Broken System: Despite 30-year battle, federal court victory, Vietnam veteran’s disability claim remains unresolved

Posted on March 9, 2011 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2011 / All Rights Reserved)

Leroy Comer in his garden, spring 2009. (Photo by Alicia Wagner Calzada)

A federal appeals court ruled in his favor two years ago, but Leroy Comer’s decades-long fight for less than $30,000 in VA disability benefits remains mired in the bureaucracy.

Comer, who started pursuing his case in 1988 with handwritten appeals penned in homeless shelters, received a partial settlement of $13,772 in November 2010, along with a note saying that the case couldn’t move forward without information Comer says he provided to VA years ago. In addition, VA withheld some of Comer’s past-due compensation to pay an attorney who withdrew from the case nearly four years ago.

It’s hardly a surprise to the Vietnam War veteran, who has endured years in limbo. He’s frustrated that delays continue even after a federal court ruled in his favor. “I’m tired of them,” Comer says. “I don’t believe they want to make it right.”

Dion Messer, one of two attorneys who represented Comer when his case finally reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, shares his frustration. “I’m completely disappointed that his case hasn’t been resolved, despite the hard work and effort we put into this,” Messer says. “The disability-compensation system is broken. It’s really broken.”

Comer first suffered debilitating flashbacks after coming home from Vietnam in 1970, where he guarded an ammunition dump that was under frequent mortar attack. Unable to keep a job, he lived on the streets, used alcohol and drugs to numb his nightmares, and served time in prison for drug possession and robbery.

VA first diagnosed Comer with post-traumatic stress in 1988, but initially denied it was caused by his service in Vietnam. He spent more than

10 years battling to get the government to acknowledge that his illness was connected to his combat tour. He then spent most of another decade attempting to get VA to grant him a few hundred dollars in retroactive compensation for errantly denying the original PTS claim.

By the time he reached the U.S. Circuit Court in 2009, the last resort for veterans unless their cases are heard in the Supreme Court, Comer was seeking an additional five years of retroactive benefits because a VA doctor concluded in 2004 that PTS prevented him from holding a full-time job. That request failed because Comer didn’t realize he wasn’t filing the correct paperwork.

VA didn’t provide that detail, and convinced lower courts that it wasn’t required to provide such assistance.

Comer’s case caught the attention of Edward Reines and Dion Messer from the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges in February 2008 when the beleaguered veteran handwrote one last appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Reines and Messer took on his case free of charge. In a January 2009 opinion, Appeals Court Judge Haldane Robert Mayer strongly rebuked VA.

“The VA disability-compensation system is not meant to be a trap for the unwary, or a stratagem to deny compensation to a veteran who has a valid claim but who may be unaware of the various forms of compensation available to him,” Mayer wrote. VA is legally required to tell veterans about every possible benefit, and then help them do what’s necessary to receive them – including informing a veteran when he isn’t filing the right paperwork. That sort of assistance is particularly needed in cases such as Comer’s, where “a veteran is afflicted with a significant psychological disability.”

At the end of the day, the government’s interest in veterans’ cases is not winning, “but rather that justice shall be done, that all veterans so entitled receive the benefits due them,” Mayer added. He sent the case back to the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.

At the time, Comer and his attorneys were optimistic about the precedent-setting decision. They believed his case would finally be resolved, even though they expected it would take some months for it to work its way back to VA’s regional office in Waco, Texas, for a final decision. In fact, the case still drags on.

Messer left Weil, Gotshal & Manges after it closed its Texas offices in fall 2009, and the case was assigned to Mark Davis, an attorney in the firm’s Washington office. Anish Desai, who is assisting Davis, says it’s been difficult to keep the case moving. “There’s no real clear avenue to speeding things up at VA,” Desai says. “In a case where there’s supposed to be expedited treatment, they should have specific dates by which decisions are made.”

From VA’s perspective, a substantial portion of Comer’s case was addressed by the $13,000 settlement. Beyond that, VA says it’s doing what’s necessary to accurately evaluate his case. “The responsibilities of the highly skilled staff members who process appeals at VA regional offices and the Board of Veterans Appeals include carefully evaluating the credibility, weight and probative value of the often extensive evidence that is submitted in support of appeals,” VA said in an e-mail response to questions about Comer’s lingering claim.

VA also said the $13,772 covers what Comer is owed for his retroactive claim, except for $3,443 in fees it withheld to pay a California attorney who represented Comer on his first appeal to the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. The attorney withdrew from Comer’s case after that appeal failed in 2007. The attorney’s firm, the Veterans Law Group, says it will return any payment from VA related to Comer’s case, in keeping with its long-standing policy to not accept fees in cases where it withdrew.

Weil continues to represent Comer pro bono, Desai says. In addition, the law firm was awarded $70,000 in attorney fees by the government for its work on the federal-circuit-court appeal. So it isn’t seeking a portion of Comer’s settlement for legal fees.

Meanwhile, VA also says it has done all it can until Comer provides “a complete history of employment, unemployment and incarceration” required to address the rest of his claim.

VA should have a clear picture of Comer’s work history, attorneys say. “The record contains document after document recording Mr. Comer’s inability to keep a job,” Messer says.

