THE “LEAVE SOME VETS BEHIND” LAW: A NATIONAL DISGRACE

In 1995, Con­gress cod­i­fied as Pub­lic Law 95–126 the VA pol­icy deny­ing ben­e­fits to vet­er­ans who receive less than hon­or­able dis­charges, includ­ing those who served in com­bat in Viet­nam and sub­se­quent wars of choice. These vet­er­ans can only receive ser­vices by going through a dif­fi­cult, painful and often unsuc­cess­ful process requir­ing them to debase them­selves by beg­ging their for­mer mil­i­tary Ser­vice to upgrade their dis­charge sta­tus. In the process, they have to relive their com­bat trauma and in some cases have to con­tact those with whom they served. This drags up hor­rific mem­o­ries that they have strug­gled to sup­press, often through drugs, alco­hol and promis­cu­ity. This is the rea­son they acted out through drunk­en­ness, dis­obe­di­ence or deser­tion of their posts state­side after return from com­bat. I know this because it has been the case in every vet­eran I have met who falls under the pro­vi­sions of this Catch-22 imple­mented by a group of chicken hawks who were too busy set­ting the coun­try up for eco­nomic destruc­tion to con­sider the con­se­quences of their actions on our vet­er­ans.
The men and women affected by PL 95–126 vol­un­teered or were com­pelled by our own gov­ern­ment to serve the inter­ests of the cor­po­ra­tions who our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives feel they need to serve to main­tain their posi­tions of power. After all, they rea­son, some­one has to pay for the pro­pa­ganda cam­paigns that con­fuse the gen­eral pub­lic, jus­ti­fy­ing unnec­es­sary wars and the real rea­sons for them, as well as lin­ing the pock­ets of the rich by sub­vert­ing democ­racy world­wide in the name of Amer­ica. Many of the mem­bers of Con­gress respon­si­ble for this out­rage shame­lessly lied to the young, patri­otic men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their par­ents about the rea­sons they were sent to kill and die. Now that these ser­vice mem­bers have done their duty, many of those most in need of help from the VA have been casu­ally dis­carded, as were the Viet­nam vet­er­ans before them.
The ordeal of seek­ing help causes flare-ups of PTSD symp­toms and reminds these vet­er­ans of the fact that their gov­ern­ment chose to dis­honor them rather than treat the wounds of war and the eco­nomic dev­as­ta­tion that these politi­cians them­selves inflicted on these com­bat vet­er­ans. The same is true when any of the esti­mated 30% of female OEF vets are erro­neously told that they are not enti­tled to VA ser­vices to treat the psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age from the dev­as­tat­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal trauma of being raped in the ser­vice. These women are often among the worst affected by symp­toms of PTSD. A high pro­por­tion of them were sex­u­ally abused in child­hood but were func­tion­ing well enough to serve until being re-traumatized dur­ing their terms of ser­vice by the very men who were sup­posed to guard their backs. Almost to a woman, they were then ostra­cized by their peers, often even if they chose not to report the crime. This has led to a gross under­es­ti­mate of the actual inci­dence of this form of trauma, which is mag­ni­fied by the abuse and neglect that fol­lowed from their com­mand, in the name of “main­tain­ing unit cohe­sion.”
I sus­pect that most vet­er­ans falling under PL 95–126 choose not to engage in this fight, know­ing that even if they suc­ceed in obtain­ing an upgrade of their dis­charge, they then have to argue that they suf­fer “men­tal ill­ness” as a result of their ser­vice. PTSD is not a men­tal ill­ness, leav­ing the VA to decide whether or not to resort to seman­tic gym­nas­tics in order to pro­vide the ser­vices that most of us in the VA ded­i­cate our pro­fes­sional lives to pro­vid­ing. What they do not know if they choose to engage in this long bat­tle is that they only stand a 50% chance of suc­cess at each step, accord­ing to unof­fi­cial sources with whom I have con­sulted.
What is worse, the law does not even have a pro­vi­sion to allow the VA to con­duct eval­u­a­tions of those who win the lot­tery in the first step. They are required to some­how obtain inde­pen­dent psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tions in order to make their case. For­tu­nately or unfor­tu­nately, those who need the help most are gen­er­ally impov­er­ished by their cir­cum­stances, so could get these exams through pro­grams set up for the poor, if they are lucky enough to real­ize that such ser­vices are often avail­able in the com­mu­nity. Because these indi­vid­u­als most often have divorced them­selves from soci­ety in their shame, anger and despair, I sus­pect that few even try to nav­i­gate the labyrinth of steps required to obtain ser­vices, if they are lucky enough to suc­ceed.
This crime against the youth of our nation, many now hav­ing grown up and pro­duc­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of alien­ated and dis­af­fected youth, is unac­cept­able. The VA may play a role because of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems endemic in such a large orga­ni­za­tion, but the real fault lies with our com­pla­cent Con­gress. All of us who want to truly honor our vet­er­ans must demand that the mem­bers of the Vet­er­ans Com­mit­tee in the Sen­ate act at once to atone for this sin against our nation. Please call Sen­a­tor Webb, Sen­a­tor Tester or other mem­bers of the Vet­eran Affairs Com­mit­tee at 866–220-0044 and demand action. I do not believe that either of these dili­gent and hard­work­ing sen­a­tors is aware of the prob­lem, despite my attempts at ask­ing for help through their aides.
When I spoke to Phillip Brady, Vet­eran Affairs aide to Sen­a­tor Webb, he made inquiries, speak­ing to the DOD and VA about the prob­lem. As the only office in either orga­ni­za­tion autho­rized to speak to Con­gress is pre­sum­ably the office of pub­lic affairs, both pre­dictably denied that it was a prob­lem. If you are as out­raged at this white­wash, please let these Sen­a­tor Webb in par­tic­u­lar know. As a dec­o­rated Viet­nam vet­eran and father of an Iraq war vet­eran, he may be will­ing to dig deeper and speak to some­one more appro­pri­ate at the VA Cen­tral Office. I sug­gested to Phillip that he start with the VA direc­tor of Men­tal Health Ser­vices, Dr Ira Katz. Dr Katz is a ded­i­cated pub­lic ser­vant who has been unfairly maligned by the media in the past but who has pri­vately expressed his con­cern about this law as well.
Please con­tact every vet­eran group and vet­eran advo­cacy group that you can locate. I sug­gest call­ing and email­ing Iraq and Afghanistan Vet­er­ans of Amer­ica Also con­tact Jim Scott at VetWatch.org and let him know that you share my anger at this con­tin­u­ing mis­treat­ment of com­bat vet­er­ans and sex­u­ally abused female vet­er­ans who only wanted to serve their coun­try while in fact being used as tools by a cyn­i­cal, cow­ardly Con­gress to serve the inter­ests of their cor­po­rate pup­pet mas­ters. While you are at it, you might make an appeal for real uni­ver­sal health care in the form of a sin­gle payer sys­tem. At last count in 2004, there were 1.8 mil­lion unin­sured vet­er­ans and 3.8 mil­lion fam­ily mem­bers of vet­er­ans with­out access to health care.
If you choose to act, please tell them that I sent you. I have been beat­ing my head against these walls for months and I would appre­ci­ate a response from those in a posi­tion to repeal this law and give our vet­er­ans the care that they have earned. If I have to go to Wash­ing­ton to per­son­ally appeal for these deserv­ing vet­er­ans, I will, but I would pre­fer to see Con­gress take respon­si­bil­ity on their own for rec­ti­fy­ing this national disgrace.

