This website brought to you in part by the following sponsor:
Find out how to advertise here - Email us! [email protected]
by Joe Snyder
We all assume the Veterans Administration does all it can to aid and assist wounded veterans and their families but how much more can it demand of Justin Bunce, Daniel Verbeke and Michael McMichael?
These men – a marine, sailor and a National Guardsman – went to Iraq to serve as ordered, served honorably and suffered grave injuries. When they arrived home another battle began – to find the care to make them well again. The men’s families told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee of anguished trips through bureaucratic hell between the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration.
Those agencies are noted for its paperwork and mountains of red tape, but especially treacherous for those with traumatic brain injuries, the signature affliction of our five-year war. Bunce lost an eye in a roadside bombing that also damaged his frontal lobe. His dad said his care was so "stove-piped" with nobody knowing what anyone else was doing, that doctors working on his head ignored his broken leg. Technicians nearly did an M.R.I. on his brain, not realizing – because scans had not been done – the danger from the metal in his skull. Nobody coordinated his many medications.
Time and time again his parents had to cross the country looking for the right therapies and treatment with little success. The VA relied on the brain-damaged corporal to evaluate his own mental state, and even threatened to cut off benefits because he could not manage his own affairs.
Verbeke’s injuries were catastrophic. He cannot speak or control his limbs, though he can laugh and smile. His father, Robert, tells of battling with the VA over medications, tests and plans for treatment. The bomb blasts that crushed McMichael’s vertebrae and damaged his brain did not take his life, at least not all at once. When he came home he seemed intact but it soon became clear his psyche was in shreds. His wife, Jackie, has refused to accept such a situation. It took her a year and a half on her own to assemble a support network for her husband.
Such forced self-reliance is the most difficult for such cases. It is simpler when veterans lose arms or legs but treatment for psychic injuries takes place on a landscape without maps. Quick responsive care is not easy to find. VA says "things are moving now and the Pentagon and VA are implementing more than 400 recommendations from five major studies."
At this point nobody has any idea when such adjustments or corrections can or will be made. Meanwhile, about 3,000 veterans have sustained traumatic injuries (by rough estimate, who really knows for sure) and there are untold thousands of others afflicted by post-traumatic disorder.
The public at large really has no idea what a job it is to dig inside the government, including the Veterans Administration or any other Federal agency for that matter.
The U.S. Naval Institute reported last month on the staggering immensity of paperwork that veterans must overcome to get attention or treatment. Defense Department records are on paper and often incomplete. The VA’s are electronic. Those seeking information never know for sure what might be missing – or incorrect, thanks to our big inefficient, wasteful government.