Transitioning out of the military is no small feat. Someone who knows this struggle all too well is Manuel Gomez. Gomez is a Navy veteran who served 6 years on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Peleliu. During his second tour he contracted tuberculosis and began suffering from PTSD. For treatment he was prescribed Adderall, which changed his life’s trajectory. He was discharged and he enrolled in nursing school, but by then he was struggling with addiction and was committing crimes to support his habit, which eventually landed him in prison. Three years into a five-year sentence, he was made aware that there were laws in place that should have sent him to treatment, not prison. Since then, it has become Gomez’s life’s work to serve his veteran community as an advocate, policy maker, and educator, making sure that veterans, both incarcerated and free, know what services they are entitled to.
What or who inspired you to join the military?
I come from a very tumultuous background. My mom was schizophrenic. My dad was a raging alcoholic, and I joined the military because the Navy was the farthest thing from Tucson. I left at 18 and I never looked back.
What influenced you to do the work that you do now?
I got tuberculosis in 2008 in the Navy and my career just wasn’t the same after that. [I had] a lot of psychological issues and identity issues. After getting sick in the military, I never really felt like I was a part of the Navy again, so I had some behavioral issues. I got two separate discharges; I have an honorable discharge and I have a general discharge. I literally hated the Navy. The only benefit that I used was the GI Bill, but I really didn’t give a crap about the military.
I was in the middle of a meth addiction while I was in nursing school. I ended up getting incarcerated for residential burglary for five years. I never thought about the Navy. I didn’t even call myself a veteran.
About three years into my prison sentence a social worker said, “Hey, you know you were sick in the military, you can get compensation for that.” I was like “what do you mean compensation?” That was when I discovered that the VA could actually provide me with disability compensation for having tuberculosis and PTSD. She also told me there’s some laws here in California that could have diverted me from prison. So imagine being in prison for three years and then somebody saying, “hey there’s this law that they should have offered you at your sentence and it would have sent you to treatment.” That really fucking pissed me off. I never knew what the VA was about until after prison and through the work that I do now. I realized someone really needed to tell people about this.
So I started learning about veterans benefits and [during my] masters [program], I got a job as a social media intern for the county department of Veterans Affairs, and because of that internship I got a job as a peer specialist in a program here in L.A. called The Veterans Peer Access
Network. After that I fell in love with the community. They didn’t judge me for my incarceration. [It was] an asset because as a peer you can tell your story to other veterans. I used my story as an incarcerated veteran to empower other veterans to seek mental health services and judicial relief.
What do you hope your work is doing?
I went to prison on my daughter’s birthday. I became a drug addict because the psychologist on the ship gave me Adderall and I come from a long history of [addiction]. I became addicted to Adderall. I thought I was really by myself. Then I was doing crimes to support my habit and support my family. I got out of the Navy and one day I had a job and the next day I didn’t. There really [weren’t] any supportive services. So, my biggest hope is that I am proof that no matter what you go through in life, no matter how hard you fall, no matter how bad the military messed you up, by sharing my story and sharing awareness about benefits can divert people from committing suicide or ending up incarcerated.
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