by
Fred Reed

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by Fred Reed:
Social Policy

For a country
always at war, the United States is remarkably not interested in
taking care of soldiers it has broken in its wars. Having bankrupted
the country, Washington sinks every available penny into the two
purposes of the military: funneling money into the arms industry,
and fueling imperial ambitions, in large part of pasty fern-bar
Napoleons at National Review and Commentary. The Veterans Administration
is way back in the chow line. It doesnÂ’t work very well. As
best I can tell, nobody cares.

What do I mean,
it doesnÂ’t work? Consider a vet blinded or nearly so in some
war or other. To use a computer, which has come to be necessary
life, he needs screen-reader software, such as JAWS. It costs roughly
a thousand dollars retail. For a blinded vet, most likely of slight
education and no resources beyond his VA compensation, this is a
lot of money.

The software
could be provided quickly and easily, as follows: The vet fills
out an application online, perhaps prints it, signs it, and scans
it to the VA. An employee of the VA receives it and keys the veteranÂ’s
social-security number into his computer. In two seconds the vetÂ’s
records come up. Yep, blind. The VA emails him a URL and download
key, by arrangement previously made with the manufacturer of the
software. The vet downloads it. End of story. Elapsed time: an hour,
plus download.

What really
happens? To begin with, the VA is so disorganized, its web sites
so badly designed, its technology so primitive, its staffing so
inadequate, its unending forms so incomprehensible, that few vets
can navigate the system. I canÂ’t. The kid from Tennessee, with
a room-temperature IQ and what passes now for a high-school education,
doesnÂ’t have a chance. He will simply be ignored. I know this
from personal experience. I have sent letter after letter to the
educational-benefits office in Buffalo, and nothing comes back.
This is common.

So much for
supporting our boys in uniform. They are broken goods. What the
hell. We can recruit new ones.

The delay and
endless often senseless paperwork involved in getting anything is
so great that it is easier for disabled vets just to do without
or pay for it themselves one way or another. Remember, we are not
talking welfare queens or entitlement parasites. These are guys
badly hurt in WashingtonÂ’s wars, brains scrambled by IEDs,
legs still somewhere in Afghanistan.
The vetÂ’s only hope is to have smart, tenacious representation,
preferably by a lawyer. Few have this. What it comes to is that,
in practice, the benefits that are supposed to exist do not. This
saves a lot of money. It doesnÂ’t help the vet.

I did have
(very) good representation in a matter involving the VA. A career
in journalism gives you contacts that men from small towns in the
heartlands donÂ’t have. My rep and I requested my VA records.
Easy, right? They pop up on the computer? No. They exist only on
paper. Scanning the records of veterans of Viet Nam, who are aging
and need care, would cost money. Washington has much more interest
in making new cripples in remote countries than in caring for the
cripples it has already made. My country, ‘tis of thee….

The VA said
consecutively that my records were in Pittsburgh, then Austin, then
St. Louis, and then, God knows why, in Portland, Oregon. It took
a year to get them, despite threats of litigation.

Utter confusion
reigned. Over and over they sent us forms to fill out that we had
already filled out, sent letters to the wrong address. This is what
most face without help. The barrier is almost insurmountable, and
saves the government a lot of money.

I live in Mexico,
as do a lot of vets, a fair few of them disabled. (The VA seems
not to understand that a world exists beyond AmericaÂ’s borders.
Nowhere on the VAÂ’s web site could I find answers to questions
that expat vets need answered.) If a vet here makes a claim because
his condition has worsened, he goes through the VA office in Houston.
On average, it takes Houston 377 days just to get to him. Not to
solve the problem, just for him to bubble to the top of the pile.
Being technologically at the grass-hut level, the VA doesnÂ’t
know about email, and so sends and demands paper letters. These
may or may not arrive in foreign lands. The VA insists on the vetÂ’s
filling out a form he didnÂ’t receive and didnÂ’t know was
sent, so the whole convoluted process stops.

Try dealing
with this if, as is the case with an acquaintance of mine, you are
so riddled with shrapnel, because something big came through the
bottom of your helicopter, that you are in constant pain – forty
years later. You have to take so much pain medication just to get
through the day that you canÂ’t under bureaucratic letters.
The consequence isÂ….

The hell with
it. The following is a letter to me from an attorney who represents
vets pro bono before the VA:

“Fred:
Of course, your suggestion (about screen-reading software) makes
perfect sense and that’s why it will never happen. Secretary Shinseki
means well and has done what he can to improve the claims backlog,
but no one ever expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would
lead to the number of service-connected injuries that currently
exist. One of the biggest problems is orthopedic injuries caused
by the 100-pound-plus combat loads these kids have to carry. I currently
have four claims for Iraq and Afghanistan kids for shoulder, hip
and knee injuries, usually caused when they fall going up or down
hilly terrain with these loads. Then there are the injuries caused
by IEDs. The truth is that the President has given more money to
the VA in five years than Bush did in eight, but it’s not enough,
thanks to Republicans in the House. The new budget proposes a 4%
increase to $63 billion, but it does not include enough money to
hire thousands of new people to work on claims. Most of the increase
is to hire more medical staff, particularly mental health providers.
It does no good to offer mental-health services when the vets who
are suffering can’t get their claims done in less than a year. It
is forcing many to live on the streets, sleep in their cars or they
end up in shelters. We see this right here, in Central Oregon.”

It makes me
feel so patriotic I could choke.

April
10, 2013

Fred Reed
is author of Nekkid
in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A
Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be, Curmudgeing
Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au
Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet
Nam, and A
Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about
Mexico. Visit his
blog.

Copyright
© 2013 Fred Reed