- [Narrator] This Original WSRE Presentation is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

- A Mad Man on a mission, Shad Meshad on this edition of "Conversations".

(gentle music) From the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of Los Angeles, most of Shad Meshad's adult life has been about helping veterans struggling with PTSD and other challenges caused by the scars of war.

Meshad, a Vietnam veteran himself, has seen and experienced the horrors of war up close and personal.

He is the founder and co-author of the National Vet Center.

Currently, he is running the National Veterans Foundation, another organization he founded whose mission it is to provide a lifeline to vets in need.

Here's Meshad in action.

- [Shad Meshad] And I've been watching this for 49 years.

It's total chaos out there.

but we're all war veterans in World War right into the center of the storm, putting our lives on the line to make sure that they have a shot.

It might be pretty.

- Can you start them off here?

- Crazy when we get around this corner here because we were here while back and they were all vets on this side of the street up at the top.

Yeah, God, look at this.

Look at this, look at the flags.

- [Man] Wow.

- Here we are outside the largest VA in the country and there's homeless on the outskirts.

These folks should be on the other side.

They should be on the other side of the iron bars.

I mean, this is just, this is horrible.

If this doesn't make you angry... (sighs) God.

Any of you guys vets?

- [Man] Yeah we're vets.

- [Shad Meshad] So am I. Shad, army 82nd Airborne.

What branch were you in?

- Served in the army.

- [Shad Meshad] Where'd you serve?

- Baumholder, Germany, and Port of Texas.

- [Shad Meshad] Wow, okay.

Well, we got a survival box here for you.

- Great.

- We have our toll free number.

- Okay.

- [Shad Meshad] Here you go boss.

- [Man] We've got rations- - Protection.

- Protection.

- [Shad Meshad] Cleanser.

- [Man] Toiletry.

- Alright.

- [Shad Meshad] It's survival box from the National Veterans Foundation.

- Yay!

- [Shad Meshad] Yay, how about it?

Give it up, bro.

Go army.

- Thank you guys.

- [Shad Meshad] All right, baby.

Hello.

You a veteran?

- Oh, yeah yeah.

- [Shad Meshad] Who were you with?

- ACP 2, ACP 1.

- [Shad Meshad] Were you on a ship, a boat?

- A boat, Oceana.

- Yeah?

- Yeah, yeah.

- [Shad Meshad] What's your name?

- Gordon.

- Shad.

Here's our number, toll-free number okay?

What's your name?

- [Woman] Judy.

- Judy, God bless you.

- Nice to meet you.

- You got beautiful eyes, girl.

- [Judy] Thank you.

- Gorgeous.

82nd Airborne Vietnam, 1970.

- Been on there.

(faintly speaking) - It's Corvus.

(laughs) - 91 Bravo, man.

- No, God bless you.

I just want you to get off the streets as soon as you can.

- Yeah.

- So our number is on that box.

If you run into any trouble through that process, you call our number.

That's what we do.

- That is a clip from a documentary about Shad Meshad entitled "Mad Man".

We welcome Shad Meshad to "Conversations".

Thank you, my friend, for joining us.

- I'm honored to be here.

- [Jeff] Tell me how did your passion for helping veterans begin?

- Well, I think it started a few weeks into Vietnam in 1970 when I really had my first taste of war and the fact that the chaos, and the man's inhumanity to man which war's about regardless of what your politics are.

I knew particularly being a young but one of the old men in the sense I was 24 going on 25 as a U.S. Army Captain Psych Officer in Vietnam, that these 18, 19 and 20 year olds, what they were experiencing, particularly in 1970, there were gonna be problems returning home.

And sure enough, when I came Christmas Eve 1970, I got a Christmas Drop, The Nixon Christmas Drop.

Came home, and as soon as I got on the plane from Vietnam to come home I felt extremely anxious more so than I did going into Vietnam because I knew I had changed, what I had seen it changed and I kept thinking, "You know, I'm 20 going on 26 years old and I'm feeling it.

And I can imagine what these 18, 19 and 20 year olds primarily are feeling coming back to a world that in a way we had sort of a Disneyland image of what America was and you know, life on easy street, and we kept saying, 'Going back to the world', but the world was not what we imagined while we were in Vietnam."

And so I had a lot of difficulty just being back and having the education and everything.

What am I gonna do?

What am I gonna do to serve now?

And the opportunity came when I went to see some sergeants in Los Angeles driving across the country and landed in Los Angeles.

Not planning to stay there, but were able to meet my sergeants, I felt like I was with my tribe, I was with people I could relate to.

