Saldana served for three years but was placed on emergency leave when his grandmother, his heart and soul, passed away, he said.<\/p>\n
“After we buried her I didn\u2019t know how many weeks I had left and when I called they told me, \u2018You\u2019re already AWOL Mr. Saldana,\u2019 and I said I was on emergency leave. I didn\u2019t know the days passed so quick,\u201d Saldana said, adding he was gone for 86 days.<\/p>\n
The mistake he made as a young man has haunted him ever since.<\/p>\n
He was given an other than dishonorable discharge and has been denied medical assistance from the VA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So now, he claims that he is sick and he needs the VA to help him out;<\/p>\n
Saldana lost his job a few years ago after being diagnosed with a number of diseases, including cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.<\/p>\n
“They found out I had a chronic disease for my kidneys, and I also have anxiety and asthma, and they also found out I have arthritis in my back,” Saldana said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Well, he’s wearing a Vietnam Veteran cap. Saldana claims to be 57 years old, even if he joined at 16 (which I seriously doubt) that means he enlisted in 1974 – the war in Vietnam had effectively ended. The last combat troops left in August 1973. So, although he doesn’t claim to have served there, the hat implies that he’s a veteran of the war. The cutoff date for the National Defense Service Medal for the Vietnam Era was in August 1974.<\/p>\n
I don’t know how someone accidentally goes AWOL for nearly three months. Regardless, there are tons of social programs that could help Saldana which are outside the VA, his AWOL ass doesn’t need to be clogging up the VA system designed for people who don’t go AWOL. But, yeah, the VA is in the news, so let’s beat up the VA for not giving relief to this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OIF’08 sends us a link to this story about Ricardo Saldana who claims that he joined … Ricardo Saldana and the VA<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dumbass-bullshit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/61168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Ricardo](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Ricardo-Saldana-300x238.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n