Desai agrees that Comer has provided his work history to VA before, but “it would take longer to figure out why they are asking for it than to give it to them.” That’s not as simple as it might seem, considering Comer lived on the streets for nearly 20 years after returning from Vietnam and hasn’t held a full-time job since 1975 because of his PTS.

For Comer, however, it’s just another day of fighting the bureaucracy. “I think they prolong and prolong and prolong,” he says, “until you get tired and say, ‘To hell with it.’”

This story originally appeared in the March 2011 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Photo of Leroy Comer by Alicia Wagner Calzada, http://www.aliciaphoto.com/

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Still Adrift: Congressional inaction sinks hope that ailing Vietnam Navy veterans will regain Agent Orange benefits

Posted on March 4, 2011 by
By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2010 / All Rights Reserved)

Ann Langston sent a desperate note to her senator in early June asking for help expediting her husband’s Agent Orange claim. Bruce Langston had suffered an aneurysm after long bouts with kidney failure, heart disease and diabetes. “We don’t have time for formal letters,” she wrote.

VA issued its standard response, acknowledging Langston’s claim and assuring him of its “sincere desire to decide (his) case promptly.” By the time that notice arrived in mid-July, the Vietnam veteran had been dead a month, and Ann was headed for another fight – over $600 in funeral benefits.

“I wanted to shout at the VA,” she says. “Twenty years of military service, and you didn’t stand behind him.”

This sense of heartbreak and disappointment defines the Blue Water veterans community, which lost hundreds of men to Agent Orange-inflicted diseases in 2010 and watched Congress go home without restoring the VA medical benefits the Bush administration eliminated in 2002.

“We’ve lost so many this past year,” says Denise Ross, whose husband, Robert, is fighting to stay alive while his Agent Orange claim plods through the appeals system. “And the ones remaining - their lives are taken over by the illnesses. They are losing their homes, they are dying. It’s over.”

Indeed, Ann Langston’s husband, who served on USS Takelma from June to December 1968, begged her to give up. “Before he died, he told me, ‘Honey, don’t do any more. You know the government isn’t going to do anything.’”

Final Push

One of the most devastating losses was that of Thomas J. Laliberte, president of the Veterans Association of Sailors of the Vietnam War (VASVW). Laliberte served on USS Constellation in the Gulf of Tonkin. He was healthy until he was hospitalized with multiple myeloma and kidney failure in 2006, he told The American Legion Magazine last spring. VA recognizes multiple myeloma as an Agent Orange-related disease. Yet his claim was denied, because he was a Blue Water veteran – a sailor who cannot prove that he stepped foot in Vietnam or otherwise had direct exposure to the toxic herbicide. Laliberte lost his job and his marriage after becoming ill, and by the time he died in August, he was living in a friend’s guest bedroom and getting by on state assistance. His dream was to become self-sufficient again.

“Tom’s life is a classic representation of what all of the Blue Water veterans are facing,” Ross says. “His death took the wind out of all of our sails. It ended all of our optimism.”

Laliberte, Ross and the other Blue Water veterans bet their waning optimism and energy on getting the 111th Congress to take action. The American Legion, VASVW and other veterans groups pushed legislation to restore Agent Orange benefits to anyone who served in Vietnam, whether on land, in the air or at sea.

Former House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner, D-Calif., stressed the urgency of passing the bill in a letter to his colleagues. “Congress’ original intent was to provide these veterans with benefits based on their exposure to Agent Orange and other deadly herbicides, regardless of arbitrary geographic line-drawing,” Filner wrote before losing his chairmanship when the majority shifted in the House after last fall’s elections.

The Agent Orange Act of 1991 made it clear that all Vietnam War veterans were presumed to have been exposed to the toxic herbicide, and should receive VA benefits for illnesses linked to it. There was good reason for that approach. The U.S. military sprayed 20 million gallons of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Laos to clear the dense jungle where the enemy took cover, as well as to destroy enemy crops and clear areas for U.S. firebases. The spray drifted into rivers, was carried out to sea, and mixed with the seawater that Navy ships distilled for drinking water, cooking, bathing and running the boilers. The distillation process increased the concentration of dioxin, according to a post-Vietnam study by the Royal Australian Navy. The Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academies of Science, later confirmed that finding.

The consequences of the decade-long Agent Orange spraying program began appearing in the 1970s, when veterans reported troubling skin lesions and an increase in birth defects among their children. After considerable court fights and controversy, the chemical’s manufacturers settled a class-action lawsuit with veterans. By 1990, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a greater percentage of Vietnam War sailors developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma than veterans who served with ground forces. A year later, Congress authorized Agent Orange benefits and directed the National Academy of Sciences to come up with a list of diseases connected to toxic exposure.

VA restricted the type of servicemembers who could qualify for Agent Orange coverage in the years after the 1991 legislation passed, says Jeff Davis, founder of VASVW. Then, in 2002, the Bush administration quietly implemented rules that require veterans to prove they had stepped foot in Vietnam – the “boots-on-ground” requirement – to qualify for Agent Orange benefits. Even veterans with approved claims, who were being treated for diseases like trachea cancer, were stripped of their benefits, according to the National Veterans Legal Services Program, which has represented Agent Orange-afflicted veterans since the 1970s. That included Blue Water veterans, who served in Vietnam’s territorial waters, and Blue Sky veterans, who flew combat and reconnaissance missions.

