Veterans Voices

Bogus Benefit: USAJOBS.gov frustrates military veterans as downsizing sends thousands into the civilian workforce

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

Before John Spanogle left the Army in the fall of 2014, he enrolled in a weeklong transition course at Fort Knox, Ky., and hired a professional résumé service to translate two and a half decades of leadership, training and distinguished service into civilian terms. A career officer with a top-secret security clearance and six combat tours that culminated in responsibility for U.S. Special Forces worldwide for the Pentagon, he had plenty to offer almost any employer, particularly the federal government.

If he could only have gotten its attention.

In the past year, Spanogle has applied for everything from entry-level work at VA to airport security supervisor for the Department of Homeland Security, through USAJOBS.gov. It has taken months to get a response from any of the federal agencies to which he applied. A simple acknowledgment of his application was rare. He landed not a single interview.

“It’s a sham,” says Spanogle, a retired lieutenant colonel with a master’s degree in business and a 60 percent disability rating. “The Army just riffed a bunch of guys. If it’s this hard for me, imagine what it’s like for the young enlisted soldiers. Can you see the hopelessness?”

Despite presidential proclamations, an overhaul of the USAJOBS website and federal agencies’ sloganeering about their desire to hire former servicemembers, veterans still find applying for a federal job arduous and – because the odds of success are so low – a waste of time.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Casey Curry, who served 26 years with the Oregon Army National Guard and has had much experience with USAJOBS.gov. Curry spent a year looking for work through USAJOBS when she got out in 2007, without success. Then she interned with the Oregon employment office in 2012 and 2013, helping other veterans trying to negotiate the federal job application process. It was as frustrating as it was fruitless.

“I don’t know of one person who got a job using that website,” says Curry, who is now outreach coordinator for the Returning Veterans Project, which helps connect veterans and families in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington to free counseling and other health services.

Roger Peterman, who helps veterans find jobs as transition assistance adviser for the Indiana National Guard, cites equally bleak numbers. “In eight years of working with USAJOBS, I only know of two people who got jobs applying through the website. And either they knew somebody or we were able to connect them with somebody in the federal agency who could pull them along.”

The problems with USAJOBS are well known. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) stopped using a contractor to administer the website in 2011, brought it in-house and made several improvements, a spokesman says.

The relaunch of what was called USAJOBS 3.0 was fraught with problems, however, and quickly became the object of ridicule on social media. Even today, the agency acknowledges that USAJOBS needs more work, including making the online application process more user-friendly.

“Veterans are not alone in expressing frustration with the federal hiring process, including USAJOBS.gov,” an agency spokesman says.

But the website is unavoidable. USAJOBS is the single gateway for a multitude of civil service jobs. That alone is an issue. “There are tens of thousands of résumés on USAJOBS,” Peterman says.

Federal statistics show just how competitive it is. Veterans initiated nearly 7.5 million applications through USAJOBS in fiscal 2015, an increase of 2.4 million compared to fiscal 2013.

Veterans also suspect that many positions are posted to comply with legal requirements by agencies that have already decided who they want to hire. And there are complaints that some job listings aren’t current.”They don’t keep it updated,” Curry says. “People are filling out applications for jobs that are already closed.”

There’s also a sense that applications go into a black hole where veterans preference isn’t considered. “There’s no accountability on the federal agency side,” Curry adds. “You don’t know if they are looking at (veterans preference) or not.”

OPM disagrees. “USAJOBS.gov is the means by which veterans can find information about many job vacancies,” an agency spokesman says. “In this context, USAJOBS.gov helps veterans use the hiring preference to which they are entitled by making them aware of job openings they might not otherwise know are available.”

But there’s evidence that some federal agencies purposefully circumvent veterans preference laws and discriminate against veteran applicants who successfully negotiate USAJOBS. The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), an arm of the Department of Energy, manipulated the qualification ratings of at least 117 veteran applicants from 2010 to 2012, according to an investigation by the Energy Department’s inspector general. That amounted to nearly half the applicants for BPA jobs.

In at least one case, a BPA administrator closed the hiring process after learning that a veteran was the most qualified applicant – and then rewrote the job description to include criteria the veteran couldn’t meet. BPA’s human resources department was ultimately blamed for the agency’s discrimination, and vowed reform after its hiring practices were exposed in 2013.

Vietnam War veteran Rick Shuart had a notably better experience with USAJOBS. While it took him a while to master the website, he learned to tailor his résumé for each job he applied for and write a cover letter to the hiring manager indicated in the job posting, he says. Shuart also became selective about the positions he pursued.

“I rarely applied for a job where there was one slot open,” he says. Still, it took him a year to find a job even though he has a master’s degree in business administration. VA even turned down his application for a file clerk’s job in Baltimore.

Today, Shuart helps fellow veterans find work as an employment development manager at Services for the UnderServed in New York City. But his organization rarely steers former servicemembers toward USAJOBS because most cannot afford the time it takes to secure federal employment. Instead, Shuart’s organization focuses on private employers with whom it has a relationship – the sorts of places it can call and encourage a hiring manager to review a veteran’s application.

Likewise, Peterman also encourages veterans to look beyond the federal government for work.

“There’s a lot of great civilian companies looking for veterans,” Peterman says. He works with an organization called Operation: Job Ready Veterans, which claims a 70 percent success rate in helping former servicemembers find work. But even then, it takes time. “You’ve got to be patient,” Peterman advises. “You’ve got to be able to sell your skills from the military. Get somebody who can help you.” Develop an elevator speech. Be willing to take an entry-level job to get a foot in the door.

In the end, Spanogle finally landed a job as vice president of a nonprofit organization where he will help former National Guardsmen find jobs. He’s looking forward to making differences for his fellow veterans. “This is everybody – not only the unemployed, but the underemployed as well,” he says.

But he won’t be looking to USAJOBS for help. “I’m done with it,” he says. “It’s a ridiculous waste of time.”

This story originally appeared in the March 2016 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bonneville Power Administration, BPA, By Ken Olsen, Operation Job Ready Vets, Returning Veterans Project, Services for the Underserved, The American Legion Magazine, USAJOBS | Leave a comment

Green River Gamble: A group of post-9/11 veterans set out to create a Legion post for a new generation — and it’s paying off

Posted on November 26, 2015 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

Critics predicted total failure.

