All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fausone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you.
I think you'll find very interesting.
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or at the web.
VeteransRadio.org is our new URL, VeteransRadio.org.
Where we're on the web 24-7, you can find a lot of our podcasts there as well.
We post new ones every Tuesday, so you can get a new story, a new interview, something
you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
And before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.
First up, we want to thank National Veteran Business Development Council, NVBDC.org.
It was established to certify both service disabled and veteran owned businesses.
You'll find out how they can help your business by going to NVBDC.org.
We want to thank Legal Help for Veterans.
Legal Help for Veterans fights for veterans disability rights all across the nation.
You can reach them at 800-693-4800 or on the web at LegalHelpForVeterans.com.
We want to welcome to VeteransRadio Pazella Colston Bonner, who's an Army veteran, and
after her service has really continued to dedicate herself to doing what's necessary
for veterans, but also female veterans and those who are in need of homes.
So, Paz, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thank you so much for having me today.
Well, let's start with the beginning, because all of us have this beginning of when we decided
or how we decided to join up.
How did you end up in the Army?
Well, in high school, I just thought it would be something interesting to do.
I'm the type of person that if I hear something, I'm like, hey, that'll be pretty interesting.
And I thought that going into the Army would be a way to partially pay for college.
And when I got ready to graduate, I told my mom, hey, mom, I think I want to go into the
Army or actually before that.
And she just kept saying, uh-huh, uh-huh.
So, when it came to my graduation.
Maybe you'll stop thinking about it if she ignores it long enough, right?
Exactly.
She said to me, no, you're not going to the Army.
I don't think you know what you're doing.
You're going to college.
And you know, your parents told you back then.
So, I went to college.
I did a year and a half in college.
And my mom was pretty young.
You know, 46 years old.
I'd never seen her sick or anything.
And she started having seizures.
And she was in the hospital.
And I went to the hospital and I told her, hey, mom, you know what?
I think I want to go in the military.
And she said, you know what?
I think you're old enough now.
You're 21.
I think you know what you're doing.
So, you got my blessings.
Three days after that, she unexpectedly passed away.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, she was supposed to come home.
And at that time, I was going to join the Air Force.
And I felt like after she passed away, I wanted to get away immediately.
So, I jumped over and joined the Army because it seemed like they were going to move me
a little faster, get me, you know, out of the city.
And it ended up not happening that way.
I ended up staying a little longer.
But with her blessings, I said, okay, now it's time to go.
Well, you spent about 20 years in the Army, both active and reserve.
Give us, paint a picture for us of what your career was like.
Okay.
Well, when I went in, my mom always groomed me for business.
She heard me say my mom a lot because my mom was my best friend, my mentor.
And I think that most parents, they see something in their kids.
So they'll try to mentor them in that direction.
My mother was an accounting supervisor at Children's Hospital.
And she groomed me for business very young.
She would bring billing home.
I would do that kind of work or whatever.
She just saw that I was really good at business.
Fast forward to high school.
She had me in shorthand and typing.
So, I kind of, you know, did business like forever.
And then when I went to college, you know, I was working on a business degree.
So after she passed away, I'm like, I'm getting as far away from business as I can.
So I signed up to be a diesel mechanic for big trust.
Okay.
That was what I was going to do.
I'm like, I'm done with business.
I had enough.
And when I got ready to leave, they're like, oh, that school's not going to start for
another year.
If you want to leave at this time, we have personnel management specialists.
I'm thinking, okay.
That's kind of what I've been doing.
So that's how I ended up jumping into that.
Went to basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
I did my AIT, which is my advanced training for personnel management specialists in Indian
apolis.
And then my permanent duty station was Bamberg, Germany.
That was a course of maybe a couple of years.
Right after that, while I was in Germany, my grandmother had a stroke.
I came home and I was temporary assigned at Taycom in Warren, Michigan.
And two months after that, the military said to me, hey, you got two sisters to take care
of your grandmother, either get out or go back to Germany.
Now, mind you, it's been not even two years since my mom passed away.
So I'm not going back to Germany.
My grandmother is on her deathbed.
So with their urging, I decided to get out and go to the reserves.
And I finished my career in the reserves a little over 18 years.
Well, it's one of those stories of you don't know where life's going to take you, but it's
an interesting ride along the way, isn't it?
Yeah, it was very interesting.
I mean, a lot of ups and downs, you know, had some hardships through there because
when I went in, I didn't know that there was a clause in my contract that said if I didn't
complete two years of active duty, which I did not, it was really like 18 or 19 months
that when I got out, I could not go to the VA hospital.
So I started having issues with my hips and my knees, tried to go to the VA hospital.
That's when they said to me, nope.
