{"id":84979,"date":"2019-02-13T08:32:07","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T12:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=84979"},"modified":"2022-01-13T20:32:28","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T01:32:28","slug":"he-has-a-purple-heart-but-the-va-wouldnt-call-him-a-veteran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=84979","title":{"rendered":"He Has a Purple Heart, but the VA Wouldn\u2019t Call Him a Veteran\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Because he left the service with \u2018bad paper,\u2019 Alejandro Garcia was denied benefits for almost nine years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I should let people know this article was by:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ms. Goldberg is a supervising staff attorney at Swords to Plowshares, a veterans rights organization in San Francisco, and a lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If people who do not complete their tour of service honorably get the same benefits that those who do … then there is no honor in military service.<\/p>\n

Some 7,000 service members enter this administrative black hole each year. I\u2019ve represented many of them, including Alejandro Garcia. He enlisted in the Marines in the wake of 9\/11 and later headed to Baghdad as a rifleman. Hit by shrapnel during his first tour, he was medivacked for emergency care. At his insistence he returned to the front lines soon after. He received a Purple Heart for his wounds. But his story was far from over: During Mr. Garcia\u2019s second and third tours, improvised explosive devices killed four of his friends and his commanding officer and hit his Humvee nearly a dozen times.<\/p>\n

As these traumas accumulated, Mr. Garcia developed symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Constantly anxious, he had chronic insomnia and nightmares about being shot. He got into minor altercations with fellow Marines. He did what he could to keep serving\u2014marijuana helped him sleep, and alcohol helped him forget. The Marines, however, overlooked the PTSD at the root of his behavior and discharged him with \u201cbad paper.\u201d Under federal law, this meant Mr. Garcia\u2019s veteran status was in doubt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I doubt his “PTSD” was overlooked.\u00a0 The Corps just doesn’t accept it for an excuse to be a shit bird.\u00a0 Smoking pot\u00a0and being a drunk are not acceptable in the military.\u00a0 Ms Goldberg seems to think PTSD is a valid excuse for being UA, smoking dope and being a drunk.<\/p>\n

There are consequences for actions, not having all the benefits those who served and were discharged honorably get is part of it.<\/p>\n

Shouldn\u2019t his years of service have been enough? Not according to the VA. In reviewing veteran status, the VA starts by looking at discharge characterizations. It presumes those with honorable or general discharges are veterans. In contrast, those with bad paper\u2014other-than-honorable or bad-conduct discharges\u2014have the burden of proving their veteran status and of waiting years without much-needed benefits while the VA decides.<\/p>\n

Service members who receive bad paper should not necessarily be deprived of benefits. While some are discharged for serious offenses, many are not. Thousands receive bad paper because behaviors symptomatic of PTSD from combat or sexual assault are interpreted as misconduct. These service members deserve support, not punishment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ms Goldberg doesn’t seem to understand that a diagnosis of PTSD is given to people who were never anywhere near combat and were not sexually assaulted.\u00a0 Shitbirds make all kinds of claims and I\u00a0doubt many of the claims her client made about his service.<\/p>\n

It was a bureaucratic nightmare. The VA repeatedly ignored evidence, including the opinion of one of its own psychologists. Mr. Garcia waited three years and four months just to be denied veteran status without explanation. The dysfunction continued during his appeal, but on Oct. 26, 2018, eight years and nine months after Mr. Garcia first applied, a VA adjudicator granted him recognition as a veteran.<\/p>\n

Calling Mr. Garcia lucky should be laughable. But compared with the majority of former service members with bad paper, he is. The VA denies these veterans status roughly 85% of the time. On appeal, the VA denies eligibility to three-quarters of former service members with bad paper who participated in combat and have PTSD.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lawyers are all too eager to file against the VA these days.\u00a0 They rarely do this work for free, so the VA ends up spending a bunch of money on these benefit vultures.<\/p>\n

I have no issue with people getting medical treatment for anything that actually did happen during their military service.\u00a0 I make a great objection to the VA paying back wages, paid backdated benefits and having the discharge characterization of a doper and a drunk upgraded years later.<\/p>\n

The VA should expand the categories of former service members it presumes are veterans, starting with other-than-honorable discharges. These discharges aren\u2019t serious enough to require court-martial proceedings; they don\u2019t call for serious penalties after service either. At minimum the VA needs to streamline its review process. Ignoring evidence and issuing cryptic denials should not be tolerated. Veterans already wait too long in too many lines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lines we have wait in might be a bit shorter if they were not full of shit birds and professional victims trying to get more money every month from the very system they constantly bitch about.<\/p>\n

What do we know?\u00a0 Its not like there is anyone who deployed more than once and has been diagnosed with PTSD around these parts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source: He Has a Purple Heart, but the VA Wouldn\u2019t Call Him a Veteran – WSJ<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because he left the service with \u2018bad paper,\u2019 Alejandro Garcia was denied benefits for almost nine … He Has a Purple Heart, but the VA Wouldn\u2019t Call Him a Veteran\u00a0<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":667,"featured_media":84981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,87,15,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exploitation","category-general-whackos","category-legal","category-liberals-suck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84979","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\/667"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/84981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}