BernieHund: The Political Watchdog

We have all heard that it is taking an Army of private attorneys to get the VA to provide the care our returning solders deserve.  But, did it all start with the Walter Reed scandal or is the entire system broken?

Rumors of mistreatment or no treatment had been swirling for a while before the Walter Reed story broke.  There is no way to go back to the beginning, because time and space prevent us from starting at Genesis.  So, we will pick up the story from January of this year at Fort Drum in New York.

Army officials in upstate New York instructed representatives from the Department of Veterans Affairs not to help disabled soldiers at Fort Drum Army base with their military disability paperwork last year. That paperwork can be crucial because it helps determine whether soldiers will get annual disability payments and health care after they’re discharged.

One disabled soldier speaking on condition of anonymity was reported as saying

“To be tossed aside like a worn-out pair of boots is pretty disheartening,” the soldier says. “I always believed the Army would take care of me if I did the best I could, and I’ve done that.”

At a restaurant near Fort Drum, the soldier described his first briefing with the VA office on base. According to the soldier, the VA official told a classroom full of injured troops, “We cannot help you review the narrative summaries of your medical problems.” The official said the VA used to help soldiers with the paperwork, but Army officials saw soldiers from Fort Drum getting higher disability ratings with the VA’s help than soldiers from other bases. The Army told the VA to stop helping Fort Drum soldiers describe their army injuries, and the VA did as it was told.

Cynthia Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Army surgeon general:

“There is no Army policy on outside help in reviewing and/or assisting soldiers in rewriting their narratives during the 10-day period which they have to review them,” Vaughan says.

She says the officers who asked the VA to stop helping Fort Drum’s soldiers were part of what the Army calls a “Tiger Team”.

The system, as usual, fell into the pointing of fingers and the typical he said, she said mode.  No one was willing to confess that he or she or one office or another chose not to help the military tragedies that had been hospitalized in substandard hospitals with substandard care.

By February

A document from the Department of Veterans Affairs contradicts an assertion made by the Army surgeon general that his office did not tell VA officials to stop helping injured soldiers with their military disability paperwork at a New York Army post.

The paperwork can help determine health care and disability benefits for wounded soldiers.

Further

Army representatives told the VA not to review the narrative summaries of soldiers’ injuries, and that the VA complied with the Army’s request.

Naturally, the Army Surgeon General, Eric Shoomaker, denied parts of that report.  Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) stepped up to the plate for the Army surgeon general, saying

“The Surgeon General of the Army told me very flatly that it was not the Army that told the VA to stop this help.”

But… there appeared a document, four pages in all.

The document says Col. Becky Baker of the Army Surgeon General’s office told the VA to discontinue counseling soldiers on the appropriateness of Defense Department ratings because “there exists a conflict of interest.”

Conflict of interest?  No one sending the troops into harm’s way seemed to have a conflict of interest.  Those who created the situation have a responsibility to follow through on the decisions that were made to go into war.  The responsibility does NOT stop when a service man or woman leaves the theatre.  The responsibility of those who began the war continues until the military personnel, in totality, are returned home, given the care they need, reintegrated into family and community life, and are without the need of further assistance.

I need not say again that I opposed this war from before the first bomb was dropped.  And, now, almost everyone will admit that we were lied into the battles in Iraq.  That said, we are there.  And, disabled veterans are back at home.  Almost 4,000 lives have been lost in support of a war of old men who never set foot on a battlefield.  That is an atrocity in and of itself.  But, tens of thousands of soldiers have been damaged or totally disabled.  And, it is our responsibility to treat them with dignity and give them the care.. physical and mental health care… they need and deserve.

To hear

According to the document, Rosie Taylor, who recently retired as Fort Drum’s Disability Program manager, described soldiers at the base in conditions of squalor and neglect. In an interview … Taylor described “soldiers crawling on their bellies to go to the bathroom, or soldiers who’d had surgery who couldn’t go to chow because they had no way to get there.”

The document says one soldier was bedridden for three days without a change of clothes or meal. Taylor says nobody listened to her complaints until the Walter Reed scandal.

This is a national disgrace.  How dare Condoleezza Rice or George Bush talk about humanitarian concerns in China or any other place on the face of this earth!  We need to clean up our humanitarian act.  We have a far greater issue here at home.  We are not talking about dissenters or outcasts.  We are talking about those men and women who served our country with pride and heroism.  We are talking about men and women who deserve to be at the front of the line for health care.  We are talking about men and women who are national heroes.  And, we treat them worse than the President’s dog.  We treat them worse than a pound puppy. 

In his defense, Army Surgeon General Eric Shoomaker offered the following

“There obviously was some miscommunication.”

Isn’t that always the answer in Washington?  Miscommunication.  In this case, as in others, the “miscommunication” shows one of two things.  Either the person shunning responsibility is too stupid to understand English, or he or she is a blatant liar, only practicing CYA.  No one… NO ONE… buys into that crap any longer.  It’s another excuse to explain lack of competent behavior.  And, if I may inject something I was told long ago… Excuses only satisfy those who make them.  We don’t need more excuses.  We don’t need more finger pointing.  We don’t need more “miscommunication” excuses.  We need someone in Washington to have the balls to stand up and say, “I made a mistake.  I am working to correct it.”  How hard can that be?

In an interview with Ari Shapiro of NPR, when speaking of the so-called “Tiger Team” the Army Surgeon General said,

In fact, their recollection and their re-creation of that visit up to Fort Drum was very, very positive. They were very laudatory of what the veterans benefits advisers were doing for our soldiers up there. They felt in many cases it was almost a best practice, and they came back with some recommendations for how we ought to embrace — even more thoroughly — the provision of knowledge about benefits at discharge for any soldier leaving the Army. So it just — it wasn’t what I’d experienced. It wasn’t what I knew from personal experience was being done within our disability evaluation process. And that was validated by the people that I spoke with.

But, when pressed by Shapiro who stated that his [Shoomaker] account was almost totally opposite of the documented report, Shoomaker responded

 Isn’t that amazing? It sort of speaks to miscommunication, doesn’t it?

There is no need to cover the remainder of that interview.  Shoomaker could only say that he was “not privy” to the information that Shapiro had. 

My question is so simple, I’m almost ashamed to have thought it.  What the hell was he privy to? 

The issues discussed above are primarily about Fort Drum, NY.  But, to think that the problem with veterans’ care is isolated to one base in New York State would make me as ignorant and as stupid as the Army Surgeon General.  I can’t go there.

The veterans are not a partisan issue.  Their care is not a partisan issue.  We are all guilty of neglect of those men and women who have sacrificed life and limb, head and heart for our country.  It does not matter that the cause of war was greed and revenge on the man “who tried to kill daddy”.  The upcoming election should take care of the blame game.  Our responsibility, as Americans is to demand through the ballot box, through phone calls, through faxes or trips to Washington, that our national heroes are not sent to hospitals that offer care worse than they could receive in a third world country. 

It’s sad that those evil attorneys Washington is always talking about are now forced to sue to get the benefits our military veterans deserve.  The Congress and the administration have a responsibility to make sure there is no need for such lawsuits.  And, until that time… well, do what it takes to get what these veterans need and deserve.

These are men and women who have sacrificed for what they believed to be a just cause.  And, now we can not sacrifice them, their families or our national responsibility.