A handful of veterans were attempting to revive an American Legion post in Green River, Wyo., that was so far gone almost no one knew it had ever existed. Tom Whitmore Post 28 never even had its own building, and its ceremonial rifles and scrambled archives were donated to a museum nearly 50 years ago. Even more challenging, this new crew planned a nonsmoking post with a family section twice as big as the bar area and a community center open to public use.

“Right up to the soft opening, we got a lot of criticism,” says Marshall Burt, a post-9/11 Marine Corps combat veteran who helped transform the run-down bingo hall into a vibrant Legion post that is buzzing with patrons on a weekday night – some shooting the breeze, some watching a ball game on TV, while a couple of kids play pool upstairs and another works on math homework downstairs. “They told us we weren’t going to be able to make it because people like to have a drink and a smoke. I’m hoping to say we proved them wrong.”

And how.

In less than 18 months, Post 28 went from 18 to 183 Legion members, purchased and renovated a defunct VFW-turned-bingo hall, and started an American Legion Auxiliary unit, a Sons of the American Legion squadron and what is now the third largest American Legion Riders chapter in Wyoming. The post is sponsoring a baseball team, working with a local Boy Scout troop, starting a Junior Shooting Sports group and supporting the high school rodeo program – a hallmark of the Department of Wyoming. As impressive: 45 percent of Post 28’s members are post-9/11 veterans.

“We average one new Legion Family member a day, whether it’s Legion, Sons or Auxiliary,” says Post Commander Tony Niemiec, who returned to his hometown of Green River after retiring from the Marine Corps.

“Nationwide, we are struggling to get younger veterans involved,” says Doug Hensala, adjutant for the Department of Wyoming. “They’ve cracked the code as to how to get them involved – Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Afghanistan and Iraq veterans – by being very family-oriented.”

Lee Bartolotta, judge advocate for Post 28, adds, “This post took it to a different level. I don’t feel like I’m a woman in The American Legion. I feel like I’m a person.”

An Original

Toll Gate American Legion Post 28 was chartered Dec. 23, 1919, and named after the iconic 6,440-foot butte on the western edge of the small railroad and mining town. That followed an early-day tradition of naming Wyoming Legion posts after rock formations, says Tom Niemiec, post adjutant and retired Navy veteran. Like his brother Tony, Tom returned to Green River after his military career.

In 1924, the post was renamed for Tom Whitmore, a Civil War veteran who enlisted in the Union Army at age 15 and came to Sweetwater County after his discharge as a second lieutenant. He worked as a liquor merchant, deputy sheriff, Sweetwater County sheriff and clerk of the district court before his death in 1923.

“Basically, he had a whole lifetime of public service,” Tony Niemiec says. “I’m a Sweetwater County deputy sheriff, so his story is kind of near and dear to my heart.”

Much of Post 28’s subsequent history is lost. There is evidence that an Auxiliary unit was started in 1926 and the post once had a female drum and bugle corps, Tom says. Rumor has it that Legion meetings were conducted at a building across from the Union Pacific Railroad depot. But Post 28 never had a home of its own. Most people who grew up here had no idea Green River ever had an American Legion presence.

Some veterans, including the Niemiec brothers, joined Post 24 in Rock Springs but didn’t participate much because the neighboring town is about 12 miles away. The handful of Legion officers who knew about Post 28 made several attempts to get it restarted. “Every time I lined someone up, it fell apart,” State Commander Tom Dean says.

Then District 1 Commander Richard Dansereau challenged Tony Niemiec to take on the project. “I was asking him why Green River didn’t have a post,” Tony says, recalling a conversation with Dansereau in which he lamented the lack of Legion presence in his hometown. “He said, ‘They do – it’s just not active. Why don’t you quit complaining and do something about it?'” Tony drafted his brother and they went to work.

Revival

Post 28 began conducting regular meetings in the Sweetwater County Library in late 2013. The members launched a rifle raffle that raised more than $30,000. With that money, a $5,000 grant from the Home Depot Foundation, $1,000 from Walmart and non-interest-bearing bond sales to members and families, they came up with a down payment for a one-story white building at 38 North Center Street in Green River.

Post 28 closed on the purchase of the building on June 2, 2014, and demolition started the next day. “We put elbows to it,” says Burt, who went directly to the run-down building after work each evening and often stayed past midnight. “We wanted a place for veterans to call home and it didn’t exist in this town.”

As volunteers tore out water-stained Sheetrock and framed new walls, Tony tracked down the post flag, original charter and other material, including the .30-40 Krag rifles the Army gave to the original post for ceremonial use. An anonymous individual gave the guns and archives to the Sweetwater County Museum in 1968, presumably when interest in the post faded. One of the rifles was sold to a collector; the museum was not eager to return the others. A lengthy battle ensued. Post 28 finally prevailed after Legion members secured a majority of the positions on the museum board and voted to return the six remaining rifles to their rightful owner.

“That was very satisfying,” Tony says.

Post 28 held its soft opening Labor Day weekend. That transformation, less than 90 days in the making, came with plenty of the unpleasant surprises endemic to old buildings. “The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘What a rat hole. I can’t believe we’re buying this building,'” says Marine Corps veteran Jere Goodrick.

“There were a lot of times I thought we were going to fail,” Tony adds. “Every time we’d repair something, we find three more things that failed. But every time we turned around, we found somebody who knew how to fix it.”

Almost always.

The day before the opening, the beer cooler failed. Tony made the six-hour round trip drive to Salt Lake City the morning of opening day to buy a replacement. He returned two hours after the festivities started, and a group of volunteers stepped up to lift the cooler over the bar and set it into place.

Smoke-free vision

From the beginning, the Green River Legionnaires knew they had to create a different kind of post if they hoped to attract younger veterans. “We didn’t want to have the same old mentality where it’s a bar,” Burt says. “We wanted it to be family-friendly, non-smoking and a warm, welcoming, friendly atmosphere.”

“You are going to attract more people by not smoking,” Tom adds. “A lot of younger veterans don’t like to expose their kids to it.”

Post 28 has received lots of positive feedback on its no-smoking approach, and attracted plenty of smoking members who are willing to step outside before lighting up.