An appeals court ultimately upheld the Bush administration’s decision, even though VA had skirted the formal rule-making process. The Agent Orange Equity Act before the 111th Congress would have restored benefits for anyone with a Vietnam Service Medal or a Vietnam Campaign Medal. Buoyed by the hope that they could get at least a little help for the medical bills they were bequeathing their families, hundreds of Blue Water veterans wrote and called congressional offices. Davis and other veterans met with dozens of congressional staff on Capitol Hill.

Summer Stall

Unfortunately, the effort stalled as Congress started scrutinizing VA plans to recognize Parkinson’s disease, hairy cell leukemia and ischemic heart disease as illnesses linked to Agent Orange exposure. To the surprise of his fellow veterans, one of the leading skeptics was Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who served with the Marines in Vietnam. Webb asked that the Institute of Medicine revisit its 2007-2008 study that recommended adding the three diseases and restoring benefits for Blue Water veterans. The results won’t be released until this summer.

Webb and other members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee also grilled VA Secretary Eric Shinseki over the wisdom and cost of adding ischemic heart disease to the illness list at a hearing in September. Blue Water veterans are convinced that controversy helped kill their bill. Webb’s office defends the senator’s work as reasonable skepticism.

“Sen. Webb has spent his entire adult life, one way or another, involved in veterans law and assistance, and he takes a back seat to no one in concern for our veterans,” says Will Jenkins, Webb’s press secretary. “His concerns about Agent Orange benefits centered on maintaining the integrity of our disability-compensation system and improving the presumptive decision-making process, in order to follow the law and ensure we adequately compensate and care for all veterans whose illnesses are service-connected.”

By the time Shinseki was defending VA’s new Agent Orange presumptions, Blue Water veterans were hearing that efforts to restore their benefits were dead because the price tag was too high. In 2009, VA estimated it would cost $27 billion to restore medical and disability assistance for sailors and airmen exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, as well as for servicemembers stationed in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and a South Pacific island where leaking drums of the herbicide were stored, Davis says. He estimates that the true cost is closer to $3 billion, considering that less than half of the 229,000 Blue Water veterans are still alive to apply for benefits.

Denise Ross, whose husband served on USS Vega, sees more than money in this controversy. “I feel like people say we’re lying about the relationship between Agent Orange exposure and the war, even though we give them evidence. I feel like they say we want to be freeloaders. They don’t realize that our fathers’, husbands’ and brothers’ lives are cut short – that they lose everything – because of the illnesses.”

Brown Water Reprieve

There was some positive news for Vietnam War Navy veterans in 2010. In late September, VA agreed to review the cases of 17,000 sailors who served in Vietnam’s rivers and inland waterways – so-called Brown Water veterans – at the urging of Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii. The claims had been denied without VA obtaining relevant military records, including the deck logs of the veterans’ ships, Akaka’s office said.

Even that presents a difficult burden for veterans. “VA says it gets Brown Water Navy information from the Navy,” says Charles Yunker, adjutant of The American Legion Department of Kansas. “But no one knows who you go to in the Navy to get information and what information you need. They could at least publish the rules or tell us how to get on the Brown Water Navy list.”

Yunker served as a radarman on USS Lloyd Thomas during Vietnam. The destroyer’s missions included inserting Australian special forces near a river a few days after Christmas 1970, and some of his shipmates are suffering illnesses directly linked to Agent Orange exposure. Because of the clandestine nature of that and other missions, however, it’s difficult to produce the evidence VA requires as Legion service officers help them file claims. “I get very frustrated the way veterans are treated by the government and many politicians,” Yunker says.

In early December, VA also announced that it had processed 28,000 claims for the three new Agent Orange presumptions in six weeks, using a new system. Veterans laud VA’s efforts to improve the claims-processing system but note that the recent effort does not address the plight of Blue Water veterans, who remain unable to get benefits unless Congress passes the legislation or the Obama administration reverses the Bush administration’s rule change.

“It’s a little uncomfortable that Secretary Shinseki used the Institute of Medicine statements to back his decision to add those illnesses, yet he will not consider that the IOM also recommended that the Blue Water Navy be covered by the rules of presumptive exposure,” Ross says. “The rest of us will still be stuck in the system of trying to prove exposure to Agent Orange.”

Retrenching

Despite all of the setbacks, Blue Water veterans and their survivors aren’t surrendering. VASVW’s Davis, for one, believes that the Agent Orange Equity Act “will be back in some form or another” and that the next House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman will push the bill. “We’ve had very good bipartisan support in the House,” Davis says.

Success will require scaling back legislation, to restore benefits only to veterans who served in Vietnam’s territorial waters, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, and the Blue Sky Air Force, Davis says. Additional legislation can then be introduced to provide Agent Orange benefits for veterans exposed to Agent Orange outside the Vietnam theatre, including servicemembers who dealt with leaking drums of the toxic herbicide stored on Guam, Okinawa, Johnston Island in the South Pacific and other locations.
“I’m hopeful that people will realize their promise to leave no one behind leaves everyone behind,” Davis says of the more comprehensive bill that failed in the last Congress.

Laliberte’s daughter, Jennifer Carlstrom, and her husband joined VASVW to take up the fight in his stead. “These benefits would have been a huge help to my dad, and possibly could have afforded him the opportunity to get more help in living with his disease,” Carlstrom says. “I hope the bill can be passed so other families do not have to suffer as my dad did and our family has.”

