Honor Ride helps Navy veteran

Leaks in his plumbing have driven up veteran Peter Rapp’s water bill for months. With no way to fix them, Rapp was amazed when the Arkansas Honor Ride stepped in to help, including replacing his broken refrigerator.

Rapp, a U.S. Navy veteran, said he relies on assistance from the DAV to help him with his utility bills, including paying a past-due water bill of $627.

“My water bill should normally run me $30 a month. I just had another one in the mail the other day for $109. That’s one month,” he said. “So we can pay for the problem, but it doesn’t fix it. We’ve got to fix the problem to take care of the bill.”

That’s when the Arkansas Honor Ride stepped in.

Wendell Roberts, president of the organization, said his group of volunteers found a licensed journeyman, Wesley Keener, to fix the leaks at Rapp’s home and also located a used refrigerator to donate to him.

“A lot of times we’ll build like a handicap accessible ramp because, not that the VA won’t, but it takes a long time to get them to come out. The VA can sometimes take a while to put these ramps in so when there’s an immediate need like when there’s an unexpected amputation and it puts somebody in a wheelchair that needs a ramp immediately, or if their ramp is so dilapidated,” Roberts said.

Roberts said the organization works closely with the Garland County Veterans Service Office to help meet the needs of veterans in the community, and one of the biggest needs in the community is for transportation.

“Not everybody lives in town. Not everybody can catch the bus. So our next thing we’d like to do is get a wheelchair accessible van that also carries passengers. That way if someone needs a ride to a doctor’s appointment or something like that, we have a way to get them there,” he said.

Eventually, the Arkansas Honor Ride hopes to open the Arkansas Veterans Support Center to help veterans with a variety of services, he said.

“If they were a munitions technician in the army, there’s not a lot of jobs for a munitions technician in the civilian world. So we want to help them retrain,” he said. “If there’s a homeless veteran that needs a place to stay to get on his feet for six months, or

even a family, we want to provide a place for them.

“So that’s our big over the rainbow goal is to open up a veterans center where they can come live for ‘X’ amount of months, get education, get vocational skills if need be, get some VA assistance if they don’t already have it. But again, that’s our end goal. That’s our five-year goal. But right now we’re just doing service projects like this and building the ramps, helping people get where they need to go.”

And meeting veterans like Rapp are what makes the work worth it, Roberts said.

Rapp is a single-leg amputee who said he served as one of “the elite four” that a serviceman would want to make sure they know.

“You wanted to know these four guys. Everybody else didn’t make a difference; Skipper wasn’t one of them either,” he said. “You wanted to know your corpsman because he made sure you didn’t look like a pin cushion by losing your shot record. You wanted to know your personnel man because he made sure you didn’t wind up in the Arctic Circle somewhere. You wanted to know your processing clerk because he made sure you got a paycheck every two weeks. And you wanted to know me, the cook.

“I used to feed 6,000 guys four times a day because I didn’t actually cook, but everything that came from the freezers and storerooms came from my hands.”

Rapp said he served in the Navy from 1977 to 1982 and “was sitting off the coast of Iran when they had the first of the hostages in the late ’70s.”

He said he is a walking miracle, and if it weren’t for the assistance he receives from organizations like the Arkansas Honor Ride and DAV, he would not be where he is today.

“If it wasn’t for other veterans taking care of veterans, there would be more of us on the street,” he said.