Gerald “Jerry” Harrell; another panhandling phony Vietnam veteran

Street corners are full of homeless phonies pretending to be veterans, thinking that will tug at the heart strings of passers-by. Very few of them are veterans, though. The first time I saw it, was about twenty years ago on CNN when a reporter was interviewing a homeless Desert Storm veteran who had been discarded by the Army after his service. He told stories about the blood and gore he had seen – the inhumanity of US troops to their Iraqi enemies. The reporter asked him when he had deployed to Desert Storm, he replied “May”. So he was either there three months before Hussein invaded Kuwait or he got there three months after the war had ended. I could tell by the reporter’s face that he realized that he had a phony on his hands, but he continued the interview because the story was too good to let the facts get in the way.

The Vietnam-era draft dodgers have had a field day with Hollywood casting call stereotypes of drug abusing veterans who started their habit during the war and then brought it home with them. Here’s one Gerald “Jerry” Harrell. His story is told in the panhandlers’ newspaper “Spare Change News” which gives the hobos an excuse to loiter on street corners by giving them something to sell;

Similar to his father before him—a Korean War veteran— Harrell found himself heading straight for Vietnam upon graduating from high school in 1970. Nowadays, he compares his experience in the war to the young men returning, traumatized, from Afghanistan today: “I saw napalm. I saw people die with their eyes open. You prayed to stay alive, and believe me, I prayed.”

In Vietnam, like so many other U.S. servicemen, Harrell discovered drugs. He recalls smoking opium and says that the marijuana grew as “big as trees” and that “soldiers were bringing back seeds and planting them.” In this regard, his experience was common: drug use was rampant among U.S. servicemen and a 1971 report by Congressmen John Murphy and Robert Steele indicated that 15 percent were addicted to heroin and half had experimented with opiates.

When Harrell returned from his tour of duty, he worked in various jobs while living with his mother. “This was when the job market was starting to go up,” he recalls. “When my mom passed away, I lived with my brother then my father … I was doing drugs. My father couldn’t cope with me anymore and in 1989 I became homeless.”

How many times have you heard a similar story? Just like the tearful, heart-wrenching stories you heard on the street, this one is false, too, double checked by Mary;

So, if you’re ever in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Starbucks on Elm Street in Davis Square, be sure to stop by and give old Jerry my regards, will ya?

Category: Phony soldiers, Valor Vultures