Outside of materials for the sleek black concrete bar, everything from plumbing to painting was donated, including the section of railroad track that serves as the bar footrest. The bar offers USB charging outlets and free Wi-Fi to keep smartphone users happy, and the adjoining family area has lots of amenities for kids. That includes electronic darts and pool tables. Air hockey and an Xbox are on the way. “Post-9/11 veterans have young families, so you have to evolve the post to support their needs,” Tom says.

Post 28 also offers a pizza night and a nacho night. Members are welcome to host birthday parties and wedding celebrations here. Other events, like a pancake breakfast co-hosted by one of the local Boy Scout troops, are open to the public. “If you get people in here, some of them will become members,” Tom says.

Creating a sustainable Legion also means including post-9/11 veterans in every aspect of the post. “When you walk into a post that’s struggling, what do you see? The people who are running it have been there a long time and they won’t let go,” Tom says. “Give the younger veterans the reins and let them move The American Legion forward.”

Future Outreach

Although half of the Legion building in Green River has yet to be remodeled, everyone associated with the project radiates pride and ownership. They point to a bar stool or chair they sponsored – each comes with a brass plate honoring a loved one – or the original charter hanging on the wall that proves this is one of the original 1919 American Legion posts. Volunteer bartenders keep the place running from noon to close seven days a week. Goodrick sponsors a poker night to help raise money. Burt, director of the American Legion Riders, is planning the group’s first rally for Sept. 12. It takes all of this and more to make the mortgage and keep the lights on. But it’s worth it.

“It’s important to have an American Legion building because veterans don’t want to belong to something they can’t touch and feel,” Goodrick says. “Once this building materialized, our membership went through the roof.”

Families are actively engaged. “This is something we can do together,” says Auxiliary President Tammy Harris, whose husband, Shane, is a Marine Corps veteran and stalwart Post 28 volunteer. And the renovated building is a nice boost for a part of Green River that has struggled for years.

“It’s probably the most active place in this part of the community on a social level,” says artist and Auxiliary member Kaye Tyler, who painted “Welcome Home” in red, white and blue letters in the post entryway and put together the color scheme for the interior of the post.

As the post grows, members focus on doing more for the community. Post 28 has already distributed more than $3,000 in financial assistance to everyone from a stranded trucker to a veteran’s family who was $250 short of replacing a broken hot-water heater. It also offers two college scholarships to high school seniors who have a family member associated with the Legion.

The best part, though, is hearing the reaction of people who discover Post 28 for the first time. “People come in here every day and say, ‘I belong here,'” Tony says. “That’s the greatest accomplishment.”

This story first appeared in the August 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged By Ken Olsen, Green River, Jere Goodrick, Lee Bartolotta, Marshall Burt, The American Legion, Tom Niemiec, Tom Whitmore Post 28, Tony Niemiec, Wyo | 2 Comments

More than Names: Janie Schaut hopes her personal histories of veterans from her community will inspire similar work nationwide

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

She is known for walking the county cemeteries – Emmett, Ola, Sweet-Montour and Bramwell – on even the coldest days, kneeling at headstones, taking careful notes and sometimes talking to the departed.

She retrieves lost stories of veterans, giving families a part of a loved one they never knew.

She is Janie Dresser Schaut, a Vietnam War Army nurse who has persuaded 500 veterans to tell their stories, and the families and friends of another 1,500 deceased servicemembers to turn over letters, photos and diaries that detail what it was like to kill a first enemy soldier, miss home and worry about a brother missing in action. At more than 2,000 biographies and counting, she no longer has time for the piano and hopes to get back to the harp, but she knows there are hundreds of other Gem County, Idaho, veterans’ stories waiting.

“This is like a calling to her,” says Cindy Gorino, who came to know her father through Schaut’s work. “Everybody has come alive because of what she’s doing.”

BORN HISTORIAN

Schaut’s curiosity about veterans was sparked by childhood visits to the grave of her second cousin, Lawrence Dresser, the first man from Emmett, Idaho, to die in World War I and the namesake of American Legion Post 49. “It first kind of struck me when I was 6,” Schaut says. “I wondered where France was. I wondered how many other veterans were buried out there.”

She gave up playing cowboys and Indians, dug foxholes in the field behind her house and recruited neighborhood friends for summer war games. “We packed our lunches and went to the trenches,” Schaut says. “Mostly we threw mud and rocks at each other.” Much to the children’s disappointment, her father filled the holes after school resumed one fall because he worried a neighbor’s cow or horse would get injured.

But her father – a game warden, farmer and mill worker – gave her an appreciation for the musical side of war. “My dad would sing when I went out in his truck with him,” Schaut says. “I learned all the old World War I and World War II songs.”

Her father, known as “Babe” Dresser, also taught young Janie to use firearms. By the time she was in high school she was proficient with everything from a .45-caliber revolver to a .30-06 rifle. “I was ready to go into the Army,” she says. “After I got home from Vietnam, I never touched a gun again.”

At 16, Schaut was immersed in military history and asking for Samuel Morison’s account of the Battle of Guadalcanal for Christmas. Once she discovered the story of U.S. nurses captured when Japanese troops invaded the Philippines, she knew she’d found her calling. Understanding what they endured kept her going through the Saint Alphonsus Hospital School of Nursing in Boise, where all but 14 of 43 students washed out.

“Every time I thought about quitting, I thought of those nurses on Bataan,” she says. “I knew nothing could be as bad as what they went through.”

Every branch of the military came calling; Schaut chose the Army because it offered the best pay and sharpest dress blues. She went through basic at Fort Sam Houston in Texas and was posted to Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, where she did postgraduate work in surgical nursing. After a short stint at Fort Lewis, she pushed for an assignment to Vietnam. “I went down to Personnel and said, ‘I don’t care who you send me with. I want to go.'”

CAMP ARMPIT

The Army wasn’t ready for the 93rd Evacuation Hospital group when it arrived at a decimated patch of jungle north of Saigon in October 1965, which Schaut’s group dubbed Camp Armpit. For nearly three months they lived in tents, fought mud and monsoons, pooled their gelatinous cans of disintegrating C-rations and waited for the Army to build Quonset huts to house the hospital. The first mass casualties arrived on Christmas: 150 men from the 25th Infantry the nurses had exchanged gifts with earlier in the day. “We grew up quickly – and we sort of grew old quickly,” Schaut says. “You can’t see so many wounded guys and not think about your own mortality.”