You didn't complete active duty long enough, so we're not going to help you.
I went on year after year trying to get help from senators who said, hey, it's nothing
we can do, nothing we can do.
So Social Security had to disable me so that I could get Medicaid and Medicare early to
get both of my hips replaced.
Had to go before the Social Security judge, and she couldn't believe that the military
was not going to help me.
She said, I will disable you for two years and we'll see what happens after that.
Me thinking, I don't know how long I'm going to get this help, I got my left hip replaced,
which was the worst, and six weeks after that, after therapy, I went and got the right hip
replaced.
Still, during that time, trying to get my service-connected benefits.
And this went on year after year.
Actually, it took me 35 years to get my benefits from the VA hospital.
So I don't know if you want to move right into that or-
Well, go ahead because I think-
Go ahead and talk about this, Pes, because I think it's sort of the foundation that helped
make you into the veteran advocate you've become with focus on homes and women health
issues.
Yes, that's exactly.
Homes for heroic veterans was born out of the difficulty that I had getting my benefits.
The disdain that I had from being helped at the VA, which I know that a lot of veterans
are dealing with right now.
I'm helping veterans to try to get their what's called service-connected benefits.
When I was in, when you got out of active duty, no one told you, hey, go sign up at
the VA, get your medical health card, do this and that.
They just kind of said, okay, see you wouldn't want to be.
You kind of wave their hand at you, which was very contrary to how it was when we went
in.
We then signed up for the military, raised our hand.
They told us exactly what to do, when to do it, where to be.
Coming out is kind of, I felt left alone and no one could really help me.
Even my reserve officers were kind of surprised that I wasn't getting the help that I need.
Fast forward to almost 35 years later, social security has helped me.
I've now gotten both my hips replaced and I'm thinking, this doesn't make any sense.
It's got to be something you can do to help veterans.
This is still before I was able to get into my service-connected benefits.
I was on Facebook and it's a group called Veteran to Veteran.
In this group are veterans as well as people that work at different VA facilities throughout
the U.S.
I just posed the question in this Facebook group and said, why am I an honorably discharged
veteran and I cannot receive health benefits?
I will call this person my angel.
I cannot remember his name but I know he worked at the VA in Atlanta.
He said, if you trust me, give me your information.
Sounds like you got out on a hardship.
No one ever said that to me.
Three days later he came back.
He said, you got out on a hardship.
That voided that clause in your contract.
It said you couldn't get health benefits from the VA.
Here we are, over 35 years later.
He says, go down to the VA now and see what they say.
I was discharged from active duty in 1981, April 17th of 2017, which is the Friday.
I go down to the VA.
When they see me coming, they're always like, oh my God, here she comes again.
You have your son with you.
I'm like, can you just check the computer?
I've been told that whatever issues are going are corrected now.
It's about almost four o'clock on a Friday.
They clicked on the computer or whatever and they're like, everything's okay now.
We close at 4.30.
Can you come back on Monday to get your ID?
I'll pause right there for a moment.
Well, a lot of few choice words I said in my head, but what came out of my mouth was,
I'll sit here till Monday if I have to.
They gave me my ID and I proceeded to still continue to work on getting my service connected
with benefits because the situations that I had, the illnesses, the injuries I had were
from the military and I felt like I needed to be compensated.
Still continue to try to help myself.
After I got my first service connection, I thought I need to help veterans.
After doing a little bit of homework, I found out that there were, I don't know how many
homeless veterans out here, and I was appalled at it.
I thought, how can you be homeless if you were a veteran?
We've served our country.
We've done what we needed to do.
What is constituting all of this homelessness?
I'm going to stop you there, Paz, before we get into the homeless angle because I want
to pull out a couple of pearls of wisdom that you've just passed along to people and we
tell them this, they don't sometimes believe us, so your story helps drive this home.
One is, we tell veterans all the time, don't give up.
It took you 35 years, but you didn't give up.
So many guys and gals just say, well, they said no and walk away.
A lot of things happened.
The law changes.
The first time you got answers or the tenth time you got answers, they were wrong.
Maybe somebody starts to apply more, and here's the second pearl, right?
You got to have the knowledge to be able to work the system.
If this guy in Atlanta hadn't used the word hardship for you, it wouldn't have worked
that you got around this contract clause because they kicked you out over a hardship issue.
That opened the door.
So you can't give up.
You got to keep talking to people till you get the right knowledge so you can move through
whatever that barrier was.
I just didn't want to skip over those pearls of wisdom.
Go ahead, you're saying while you're doing this, you realize the extent of homelessness
for veterans and how unfortunate and unwarranted it is, so talk to us about that part of your
advocacy.
