War may be hell, three veterans of the Iraq conflict told college students Monday, but coming home is no picnic either.

The three painted a bleak picture of a soldier's life in the war zone at a forum at Nassau Community College, saying troops still lack body armor, fly in decades-old helicopters and don't have enough Arabic-speaking interpreters to do their jobs effectively.

But they saved their harshest words for the conditions that soldiers face after returning home. They cited a lack of services and compassion -- both in Washington and among the general public -- for high rates of alcoholism, homelessness and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder among the recently returned troops.

"A lot of people praise the dead for being heroes ... but people forget about the living who returned," said Nicole Goodwin, a former army private. "You always see those bumper stickers that say 'Support the Troops.' I'm a living troop. I'm tired of seeing those words ... where's the action?"

The members of Operation Truth, a veteran's group founded last summer to push for more resources for soldiers overseas and at home, castigated Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush for proposing cuts to benefits for veterans, saying that the Veteran's Affairs hospitals, though run by well-meaning staff members, were already underfunded.

Paul Rieckhoff, an Army reserve lieutenant, said his father, also a veteran, had warned him upon his return from Iraq about federally funded vets hospitals.

"The VA is the last place you want to go," Rieckhoff said his father told him. "When older veterans are telling the new guys that, there's a problem."

Goodwin, who shipped out to Iraq a month after she gave birth to her only child, said she returned to family members who quickly told her to move out. She stayed on friends' couches and was homeless for a time, she said, before finding an apartment in East Harlem and enrolling in community college in the Bronx.

"There's no parachute, no net to stop you" for soldiers who don't get off on the right foot, she said.

Rieckhoff, who founded the group shortly after returning from Iraq a year ago, said he started it when he realized that "most of the American people were not getting the whole picture."

The third panelist, former Marine intelligence officer Andrew Borene, said he wasn't opposed to war -- but did object to many of the decisions made by the top military officers and the administration.

"You can't be a U.S. Marine and be a pacifist. They don't let you into the club," Borene said. "But there are things we could do better."

About 400 people attended the wide-ranging discussion at the student center, and afterward, a handful of students approached Rieckhoff to ask if they should enlist.

"That would take a lot more time to answer that we have," he said to one. "There's good and there's bad. You need to tak to some guys who've been over there.

"Here," he said, "take my card."

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

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