivan, the one crammed with all his possessions and held together with duct tape.<\/p>\n

As of January 2012, more than 60,000 veterans were homeless, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Reducing that number has been a priority for the Obama administration – and the number of homeless veterans dropped 24 percent nationwide from 2009 to 2013. In Pennsylvania, however, it jumped 46 percent, to more than 1,400.<\/p>\n

Joblessness among returning service members is even more common. Freniere describes a monthly lunch he has attended in Washington, a hushed tradition that he says attracts about 200 veterans. After they eat, the men and women who are unemployed stand up one by one to recite their service records, hoping someone else in the room will hire them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m guessing that you want me to do a FOIA on him, but there are official photos floating around and former colleagues are commenting on what great guy he is, so I don’t know how productive it would be to check on him. I didn’t see his name in AKO, but he’s Air Force, so that says nothing. I tend to believe him – yeah, he’s a retired LTC and he should be pulling in a couple tens of thousands of dollars, but he also got divorced right before he retired, which probably took a chunk of his retirement pay, and he has kids in college and private schools, so there it all goes. <\/p>\n

I’m thinking he’s a victim of geography – he probably wants to stay near his kids. And Philadelphia doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for his particular set of skills. He should try to find a job in the DC area – my kids go through jobs there like I change my socks, but to each his own. Then again, I could be wrong. I spent sometime unemployed in Upstate New York and when I got tired of that, I moved to DC. But then, I don’t have any ex-wives and my kids are spread out around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of dozen readers have sent us this link to the story of former-Colonel Robert … Colonel living in his van<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-force"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}