This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Veteran Health Care

  • Stop pretending that you care, at least it will make you honest.

    Once again there are stories being posted about the issue with suicide in the military and PTSD. Sounds like it could be good thing right? Yea I wish. More then anything it really reinforces that groups are willing to uses people in suffering as a means to a end. Case one is talking about 18 Veteran Suicides Every Day . It is not as bad as other that I have seen but still manages to bring in the politics.

    I commend the VA for their efforts and for the lives they are able to save, but obviously much more needs to be done. They not only need to increase their outreach to include many veterans not currently receiving care, but they also need to increase the quality and effectiveness of the care they are giving (because five suicides a day among those receiving treatment is just too many).

    Notice the quickness on pointing out a problem and saying that someone else should fix it. Kinda like watch your neighbors house burn making off hand comments about he should really need more water. If you not going to help, get out of our way and stop pretending that you are.

    The next one is even worse. Yet in the comments and story it tries to make it sound that James Branum that he cares about his clients or can do his job without putting his “cause” first.

    What this young man has had to face should be an outrage to us all. I hope that he will find his strength and begin to heal. I thank James Branum for his dedication to helping these soldiers find their way toward justice in the midst of the overwhelming intimidation that is the military culture.

    Yea I had a knee jerk reaction too. But it get better with the next two replies to me.

    Masterspork, with all do respect to having your own opinion, you nor thisainthell know what you are talking about. why don’t you come down to UtH coffeehouse and talk to some of James’ clients and people who have worked with James?

    Masterporks,

    Yes come talk to clients that got guilty charges. There are two that come to UtH daily. And they still stand behind James and the choices THEY made.

    As for having a general understanding of UCMJ and how it works does not give anyone the right to slander people.

    The problem with people like you all is that you always get your info wrong or make assumptions. All soldiers that we talk to know they can apply for CO for free. If they choose to ask an attorney for help and are low on funds there are great people out there that donate to help them. So there is nothing unethical that James is doing.

    As for Travis we know the story so there is no need to comment on it.

    Honey as we all know in the military community when you go up against the brass or institution it never goes well. You got two options… 1. You stay quiet and accept what they give you or 2. You tell them to go fuck themselves and get more time.

    Well that’s to bad you can’t visit UtH maybe when you come back to TX you can see for yourself what we do.

    So as a military blog with many members that had deployed with a few that have seen combat we collectively know nothing about how the military works. Still have not heard of any such people exist.

    There is at least one guy that seems to be doing it right. From the group that he runs to help soldiers with PTSD and any issues that they are facing. Here is something that I got off of his Facebook group, Soldiers Advocacy Group.

    More progress here at Ft Benning. Last week the actions of the Reduction Board were overturned and the rank that was taken from husband was restored. Again, this wouldn’t have happened without Chuck’s intervention. Thanks for all the prayers and good thoughts from all of you. We aren’t done yet, but it is getting better!!!

    Taking note James this is what success looks like.

  • IVAW’s witness to “collateral murder”

    Josh Stieber was in B 2/16 Infantry on the day the the “Collateral Murder” video was shot, according to him in this interview

    The IVAW article about the video admits that Steiber wasn’t on the scene that particular day because he was being punished for disobeying an order earlier – so that’s his starting point in the story. No where. He wasn’t there, and he was a consciencious objector. Stieber goes to say that the soldiers in video weren’t bad apples, but he hints that they’re mindless drones who are only acying and talking like they were programmed to act and talk. I guess folks in the military aren’t smart enough to think for themselves. Well, except Stieber…who was being punished for disobeying a lawful order.

    Of course, it’s difficult to insult the “system” without insulting the people who are the system. Yes, the helicopter pilots were in a rush to kill some terrorists standing on a corner in proximity to US troops and their on-going operation. It’s not some immature video game jabber – it was the excitement over avoiding a US catastrophe and casualties. I guess Stieber never understood the camaraderie of the military because he was too busy avoiding his duty.

    At the IVAW website, Stieber shows just how ignorant and immature he’s become;

    “If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like,” says Stieber. “If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.”

    Yes, alternatives to war – like Twinkie-eating contests or unicorn races.