She also gained an unflappable confidence that propelled her through a career as a surgical nurse. But her return to the United States was difficult. She was sent to DeWitt Army Hospital at Fort Belvoir, Va., where she helped treat soldiers injured by antiwar protesters in October 1967.

“It was a strange experience to be in America,” Schaut says. “I don’t resent the people who were antiwar. I just didn’t understand them.”

With some matchmaking help from their fathers, she ran into a high school classmate named Paul Schaut while home for Christmas a couple of months later. Paul was stationed in Boston after a tour with the Brown Water Navy in Vietnam, and Janie was headed to Florida when she got out of the Army. They dated “up and down the East Coast for the next two years” and married at her parents’ home in Emmett in 1969.

The couple migrated to the Seattle area, where Paul became a software engineer and Janie continued her nursing career.

HOMECOMING

About 2004, the late Jim Olson, then commander of the Emmett American Legion post, called seeking information about its World War I namesake. Schaut turned to her father to refresh the stories she’d heard about Lawrence Dresser as a child. A volunteer with the Idaho National Guard, Dresser was nicknamed “Taps” because of his ability to play the bugle more beautifully than anyone else, according to news accounts. He served along the Mexican border with Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing’s expeditionary force in 1916. Dresser then went to France in World War I and drowned in the Lille River in August 1918. His headstone in Emmett Cemetery, where he was re-interred in 1921, has an engraving of a bugle.

Olson’s call prompted Schaut to put aside a memoir she was writing about her own service in Vietnam to compile a biography of Dresser for Post 49. That led her to update the records of veterans buried in Emmett Cemetery when she moved back in 2007.

“The American Legion gave me a list of 942 veterans,” Schaut says. “I started walking all the rows of the cemetery – there’s 9,400 and some people buried there – and I knew there were many more veterans not on the list.” For the next year, she read every available Gem County obituary from 1873 forward and discovered another 350 veterans buried in Emmett alone.

Word of Schaut’s expertise got around. Soon people were stopping her at the grocery store or catching her at the museum to ask her to write about the uncle who died on Iwo Jima or the brother who was killed in Korea. Olson was an instigator, cheerleader and advocate as the number of biographies grew.

“I’ve tried to get the hometown kids,” Schaut explains. “As long as they have lived in Gem County. As long as they served on active duty.”

Schaut’s subjects include veterans from the Civil War to the post-9/11 era. There’s a circa-1900s governor of Idaho and a colonel whose Air Force career spanned propeller-driven airplanes to nuclear missiles. Glen Newell was one of the longest-held prisoners in World War II. The Hosoda brothers served with the highly decorated 442nd Infantry Regiment, one killed in Germany and the other in Italy.

Then there are Schaut’s miracle men – guys like Fred Ashley whose stories barely amount to a hard-earned page of information until a stranger or distant relative contacts her out of the blue with a trove of letters, including one Ashley wrote to reassure his mother he was fine shortly before he was killed by Nazis in Czechoslovakia. Schaut even received a footlocker of memorabilia about one veteran from an anonymous donor.

Schaut compiles a family album that tells the story of each generation’s veterans. The Grattons’ story includes 15 family members who served from World War I to the war on terrorism. The Forrester family covers seven veterans, including the father who went to World War I with the Army and then advised his sons to join the Navy and avoid the horrors of trench warfare.

The biographies average 150 pages and are sweeping in detail and depth. Often working until 2 or 3 in the morning, Schaut includes photos, a detailed history of the veteran’s military unit, maps of the major battles in which they fought, letters home and, where appropriate, a copy of the telegram from the War Department with news of the missing or dead. When Schaut gets stuck for a photo, she often heads down to a breakfast place called The Rumor Mill, where owner Eltona Henderson displays the photos of more than 700 veterans.

The result of this incredible volunteer work is more than 14,000 pages of personal histories in 74 volumes in a special collection at the Gem County Historical Museum in Emmett. Schaut’s husband keeps a digital archive of her work, scans maps and photos, and is her full-time tech guy. “I consider the computer the work of the devil,” she says. “Paul gets me out of trouble.”

Schaut’s work has been recognized by the Idaho Military Department, the mayor of Emmett, U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Shortly before Olson died, Schaut received the Esto Perpetua Award, the Idaho State Historical Society’s highest history honor – a recognition for which he nominated her. Schaut doesn’t do it for the awards, but for the veterans, she emphasizes. And she hopes her work will inspire other communities to write biographies of their veterans.

Schaut is most proud of the biography she penned about her husband’s uncle, William Kirby, a Marine aviator killed in the Battle of Savo Island in World War II. There’s also the research she compiled about Ron Rekow, a waist gunner and engineer on a B-24 who still runs a barbershop in Emmett. Rekow was troubled by a customer who convinced him that U.S. bombers had sunk a Japanese “hell ship” carrying American prisoners, including two Gem County lads. Schaut proved the customer wrong.

“I went down and told Ron, ‘You know all that guilt you’ve been carrying all these years? You didn’t sink that ship. You were never anywhere close. A submarine did.'”

Families often first discover what their loved one endured through Schaut’s work. Cindy Gorino finally learned the story of her father, who was killed in a logging accident when she was 4. Because her mother drowned six months after her father’s death, Gorino had only a few military records and a long list of questions – until Schaut showed up on her doorstep with her father’s biography.

“It’s tearful to see every place he had gone – Normandy – and this horrifying prisoner of war camp they liberated,” Gorino says. She used the information Schaut complied to apply for the medals her father earned and is having a box built to display them in her home.

Robert Sawyer first saw photos of his father, Charles, from the elder Sawyer’s service with the Flying Tigers because of the biography Schaut complied. But he speaks of a larger sense of gratitude.

“For my family, we appreciate the public acknowledgement of what my father did,” says Sawyer, who is a Vietnam War Navy veteran. “But it’s good for the community to be reminded what its sons and daughters did for Gem County, Idaho – and the rest of the country.”

