http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/#43218
Military families go hungry at Camp Pendleton
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein on October 19, 2006 at 6:43 AM.

Support our troops, feed their kids:

As the Iraq war marches toward its fourth anniversary, food lines operated by churches and other nonprofit groups are an increasingly valuable presence on military bases countywide. Leaders of the charitable groups say they're scrambling to fill a need not seen since World War II.

Too often, the supplies run out before the lines do, said Regina Hunter, who coordinates food distribution at one Camp Pendleton site.

“Here they are defending the country. . . . It is heartbreaking to see,” said Hunter, manager of the on-base Abby Reinke Community Center. “If we could find more sources of food, we would open the program up to more people. We believe anyone who stands in a line for food needs it and deserves it.”

The base's list of recipients swells by 100 to 150 people a month as the food programs streamline their eligibility process, word spreads among residents and ever-proud Marines adjust to the idea of accepting donated goods.


Ways to help
People interested in donating food, furniture or money to help military families in San Diego County can call:

Military Outreach Ministry at Camp Pendleton: (760) 908-7043
Military Outreach Ministries at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station: (619) 843-8964

[San Diego Union Tribune, tipster Flint.]

Okay.. is this for real? If so I'm absolutely floored that no provisions are set up even on the bases or the near surrounding areas for taking care of one of the families most basic needs while the main income person is called to duty.

Marine? Vet? someone..

Well, this one sort of floors me.

We never had a lot of money to spare but we always had food on the table.

The only time we ever had a problem like that was a transfer where my paperwork got lost for three months. That happens I guess about once in a million times. We got down to our last reserves but Uncle Sam caught us up in the nick of time.

Just out of interest I looked up some info on Lindsay Beyerstein the writer of this article. I'm real surprised she'd care enough about the Marines to take off from her favorite topic, which is Bush bashing.

If they need something they should try this link.

Well I went to the source and called them. This program is specifically aimed at children ages 5 and under who's parent or parent's are in the active Military. It appears that for the first time ever, they can't keep up with demands of food, furniture or clothing for the children of these families. You have to show that you need the help, so not just anyone can walk in and get the supplies. She said the living expenses have risen so high and many of the families have 2-3 children age 5 and under that their military pay isn't enough to adequately feed the children.. she also said this was the highest ever where both parents were out of country leaving the children with guardians, grandparents or what not.

Bread items are given out 2 times a week. Everything given out is on a schedule.. be it food, clothing, canned goods etc.

It's an organization that's been around a long time.

more to the story not just camp pendleton also Miramar Marine Corps Air Station

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/militar...-7m13bread.html

At least 2,000 financially strapped people in North County qualify for food and other items given out at the center and a Camp Pendleton warehouse run by the Military Outreach Ministry.

Ways to help
People interested in donating food, furniture or money to help military families in San Diego County can call:

Military Outreach Ministry at Camp Pendleton: (760) 908-7043

Military Outreach Ministries at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station: (619) 843-8964


To the south, about 1,500 individuals pick up free food, diapers or furniture at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station and several military-oriented distribution sites supported by churches and the San Diego Food Bank.

The numbers don't include military households that frequent other charities countywide to get enough to eat.

“I cry tears of joy every week,” said Patty Dutra of the Military Outreach Ministry. “You are looking at them and saying 'thank you' and they say, 'No, thank you.' ”

Some of the women in last week's food line at Camp Pendleton were newbies like Jennifer Stocker, 25. A friend told Stocker, the mother of 7-week-old Shylah and wife of Cpl. James Stocker, about the service. She arrived an hour early to get first picks.

“It looks good,” Jennifer Stocker said as she glanced at the tables stacked with loaves of French bread and doughnuts covered with red, white and blue sprinkles.

“It looks helpful,” Stocker added as Shylah gummed her mother's wrist. “I'm definitely going to start doing more of this.”

Also present were food-line veterans trying to make ends meet. Michelle Rankins counts herself as a reluctant regular.

“I do this for the kids,” said Rankins, whose husband is a corporal deployed in Iraq. “They need the protein from the bread. For me and my family – for a lot of the families at Camp Pendleton – this (program) is a necessity. I come every week.”

Barbara Chavez deals with many similarly challenged families in San Diego County. She is director of Military Outreach Ministries, which supplies bread and other staples to troops and their loved ones at the Miramar base, a Navy housing community in Lakeside and other locations.

