There's no way to understand how far Bob Hunter has come without knowing how far he fell. From a successful writer in St. Louis to a denizen on the streets of Los Angeles, the decline was gradual, a bottle his companion all the way down.

For 15 years, Hunter has lived in jail, shelters or on the street. The last five years were spent on Skid Row; five years of drinking and doping, of stealing to survive and, he said, watching other men have their throats slit because they'd stolen someone else's crack.

"It was commonplace to see someone (killed) right next to you. And you'd just walk over the body and smoke," Hunter recalls. "They would just toss bodies in an alley."

Early last year, Hunter showed up at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Los Angeles. "I had not come here to get sober. I just came for a rest from the streets," he says.

But soon, Hunter found himself with a group of people who knew what he had forgotten: that he could get off the streets if he really wanted to. Within a few months, they not only had him clean and sober, but immersed in a program for homeless veterans that is widely recognized as among the most comprehensive in the nation.

Today, at age 60, Hunter is working again, having just started a job managing a Long Beach store run by the Disabled American Veterans group.

So call Hunter one of the lucky ones.

He sure does.

"I feel a miracle has occurred to me," he says.

"I wish I could tell you there are a lot more like that," adds Bill Daniels, director of the medical center's homeless program. "We're here if someone really, truly wants to come off the streets. But it's not an easy road back."

On a 500-acre site nestled between Brentwood and Westwood, in some of the most valuable real estate in the country, lies the VA's West Los Angeles facility--home to the nation's largest veterans' hospital and one of the country's most comprehensive programs for homeless veterans.

Mirroring national statistics on the homeless, local officials estimate that 40 to 50% of the men without shelter in Los Angeles County, approximately 15,000 to 23,000 men, are veterans. That's the largest population of homeless veterans in the country. About half of them are believed to have been in the military during the Vietnam War.

To help meet the demand for services, the VA's West Los Angeles facility opened its Comprehensive Homeless Center in 1987 to provide medical treatment, job training, a stable living environment and a support network for veterans who are without permanent shelter.