This story originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged American Legion Post 49, Brown Water Navy, Janie Schaut, Jim Olson, Ken Olsen, Lawrence Dresser, Paul Schaut, The American Legion Magazine, Vietnam War | Leave a comment

Vietnam’s Senior Class: Often forgotten, the Americans who served in country between 1950 and 1964 saw their share of death and danger

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

Just before the Army sent Jable Dean to Vietnam in 1954, it outlined a simple emergency evacuation plan: “If we have to pull out, get to the Saigon River,” Dean recalls the Pentagon briefer telling him. “And if we can’t get to you, we don’t know you.”

Dean survived his yearlong mission and became part of one of the most forgotten cadres of the U.S. military: servicemembers who were shot at, bombed, captured and killed in the decade-and-a-half prelude to the official start of the Vietnam War. Rarely are they acknowledged as combat veterans. It’s as if the words Dean heard before heading to Vietnam – “we don’t know you” – still echo.

“They were as dedicated as any soldiers involved in previous conflicts,” says author and retired soldier Ray Bows, who served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. “Not only are they the senior class, they are the unsung heroes of the Vietnam War. But their status as Vietnam veterans is totally ignored by the U.S. government.”

The U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), the Army Security Agency (ASA), the Temporary Equipment Recovery Mission and other groups – official and unofficial – served from 1950 through 1964. They supported French efforts to retake its former colony following World War II and then backed South Vietnam’s efforts to deflect the Viet Minh, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese after the French were defeated in 1954. A mix of World War II veterans, Korean War veterans and new recruits, they were prohibited from carrying their service weapons and many wore civilian clothes. Nevertheless, they gathered intelligence, trained soldiers, transported Catholic refugees out of the north, flew reconnaissance, took casualties and were sent home with orders not to talk about their time in Southeast Asia. That secrecy became a curse for many of them, part of the veil that hides their service and sacrifice.

“The thing that bothers me is none of this is out there,” says Wayne “Maddog” McCaughey, who served with MAAG in 1960. “You pick up a book on Vietnam, and it says it all started in 1965. If we had not been there, the South Vietnamese government probably wouldn’t have survived.”

ROUTINE MISSION

MAAG’s arrival in Vietnam in 1950 wasn’t necessarily remarkable. The United States had more than 40 military assistance groups stationed around the world between 1946 and 1960. “We had MAAG Laos, MAAG Ethiopia, even MAAG Finland,” Bows says. The difference was the job hazards that came with Indochina. “Of all the 44 MAAG groups around the world, the guys who got caught up in the bombings and shootings were those assigned to MAAG Vietnam.”

At least 60,000 served in Vietnam prior to 1965, the majority from 1961 to 1964, says Andrew Birtle, chief of the military operations branch at the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington. The United States was allowed to have about 340 MAAG personnel in the country in the early years under the terms of the Geneva Accords, McCaughey says. When MAAG Indochina became MAAG Vietnam in November 1955, there were 746 U.S. servicemen in country, Bows adds. That was augmented by the 350-member Temporary Equipment Recovery Mission that primarily served as clandestine reinforcements for MAAG.

All told, nearly 250 U.S. servicemembers died in enemy action in Vietnam prior to 1965, Birtle says. Most were killed in 1963 and 1964, as U.S. troop levels rose from about 16,000 to more than 23,000.

Reluctant recruit Dean had no intention of going to Vietnam when he joined the Army in 1953 to escape his job at a golf-club factory in Tennessee. He was approached by “two men with badges” while in cryptology school at Fort Gordon, Ga. They told Dean they were recruiting volunteers to go to Indochina. Dean declined; he had recently become engaged. The men insisted. “I just accepted the fact there was nothing I could do about it,” he says.

Dean went to Washington for a two-week briefing. He purchased two alligator-skin Samsonite suitcases, filled them with civilian clothes and headed out.

When he arrived in Vietnam in August 1954, Dean was sure he was in the wrong place.

“It was hot, I was sweating and it smelled terrible,” he recalls – a common recollection among MAAG veterans who arrived in Saigon to find its open sewers, rotting garbage dumps and overpowering smog. He worked rotating shifts – days, swings and then midnights – encoding and decoding messages from around the world. He lived in a hotel on the Rue Galliéni, and woke up one night in April 1955 to tracers zinging down the street as forces loyal to President Ngo Dinh Diem battled a powerful sect led by a man named Ba Cut.

Dean and a fellow American watched what became known as the Battle of Saigon unfold in the streets below their hotel over the next three days. It seemed harmless until the bullets came their direction. “We’re standing up there watching guys throw white phosphorus mortars and somebody cut down on us,” he says. “Talk about getting inside quick.”

Even so, Dean photographed the battle and came home with a set of black-and-white images nearly identical to some of the photos that appeared in Life magazine that spring. “It never crossed my mind I might get hurt,” he says. “When you are young and full of piss and vinegar, it doesn’t bother you as much as it does later on.”

TERRORIST STRIKE

Bill Pratt was more shaken by his brush with death. Communist insurgents rolled a bomb under the U.S. military bus Pratt boarded in front of the Metropole Hotel in Saigon the morning of Oct. 22, 1957. A tornado of smoke and shattered glass ripped through the heavily damaged bus. Thirteen U.S. servicemen and five civilians were injured. Eight were medevaced to Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

“I played and replayed the sights and sounds over and over in my mind,” says Pratt, who was headed to his job with the MAAG engineer branch when the bomb went off. “No one perished simply because the bus was fueled by diesel instead of gasoline, preventing a huge fire that probably would have killed all of us.”

Equally miraculous: a gasoline station next door to the hotel didn’t go up in flames.

The bus attack was accompanied by a simultaneous bombing at the U.S. military’s officers’ quarters in Cholon a mile away, which injured four Americans. Another bomb was detonated at the U.S. Information Service library elsewhere in Saigon, but the building was unoccupied.

The bombings captured a few headlines in the United States, as well as the attention of Pratt’s mother. She contacted the Red Cross to inquire about his welfare. As a result, Pratt was called before Gen. Sam Williams to explain why he wasn’t writing home. Otherwise, it’s as if the three attacks never took place.

“I fail to understand why history basically ignores the coordinated attacks in Cholon and Saigon on that day,” Pratt says. “Sadly, many of those involved in the incident cannot even be credited with service in Vietnam because their official discharge records failed to specifically state they served in Vietnam. Instead, they only receive credit for ‘foreign service.’ Somehow this seems unfair.”