    Background on Stieber and his “expert” opinion. It seems to me that if this was a big deal and Stieber had anything to contribute, he’d have done so before the video became public.
    Stieber’s IVAW profile (you can’t get there from here)
    Stieber and Elaine Brower.
    Contagious Love

  • I guess we all have PTSD, then

    IVAW member, Jeremy Bergren, has a blog post up on the IVAW website in which he defends his bout with PTSD. Like most of the IVAW members, Bergren never deployed. His unit deployed, but he was legally absent – and that, apparently is the source of his PTSD;

    I will not get too much into the guilt and shame that goes through a marine’s, or probably any servicemember’s, heart and head in a situation like this, but it is at a disturbing level to be stuck stateside while your friends, your peers, and unit are gone. Throughout my unit’s deployment I had a difficult time sleeping, had nightmares about what they were doing, but this made me feel more alienated so I never talked about it and just bid my time and got out as soon as my contract allowed me to.

    Yeah, his unit was a mortuary unit, so I’m guessing his nightmares were somehow related to ninja zombie mutant robots. If his unit was infantry, or engineer, I might understand crediting his discomfort to survivor’s guilt, but they were pogues in the rear with the gear.

    I don’t usually comment about others’ PTSD, but let’s recount what IVAW members think cause their PTSD. We had one, whose name slips my mind for the moment, who got PTSD while guarding a gate at 8th and Eye in DC in the weeks following 9-11. We have Matthis Chiroux who claims his PTSD stems from listening to others tell war stories in the barracks and finally, Bergren, who claims he suffers PTSD because he DIDN’T deploy – he got it from his dreams and imagination.

    I guess that about covers everything, doesn’t it? Everyone who ever put on a uniform for more than a day suffers from PTSD. Hell, I pulled gate guard while I was at the reception station at Fort Polk on day four of my active duty time. All of the prior service guys at the reception station were Vietnam vets in 1974, and they loved to tell us their war stories – shit, I guess I had PTSD right from the get-go.

  • Now that the deed ‘tis done, how will it affect you? (Part I)

    Cross Posted from The Burn Pit.

    Veteran

    Lots of heated rhetoric floating around out there, and I want to leap in.

    [Part II of this will discuss the effects that this will have on the VA.]

    The big question everyone has is: how will this affect me, the VA/TRICARE/TRICARE-for-life individual? Well, let’s start by looking at what some of the others are saying, and then try to cut the middle. Separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

    The only folks I have found thus far that think this thing is just great for veterans and their families is VoteVets. Now, mind you the MoveOn.org affiliated group is also citing some Harvard study of how many veterans die without health insurance that is based on nothing but comparing the number of deaths with the percent of veterans, so take it for what it is worth:

    The right has spent a good portion of the debate over health care reform engaging in scare tactics aimed at Veterans and Retirees (and when not doing that, have engaged in the demonizing of government health care begging the question why our Veterans would get health care that is somehow substandard, but I digress). Today, VA seeks to put those fears to rest…

    [Duckworth statement that deals with VA]

    The author of that statement is, of course, Tammy Duckworth, Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs, a double combat amputee who left both her legs in Iraq. As the vote on health care reform draws near, expect to see more shameful fear-mongering directed at the Veteran community– a slimy political tactic that falls well beneath the measure of service Vets have given to our country.

    Now, not long after that, VFW went live with its statement:

    “The president and the Democratic leadership are betraying America’s veterans,” said Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran from Sussex, Wis., who leads the 2.1 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. and its Auxiliaries.

    “And what makes matters worse is the leadership and the president knows the bill is flawed, yet they are pushing for passage today like it’s a do-or-die situation. This nation deserves the best from their elected officials, and the rush to pass legislation of this magnitude is not it.”

    And of course, VoteVets returned the salvo:

    VFW PAC operates as little more than a subsidiary of the Republican Party, as does the leadership of their parent organization.

    Today, that organization issued a statement toeing the GOP line on the health care vote. Of course, in order to toe that line, the VFW had to make things up.

    Remainder after the jump.
    (more…)

  • Healthcare bill screws veterans

    You might remember if you’ve been around here that long, back in August, we reported that Stephen Buyer warned that the healthcare bill penalized veterans who rely on their earned medical benefits as their primary provider. In fact, I asked the question just the other day.

    Well, according to the VFW, I was asking the right questions all along, and no one wasanswering for a good reason;

    “The president and the Democratic leadership are betraying America’s veterans,” said Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., a combat-wounded Vietnam veteran from Sussex, Wis., who leads the 2.1 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S. and its Auxiliaries.

    “And what makes matters worse is the leadership and the president knows the bill is flawed, yet they are pushing for passage today like it’s a do-or-die situation. This nation deserves the best from their elected officials, and the rush to pass legislation of this magnitude is not it.”