Ann Langston will also continue to work on behalf of Blue Water veterans as she pursues her late husband’s Agent Orange claim and works to get VA to reimburse $600 of his burial expenses. That seemingly small amount is important, considering she still owes $6,000 on her husband’s funeral bill, is behind on her house payment, and is dealing with her own health concerns, including a second brain tumor in two years.

Meanwhile, Langston is being asked to prove that her husband’s diabetes, heart and kidney diseases were related to Agent Orange exposure to get help with his burial expenses. She is frustrated, but determined.

“I’m not going to give up,” Langston says. “I’ve got God. I’ve got my family. And if this means other veterans don’t have to go through what these Blue Water sailors are going through, then it’s worth it.”

This story appeared in the March 2011  issue of The American Legion Magazine. Read other stories by Ken Olsen about Vietnam veterans who are battling to regain their Agent Orange benefits including Sailors Adrift.


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Frank Buckles, last surviving U.S. World War I veteran, dies at age 110

Posted on February 28, 2011 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2011 / All Rights Reserved)

Frank Buckles, the last living U.S. World War I veteran among the 4.7 million who served– and the last survivor of that conflict’s brutal Western Front – died February 27 at his small West Virginia farmhouse. He was 110.

Frank Buckles, age 16, shortly after joining the Army in 1917

Buckles’ storied life – forged as a Missouri farm boy, Army ambulance driver, international ship’s purser and freight expediter, and World War II prison camp survivor – was harrowing, inspiring, courageous and historic. He survived the Spanish Flu pandemic, witnessed black U.S. track and field star Jesse Owens win a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and bumped into Adolf Hitler on the stairs of a German hotel during the dictator’s rise to power. He was the last of the generation of soldiers that founded The American Legion and the oldest person to ever testify before Congress.

“He’s Forrest Gump with class and IQ,” says photographer David DeJonge, referring to a 1994 fictional movie character who witnesses the 20th century’s most important events. “He’s lived half of American history. He’s the last man of 70 million combatants in the world who witnessed the Western Front (during World War I). He’s brushed elbows with some of the most significant people in history.”

Buckles was aware of his place in history. “I always knew I’d be one of the last because I was one of the youngest when I joined,” Buckles said in his interview with the New York Daily News, after he became the last surviving member of those 4.7 million.

“But I never thought I’d be the last one.”

Buckles also died disappointed that Congress failed to create a National World War I Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in honor of the millions of Americans who helped defeat Germany. He did live long enough to see a significant refurbishing of the memorial on the National Mall that pays tribute to those from the District of Columbia who gave their lives in the “war to end all wars.”

“He’s the last torch bearer from World War I,” says DeJonge, who is producing Pershing’s Last Patriot, a documentary film about Buckles. “He recognizes that The American Legion was birthed out of the veterans of World War I. And to have the nearly 5 million who served go without representation in our nation’s capitol (was) very disheartening to him.”

Frank Woodruff Buckles was born on Feb. 1, 1901, on his family’s farm near Bethany, Mo., roughly 40 miles from the birthplace of Gen. John J. Pershing – leader of U.S. forces in France in World War I. Buckles’ family moved to Oakwood, Okla., when he was 15, where he attended high school and worked in a bank.

He joined the Army in August 1917 by claiming to be 18 and, when challenged, insisted the only record of his birth was back home in the family Bible. This after the Marines and Navy each rejected the 16-year-old three times for being under-age, under-weight or flat-footed.

Buckles opted for the Ambulance Service on the advice of an old sergeant who told him it was the quickest way to get to France. He trained in ambulance operations and “trench casualty retrieval,” as he described it, at Fort Riley, Kan. Buckles sailed for Europe in December 1917 on the Carpathia, meeting several of the ship’s crew who helped rescue Titanic survivors five years earlier. His detachment replaced a unit of the 6th Marines at a military hospital near Winchester, England. After weeks of chauffeuring visiting dignitaries and driving ambulances, he asked to see the commanding officer.

“I told him, ‘I came over to go to France,’” Buckles later told filmmakers. “He said, ‘So did I, but I have to go where the government tells me to go.’” Buckles was finally assigned to escort an officer from another unit to France. He served along the Western Front for the duration of the war.

“Everybody was in mourning,” Buckles told videographer Sean Dunne in 2007. “Every officer, every man, seemed to have a black ribbon on his sleeve,” commemorating the deaths of friends, family and fellow soldiers.

Although less dangerous than the grim trench warfare of the time, driving an ambulance was risky and exhausting. Buckles was forced to grab sleep wherever he could. One night he took an unused bed in a field hospital and fell asleep talking to the man in the bed next to him, DeJonge says. When Buckles awoke, the man had died of the Spanish Flu.

Armistice Day brought a different set of worries for the 4.7 million U.S. soldiers. “They were naturally wondering, ‘What’s going to happen to us? All those men back looking for jobs,’” Buckles told Dunne. Indeed, there was no VA, no GI Bill, and no veterans home-loan program when Buckles’ generation answered the nation’s call.

Buckles remained in Europe after the war and helped transport prisoners back to Germany. He returned to the United States in 1920 and left the Army as a corporal. “When I came back, the parades were all over. Nobody gave a damn,” Buckles said.

