A Safe Haven For War Vets
As director of the Honolulu Vet Center, Steve Molnar and his staff offer free counseling for veterans returning home from war and provide a safe haven for those suffering from post-traumatic stress
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The original Vet Center team in 1980 (from left) Ric
Seesz, Gene Awakuni, Luci Kitaguchi and Steve
Molnar
Doonesbury comic artist Garry Trudeau had his prosthetic-legged, ornery, alcohol-troubled, Vietnam-and-Iraq-veteran “B.D.” go to a war veteran’s counselor.
The two men got along, and B.D. asked the counselor what he owed him for the help.
The counselor, also a lost-a-leg man, answered: “Believe it or not, your government provides you with the services of a burned-out, gimp, recovering, bullet-headed, high school dropout absolutely free.”
Trudeau’s political point that we send people to expensive wars to lose arms and legs and then counsel them for free probably isn’t wildly popular in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld office quarters. But it’s welcome material within the 206 Vet Centers - five of them in Hawaii and a Honolulu center so well-used that 5,600 clients walked through its door last year.
The vet counselors figure if B.D. finally concluded he needed professional help, maybe some troubled vets in real life will do the same. Some just need to talk to someone, some are full-on in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.
Honolulu Vet Center director Steve Molnar in a
counseling session with a client
They do not meet here with a “burned-out, gimp, recovering, bullet-headed, high school dropout,” but they will likely meet with the man who’s seen and heard it all - Honolulu Vet Center director and counselor Steve Molnar of Kailua, formerly of Mine 37, Penn., and the first one in the Molnar family to go to college.
Molnar is a Vietnam vet who used the GI Bill to go to Leeward Community College and UH-Manoa for his master’s in sociology and social work. He’s a member of the Honolulu Vet Center’s first team in 1980 that included Ric Seesz, Gene Awakuni and Luci Kitagawa.
He’s still at it, 25 years later, aided by licensed clinician Ann Fisher, clinical psychologist Barbara Thacker, out-reach specialist Matthew Handel, manager Bill Hanley and state Department of Labor adviser Clyde Kawakami.
A couple of things Molnar is very passionate about:
The vets who come in are “clients” rather than “patients.” And the center is a safe haven. Nobody, not even the Veterans Administration, gets to see a client’s records. So users never generate one of those “he’s a little bit crazy” files that can haunt them later.
Congress created the centers to help anyone who served in a war theater - some with post-traumatic stress disorder, some with sleep, alcohol or family problems, some looking for work, some just wanting a good listener.
“War changes the way we view life,” Molnar says. “The world becomes different. When I went to the UH I had trouble hanging out with people who weren’t vets. And we vets had a lot of issues with the U.S. government.”
Vet centers were started for Vietnam.
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