    Apparently, Buyer saw it comingback in August and no one did anything about it – that means to me that it was intentional on the part of the people who wrote the bill. Otherwise, they would have fixed it. We saw last year how this government tried to finance their health care bill on the backs of service-connected disability veterans and they caved pretty quickly – now we know why.

    The folks who play at being veteran advocates, like those at VoteVets, have been telling us to sit down and shut up. I hope veterans remember in November.

    ADDED: Defense Secretary Gates claims that TRICARE meets the minimum requirements of the health care. I guess we can expect Shinseki’s blowjob support any minute, too.

  • Speaking of the DVA

    The Associated Press does a story on the VA’s Office of the Inspector General’s internal investigation of DVA’s claims processing;

    The internal watchdog for the Veterans Affairs Department says VA medical centers need to give compensation and pension medical exams to veterans sooner in order to expedite disability claims.

    It says some veterans wait months longer than necessary for disability claims because getting the exams takes so long.

    Oh, no shit! I. Never. Knew. That. How much money to get to that level of brilliance?

    At a facility in Roseburg, Ore., the IG found hundreds of requests for an exam tucked in file cabinets so a timeliness quota could be met. And it found claims at an outpatient clinic in Winston-Salem, N.C., were processed out of order to also help with the quota.

    How many stories of this type of incompetence and intentional malfeasance have we suffered in the last few years?

    The chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Daniel Akaka, says the VA needs to devote more resources to fixing the problem. The VA has told the inspector general it will do that.

    Oh, well, I feel much better now. Shinseki promised an improvement in veterans’ services back in January last year. He promised changes in the DVA. As recnetly as last month, he promised he’d improve the system. But you know what – just last week, Shinseki finally agreed with Congress that he needs to “prioritize reform“. Isn’t that something he should have done last year before he took office? I’m no MBA grad, but it seems to me like you can’t reform anything until the reforms are prioritized. Fucking brain dead morons.

    You know, I’m pretty sure that reforming a big bureaucratic dinosaur is a tough job that takes a long time, but after watching the media hammer the Bush Administration (who doubled the funding for veterans in the first three years in office) for every streak they found on a hospital window, where the fuck are these watchdogs now?

    I don’t envy Shinseki for the task he’s committed himself to, but shouldn’t he at least act like he’s trying to do something instead of whacking his meat for Congress every couple of months?

  • [Army Sergeant] Partisan Politics Only Screws Veterans

    Now, I’ll start off by admitting that my politics may not look like a lot of the commentators on this blog. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how: most of you know. I am an IVAW member, and if you want to see more of my more nakedly political offerings, they’re over at Active Duty Patriot. That’s not what this post is about, though I’m sure it’ll be interpreted that way by those with an axe to grind.

    What I’m here to talk about is the way that veterans are constantly being exploited by politicians and over-bureaucratic systems, promised the world when it’s election season or when they want to look good, and then as the nitty gritty grind of the year drags on, people remember that helping veterans is work, and costs money, and not just money but actual commitment. And somehow, almost to a man, they all find better things to do.

    A few years back I was almost fangirlishly squealing over Senator Jim Webb’s Post 9/11 GI Bill. I loved it then, and I love it-in concept-now. But I know too many veterans who are having to drop out of school, who are getting evicted, or who are straight up not able to afford an apartment of their own because they haven’t gotten their check. Some still haven’t gotten their check. This is happening in an Obama administration just as much as it was happening in a Bush one, and you older vets will have to tell me if it was happening just as much under a Clinton one. The VA is broken. They’ve got some good people working for it, but the VA is still broken. They’ve been hiring some of their former most outspoken critics, but I haven’t seen substantive changes, and I don’t know that anyone else has either.

    The problem is right now, there’s a severe recession going on. How severe? Severe enough that I know more than a couple vets personally, my generation of vets, still in their twenties or early thirties, who are functionally homeless, couch-surfing across the USA because they don’t have a better option. There are veterans out in the streets right now-veterans who often have no ability to make it through the severe, complicated, time-consuming process that is applying for benefits. Severe enough that veterans are coming out of the woodwork to apply for their VA benefits and disability benefits for the first time in years. Veterans who know the VA is broken, who know they’re going to be engaging in a fight that will potentially take years. But they don’t have a better option.

    60 minutes recently did a piece on the VA issues, which, while it won points from me for using the phrase ‘Delay, Deny, and Hope You Die’ in national newsmedia, honestly turned into more of a light exfoliation than the gritty expose the VA actually deserves.

