- Just, just give me a minute.
I'll be okay in a minute.
- My name is Ray, and I'm a US Navy Veteran.
Does this tie make me look fat?
- I've been serving for 21 years.
I'm a Chief War Officer in the United States Navy.
- [Interviewer] Perfect, and now do it lookin' at me.
- Oh, I'm sorry.
- [Interviewer] That's okay, no, no.
- I served in Korea, December of '51
until January of '53.
Thank the good Lord that I am,
I got back safe and sound,
and all in one piece.
- Very fortunate when I am home to be at home.
Just relish that moment.
- Whether you step off the plane, step off the ship,
that first step always feels really good.
- Right when you pull in there,
you come into the channel,
and then there's a big American flag.
So for me, that's comin' home.
- There's one memory in particular
of coming into Pearl Harbor at midnight,
and most of the families had left.
Not mine.
- Even walking into a house.
Sometimes it's months
before you just go into a personal home.
- And there's my five-year-old son screaming
at the top of his lungs for his Dad.
And then that go to cross Pearl Harbor, that was great.
That was a long 10 months,
and it was a wonderful opportunity
to be with my family.
- Well, the most difficult part about coming home
was getting off the ship in the middle of the night
in San Francisco,
and they just said go home.
I mean, what do you mean go home?
Said well, yeah.
I said, well, how am I supposed to get home
from here to Ventura?
And this is about, Oh God,
maybe one or two o'clock in the morning.
Yeah, in the middle of the night,
we walked approximately, I would say maybe five miles
to get to Highway 80.
And so then I hitchhiked from there,
and they gave us our discharge, that was it.
They never told you, you know, get checked
or anything else like that, so.
I've had the ringin' in my ears
since 1952,
because I was the gunner
of a water-cooled 30 caliber machine gun.
And back then they weren't really quiet,
and then of course, also.
I got back from Korea in January of 1953.
It would have been around 1995, '96
that I found out that I had PTSD.
- In 2009, our Veterans were coming home by the thousands,
and they're standing around
asking where do I turn, who do I ask, where can I go,
where's my help.
And it was across the board.
Mental health support.
Physical health support.
- We need to hire more doctors and, you know,
psychiatrists especially, to help talk it out.
They can't hire enough people to do the work
that needs to be done.
- The core values of the Navy have, I think,
have stayed the same.
What has changed is we are an image of society,
and society has changed in many ways,
and so has the military, as far as that goes.
Some kind of struggle with that.
- Some Veterans find themselves
on the extreme ends of our society.
Homeless, jobless.
A number of maybe medical concerns.
- I have a lot of friends and they're retiring now,
and some of them have retired.
And it's just getting back into
the civilian sector of employment.
There's a lot of concern, a lot of worries.
Some are fearful.
- Imagine doing a Google search,
and you put in Veteran and legal aid,
and you get 16,000 hits.
Which one do you choose?
Where do you navigate when it's a tsunami of goodness
coming at you?
Or imagine that you Google for your zip code
and it comes up with zero,
and now you're in a desert of resources.
So we could do a lot better.
- Ray.
- this is my.
- My name is Raymond, and this is my son, Ray,
and my grandson, Casey.
When Ray would come home,
it's indescribable for somebody to describe the feeling
and the joy at knowing they're home.
- Coming home without a family.
It's difficult to imagine.
Find some family, I wouldn't know,
I don't know how to answer that any other way.
Where do they find their family?
They go down to the American Legion.
They go to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
They have family.
If they served, they have family.
And their family is the shipmates and their comrades,
the fellow marines, the fellow soldiers
that they served, that's their family.
- Be thankful for the support you do have,
and if you do find yourself in a support deficit,
to reach out and ask for help, or voice that,
don't suffer in silence.
- We truly tell each other all the time we love each other.
That's basically the feeling that we have.
Just too bad I can't spank you anymore.
Not that I would anyway.
- Cameras, Dad.
Camera.