Ten year ago today, Kerri Fivecoat-Campbell’s brother, Steve, died far too soon. He was a war vet who died homeless and alone. Here’s a beautiful tribute Kerri wrote:

Steve’s life started out like many little boys of the 1950s. He loved Hopalong Cassidy and wore his cowboy hat and boots constantly. As he grew older, he developed a love for sports and played on the high school football and baseball teams. Steve loved to tell a joke and play jokes on people, but his jokes were never mean or cruel.

He was a sensitive soul who loved the Lutheran Church in which we were raised. He felt at home in the traditions of communion, and the seasons of Lent and Advent. He especially was fond of the midnight candlelight ceremony held on Christmas Eve.
One of his early aspirations included becoming a Lutheran minister. Fate took him on a different path, one to military service and to war. Before he left at age 17, he was a happy-go-lucky kid, a brother who loved the Beatles, and who used to take me for rides on his shoulders.

When he returned, he could still tell a joke, but not with the same carefree gusto. He had nightmares and he drank. He began seeking treatment from the VA, and by the end of his life, accrued a volume of medical records that spanned over 400 pages. Steve was never diagnosed with the obvious, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a common mistake made by the VA with so many veterans from Vietnam.

Steve died alone, wrapped in a sleeping bag.

When the police found Veteran’s Administration ID on his body the next day, they turned him over to the VA, who quickly had his body shipped to Ft. Snelling, Minnesota. He was buried alone, the day before Thanksgiving in 1999, without the benefit of mourners or even a flag, as no one had bothered to locate his mother and notify her that her only son was dead. Only after I initiated a search 14 months later, did we learn of his fate.
The homeless are often invisible to most. If we do see anything, it’s a “homeless drunk,” or “homeless crazy.” To the police, Steve was a homeless DOA. To the VA, he was a file they wanted closed and off of their desk before the four-day weekend.

It was almost enough to suck my faith of humanity, of the system that treated him and our family with such disregard. But then there was the nurse who told me she had treated Steve in an emergency room, she remembered him because she said he broke her assumptions of the homeless. He was witty and seemed “normal,” she said, he was a remarkable person.

His AA sponsor, who had through the years, became a best friend, who spoke passionately at Steve’s memorial and who also told me that it was Steve’s intelligence that struck him the most. There was the man who played football from a rival school some 30 years before who told us that after all of that time, he still remembered Steve’s fervor for sports. Ken Nettling, the Lutheran minister in the church where we grew up, who did not judge, but helped bring peace and closure at his memorial.

Finally, there is Mavis Wold, who tends Steve’s grave for us because he was buried so far from home at Ft. Snelling. She sends photos of the Christmas wreaths in the snow next to his headstone and birthday balloons she placed there on his 50th birthday. These are the people who restored my faith in humanity. These are people who saw Steve as we did, a person, a veteran, a son, brother, uncle, and friend.

These kind souls make me have faith that other homeless will not be treated just as a number, or a file to clear. That they will be treated with the dignity and respect we would want for ourselves or any of our loved ones, because really, most of us are all just a paycheck or a trauma away from being society’s invisible.

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