“The bases are in the more expensive parts of the county and things like gas, food, insurance and rent are just higher here,” Chavez said. “I got a call last night from a lady in need. She ran out of baby formula and diapers. She's 22 with two kids under 3 and her husband is in Iraq. She was distraught and cried for 10 minutes. This happens more often than not.”

On the Miramar base last week, Melissa Dixon came to receive diapers, paper plates and canned goods. Her husband, John, is a lance corporal stationed there.

“Believe it or not, there are a lot of military families struggling,” said Dixon, 22, as fighter jets flew overhead.

At the Navy housing complex in Lakeside, Nicole Purselley said she wouldn't know what to do without the donated food.

“One week we couldn't come to get food because we didn't have gas money,” said Purselley, a mother of three whose husband is a hull technician aboard the Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship based in San Diego.

Purselley's disabled mother, Kathy Frisbie, lives with the family. Frisbie said the gracious spirit in which the food is given makes taking it easier on their pride.

“They don't look down on us because we are here,” Frisbie said.

During World War II, the National Presbyterian Church started an outreach program for military families coast to coast. In 1968, the Presbytery of San Diego took responsibility for the local chapter.

The presbytery spun off its military food program this year, with oversight now divided between the Military Outreach Ministry in North County and Military Outreach Ministries in the rest of the region.

“(Service members) struggle because of our cost of living,” said Faye Bell, executive director for the Military Outreach Ministry. “The lower-ranking enlisted guys do all the hard work and still have the stress of not being able to take care of their families the way they wish they could.”

I don't know what to say.

My wife and I are frugal I guess. I know we drove a 15 year old chevrolet a long time because we felt we just couldn't afford any better. Matter of fact, I drove a motorcycle for almost five years because we could not afford a second car and I wanted the wife to have our car available for her use. During the gas shortages back in the 1970s we'd use the car's gas tank to fuel the motorcycle and only used the car when we had to. We managed to raise and put two daughters through college with what the military provided us.

Military pay won't make you wealthy, that's for sure. But if you budget you can get by. I have seen many a Marine get himself in trouble over the loan sharks and payday loan places right outside the gate to every military reservation I've ever been at though. And I've seen many a Marine who just had to have that brand new tricked out car or pickup truck too. I can't but help there's more to this story than what we getting told. I know one of the fastest ways to get your security clearance yanked is to have a debt collector call your C.O.

It makes my heart bleed to see these young families getting themselves buried up in debt. They become not much better than a slave to the finance company.

I wish we could pay the youngsters enough so they wouldn't have to live like my wife and I lived way back then. They ought to get enough pay so they can buy some of the nicer things in life, they deserve it.

I suggest you read this, surely surprising that the resident expert on the military doesn't know about all this.

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...88&#entry633388


lenal

I'd really like to point out something. No matter how frugal someone is - when you hit a state like California you're dollar shrinks to almost nothing.

I CAN understand why military families are having a much harder time in extremely high cost states vs other stats like TX, LA etc.

And we can't compare the dollar now to the dollar of 30 years ago, though in some states it's a lot closer than others.

I bought my first new car in 67 it was a brand new 68 camero but I was single stayed that way until I was out of the navy. I can remember no gas money if the car payment and insurance came the same month

I read that story Lenal. Part of it was true but part of it was crappola.

I knew for a long time the surest and quickest way to lose your security clearance was to get too deep in debt. The part about keeping you from going overseas is a crock though. I've known a bunch of fellas who just got sick and tired of the debt collectors chasing em who put in for duty in some armpit duty station out of those leaches reach.

The only time I saw anyone selling government property didn't involve being in debt at all, the fellow was just greedy and selling a few M-16s he though was a good way to make some big bucks.

That's true if you can't get base housing for your family. Living off base has it's advantages and it's shortfalls. The nice part is not getting jumped by the MPs if you don't mow the grass every week or if your kid messes something up. The bad part is off base housing costs a whole bunch more.

My first "new" car was a 68 Camaro too Vet, new for me anyways. I bought it 2 years old in 1970 and mad a $69 payment every month to the bank. Considering I only made $110 a month I didn't have much to spare.

That's also how I got broke from ever wanting to gamble too. Being a dirt poor PFC the Sergents in the comm center invited me to their Friday night poker game. "Aw, come on, we got a $20 limit, the most you can lose is $20." It took them about 15 minutes to separate me from my $20. I was a smoker then and it got to where when my buddys saw me coming they'd hide because they knew I was going to try to bum a cigarette.