What I found out is that there's just a huge number of veterans that are homeless.
And so I wanted to try to discover why are they homeless.
And in my discovery, I found out that when a lot of them get off of active duty, it doesn't
matter whether they've been to war or not.
They're trained for war.
So this is what people don't understand.
I'm training for war or either I'm in war as a veteran.
I'm discharged on a Thursday.
I go to my out processing on Saturday.
So you want me to come home on Sunday and go to church on Monday to take my kids to school
like nothing has ever happened?
A lot of veterans do not make that transition.
We need out processing.
I feel almost just like people do that are held hostage because you're coming from a controlled
environment where you are told what to do on a regular basis.
And now you just want me to come back and transition back into society.
And a lot of people don't make that transition.
The other part of it is that a lot of family members don't know this person when they come
home because they may want to be isolated.
They may not want to be around a lot of people.
And the first thing that a family or friends want to do, hey, let's celebrate your home.
You've been in a war zone.
If you've been in certain areas and you've been isolated for some time, just being around
crowds is a problem.
So that's one of the things that I found out.
And so a lot of veterans will start drinking or doing drugs or doing things just to try
to cope with transitioning back.
They may go down to the VA.
They may try to go to a VFW or other places to try to get the help that they need.
If they don't get the help or they don't get a camaraderie with another veteran, a lot
of times they fall through the crack.
A large majority of them are able to come back home, get their jobs back or start a
job, start a family, and just keep moving on.
But there is a huge number of them that do not.
That's what I've noticed is constituting most of the homelessness.
You know, just getting caught and, you know, just like, almost like underground.
And that, that, that sort of, that motivated, all that motivated you to set up Homes for
Heroic Veterans.
Tell us what that's about.
Homes for Heroic Veterans is a 501c3.
We are five years old.
We started out transitioning veterans.
I connected with different homeless shelters as well as case managers to say, hey, what
is it that we can do to help veterans?
So we started out, I started out with one home which I bought out of my own personal
finances, a three bedroom home.
And I started just housing veterans, starting out with men.
I would put three men, it doesn't matter what branch of the service they were in, in a three
bedroom house.
And they really gelled very well together.
They felt the camaraderie that they missed when they were, when they were on active duty.
So what we do is we try to find out what is it going to take to get them to the next step
of their life, to getting back to being on their feet.
For some of them, it may be something as simple as getting ID.
For some of them, it may be something as simple as getting their discharge papers, which is
their DD 214 so that they can apply for benefits.
You know, a lot of it is very simple, but if you don't know what to do, you don't know
what to do.
And for some of them, they have gone down to the DA and they haven't got the help that
they need, so they just give up.
You know, that's what it's been.
So we started out with, actually it was during COVID, and we had veterans from anywhere from
three months to a year.
After that, they were able to get a voucher and move on to permanent housing.
We've helped veterans get jobs.
We've helped veterans get vehicles, whatever it takes for them, again, to get back on their
feet.
So we started out with the one house.
We ended up with another house.
And I started working with older veterans because what I found out is a lot of them are becoming
widows now.
So that's a whole other transition and they don't know what to do on their own.
So I started just working with the older veterans and after that, I'm thinking, you know what?
After they transition, they need permanent housing.
So as of last year, we were able to acquire an apartment building.
So all of the veterans that we were able to transition from transitional homes are now
in permanent housing in our apartments.
And we're still monitoring them.
They still have case managers.
I stay very connected to all of the veterans.
They know that they can reach me at any time.
You know, just to kind of have that camaraderie.
I connect them to other service organizations where they can go to events, where they can,
you know, just be in groups.
Yeah.
As you say, that whole community is so important and it builds your self-esteem.
It builds your confidence, you're kind of ready for whatever the next step is based
on where you are in the life process.
It's not easy to do this.
This is kind of the hard work, you know, you start out with doing, well, I'll just do three
guys and all of a sudden it's much bigger than that.
Talk to us about the support community, the donors, the other volunteers who are involved
in the process for you.
Our homes, all of our properties are in Macomb County.
They're actually in Warren.
I live in the Macomb County and I've been a resident of Macomb County for over 20 years.
So just to double back a little bit, I'm also a notary and a paralegal.
So during this process of me thinking how I can help veterans, there was two gentlemen
that came in my office that wanted to get rid of their property.
They were in their 80s.
They wanted to give their children their inheritance before they passed away.
And during this time, one of them passed away and there was one house left and he decided
that he wanted to sell it.
Long story short, one of my friends said, you keep saying you want to help veterans,
why don't you buy this house?
That's how we ended up acquiring the property.
Since then, I've been working with just Macomb County Veterans Services, SSDF of Macomb County,
and everyone has really jumped on board to do what they can to help veterans.