He attended business school in Oklahoma City, worked for the post office and then landed a job in the freight office of the White Star Line in Toronto. Buckles spent most of the next 20 years working on cargo and passenger ships in South America and other foreign destinations. Along the way, he joined American Legion Merchant Marine Post 945 in Jefferson Valley, N.Y., and was a member of the Legion for nearly 80 years.

On a trip back to Germany in the 1930s, he met German military officers who told him their country was equipping itself for another war, DeJonge says. After the ship landed, Buckles warned friends and fellow riders at a German equestrian club that Hitler would bring down their nation. He later bumped into the up-and-coming dictator in a Berlin hotel.

American President Lines sent Buckles to Manila in 1940 as a freight expediter. “Unfortunately for me, my stay was extended by the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941,” Buckles later joked. But his three years in the infamous Los Banos prison camp was the most grueling experience of his life, far worse than what he experienced in World War I. “He obviously witnessed the catastrophe of the war and the wounds and the after-effects,” DeJonge says. “But when he was a prisoner of war, he was in the middle of it for 39 months.”

Starvation was the rule at Los Banos, and prisoners stopped weighing themselves when they dropped below 100 pounds. Buckles routinely gave his food to the children in the camp, and plummeted to about 75 pounds. Buckles also witnessed atrocities, including the deaths of friends and fellow prisoners. “He still had nightmares about that,” DeJonge says.

A couple of prisoners escaped in late February 1945, reached a detachment of the 11th Airborne, and warned them that the Japanese planned to execute all of the remaining prisoners because they had run out of food. The 11th Airborne parachuted in the morning of Feb. 23 as the Japanese soldiers did calisthenics in their loincloths. All 2,000 prisoners were rescued without a single loss. Buckles returned to his burning barracks to get the starched shirt, shorts and polished shoes he’d long kept ready for his liberation. The burning building collapsed moments after he left, DeJonge says.

Buckles met Audrey Mayo in California after returning from the Philippines, and the couple married in 1946. They eventually moved to Gap View Farm, near Charles Town, W.Va. Susannah Buckles Flanagan, the couple’s only child, returned to the farm to care for her father after Buckles’ wife died in 1999.

Buckles told her his war stories almost as life lessons, Flanagan said. He also “taught me the importance of knowing who you are, the importance of being independent and making up your own mind,” she told Dunne in 2007.

Buckles became something of a media celebrity in December 2009 when, as the oldest person to ever testify before Congress, he advocated giving national memorial status to the District of Columbia World War I memorial on the National Mall. That campaign was born during Buckles’ March 2008 visit to the deteriorating monument, erected by D.C. residents in 1931 to honor their World War I fallen.

“It was sad to take him up to the World War I memorial,” says Staff Sgt. Gustavo Rodriguez, who was Buckles military escort during that visit. “You go all the way down the National Mall, past the World War II Memorial, and all of a sudden you see, down in the corner, a little memorial that nobody has taken care of.”

That changed, thanks to a $2.2 million restoration project that started last fall. And it’s a fitting tribute to Buckles and all his generation represents, Rodriguez says.

“People are in awe of him and all he’s done. He’s a national treasure.”

To read more about Frank Buckles go to The American Legion Magazine’s website.

Read more about efforts to make a documentary about Frank Buckles life here.

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Pershing’s Last Patriot: Photographer pitching documentary on Frank Buckles, the last surviving American World War I veteran

Posted on February 20, 2011 by

Frank Buckles, age 16, shortly after he joined the Army

By Ken Olsen

A Michigan photographer is working to raise $150,000 to make a documentary about Frank W. Buckles, the last living American World War I veteran. The film will be narrated by Richard Thomas, who started in the television series The Waltons, says photographer and film maker David DeJonge. Thomas also played the lead role in the 1979 remake of the classic World War I movie, All Quiet on the Western Front. Buckles is believed to be the last survivor of the Western Front.

DeJonge became acquainted with Buckles more than four years ago as part of his effort to photograph the last American World War I veterans. He has since gathered hundreds of hours of footage of Buckles, ranging from on-camera interviews to Buckles’ visit to Gen. John J. Pershing’s home in Mississippi. Pershing led U.S. troops in France in World War I. Buckles met the famous general after the war.

Buckles joined the Army at age 16 and went to France as an ambulance driver. After leaving the Army, he spent about 20 years working in international shipping, learning five languages along the way. Buckles also endured more than three years in a Japanese prison camp during World War II.

DeJonge knew Buckles’ story was ideal for a documentary soon after meeting him. The film maker was struck by Buckles’ story telling ability, his wit and his intellect.

“This man has lived half of American history,” DeJonge says. “He has this ability to transport anyone, anywhere to a time 100 years ago.”

DeJonge launched the kickstarter.com campaign on the eve of Buckles’ 110th birthday, which was Feb. 1. More than 60 people have pledged a total of about $7,700. The deadline for raising money is April 1.

For more information about the film go to Pershing’s Last Patriot.   For more information on the fund raising effort, go to kickstarter.com .

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Book recounts ‘Mother of Normandy’ — Little known French woman corresponded with families of Americans who perished during D-Day Invasion

Posted on January 26, 2011 by

The editor of The American Legion Magazine will return to his hometown of Clarkston Saturday, Jan. 29, to sign books and discuss the documentary film about a French woman who dedicated her life to the memory of Allied soldiers who participated in the D-Day invasion in June of 1944.

