Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are increasingly becoming homeless across Oahu and an organization devoted to treating homeless veterans already has seen more young vets this year than in all of 2010.

From January to December 2010, U.S. VETS treated 30 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom or Operation Enduring Freedom — representing more than one-tenth of all of the 282 veterans seen at U.S. VETS last year, most of whom served in the Vietnam era.

But from this January to Aug. 3, the group already took in 31 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and is expecting more.

A snapshot of Oahu’s homeless population taken on Jan. 25 showed 332 homeless veterans from various eras — of whom 185 were "sheltered" and an additional 147 were "unsheltered."

"That number’s underrepresented. It could be three times as much," said Noe Foster, chief executive officer of theStrategist, which is organizing the first "stand down" for homeless veterans on Oahu in nearly a decade.

Foster’s company has a contract with the U.S. Department of Labor to help female veterans with families. They sometimes return to Oahu to jobs — or employers — that no longer exist and to families ill equipped to deal with war trauma, Foster said.

"Wars since 9/11 are very different in the kind of veterans casualties" that can lead to homelessness, Foster said. "We’ve never seen PTSD or TBI (traumatic brain injury) or military sexual assaults of female soldiers. And National Guard soldiers have never been on the front line in such numbers before. Even for those with a support system living off of base, trying to revert to a civilian lifestyle is very difficult."

All military branches provide some form of transition assistance to help prepare veterans heading into the civilian world, Foster said.

But the combination of complex war traumas and high unemployment means that "when something goes wrong it isn’t long before they’re living in the car," Foster said.

"For veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan — especially a single mother with no extended family, PTSD or TBI or war-time sexual trauma — it’s not unusual that they can be homeless as soon as three months after getting out of the military," Foster said.

Army and Marine officials in Hawaii said their mandatory transition assistance programs are designed to help their service members succeed in civilian life. They include training on a wide range of topics — including resume writing, job hunting, financial counseling and Veterans Affairs benefits — but are not aimed specifically at preventing homelessness.

The Sept. 7 homeless veteran stand down will offer health screenings and employment and housing assistance at McCoy Pavilion for an expected 100 veterans. Foster won’t be surprised if 30 to 50 percent of the veterans will have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Compared with older, homeless veterans — especially those from the Vietnam era —substance abuse, PTSD and other related problems are showing up earlier in younger veterans, said Darryl Vincent, who runs the Hawaii U.S. VETS program and is vice president of the organization’s national program.

"They’re coming home after three tours with PTSD and the social climate has made it easier for them to be looked at sooner, compared to the Vietnam guys who got a much different welcome when they got home," Vincent said.

Even younger, local veterans with strong family connections in the islands can become homeless quickly when "they come home and they run into family issues," Vincent said. "They’re not the same person they were when they left."

ANTHONY "JAY" HUBBARD, 24, of Baltimore, served five years in the Marines and one tour in Fallujah, Iraq, as a military police officer. He left Marine Corps Base Hawaii as a corporal in May 2010 with $25,000 in savings.

Less than a year later, Hubbard had a cocaine and marijuana problem and found himself broke and homeless in Waikiki.

Hubbard now lives in a four-bunk room built for enlisted Navy sailors with three other homeless veterans at U.S. VETS, where he is nearing the end of a nine-week substance abuse program. He is also trying to get into a PTSD program but "the classes are always booked," he said.

Hubbard rarely sleeps and his mind remains filled with images of burning vehicles and rotting Iraqi corpses.

As a military police officer in Fallujah with daily contact with Iraqi civilians, Hubbard was trained to be on alert. Three years later in Kalaeloa, Hubbard still found himself bothered by a car battery that was abandoned near U.S. VETS.

"I know I’m back here in the rear on American soil, but I’m still thinking that everything can harm you," Hubbard said. "I’m still in a combat mindset, thinking that an old car battery can blow us up. If you want to call that PTSD, it is. If it’s not, it’s not. But I still replay scenes and events of the stuff that I’ve seen."

Hubbard believes his problems began when he returned to Marine Corps Base Hawaii after his first tour and began smoking marijuana for the first time with other Marines troubled by what they had seen in Iraq.

"A couple of our friends didn’t come back," Hubbard said. "To take the edge off, we’d smoke weed, watch cartoons and eat."

He began working as a disc jockey and promoter in Waikiki nightclubs, where he began earning thousands of dollars that he often spent on cocaine, marijuana and occasionally Ecstasy.

Hubbard rarely slept and was getting ready to go back to Iraq when he fell during a Marine training hike on the Big Island in 2009. At 5-foot, 5-inches and 150 pounds, exhaustion combined with the weight of a 50-pound pack knocked Hubbard to the ground and left him with a cracked skull, concussion, broken bone in his left wrist and a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.

He signed up for one more year with the Marines but was assigned to a desk job that occasionally allowed him to work on Humvees.

Asked if he enjoyed his Marine career, Hubbard said, "In the action, yes. Being back in garrison doing office work? No. I didn’t like the boredom."

Once he was out of the Marines — with a chronic drug problem and no permanent home — Hubbard still thought he was doing all right. Then in May a friend drove him to U.S. VETS where Hubbard pays nothing for room, board and treatment

"The military believes in no soldier left behind," Hubbard said. "It’s amazing. There’s no other word for it but amazing."

MARKO JOHNSON, 48, helped direct aircraft traffic aboard the USS Okinawa as a Navy aviation boatswain’s mate handler in the mid-1980s and now searches for homeless veterans on Oahu as one of two outreach case managers at U.S. VETS.

He often gets called to jails, homeless shelters and hospitals to help veterans. But he can just as likely be found searching freeway underpasses and peering into bushes and caves looking for veterans whose honorable or general discharges make them eligible for VA benefits.

As he scours the streets of Oahu in his 2005 Ford Freestyle SUV, Johnson typically meets the same veterans over and over for weeks and months before they accept help.

And now Johnson is finding more Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and estimates there might be 50 to 60 of them homeless on Oahu.

"There’s definitely an increasing number of younger veterans on the street," Johnson said. "A lot of them suffer from PTSD and the way they tend to deal with it is self medication, heavy drinking and illegal substances and other illicit behavior."

As he meets more and more homeless veterans, Johnson sometimes finds himself having to separate his own emotions from the work he needs to do.

"I do have to remove myself from my feelings," Johnson said. "No veteran who has served honorably defending their country should be left homeless on the very streets that they defended."