Two years later, Maj. Dale R. Buis and Master Sgt. Chester M. Ovnand were killed when Viet Cong attacked the MAAG compound at Bien Hoa, 20 miles northeast of Saigon. The deaths of these two soldiers in July 1959 also received passing news coverage and faded from view. “I’m sure the U.S. government would have suppressed it if they could have,” says Bows, who chronicled the attack in his book “First on the Wall.” Williams, commander of U.S. MAAG in South Vietnam, was worried about the North Vietnamese coming across the 17th parallel, much the way the North Koreans had come across the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula

“He was far less concerned about terrorist attacks and bombings,” Bows says. “For him, two soldiers getting killed at a compound in Bien Hoa was not of great significance in regard to the overall big picture.”

PRISONER OF WAR

The first U.S. prisoner of the Vietnam War came from the MAAG ranks. But it took George Fryett decades to convince VA that he was held by the Viet Cong for more than six grueling months, during which he expected to be executed at any moment.

Fryett was in charge of classified documents at MAAG headquarters. But on Christmas Eve 1961, he headed out of Saigon on his three-speed bicycle in search of a swimming pool in Thu Duc – a leisurely outing he thought was safe. He was jumped by Viet Cong insurgents after turning down a side road he assumed led to the pool. The U.S. military searched extensively for Fryett, but the Viet Cong kept him moving, twice even taking him into Cambodia.

“It seems that every time the choppers or artillery came close, I was moved,” Fryett says.

He estimates he marched 500 miles as a prisoner with a rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back. Although his release and return home in June 1962 was widely publicized, it failed to register with some of the people he dealt with in the United States.

“When I came down with a temperature of 104, I went to the Fort MacArthur (Calif.) hospital. When the doctor asked me why I was there, I tried to tell him that it was perhaps due to my period of captivity,” Fryett says, noting that the doctor had a copy of the newspaper story about his release on his desk. The doctor instead wrote, “This man has a thinking disorder” in Fryett’s medical chart. And for years afterward, the military and VA medical systems treated Fryett as if he was indeed insane. He wasn’t officially recognized as a POW until 1985.

FOND MEMORIES Other soldiers regarded overseas duty as an adventure. McCaughey deployed to train South Vietnamese soldiers in early 1960 after persuading the Army to give him the opportunity to see another part of the world. “My expertise was fields of fire,” he says, born of shooting skills he honed on woodchucks while growing up on a farm in Connecticut.

McCaughey sustained shrapnel wounds when another soldier tripped a land mine while on field exercises near the DMZ. He was ultimately shipped to Germany – but not before seeing evidence of the North Vietnamese assassinations of village chiefs and their families loyal to the South Vietnamese government.

“It was not pleasant,” he says. “It looked like their throats were cut or they were partially beheaded.”

Like McCaughey, Lonnie Frampton campaigned for an overseas assignment. He wanted to escape the routine of KP, guard duty and other chores that marked his days stateside. He was sent to Saigon with an ASA radio installation team in 1961. He returned for a second deployment in 1967 with an aviation company that hunted enemy positions with radio direction finders. Frampton loved both tours, but is reluctant to share much about his time in Vietnam.

“I’m still in a quandary about what I can and can’t say,” he says. “The ASA wasn’t supposed to be there, of course. And because of the security clearances, we couldn’t travel to Cuba or other restricted countries for 10 years after we got out.”

Looking back as the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon approaches, Frampton has mixed feelings about how the Vietnam War ended. “From what I read, we didn’t lose a battle. We just lost the country because we pulled out,” he says. “It’s almost like we wasted all that material and sacrifice and lives for what? But if it was under the same circumstances, I’d go again.”

That sense of loyalty and no regret persists among veterans of MAAG, the ASA and other groups that served without recognition in Vietnam.

“I think it grew me up and made me accept people,” says Dean, who was a schoolteacher and principal for more than four decades after leaving the Army. “I think I’m a better person for being involved.”

This story originally appeared in the April 2015 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bill Pratt, George Fryett, Jable Dean, Ken Olsen, MAAG Vietnam, Maj. Dale R. Buis, Master Sgt. Chester M. Ovanand, Ray Bows, The American Legion Magazine, Vietnam, Vietnam prisoner of war, Vietnam veterans, Wayne McCaughey | 1 Comment

Mystery in Hot Springs: Veterans are baffled and furious as VA prepares to abandon a medical center that serves three states

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

John Renstrom used to get all his medical care at a VA hospital near his home in the southern Black Hills of South Dakota. Now he drives 120 miles round-trip for everything from PTSD treatment to a 15-minute medication checkup. And soon, he and thousands of other veterans will have to travel even farther for medical care if VA closes the Hot Springs, S.D., medical center that has served three states and two of the nation’s most impoverished Indian reservations for more than a century.

“Hot Springs VA was the best preventive care a man could receive,” says Renstrom, a Vietnam War veteran. “Now they are going to take that away from me.”

“What are we going to do with young men coming home from the wars now?” adds Richard Galeano, another Vietnam veteran and a former Hot Springs VA employee.

Cutting services in Hot Springs runs contrary to efforts to expand veterans’ care in response to the scandals at VA hospitals in Phoenix and other cities where former servicemembers wait months to have urgent medical needs addressed. “The veterans we serve will be put into longer waiting lines at the VA medical center where they will be referred,” says Patrick Russell, an Army veteran and medical technologist at the Hot Springs VA.

There are also concerns that VA manipulated patient data, overstated maintenance costs and mismanaged medical staff to make closure of the Hot Springs medical center inevitable, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in a letter submitted to the U.S. House Veterans’ Affairs Committee during an August hearing in Hot Springs.

Given these discrepancies and the resignations of the two most prominent supporters of closing Hot Springs – VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and Health Undersecretary Robert Petzel – VA should drop its Hot Springs “reconfiguration” plan, Thune added. “I believe VA should rescind its proposal and focus all of its energies on addressing the recent scandals and the pressing issue of veteran wait times.”