I could still smell Vietnam, so to speak, on me five months out of the war and I felt totally comfortable.

And I kinda knew that's where I'd like to be, and then I had the opportunity by the one of the biggest psychiatrists who was also head of not only the VA psychiatric side, but also NPI, the largest psychiatric center in the world at a UCLA.

And he met me and said, "I need you to tell us why young vets are not coming to the VA." And he talked me into analyzing the hospital, which I did over three months under psychiatry, and told him very bluntly in a memo, a white paper as to why vets, myself, would not go to this VA and if they're all like that, you're never gonna get vets.

- And why was that?

Why wouldn't they go?

- Well, first of all, you know we fought the war in Vietnam and the war coming home.

The VA at that time had not adjusted.

They were still thinking that World War II vets were coming back or Korea and they were gonna do the same old type treatments.

There's a whole, it was a 60s generation and we're now in the 70s and they were not responding to what they had to offer.

You had to literally go to the VA or whatever.

We didn't have a diagnosis for what we now know today as PTSD.

It was something like a syndrome.

You have post-Vietnam syndrome.

Well, that's not a clinical definition.

So it was really raw and the fact that veterans, people feared Vietnam veterans because by the end of the war, by '71, '72, '73 up till the end of the war, most of the press saw us as baby killers, dope addicts, just, you know, a mess.

- [Jeff] That's right.

- So people feared us.

And, you know, we had at least 4 million that had served during that 10-year period, at least they call, I mean we know that we were in there longer, but as far as massive troops.

And to come back and not be able to go and even talk about it 'cause you've heard stories of being spit on, being called a baby killer or whatever, that wasn't the homecoming that we wanted.

We didn't have a homecoming parade like Desert Storm in other wars, particularly World War II.

- [Jeff] Right.

- And being looked at is a problem child or whatever.

Here, we are as heroic has any veteran.

Not that we felt like heroes, but we didn't, we have grown up with Audie Murphy and John Wayne and all these images and we were looked at as losers.

How could you lose the war and never lose a battle?

I mean, it was conflicting.

And you know, the major part population returning were 19, 20, 21 year olds.

They were still in late adolescents.

Now, all of a sudden, how do you even become a civilian?

- [Jeff] Right.

- You were in high school and you were into a war.

- You know, we hear a PTSD.

What exactly is it?

I mean, we know what it is.

We know, but what is it?

How would you describe it to someone?

- It's a catastrophic event that you survive.

In a catastrophic event, you are prepared to die, you feel like you're gonna die, and you come out.

And how it affects the brain, of course we're still researching that, but we know that it alters the brain and the brain stores.

And so you look at everything through the lens of trauma.

Noises, sounds, war is all noise, sound, gory or whatever.

And you can't erase those memories.

You have daymares, you have nightmares, you're always on alert.

All the things that you dealt with in the war, there's no detox, there's no deprogramming that.

We called it "Foxhole the Front Porch" in my war and it's faster even today.

And you're back there and people are going, "So how'd you do it?

How was the trip?

How many did you kill," or whatever.

They don't even know how to approach it.

And most people that don't go to war feel uncomfortable talking to a warrior.

They ask stupid questions and it make you uncomfortable, they feel uncomfortable, and it's hard to integrate into the conversation or society.

And the more and more that you don't integrate, and the longer that waits, you've already, well in these two wars that we've been in for 20 years, you could be 10 or 15 years behind your peers.

And you gotta go to college at 30 years old with 18-year olds that are playing with smartphones or whatever, and playing games or whatever, and it's like, "I landed on Mars.

How do I adjust to this?"

in their head.

And everybody's looking at you like, "What's wrong?"

And it's like, "I don't know how to switch on, switch off.

I don't know how to be comfortable with you."

- How do you adjust to it?

- The only way is to get counseling and that's what my career began was I investigated and evaluated that hospital.

I was in a city that was twice the largest city I was raised in with Vietnam vets, 335,000 in 1971 in LA County.

You know, they were spread out over.

LA is like several countries- - Right.

if you've ever been there, it's not a city, it's just monstrous, it's spread.

But I went to them.

They weren't coming to the VA.

So the challenge was for me to go and find where they went and through some veterans that I met early, actually the first two days I was at the VA, a set talking to whatever, I went where they told me to go.

And they told me where to go, and I went from the Canyons to the East LA to South Central to the mountains, to the hills, to the beaches, I was finding them everywhere.

And I was working groups in their environment, not in the VA. And that's where I started what I called rap groups.

That was the coin for what we call group therapy, rap groups.

'Cause that's the language that combat vets know, rap, this, that.