Jeff Stoffer, a graduate of Clarkston High School and the University of Idaho, will be joined by American Legion National Adjutant Daniel S. Wheeler and special guests from France and New York. The event will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Quality Inn, 700 Port Drive in Clarkston. It is free and open to the public.

Stoffer wrote a coffee-table book and the script for “Mother of Normandy: The Story of Simone Renaud,” which had its debut at the GI Film Festival in Washington, D.C., last May.  The book and film chronicle the life of a little-known French woman who survived the earliest hours of D-Day and spent more than 40 years corresponding with families of fallen U.S. troops, as well as veterans.  She also helped establish an annual D-Day anniversary commemoration draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to Normandy each year.

Maurice Renaud, the son of Simone Renaud, who was a toddler on June 6, 1944, will also attend. Maurice Renaud is now a retired businessman who has coordinated return visits to Normandy by U.S. veterans every year for all of his adult life.  The battle at Ste. Mere-Eglise, where Renaud’s father was mayor, was depicted in the 1962 blockbuster Hollywood movie, The Longest Day.

In addition, Cathy Soref of Locust Valley, N.Y., will participate in the event. Soref will represent Operation Democracy, which gave birth to the Sister Cities program, pairing U.S. communities with war-torn counterparts in Europe after World War II.

Also scheduled to attend is Ken Olsen, a former reporter for newspapers in Moscow and Spokane, who wrote Lasting Valor, the 1997 biography of Medal of Honor recipient Vernon Baker of northern Idaho, who died in 2010. Lasting Valor was the basis of the 2006 NBC documentary by the same name. Olsen, who now lives in Portland, is a frequent contributor to The American Legion Magazine.

Stoffer has been with the 2.4-million circulation American Legion Magazine since December 2000, for the last four years as its editor and director, managing a variety of print and electronic media programs for the nation’s largest veterans service organization.

Books and DVDs will be available for signing by the author. Copies may be reserved at And Books Too!, 918 6th Street in Clarkston. The event is co-sponsored by American Legion Post 246 and VFW Post 1443 and Auxiliary, both in Clarkston.

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Returning veterans frustrated by high unemployment, hollow slogans, difficult access to federal jobs

Posted on November 29, 2010 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved)

Ron Conley approached VA representatives about an employment fair scheduled in Pittsburgh in November and asked if they would be taking applications for VA jobs at the event. The answer was a perplexing “no.”

“They told me that would be an injustice to veterans because they don’t have their completed applications with them,” says Conley, a past national commander of The American Legion and manager of the Allegheny County, Pa., Veterans Affairs Office. “They want to sit there and preach how good veterans are for employers, but they don’t want to take applications from veterans.”

This sort of hurdle is common for returning servicemembers, who find great frustration in their searches for government jobs despite a veterans-preference hiring law dating to the mid-1940s, a slew of “hire vets” slogans, and promises from politicians and agency chiefs. A government hiring guide acknowledges the complexity of a federal job search, then blames the problem on fairness rules. The Obama administration has even convened a task force to try to revamp the process.

Meanwhile, more than 21 percent of veterans ages 18 to 24 were unemployed in 2009, outpacing the civilian jobless rate. The official statistics likely underestimate the problem, because a large number of returning servicemembers don’t file for unemployment but stay with family or friends and live off their savings while they search for work.

“I think it’s far worse than folks see,” says Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran Tim Embree, a Legionnaire and a legislative associate with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). “And I think with this wave of veterans coming home from Iraq – and potentially from a drawdown in Afghanistan – the problem is going to be worse than anyone can imagine.”

Urban Myth

Veterans are surprised at how difficult it is to land a job once they leave the military. Tom Tarantino and his fellow soldiers talked optimistically about the opportunities that awaited them once they finished their tour with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. That vaporized when Tarantino left the Army a year later.

“It’s an urban myth that if you have been in the military, it’s really easy to get a job,” says Tarantino, also a Legionnaire and a senior legislative associate for IAVA. “I spent a very painful 10 months looking for work. Usually, I would get to the offer stage, and they would go with someone who had no military experience but had a master’s degree, or had been in the company a long time.”

He realized he was in trouble when a prospective employer, who was looking for a small-factory manager, cautioned him that he would have to oversee 30 people. Tarantino commanded 50 soldiers in combat as a platoon leader and 400 soldiers as acting company commander.

“At first I thought it was funny,” Tarantino says. “Then I realized I was in trouble. I had been sitting there talking to the guy for 20 minutes – going over my résumé, explaining what I had done. It was like teaching French to a guy from Mars.”

The federal government, on the other hand, is compelled by law to offer veterans an easier path to post-military employment. The government has more than 400 occupational specialties, the most of any U.S. employer. And VA is one of the largest veteran employers.

“Veterans prefer to stay with the government,” says Joe Sharpe, director of The American Legion’s Economic Division. “The jobs are often similar to what they had in the military. The benefits are good, the work is stable, and they feel that is a better fit for their family.” After nine years of fighting two wars and serving numerous combat deployments, military families need such stability, Sharpe says.

Returning servicemembers, however, are discouraged by a byzantine federal-application process, and never reach the interview stage. One of the most formidable hurdles, they say, is the website USAJobs.gov, the mandatory entry point for seeking federal work. The job descriptions posted there are voluminous. A maintenance mechanic’s job at the Pentagon fills six pages. The computerized application itself is long and complex. Veterans also have to fill out other forms and supply additional documentation to claim a veterans-preference status that they suspect is overlooked or ignored.