EXTRAORDINARY CARE

Hot Springs VA is the town’s largest employer and an important source of jobs for veterans. It started as a sanitarium in 1907. A hospital was added in 1926, and the sanitarium eventually became a domiciliary renowned for PTSD and substance-abuse treatment. Some 87 percent of Hot Springs domiciliary patients remain clean and sober after completing the program here. Hot Springs is also widely praised by veterans for its medical care.

The campus included a 250-bed hospital when Renstrom started working there in 1989. It was one-stop shopping for veterans from western South Dakota, northern Nebraska, eastern Wyoming, and the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations.

“Veterans could see their doctors, get their X-rays and get their prescriptions filled,” he says. “Everybody went the extra mile to make sure people didn’t have to come back.”

Hot Springs VA has a reputation for being especially welcoming to Native American veterans and became home to the first sweat lodge built at a VA hospital.

“It is one place I can come and feel like I’m treated the same as my non-Indian counterparts,” says Bryan Brewer, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, headquartered on nearby Pine Ridge.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

Hot Springs’ fortunes changed in 1995 when Petzel became director of the VA region that includes western South Dakota. The Fort Meade VA hospital in Sturgis and the Hot Springs medical center merged into a single administrative unit called the Black Hills Health Care System. VA cut maintenance funds for the Hot Springs campus and transferred several medical services to Fort Meade. Hot Springs lost its intensive care unit, emergency room, all surgeries, cardiac rehabilitation and preventive services such as colonoscopies. The sleep lab and pacemaker clinics are gone. The hospital no longer even has the ability to ventilate patients with acute breathing problems, Russell says.

As consequences of these cutbacks accumulated, Petzel was promoted to VA undersecretary for health in 2010, but resigned last May after a litany of patient-care scandals came to light.

Edwin Thompson -- Hot Springs, SD low res

Ed Thompson

Meanwhile, VA has been slow to fill Hot Springs job vacancies and forced some medical staff to practice at both Fort Meade and Hot Springs, effectively adding a 200-mile round-trip commute to their job descriptions, says Ed Thompson, District 2 commander for the South Dakota American Legion. Moreover, VA has passed over qualified job candidates in favor of medical staff deemed less likely to stay in Hot Springs, according to Thune.

It’s been excruciating for veterans and Hot Springs VA staff alike. “This systematic dismantling has caused undue hardship on the veterans and lowered the morale of employees who have been bearing the brunt of a greater workload,” says Russell, who is also president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1539.

Veterans and hospital employees started questioning whether VA secretly planned to close Hot Springs more than three years ago. After months of stonewalling, VA announced in December 2011 that it planned to “realign” the mission of the Hot Springs medical center and domiciliary – widely believed to be a euphemism for closing the campus. When asked to defend the proposal, “VA was unable to produce a cost-benefit analysis to justify the reconfiguration, leaving doubt as to how VA decided on its plan and raising suspicion that the change was directed by a political agenda,” Thune said.

The region was devastated.

“Veterans expressed anger, and confusion over what they felt was betrayal by a country they had once served,” says author Mary Ellen Goulet, who compiled a book of interviews with area veterans called Reveille in Hot Springs that makes the case for keeping the medical center. “Many feared for the future of the younger veterans who may not have the help of this VA when they return from the service.”

CLOUDY FUTURE

Can the Hot Springs VA – and the town it supports – be saved?

Closing the medical center runs counter to the 2004 Capital Asset Realignment for Enhanced Services (CARES) Commission recommendation that VA continue to operate a hospital, domiciliary and outpatient services here. It is also mystifying given that South Dakota is constructing a $41 million, 100-bed state veterans home in Hot Springs that relies on the local VA hospital to care for its residents. In fact, VA contributed $25.4 million to the project, which replaces a veterans home that dates to the 1880s.

But VA says the Hot Springs medical center loses money and that the domiciliary requires expensive renovations to make it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Maintenance costs on the old buildings are high, and it’s difficult to recruit medical staff to a small town in rural South Dakota. Veterans believe the latter problem is a consequence of VA failing to fill vacancies. “I’ve had nine different primary care doctors since 2009 and all of them said they would have stayed if they were offered permanent jobs,” Renstrom says.

Steven DiStasio, director of the Fort Meade and Hot Springs hospitals, is clear about his preferences: he wants to move. “I need a new building,” DiStasio says. “I would like to have it in Rapid City.”

DiStasio acknowledges that such a move will devastate the Hot Springs economy. Some of that could be offset if a private company repurposed the property, he says. When pressed to offer an example, he suggests that the Hot Springs VA is well suited to become a rental storage facility. “This building is never going to blow down, fall down, never going to get flooded,” he says of the regal sandstone block building that is on the National Historic Register.

“What are they going to store in that? Fly ash from North Dakota?” Renstrom replies.

More to the point, who will be left to store anything in a former medical center if VA pulls out of Hot Springs, population 3,800, and takes 370 federal jobs with it?

MATH PROBLEMS

VA also argues that a declining number of patients will use the Hot Springs medical center over the next 20 years. But the agency’s own projections show almost no change in the veteran population in the Hot Springs service area. The evidence suggests that VA is driving patients away by cutting staff and eliminating medical services, Thune says.

VA is also excluding veterans from the nearby reservations when it calculates future demand for Hot Springs’ services, says Thompson, a member of the Oglala tribe. There are nearly 3,600 veterans at Pine Ridge alone, many of whom may not be aware they are eligible for VA care, and another 2,000 at the Cheyenne River and Rosebud reservations. VA dismisses those numbers, saying they can’t be verified.

The agency eventually produced a cost-benefit analysis of Hot Springs that has also been questioned. VA says it would have to spend  $1.5 million to acquire land if it were to build a new domiciliary here, despite the fact that it owns ample acreage in Hot Springs, Thune says. VA also estimates it will have to spend $1.9 million to repair a maintenance building that essentially serves as a garage. And the agency lists $112,000 in expenses for a laundry building even though the agency closed the Hot Springs laundry services years ago, Thune says.

The agency’s budget also calls for spending  $10 million a year to lease domiciliary space in Rapid City – an expense easily avoided if the facility stays in Hot Springs, says Navy veteran Bob Nelson Sr., who worked at the Hot Springs VA for nearly four decades.

VA did not respond to questions about these discrepancies.