And I look like them, I had an Afro and a beard.

Only thing that distinguished me from any of them is my accent 'cause I was a Southern race, Southern or whatever, but I'm in here with vets from all over the United States that came to Los Angeles in masses because you could hide there.

You could cluster there, you could live in that weather almost year round without whatever, and I just bathed in it.

And then I learned why, and I learned what we need to do.

And first of all, we've got to get them talking and knowing they're not alone, and they're not all these things that they'd been called by the press and the media.

- How did you build trust?

How did you build their trust, I should say?

- Because I was one of them.

- [Jeff] Mm-hmm.

- When I did groups I said, "Hey, and I was a part of those groups."

Even though I was the therapist and I was a mental health professional, I had a, I sat in there and we all needed to say, "We're not alone and we're gonna get through this."

But being older and having, you know, clinical skills but still scarred by war I said, "You know, we're it.

We have to get ourselves out of this mindset and this whole and we have to do it together."

'Cause we went over individually came back individually.

Most wars today they go in units and whatever, it was draft war.

So I sort of built tribes and groups all over the city.

South Central, East LA, the beach, the Canyons, if you've ever been to LA, it was massive.

So I had groups every night in different areas with different population, different races, but all of us had tasted war.

We had seen war, we felt war and we had to get it out.

And as a therapist, the first thing we had to do was talk about it, feel like it's okay, you know?

Some of the horrible things that you do in war, in war fighting, I mean, it's kill or be killed.

People don't understand that the mission of a war fighter is to search and destroy the enemy no matter what branch you're in.

But most people look at it, whether it's a commercial, that the marine and the beautiful fade with the silver sword like it's a beautiful thing.

And you feel as this macho thing that whatever but when the first bullet goes through or you get wounded or whatever, you realize this is life and death.

- [Jeff] Right.

- And most people don't understand that.

And so being a Vietnam vet, I could merge, I look like him, I got a reputation over the first three or four years, I buried 15 of my vets that took their lives in my group because there was just no place to go.

And I was running groups all over the city.

I buried two from Agent Orange.

I was everywhere, but I had a program.

And the more I learned about it, the more I got the VA comfortable in addressing and not being afraid, to be afraid of your client.

Imagine going to your therapist and he's afraid of you.

And the trust issue is everything.

If they don't trust you, they're not gonna talk.

They may do even more.

They may do harm to you- - Right.

- if they think.

- Tell me about the first program that you started, the National Vet Center Program.

- Well, it started with my first program.

It was modeled after my program called the Vietnam Veteran Re-Socialization Unit in '71 and then '74, a triple amputee Vietnam vet Max Cleland came to see who this.

I had the title of "Mad Man" because of how I looked, I'm in the largest psychiatric VA, and I'm out, I ride a Harley Davidson to all my groups or whatever.

Even the therapists in that hospital were afraid of me until they talk to me.

I just looked like a grok.

And that was like out of, just didn't fit in.

According to them, I didn't really care how to look because my world was out there.

And so I just started my program got known, TV, you know LA is a huge TV thing, and everybody wanting to know what's going on with Vietnam vets.

Well, the war was still going on to early '75.

So I was always on TV and I'd bring combat vets on and talk about it.

"So what are you mad about?

What are you mad about?

How Shad helping you?"

Whatever.

And if you saw videos of those you would be laughing and here I am.

And all of a sudden Max Cleland becomes Jimmy Carter's secretary of the VA.

It's all of a sudden '77.

And '74 to '75, he came out to see who the Mad Man was.

'Cause that was my nickname in the VA.

I got this program, I looked like a Mad Man or whatever, but the vets love him and he's working with them.

And he came out to see because this is just one city.

We have vets all over the country.

- [Jeff] Right.

So he came out, and I pushed him to Venice Beach, I showed him things.

He was like, "Wow!"

He hadn't even been out in the world.

He'd been, how do you live with one arm and no legs?

And all of a sudden, he becomes a VA secretary.

And he knew, and Cranston, he was a senior member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Senator, who was a World War II vet, sent him out to see what I was doing.

And then he'd been pushing Public Law of 96-22 which is a readjustment bill for veterans.

And he said, "Go check out the Mad Man."

And racks came out and then he becomes VA secretary and the bill starts getting close to be passed in Congress, and now I've got to come in, and I went in with a colleague of mine.

He helped me author it.

I was the founder of it because it was what I was doing in LA.

We kinda cloned it and modified, it got passed.

And within three months, I was setting up vet centers all over the country with training, hiring.

It was mad.

Trust me.