“It’s needless and bureaucratic,” Tarantino says. “You had to have eight hours to spend filling out an application. And you knew you wouldn’t get a call back.”

Barry Searle, a retired Army colonel and infantry combat veteran with a master’s degree and a decade of experience as a pharmaceutical sales and marketing director, applied for more than 70 positions through USAJobs.gov between 2007 and 2009. He couldn’t even land an interview for front-desk security guard at an Army maintenance facility, says Searle, director of the Legion’s National Security & Foreign Relations Division.

It’s a jarring welcome home for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who have a higher unemployment rate than any other veteran group. “A lot of these men and women come back and see this process and think it’s insane,” says Embree, who served with the Marines in Iraq. “And they are right.”

Once Burned

The federal hiring gauntlet is equally depressing for veterans who left the service before 9/11. Allen Dinning was medically discharged from the Air Force because of a knee problem in 1986. The disabled veteran became a respiratory therapist 14 years ago, after trying his hand at other careers.

“My dream job would be to work at VA with my fellow veterans,” Dinning says. He applied at a Pennsylvania VA hospital four years ago. Although Dinning had a decade of experience, VA passed him over but hired four co-workers from the hospital where he worked. None had served in the military. A VA human-resources recruiter told him there is no veterans preference for health-care workers, he says.

Now 47 and unemployed, Dinning has applied for six different VA positions, including clerical jobs, “just to get my foot in the door. I’m at the point where I’m going to apply for housekeeping.”

Kent Weaver left the Navy in 1995 after a 10-year career, to spend more time with his only child. He put on a suit and tie and visited the state employment office in Columbia, S.C., expecting to get help with his résumé and leads on good jobs. Instead, the employment representative told him he didn’t qualify for any veterans programs, handed him a business card for the West Columbia Police Department and told him to go be a cop. He received a similar brush off from the local VA.

“Being in the Navy didn’t mean anything,” Weaver says. “I was so mad I threw the card away and swore I would never go into a government office looking for help again.”

Weaver delivered windshields for $7 an hour, then worked as a corrections officer, a landscaper and a beverage-truck driver. He shattered his elbow working in a lumberyard four years ago and has been unemployed since. Weaver and his wife moved home to Pennsylvania, where he ventured back into a state employment office in desperation. The veterans representative he’s dealing with now is going out of his way to help, Weaver says. It’s help he could have used 15 years ago.

“I could have gone to work for the federal government when I got out if I hadn’t been lied to by the South Carolina Job Service representative that day,” Weaver says.

Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are running into similar obstacles with USAJobs. “It’s like, ‘I’m over here fighting for you and you send me to a website that’s going to take me forever to figure out?’” Weaver says.

The online application process is only part of the problem. There’s confusion as to whether applicants have to include “Key Skills Assessments” – a written summary of their knowledge, skills and abilities. Weaver, who recently used USAJobs to apply for a job, received a tip from VA that he needed to include that information. “But there was nothing on USAJobs that told me I had to do that.”

It also takes six to eight months for the federal government to hire someone after it receives an application. By that time, “most veterans have taken another job,” Sharpe says.

Veterans who have had mental-health counseling are deterred by security clearance requirements for federal positions in the Department of Defense, says Rachel Natelson, a volunteer legal adviser with the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN).

“One issue that arises: ‘Have you ever sought mental-health counseling?’” Natelson says. Rule changes in recent years mean servicemembers who have received counseling because of combat trauma don’t have to report it. However, those who received counseling because of sexual harassment or sexual assault do have to report assistance they received.

“A lot of women are so afraid of the consequences of having counseling they don’t seek counseling or they don’t bother applying for federal jobs,” Natelson says. “And this doesn’t apply exclusively to women veterans.”

SWAN supports efforts to persuade DoD to stop requiring veterans to disclose counseling for sexual assault or sexual harassment. Meanwhile, women veterans there are floundering in the job market because VA counseling and treatment that would help them re-integrate is often difficult to obtain or geared for male veterans, Natelson says.

“Unemployment among veterans hasn’t been tied to the economic downturn alone. It’s tied to larger social issues, things like benefits and counseling,” Natelson says. “This will be a bigger and bigger problem as more and more veterans come back.”

All the hurdles don’t make for a better federal work force. A study released in August by the Partnership for Public Service and a private human-resources consulting company found that the federal government is doing a poor job of evaluating job applicants. The study singled out factors such as flawed computer systems that stymie a federal agency’s ability to evaluate applicants. Other factors included poor coordination among hiring managers, human resource offices, agency chiefs and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Wired to Serve

The unemployment issue has captured the attention of Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We’ve got over a million who are returning from these wars and whose American dream hasn’t changed a bit,” Mullen said in a speech to the Executive Club in Chicago in August. “They are flat-out wired to contribute, flat-out wired to serve.”

The consequences of not dealing with the needs of returning servicemembers, he added, are already appearing. “We are generating homeless at a rate about four times greater than we did in Vietnam.”

There are signs the federal government is addressing the problem. Last year, President Obama directed his agency chiefs to do a better job of hiring qualified veterans, and many have responded with initiatives to remove some of the hurdles.