Rick Staggen­borg, MD
Founder, Sol­diers For Peace Inter­na­tional
Physi­cians for a National Health Plan
Cap­tain, USA (Ret)
VA Psy­chi­a­trist, North Bend, OR

After the humil­i­at­ing rebuke by Paul Wol­fowitz (who never served in the mil­i­tary), for dar­ing stand up to Don­ald Rums­feld (who also never served in the mil­i­tary) and insist that we needed more troops on the ground in Iraq, Shin­seki has been appointed to head Vet­er­ans Affairs by Obama. For more on the dis­grace­ful man­ner in which Gen­eral Shin­seki was treated please read James Fal­lows in The Atlantic.

The show­down came just before the war began. Shin­seki, who had direct expe­ri­ence with land war­fare (in Viet­nam) and post-combat occu­pa­tion (in the Balkans), was urg­ing that the U.S. go in with a force large enough to ensure that it could main­tain order and gen­uinely con­trol Iraq’s siz­able ter­ri­tory and poten­tially frac­tious soci­ety after it ousted Sad­dam. Rums­feld and Wol­fowitz hated this whole idea.

Rums­feld rightly suf­fered his own well deserved dis­grace when he was forced out of office after the GOP were slaugh­tered dur­ing the 2006 elec­tion cycle. That slaugh­ter being widely attrib­uted to the poor han­dling of the Iraq war as envi­sioned in Rumsfeld’s ‘lighter, faster, dead­lier’ doc­trine which turned out to be a disaster.