Because the VA didn't like it and this is, we were funded by congressional money and the VA had to kind of manage our money and stuff.

And quite a few times they took our money, and that's another story, but it was a constant battle, but we were on the streets.

The vet centers were put in the community not behind the big VA walls where they were there and it was... And the title came which was one of our logos, "Help Without Hassles".

Hassle was one of the slang words in Vietnam.

"Is that officer hassling you?"

or this or that or whatever.

And so we had billboards, and we had celebrities talking about it because by that time the movies were first coming out about Vietnam and everybody was interested.

"What are we up to?"

"Where are they?"

"What are they doing?"

"Are they real?"

"Can they talk?"

And we got introduced by films but not really who we were because, you know, films are kind of exaggerated and- - [Jeff] Sure, sure.

- Hollywood or whatever, but at least it gave a focus to us.

And I had all kinds of focus about it every year.

And when I got the program going and started setting them up.

Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, probably by the time I was left in seven years, we had the Vet Center Program.

We had about a hundred in place.

Today, there's over 300.

- Wow.

What is the biggest problem right now?

As we sit here and do this program in 2021, what is the biggest problem for veterans right now in this country?

- Number one, I mean there's several.

Number one is really getting to someone that can help deal with your post-trauma, your readjustment, and it could be a lot of things.

Economy, seeing a counselor that understands, money, 'cause you got to get a job, you've got to start and you've got to at least get a college education depends on what part of the country, what your ethnic group is or whatever, what's available.

But the main thing is still getting, reaching to them instead of waiting them to come to whether it's a VA or even a vet center, even to the National Veterans Foundation.

That's why when I left the vet centers, I decided to a whole bunch of Vietnam vets that I need to get out of the bureaucracy and do the things that we weren't allowed to do.

Go into prisons, work with the homeless, have a national hotline where veterans could call and ask anything, and talk to a veteran.

That's why eventually, even today I've gotten into the peer-to-peer training, the trauma-informed training that I'm doing with my wife, who's a traumatologist who I'm sure you'll meet later or sometime.

I mean, it just sorta came together.

And all of a sudden, it became popular in my area to talk about Vietnam and the Vet Center Program was there.

People were getting more comfortable and we thought it was the last war.

And what happens?

Desert Storm.

Oh my God.

And we had had a national hotline for Vietnam vets.

We had to change our name to the National Veterans Foundation because we had parents, family members, calling us when vets were going to Iraq.

I mean not Iraq, but into a- - [Jeff] Desert Storm or- - Yeah, Desert Storm.

And they're like, "Wow, is this just gonna be like Vietnam because we thought, 'Wow, you know, they've got nuclear weapons maybe or whatever.'"

And even though they called it a three-day war, there were troops there for a year and never knowing if it was going to be a nuclear war or whatever.

And then we started taking their calls from all over, helping them navigate the SOS, they need to know how to address the VA, most of men, many of men had problems going to the VA.

These are war fighters and they suck it up.

I mean, in life and death situations, am I going to go knock on a VA or even a vet center and say, "I need help.

I'm really suffering.

I'm having flashes."

They don't do that.

You got to go to them, and you got to present programs where they can walk in like meeting you and being able to get comfortable and say, "Hey, I'll tell you anything.

I want to be transparent."

And that's what we are.

The National Veterans Foundation is tramp it.

Call me, World War II, a burial, a suicide or whatever.

You can call and ask us.

And what we do is we network throughout the whole United States.

I'm here today meeting you because AHERO, Frenchie Lafontaine, you know, we've got Dave Glassman.

I met a host of unbelievable people.

So I network with them.

So we get a crisis call, whether it's from Tupelo, Mississippi, Brooklyn, New York, Pensacola, I'm calling AHERO.

I've done it a million times and say, "Hey, help me integrate these guys somewhere.

They need housing, they need this and that."

And it's just been an incredible relationship.

- How can we as a society, I mean, you're there on the ground floor, you're on the front line so to speak but how can the rest of us do a better job of helping veterans and especially homeless veterans?

- Well, first of all, let's start with veterans 'cause homeless is a real complicated and a big problem in America.

What you're doing today is having the conversation today about what's going on and not going on, you're doing your part.

You, this station, or whatever.

And however outreach, whoever you reach with this program and any program about veterans is making a difference.

'Cause hopefully, a veteran or a wife or a mother or father, see that and say, "Hey, who was that guy?

How do we reach them?

Call the station day."

You know, AHERO pick up or you got the Marine Corps Foundation here that is huge in this area.

Most of all these people involved here with your memorial that is awesome or whatever, they've got equine horse therapy going on here that starting up, getting the word out and letting people know this is available.