We still are in need of more properties because this year is the year that I am focusing on
female veterans.
Over the last five years, we have successfully transitioned over 35 male veterans from chronic
homelessness to permanent housing.
So this is the year that we are focusing on female veterans and at this very moment,
I am aware of three female veterans that are living in their cars.
I'm working with the City of Warren to try to get some blighted properties, but all of
this is a process.
So I still keep in touch with the female veterans, direct them to where they can get food and
showers and things of that nature, but we are definitely in need of support.
And so I'll just move on to our, we're having a golf outing.
This is our fifth annual charity, Golf Scramble, which is put on every year by the local business
network of Sterling Heights, which I'm a member of.
This golf outing will be on September 11th this year.
I decided to do 9-11 because I want to highlight and focus first responders that are veterans.
You know, just to kind of get the word out on them, because a lot of people don't realize
that, you know, first, a lot of the first responders are veterans.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the golf outing will be held at Twin Lakes Golf Course in Oakland County.
The address is 455 Twin Lakes Drive Oakland Charter Township, Michigan.
And if someone is interested in donating or also sponsorship, I can give that information
as well.
Please do.
Give us, I saw it on your website.
So why don't you give us the website for folks to learn more about and how they could
help homes for heroic veterans?
Okay.
The email address is homesforheroicveteransatgmail.com.
Perfect.
And if folks want, is that the best way for them to maybe sign up for the golf outing and
help sponsorship?
Yes, they can go there and I can email them flyers.
If they can contact us there, I can send a flyer to them.
There's also another email for the golf outing which is hfhvgolfoutingatgmail.com.
And I do believe that that's up and running.
I was just in a meeting this morning.
I think they said that is up and running.
So we're in need of sponsorship.
You can sponsor a whole.
You can sponsor a foursome.
You may have a business where you just may say, hey, we want to donate a couple of cases
of water for the golf outing or because it is going to be a lunch and a dinner.
You may just want to donate, you know, just anything to help out with the golf outing.
Also, if someone wants to donate, you know, just to help with the veterans as well, they
can do that on the website.
And give the website address again.
The website is homesforheroicveteransatgmail.com.
Okay.
And it's important for folks to recognize that to do good work, it takes support from
all around.
Fortunately, the community here in Macomb County is very supportive of veterans as a
very veteran and military friendly business community.
So you're doing really good work with some help from some folks.
But I want to close up with a question that I ask a lot of folks.
And, you know, you did your 18 plus years.
You fought the VA for 35 plus years.
You've been a veteran advocate for decades.
Does nieces and nephews, friends, kids come to you and say, hey, I'm thinking of joining
up with the military, you know, the question or the statement you made your mom?
When you get that question nowadays, what's your answer?
My answer would be if this is something that you want to do, go to the reserves first.
Because if you go to the reserves, that's your six or eight weeks of basic training,
and then your school training, which could be anywhere from two to three months.
And then after that, if you like it, you really think this is something you want to do, then
go active duty.
I would not recommend someone that is unsure to go to active duty because you're signing
up for two, four, six years right there and it's nothing you can do about it if you don't
like it.
I personally believe, and I felt this way for years, I feel like every 11th grader from
that summer before they become a senior, I think they need to go to basic training just
for that summer.
You don't have to sign up with the military, but I think the discipline, the six weeks
of basic training will just give them a little bit of an awakening of what they need to just
persevere on, you know, for that senior year for becoming an adult.
I feel like that a lot of discipline has been lacking for years, but that basic training
will just kind of give them a little wake up, a little wake up call.
Wow, that's an interesting idea I've not heard before.
Let's put it out there into the world and let people talk about it, but you know, there's
been a lot of talk about the lack of involvement the US population have in securing their own
liberties and freedoms.
We let the military, which is 1% of the population now.
You go take care of that, I don't want to, but what an interesting idea.
Everybody goes through basic training to get a little life lessons and maybe it's something
they want to pursue.
But at least they know a whole lot of different stuff than they did otherwise.
So very interesting.
Well we want to...
You can teach this work in camaraderie and everything, and there's also programs in Michigan
that are for kids to go to.
It's a five and a half month program, you know.
Maybe we'll be talking again, we can talk about that, but it was life changing for people
that I know.
Well, we're glad that Pazella Colston Bonner of Homes for Heroic Veterans had a little
time to talk to us today on Veterans Radio.
Keep up the good work that you're doing for our veterans, both male and female.
Thank you so much for having me.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawson.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans, and you can reach us at
800-693-4800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
shows by visiting us at veteransradio.org.
That's veteransradio.org.
And until next time, you are dismissed.
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And until next time, you are dismissed.