AlterNet: America's Vets Left in the Lurch

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America's Vets Left in the Lurch

By Jeanine Plant, AlterNet. Posted March 7, 2007.


Chronic under-funding, communication breakdowns and nightmarish paperwork have left the VA system woefully unprepared for future veterans: the tens of thousands currently deployed in the war on terror.

Two years ago, Lorin Bannerman, a 43-year-old Sergeant in the Army National Guard, came home to his wife saddled with baggage from Iraq. He didn’t receive a full mental health screening from a veterans’ hospital for seven months and wasn’t diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, for months after that. Two years later, Bannerman and his family bear the lingering scar. He and his wife are now separated.

Jon Town knows he incurred short-term memory loss and severe hearing damage from the shrapnel that struck his neck in Iraq in 2005. Yet he’s been deprived of a signing bonus, disability pay, and medical support because his discharge papers state he had a personality disorder before he enlisted in the Army. Ever since, he’s been in a vicious struggle with the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). For now, he is unemployed and lives with his wife and son at his parents’ home in Findlay, Ohio.

This January, Jonathan Schulze requested admission to a Minneapolis VA. The former marine was haunted by the many casualties he had witnessed and deaths of close friends. But the VA’s waiting list extended through March. Schulze knew he couldn’t wait that long, so he went to a different VA in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He told a staff member there he was suicidal but was met with a similar response: He was number 26 on their waiting list. Four days later, Schulze committed suicide.

In the wake of stories like Schulze’s tragic demise, which got ample media coverage, more commonplace stories like Bannerman’s and Town’s emerge. And recent coverage of the decrepit conditions at Walter Reed, the military’s flagship hospital outside of Washington, D.C., has prompted a wave of enraged veterans with similar experiences to speak out. Though Walter Reed is run by the Department of Defense, all of these stories call attention to the VA’s appalling ineptness to adequately care for returning veterans. Chronic under-funding, nightmarish paperwork, and a cumbersome transition from DoD payroll to the VA system are hampering the VA’s ability to provide basic healthcare and dispense benefits to recent veterans. ....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/48894/