This is the seventh in a series of articles on Christ's Church outreach initiatives. This issue focuses on the needs of patients at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Montrose, N.Y.

Fellowship with Veterans

An Opportunity to Talk --- and Sing!

by Peter Young

The 56-year-old Vietnam veteran and diabetic munches a sugar-free cookie and talks about his life at the VA Hospital in Montrose, N.Y., where he's been under treatment for the past six months for a condition brought on, he says, by exposure to Agent Orange. "It's a pretty good place here, and we had some nice barbecues over the summer," he recalls. " I visit my brother a lot. He lives nearby and he's a great cook. Nothing like home cooking!" A woman with kind eyes, who was a nurse in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, nods in agreement, as does an older man in a wheel chair with a severe back problem, from an injury sustained in the Korean War.

The three are among some 200 veterans undergoing treatment at the hospital, an enormous complex of three-story brick buildings once occupied by 2,000 veterans of twentieth century wars. Today, more than half of the buildings are empty, and rumors have it that developers would like to tear them down to make room for fancier real estate.

On this particular day, a team of volunteers from Christ's Church have come to visit the veterans, bringing with them donations of books, videos, and clothes, and an enormous cake bearing the United States flag. The visit lasts only an hour, but it is sixty minutes filled with song: American the Beautiful, God Bless America, and The Star Spangled Banner, among others. One patient does a remarkable rendition of The Old Rugged Cross. The applause is deafening.

The veterans have a variety of needs and occasional fellowship with Christ's Church volunteers is one of them. Three or four times a year parishioners Carolyn Praete and Bill and Kathy Cusano organize expeditions to Montrose, taking with them trunkloads of clothing, books, games, videos, toiletries, baseball hats, old luggage, and even computers. "They have a lot of needs, and many go unmet," says Carolyn.