New Calling: While battling the lingering toll of war, homeless Iraq veteran finds peace in auto class.

The Orange County Register

06.09.09

By Barbara Giasone

FULLERTON The thermometer inches toward 100 degrees as Carlos Cruz crawls on his belly beneath a Ford Focus.
   Competing with the clatter of his auto repair class, Cruz shouts to his buddy to help align the jacks.
   It’s familiar ground for the former Marine. In Iraq, he taught recruits to squeeze under Hummers and 5-ton tanks that rolled along enemy-lined roads.
   But last month’s repair lesson was in Fullerton, not the Mideast, in a steamy auto bay at Fullerton College – where Cruz, 27, figures he may finally have found his path to success.
   It has been a long search.
   “For five years after I was discharged, I couldn’t keep a job,” says Cruz, who wrestles with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. “I was suicidal, thinking about ending it all.”
   Four years ago, with his savings depleted and many personal relationships soured, Cruz made the choice to “be on the streets.”
   He eventually set up housekeeping in a 1992 Mazda.
   That meant he would live homeless, with his clothes strewn in the back seat.
   He occasionally visits his childhood foster family, or his biological mother, for a home-cooked meal.
   He showers at a friend’s house or washes up in a restaurant restroom.
   But in the process, the man who concedes he’s afraid to be alone, yet despises crowds, has found a community – and stature – among other car-bound neighbors living in an industrial-area parking lot.
   Before hitting the sack in their front seats, the men and women commiserate with Cruz about unemployment, struggles with temp jobs or where to get help.
   Cruz doesn’t pretend to be a savior. But he has shown other homeless people where to find area churches that serve hot meals.
   “I try to get to those churches myself and counsel those in need from my experiences,” Cruz says.
   Last summer, Cruz’s mother suggested he get a college education.
   Cruz says it sparked something in him.
   “It was as if my brain reset,” he says.
   Off Cruz marched to meet with the school’s veterans certification official, Ray Bustos, who talked up the benefits of the Montgomery GI Bill, plus the federal Pell Grant Program and other funding sources that, even while homeless, Cruz could use to pay for school.
   Bustos, a former Marine, said many veterans are unaware of the $660 to $1,200 monthly payments available to them.
   Cruz qualified for a $5,350 Pell Grant for the 2009-10 school year and become one of an estimated 200 veterans attending Fullerton College.
   “If we can keep Carlos in school, that’s a plus, and good things will happen,” Bustos says.
   School – and life in general – has, at times, proven difficult for Cruz.
   By 12, he says he was “a rebellious ward of the court,” a child already distanced from his biological family. He was placed in foster care. Cruz initially considered his foster parents extremely strict, though he’s come to view them differently as he’s grown older.
   “If they wouldn’t have cared,” he says, “I would have been in gangs.”
   He started to plow his way through high school in Huntington Beach. Still, when relatives called to say he could live with them as a way to rejoin the family circle, Cruz shuffled off to Michigan.
   It didn’t take.
   “I couldn’t get along with that family,” Cruz says.
   “So I called a recruiter and enlisted in the Marines. I was 17, and surrendered my authority over myself. I decided to see where the military would take me.”
   He filled assignments in Missouri and Okinawa, Japan. But it’s his two tours in Iraq that have played heavily in Cruz’s assessment of America’s involvement in the Middle East.
   “Wait until this dumb war is over,” he says. “We’re there for a reason, but for the wrong reasons.
   “I love the military,” he adds.
   “But if we all took the time to pay attention to what’s going on in the government, it wouldn’t be like this. Look at these wars; nobody wants to volunteer. Who wants to sign away their life?”
   Cruz’s belief system doesn’t play out in class. But his military training often astounds his instructor, David Lopez, himself a Vietnam veteran.
   Lopez says that because Cruz has worked as a mechanic, he’s “more conscious” of what he’s doing in class. Lopez adds that Cruz’s military training has turned him from a student who might otherwise be ignored into a man seen by his peers as a leader.
   “Cruz shows other students … the need to ask questions. And that all comes from his military training.”
   The familiar “Good job, Cruz” or “Thank you, sir” bantered about in class every day is a familiar throwback to their shared Marine lingo.
   Students aren’t aware, however, of another holdover from Cruz’s days on the battlefields.
   Clang! The sound of a metal tool crashing against pavement sends chills through Cruz’s body.
   “It’s that old flashback to the times I was getting shot at,” Cruz says in describing the feeling. “It’s as if war memories are running through a picture frame. I can see the faces of my buddies. But, hard as I try, I can’t recall their names.”
   Minutes later, Cruz snaps back to reality. He checks lug nuts, removes a wheel lock key.
   Last week, Cruz overslept and missed class. He was so disappointed in his behavior that he stood up in front of class and apologized.
   Instructor Lopez admired Cruz’s guts to admit the mistake.
   “Carlos interacts with these kids, many who are younger than he is. The other day they invited him to go to pizza and he was low on funds. I lent him the money, and he paid me back immediately.
   “That means he’s getting back into the world; he’s moving forward,” Lopez adds. “I see him teaching auto shop or excelling as a top technician.”
   Cruz has other plans.
   He wants to work for a dealership or own his own auto shop – and go home at night to his own condo.
   CONTACT THE WRITER:
   7 1 4-704-3762 or
   bgiasone@ocregister.com