    For a million veterans to be waiting for their VA benefits is wrong, wrong, wrong. The fact that it can be glossed over by anyone is just straight jacked up. And this is where the partisan shit comes in-because it is just as wrong under an Obama administration as it was under a Bush administration, but there are a lot less of certain people willing to talk about it. Just as under a Bush administration, there were a lot less of a different kind of certain people willing to talk about the problem.

    We have to stop that. If we’re ever going to get anything accomplished, if these guys aren’t going to be languishing for years while the VA fantasizes about getting its shit together, we need to be united in these issues. Forget who’s in charge, forget who may gain or lose in political capital, stand united. Because let’s face it-much as everyone may hate to talk aloud about it, we have  a lot in common. We as veterans have a lot in common. We as politicized veterans who aren’t going to take things lying down have even more in common. Whatever else we may want, whatever else our personal issues may happen to be, whether they come with an elephant or a donkey or a little Ron Paul sticker, we all served, and we all want to have our brothers-in-arms treated as well as they deserve for that service. Most of us have been in the military so long that we have an inborn distaste of taking care of ourselves: well, think of it as taking care of your buddy while your buddy takes care of you.

    We need to take on the VA-the whole bloated mess of it. Yes, Democrats, you too, even in an Obama administration. Yes, Republicans, even if they take back the Senate or the House. We need to take on the entrenched incompetence and apathy.

    People talk a lot about the old GI Bill, back in WWII. What they forget to remember is that those benefits didn’t come from nowhere. Those benefits came, in large part, because of what happened to the last veterans, the veterans of World War I. And those veterans had to march on Washington to get better treatment. Not as part of a protest march, some three hour shindig where everybody enjoys feeling good about themselves, and then goes home with their demands unmet and their needs unsatisfied. No, those veterans set up a camp and refused to leave until they got what they needed. Check out some history of the Bonus Army-it’s a fascinating read. And they weren’t divided by politics. They were of no political brand or creed. They united and said-hey, we’re starving here. We were promised these things and they didn’t materialize. There’s a Depression, and we really need the country we served to honor their promise to take care of us. Real issues faced by real veterans at the time-not pie-in-the-sky stuff. And what’s the important thing-they succeeded.

    We could learn a lot from those folks.

    “No, thank you, we don’t want food, sir; but couldn’t you take an’ write
    A sort of ‘to be continued’ and ‘see next page’ o’ the fight?
    We think that someone has blundered, an’ couldn’t you tell ’em how?
    You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now.”

    -Rudyard Kipling, Last of the Light Brigade

    I know that this doesn’t apply to all veterans. I know many veterans are making it, are successfully weathering out this economic downturn. But the thing is, there are a lot who aren’t. I’m not trying to make it sound like everyone is out on the streets. But there are a lot who are, and a lot who aren’t making it. And the more we fight with each other about what the concept of taking on the problem would mean to various political parties, the more the problem doesn’t get fixed.

  • Now, try and get them

    Last year, the Democrats passed some great benefit packages – almost ambitious you might say. We all know that they’ve been unable to deliver on the new GI Bill and thousands are still waiting on their first checks to pay off their education expenses for the last semester and the next semester looms. The Washington Times writes this morning about Vietnam veterans who are trying to get the health benefits that they are owed;

    VBA, the branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs that dispenses aid and assistance to veterans and their families, is simply overwhelmed. It reported on Monday that there are 481,751 pending claims, some of which will take more than a year to be processed.

    Among those flooding the VBA’s facilities with claims are retirement-aged Vietnam veterans and elderly World War II veterans, middle-aged Gulf War veterans, and younger Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. All of these groups are applying in larger numbers because of the weak economy, said Larry Scott, the founder of the advocacy group VAwatchdog.org.

    These things didn’t happen overnight, of course, and the blame can probably be spread out evenly over every administration since Woodrow Wilson – but it’s disingenuous for the Obama Administration to run a campaign targeting veterans with a promise of better administration of their health care and then a year later, nothing has changed except the depth of the incompetence.

    And the VA dodges reporters;

    Efforts to speak with someone at the VA about these matters on the record were not fruitful. The only person the VA would make available was a high-level technology officer at the VA, and that interview was canceled twice at the last minute.

    Probably because, like everything else this administration has failed at accomplishing, they realize that it’s a lot easier to campaign for something than actually accompishing something.