Methinks the high cost of housin' in some areas is why many years ago the Congress came up with the "Variable Housing Allowance". Although 'tis 'bout a year behind, it pretty much makes up the difference between what active military folks get in their housin' allowance and average local housin' costs in high cost areas like California. Remember too, housin' allowances are non taxable income that's in addition to your other pay and allowances (pay is taxed, allowances aren't).

Although base exchanges don't really offer cheaper prices than big box stores in the local economy, the commissary's still cheaper than local supermarkets for most stuff.

IMHO, as the armed forces have gotten more receptive to younger, more junior military folks havin' families we're seein' what's been seen in civilian life for a long time. People are gettin' married and startin' families long before they're financially ready to do so, eh?

Far as base housin' goes, 'tis somethin' we never availed ourselves of durin' my years in the Navy. Even before VHA came in we lived in high cost areas like San Diego, Alameda and Garden Grove in California, Denver and Boston and always found a way to make ends meet. Paid cash for what we wanted, stayed away from credit cards and saved when we could to tide ourselves over in emergencies.

IMHO you gotta learn to live within your means and not take on more'n you can afford. Methinks these youngsters're like some of them workin' for me I used to try to help get back on their feet when I was still on active duty, but in my day we tried to recognize kids that were gonna have problems before they got into dire straights, eh?

I would imagine there is much truth in most of what has been posted. When Marine, Fly, and others including myself were associated so many years ago with the military the cost of living in California was NOT what it is today relative to income. A couple of years ago my husband and I had a vacation on the CA coast and while it was just as beautiful as we remembered, the cost of living was completely beyond our means.

We visited my husband's home in Palo Alto where he was born a long time ago, for instance. It was an ordinary middle class home back then. It is valued at $4M today. We had a long visit with the present owner. The house next door that hadn't been improved since the early 50's is on the market for $1M+.

Just for the fun of it we picked up real estate brochures along the way to see what our present income would buy in any given place. We never found a place anywhere on our trip that we could afford in CA today. By contrast we live well in SC. So what I think we're talking about is a bizarre state of affairs in a particular part of the country.

When these young military boys and girls/ men and women marry young and try to make a go of it, it used to be very hard "back in the day", but it would be impossible now. I expect that the assignments to Iraq carry extra pay which makes them think they can afford it, but it doesn't work out long term. They may even be marrying in other parts of the country, moving their families to the CA area to be near one another, and discovering too late that they can't possibly afford it.

I know there are groups other than the one mentioned earlier, like the Navy Relief Society for instance, that provides loans and grants according to need and ability to repay. That organization has been around a very long time. It was especially helpful for the young service person who had to go home on emergency leave due to family illness or death. Those were the grants. Having been one of those young wives who staffed the offices in my younger years I know they do a lot of good. Besides money they also have other forms of assistance now. Even in my day we'd sit down with the young Marine needing help to get by and work out a budget so he could see where his money was going and what he could do to make it work. This probably still helps in other parts of the country, but I expect it is impossible to make it work in CA today. That would be why these organizations can't keep up with the needs.

Unless they send the wife and children back home to live with mom and dad, I doubt it will work at all. Yes, I know they aren't going to do that, but I really don't see how they can even live on a budget in that state today. There ought to be some sort of warning posted to let them know not to transfer there and certainly not to bring the family if they are posted there.

It sounds like a tragic situation to me and would take a huge influx of money that could never really solve the problems. Moving the bases to less expensive areas of the country is the only solution that makes any sense to me. Those of us who are familiar with those southern California bases know full well they were long ago destined not to be able to sustain their personnel/families against the housing markets of LA or San Diego. They would be having this problem without Iraq or Afghanistan. There would be fewer people involved, but the same problem would exist.

My wife and I were one of those younger familys back in 1972 when we married.

The last move we made before we came here we shed some of the things we'd accumulated over the years. I remember throwing out a hi-fi we had bought at the PX probably about two months after we had got married.

It had a record player, a built in 8 track player and an AM/FM radio, I think we paid about $70 for it. Looking back I wished I'd kept it, it was the first "major" purchase my wife and I made together.

Man oh man, thinking back on those years makes me wonder how we survived on so little money.

Methinks what we're talkin' 'bout in this thread may well be connected to what Snuffy posted here, eh?

Yep, saw that article; yep it's a quick way to lose your security clearance. Not so sure about it barring someone from duty overseas though, I knew a lot of young fellows who put in for duty as far away as they could get from those debt collecting leaches.