For more than two decades Horace Montgomery, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran and two-time Purple Heart recipient, used his VA benefits and modest earnings from his reggae singing career to cover the rent on a San Jose bungalow.
Then, suddenly, he received an eviction notice in July as well as notification from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. that his electricity was being cut off. Montgomery was baffled: For years he had entrusted his caregivers to handle his finances as his war-related injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder had limited his ability to read and write.
He didn’t know what was happening to him.
“I thought that was it for me — I didn’t know who to go to for help,” he said. “Next thing they know, they cut my lights out. The hot water went off.”
Montgomery said his caregiver, who is also the mother of his 4-year-old son, Matthias, had developed a drug addiction. Rather than use his military benefit checks to pay the landlord and utilities, as she had done in the past, she had been pocketing the money and using it to feed her drug habit. Since then she has disappeared onto the streets and Montgomery is raising the boy on his own, he said, although she occasionally stops in.
Montgomery didn’t want to ask for help. He was proud of his military service and his musical career. He didn’t want to bother his first cousin, R&B artist Macy Gray, or other musician friends “who were all busy doing their own thing.” He worried he and Matthias would end up on the streets.
Facing likely homelessness, Montgomery reached out to the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, where he has been receiving medical services for 25 years, and was put in touch with program manager Lisa Moreno, who sprang into action. She told him about the Chronicle Season of Sharing Fund, which works year-round to prevent homelessness and hunger in the nine-county Bay Area. All donations go directly to help people in need.
“He had a three-day notice and was going to get evicted if he could not get that back rent paid,” Moreno said. “He was very emotional. He has a little son who lives with him — a beautiful little boy.”
Moreno helped Montgomery gather documentation and write a statement about what he was going through. A Season of Sharing application to cover his back rent was approved.
“I called his landlord and said the check will be mailed within 10 days, and he was able to get his rent caught up on,” she said.
The Season of Sharing lifeline has allowed Montgomery to focus on the things he loves: his young son, his church, his music and the veterans community he has been a part of for a half-century.
Born in 1955 in a small town in Alabama — where he made money picking cotton alongside his grandmother — he moved west to Fresno with his family when he was 17.
“The next thing you know my mother came and said, ‘Horace, you need to go in the Army like your father.’ My father fought in Korea. My grandfather fought in Germany. She took me down to the recruiting station. So I went to Vietnam.”
“He had a three-day notice and was going to get evicted if he could not get that back rent paid,” Moreno said. “He was very emotional. He has a little son who lives with him — a beautiful little boy.”
He wasn’t there long before he was hit in the leg by shrapnel from a mortar round that had ricocheted off a tree. He woke up in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital — known as MASH — and recovered there. When he started feeling better, he received a visit from his commanding officer.
“The officer came over and said, ‘How are you doing?’ I said, ‘Duty first, sir.’ He said, ‘But how are you feeling?’ I said, ‘I’m getting better.’ I kept saying, ‘How’s my unit? I want to get back to my unit.’ I got sent back, and the next week I got hit by mortar again. In the other leg.”
That was spring 1975, when North Vietnamese forces had captured Saigon and U.S. soldiers were being pulled out. Montgomery ended up back in Fresno, where, unable to do physical work because of his war injuries, he embarked on a career as a reggae singer. He moved to San Jose 24 years ago.
Currently, Montgomery sings for a San Jose group called No Voodoo Here. Though he struggles with reading and writing, lyrics flow from his imagination. His songs, he said, are focused on “spirituality, oneness and unification.”
“One love, one peace, one goal, one destiny, one aim,” he said. “We come from the same tribe. I don’t care who you is, or what you look like. That don’t matter at all. We are all God’s children. I’m your brother, you’re my brother.”
Montgomery said he is writing a song with the theme, “If you close your eyes and think of love, what will we be tomorrow.”
“What would this world be like if we wake up with love for our brothers no matter what breed, no matter what color,” he said.
Moreno said getting to know “a great veteran” like Montgomery — and listening to his singing — has been “inspiring.”
“It’s not every day you are able to help a two-time Purple Heart recipient,” she said. “He has just been so grateful.”
Reach J.K. Dineen: dineen@sfchronicle.com
At Season of Sharing Fund, we believe that an unexpected financial crisis should never mean losing your home. Preventing homelessness isn’t just kind—it’s also the most effective way to keep our communities thriving. 100% of your donation keeps Bay Area residents housed, cared for and nourished.