Assistant Labor Secretary Ray Jefferson is drawing praise for his efforts to revamp the federal hiring process. OPM, meanwhile, persuaded seven federal agencies to reserve 600 jobs for qualified veteran applicants in advance of a job and hiring fair at The American Legion’s 92nd National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this year.

Job descriptions were distributed to veterans across the country through the Department of Labor, state employment agencies and veterans service organizations such as the Legion two weeks prior to the convention, to give veterans time to apply.

Nearly 170 veterans met with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials at the convention, says Joe Arata, assistant director for national recruitment at the agency.

“We’ve greatly expanded our reach beyond what you would consider traditional veterans hiring,” Arata says. As a result, 22 percent of new applicants for Border Protection jobs are veterans. And 31 percent of new hires in fiscal 2010 are  veterans.

OPM also sent a trainer to the Legion’s convention workshops to help veterans submit polished applications for federal jobs, and has a task force working to improve USAJobs.gov. Sharpe credits the Obama administration and John Barry, director of OPM, for starting to make these strides.

“They are making good on their promise,” Sharpe says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

There’s far more than jobs at stake, Embree adds. “We’re at a crossroads,” he says. “If you get veterans back into the economy, you are going to solve a lot of the problems you are going to see down the road, such as homelessness and suicides. The time for talk is over. This administration and this Congress need to step up and show today’s veterans they have their back.”

This story appears in the December issue of The American Legion Magazine

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Family considers leaving military after enduring multiple combat deployments

Posted on October 28, 2010 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved)

Josh Buck read his daughter a bedtime story on the eve of his second deployment. He tucked her in and gave her the news. “Daddy has to go back to work tomorrow,” he said. Little Reagan leapt up and closed the bedroom door. “No,” she told her father. “You stay here.”

That moment in August 2009 illustrates the conundrum the Bucks and other families face when they weigh whether or not to stick with the multiple deployments that now define a military career, or get out and try for a more stable life, albeit in a sour economy.

“I think this deployment is harder,” says Josh’s wife, Deanna. “He is missing her 2-to-3 year. And we are at the potty-training age. So I don’t get a break.”

Josh missed his daughter learning to count to 10, speak in sentences and ride a tricycle. Moreover, the family worried Reagan wouldn’t take to her father when he came home on R&R in late March. She did, Deanna says. “She was so sad for the longest time after he left again.”

Now, even before he’s returned home from his second deployment, Josh has learned he is already scheduled for a third combat tour in August 2011. That’s if he stays in the Army. “If he goes, it means he will miss her 4-to-5 year, and she will be starting school,” Deanna says. “Do we want to one day know what it’s like to live a real life?”

The Bucks, who were high-school sweethearts, did not expect to find themselves questioning an Army career. He is a combat medic whose sister married one of the men he served with in the 82nd Airborne Division. Deanna’s brother is an Army Ranger.

Josh’s first deployment lasted 15 months. He made it home on R&R four days before Reagan was born. When his tour was finished, his daughter was already 7 months old.

“Kids change everything,” Deanna says. “It’s really, really hard for me because I get to the point I count down the days and the weeks. I feel like my life is on pause, waiting for somebody to hit play.”

Deanna is surprised to find she doesn’t get support from the places she expects it. Some other Army wives criticized her after she posted a note on Facebook about how sad she was that Josh had returned to Afghanistan. “They said they ‘hate all of these Army wives who whine – it’s only a deployment.’ That’s easy to say if your husband is stateside. I’m sorry – I love my husband a lot. I don’t want to send him off to war.”

The family’s personal security is a great concern while Josh is deployed. “I felt some real serious anxiety when he went back to Afghanistan. I have an alarm system. I have a dog. I have guns. (And) I have this horrible thing where I can’t sleep when he’s gone. When he’s home, it’s like a great weight is lifted off me.”

There’s also the grind of keeping up a house. The air conditioner broke in April, just as spring temperatures headed for the 90s. Deanna waited more than a week for a repairman to check it out, only to learn it would take another week to get the parts necessary to get it running again. Deanna loaded her 2-year-old in the car and drove 250 miles to her brother’s house in Savannah, Ga. The garage door broke the morning she planned to leave.

“Everything always goes to crap when the husband is gone,” she says.

The couple thought Josh would have at least two years at home after his current deployment ends this fall, one reason they bought a new house. If they don’t leave the Army, the Bucks not only face the prospect of spending every other year apart, but also of moving to different posts every two to three years, or even overseas. Reagan would never stay in the same school for long. If they leave the Army and sell their house to move home to Texas, they will have to repay the $8,000 first-time-homebuyer’s tax credit. They also worry about Josh’s ability to find a job, given the recession.

“I hate how everybody thinks that you can’t survive in the civilian world,” Deanna says of pressure she feels from the Army to stay. “My parents do it. Lots of people do it.”

Deanna also knows Josh feels he needs to do more for his country. “He told me if he does get out, he will always feel like he needs to be there until the war is over.”

Although she says she would never tell him to quit, if it were up to her, they would put the Army life behind them:  “Eight years is enough to sacrifice.”

Deanna Buck’s story is part of the special report “Behind the Blue Star” about how military families are faring after nine years of war. The special report, written by Ken Olsen, was  featured in the September 2010 issue of The American Legion Magazine).

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