It's incredible.

But it's the word out.

People have got to know, hopefully veterans see it and realize it's a vet-to-vet thing, it's a peer-to-peer.

Because just like with me, when I started, I couldn't have gotten anywhere.

Had I been a mental health professional right out of college or school and going in in a coat and tie and trying to hit the streets, I'd be shot.

- Right.

(Shad stammers) I've got about three minutes left just, and I know this is not enough time, but just give me a real quick 10,000-foot overview on how to maybe address the homelessness issues.

- The homeless issue, the largest homeless population is in Los Angeles.

I've been dealing with it 50 years.

So that's a two-hour show but basically, it's with veterans, they come back, they don't reintegrate, they can't get employment, this is a capitalistic society so you gotta have money, and particularly in LA it's very expensive, you've got to have education, you've got to have someone that you can talk to to clear out any previous trauma whether it was before the war, during the war, after the war.

And what happens?

Eventually you come home, if you don't have resources, you're with your folks.

Then you're kicked out, then you're staying on the couch with your girlfriend or a buddy.

Then you're kicked out.

Then you get in your car, you're sleeping in your car, your car gets towed, now you're on the streets.

It's a process.

And that process is spreading because of economic situation here.

I don't care about the stock market that has nothing to do with those that are coming out of the military, have not been able to integrate and deal with the nightmares or whatever.

And also, what do I do with the rest of my life?

Listen, I was trained, I had a mental health degree and everything, I came out.

I was like, "What am I gonna do?"

I went through that.

That made it more real for me.

And I just knew, for those that hadn't had any education or whatever, and had been wounded like several of the people here in this area with the Marine Corps fund and AHERO, that all these other programs in your area which are phenomenal, how would I, how would they know?

How would they know?

These programs need to be on with programs like there.

I got my reputation because eventually 60 minutes came to see what I was up to, just like you want to know, asking me the questions.

But the homeless problem is a pandemic.

Whatever you believe about the COVID situation here, the homeless thing is growing out of control in LA and I'm seeing it everywhere.

- [Jeff] Yeah, yeah.

- And we go out twice a week, we have a street team trying to give out you know, non-perishable foods, water, blankets, backpacks, anything so they can survive and then we try to fish them off.

If they're vet, jump in the van, we'll get you to a program.

We've got them, but they don't know.

You have no communication.

You don't have a cell phone.

You don't have a bathroom.

You're sleeping in a tent, a year goes by, two years go by and all of a sudden, if you're a combat vet you can adjust on the streets in LA and you can adjust.

Maybe you couldn't or whatever, I don't want to.

But it's very tough, but the youth can do it for a while.

And then in awhile, health issues hit you, nobody wants to talk to you- - You can't escape any problem.

- you get diseased, you die.

I mean, it's real quick.

I mean, we could go do a whole show on that and I'm dealing with that now.

And I've seen it here, but it's in all cities.

And it's, and people are afraid just like they were afraid of Vietnam vets to address the problem.

I mean, we have a huge pandemic spread in California.

We're trying to...

But they don't go down to the homeless.

Well, are they physical?

Are they beans?

It's inundated with the virus down there, nobody's going down there to give them shots or whatever.

So if you don't fix that, you don't kill the virus.

It's in the air.

- [Jeff] Right, right.

- I mean it's just very complex but you've got to attack it and I have been for 50 years and talking here on your your program or whatever saying, "Hey, people have got to step up and look at it."

And it's gonna hit every city because it's not getting any better.

And the wars are continuing on.

It's very complex but I'm honored to be here, to meet everybody here in this city and all the powerful things that a few good men and women are doing here.

- Well, it's a great honor to meet you and to hear about all the great work you've done and continue to do.

- And the great thing is the training for these peer-to-peer counselors or whatever, my wife and I, she's a traumatologist, are doing this in California.

It's huge.

- [Jeff] Thank you, my friend.

- God bless you, man.

Thank you.

- God bless you.

All the best.

By the way, you can learn more about Shad Meshad's mission and the National Veterans Foundation at NVF.org and if you were a veteran and you need help, call 1888-777-4443.

And by the way, if you're a veteran watching this show, thank you for your service.

You don't hear that nearly enough.

By the way, you can see this program and many other "Conversations" online at wsre.org/conversations as well as on YouTube and Facebook.

I'm Jeff Weeks, thank you so very much for watching.

I hope you enjoyed the broadcast.

I hope you learned something from this broadcast.

Take wonderful care of yourself.

We'll see you soon.

(gentle upbeat music)