CONTRACTED CARE

VA portrays the closure of Hot Springs as an opportunity for veterans to receive care close to home even though the closest VA hospital will be Fort Meade, another 100 miles north. Instead of forcing veterans to drive even farther for care, VA will pay for veterans to see private providers or, in the case of tribal members, the Indian Health Service, DiStasio says.

VA has little to back up that plan. More than two years after it announced its plan to close Hot Springs, Fall River Health Services – the only other hospital in town – told The American Legion’s System Worth Saving Task Force that it never received a formal proposal from VA. DiStasio confirmed that during a national commander’s visit to Hot Springs in May, saying it was premature to negotiate specifics.

A future deal between VA and Fall River may not do much to alleviate waiting times for veterans. Renstrom attempted to line up a private physician after learning he had heart problems. He was told it would take a minimum of 60 days for him to get an initial appointment, and 90 days before he could see a cardiologist.

“What the hell good does it do to tell me to go see a private-sector doctor when there aren’t any around here?” he asks.

Native American veterans adamantly oppose VA’s proposal to contract with the Indian Health Service for their care, Thompson and other tribal representatives say. Tribal veterans don’t always trust Indian Health Service hospitals, which are poorly funded, often understaffed and poorly supplied with sufficient medications.

There are also concerns about VA’s track record for reimbursing non-agency hospitals and clinics for contract care. That includes “long-standing compensation issues between VA and Indian Health Service,” Thune noted.

In fact, VA’s fee-for-service proposal could jeopardize health care throughout the region. Because VA reimbursement rates are so low, “rural hospitals run the risk of losing money on every veteran they treat,” Nelson says. “Add to that the slowness of the VA to pay their bills, and these hospitals are placed at greater financial risk.”

Veterans here also prefer VA care. “These local hospitals don’t know what the veterans’ issues are,” says Virgil Hagel of Gordon, Neb., a Korean War veteran and past department commander for the Nebraska American Legion who uses the Hot Springs VA. “Veterans were promised health care. We shouldn’t have to be up there fighting for it.”

SAVE THE VA

A citizens group called Save the VA formed soon after VA announced its plans to close the Hot Springs facilities, and drafted several proposals for keeping the campus viable. They include creating a national PTSD treatment center and a work-therapy program that would operate in conjunction with private businesses. VA abruptly stopped negotiating with the group in September 2012 and moved forward with plans to close Hot Springs.

The Legion’s System Worth Saving Task Force has recommended that VA upgrade the Hot Springs medical center and keep as much care there as possible, especially considering the needs of residents of the local veterans home. And if new buildings are required, VA should consider putting them in Hot Springs instead of another community such as Rapid City.

Anything less will devastate the region,  Renstrom and other veterans say.

“I’m 65,” he says. “I own a home here. If they pull out, I’ve got nothing. Me and thousands of other veterans.”

This story originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

HOT SPRINGS VA TIMELINE

1889 A state veterans home is constructed in Hot  Springs, S.D.

1902 President Theodore Roosevelt signs legislation authorizing the Battle Mountain Sanitarium in Hot Springs, which later becomes a VA domiciliary renowned for its PTSD and substance abuse treatment programs.

1907 The sanitarium welcomes Civil War veterans as its first patients.

1926 A veterans hospital is added to what will become the Hot Springs VA Medical Center campus.

1996 VA combines the Hot Springs VA and the Fort Meade VA in Sturgis, S.D., into one administrative unit named the Black Hills Health Care System. Maintenance budget cuts begin at Hot Springs. The transfer of medical services from Hot Springs to Fort Meade begins.

LATE SUMMER 2011 Veterans and current and former Hot Springs VA employees begin questioning VA about rumored plans to close Hot Springs.

DEC. 11, 2011 VA announces plans to “realign” its Hot Springs medical center campus, widely believed to be a euphemism for closing it.

OCT. 13, 2013 South Dakota breaks ground on a $41 million project to replace older buildings at the state veterans home in Hot Springs. VA provides $25.4 million for the new facilities.

AUG. 14, 2014 Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., sends a letter to the U.S. House Veterans’ Affairs Committee with questions about whether VA manipulated data and cut programs to force the closure of Hot Springs. He also calls on VA to abandon its plans to shutter Hot Springs.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged American Legion, Black Hills Health Care System, Ed Thompson, Hot Springs VA, Ken Olsen, Mary Ellen Goulet, Reveille in Hot Springs, Sen. John Thune, Steven DiStasio, VA | 3 Comments

Betrayed: In West Los Angeles, VA is leasing property to private businesses as mentally disabled veterans languish in the streets

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

Of all of the egregious cases involving homeless veterans in Los Angeles, one stands out for attorney Mark Rosenbaum.

VA police arrested a homeless Vietnam War veteran they caught taking food from a trash bin on the West Los Angeles VA campus. Although clearly mentally disabled – the veteran had suffered a head injury after falling out of a helicopter – VA cops didn’t extend a helping hand. Instead, they gave him a citation for stealing government property. He paid the $1,000 fine by collecting aluminum cans.

At a time when veterans are dying in the nation’s streets in greater numbers than they died at war in Iraq or Afghanistan, VA is not only turning its back on mentally disabled veterans in Los Angeles but actively punishing them, homeless advocates say. It’s especially appalling considering that the West Los Angeles VA campus was built on land given to the federal government for the express purpose of housing disabled veterans.

Not only did VA stop allowing veterans to live there, it turned more than 100 acres of the property into a leasing enterprise for everything from a dog park to charter bus storage, a private school’s athletic center and a hotel chain’s laundry – not to mention the UCLA baseball stadium. And VA is fighting a federal judge’s order prohibiting such deals.

“They have treated these veterans as a nuisance to be ignored,” says Rosenbaum, who is part of a coalition suing to force VA to honor its legal obligation to house veterans at the West Los Angeles VA. “You are better off being a piece of (Marriott’s) laundry.”

VA’s antipathy toward chronically homeless veterans in West Los Angeles is especially striking given the Obama administration’s vow to end homelessness among former servicemembers by 2015. That seems impossible as long as VA denies permanent supportive housing for mentally disabled veterans in the homeless-veteran capital of the United States.

“This really isn’t a Los Angeles story, it’s a national story,” says UCLA law professor emeritus Gary Blasi, who has worked on homeless issues for 40 years. “One in every eight homeless veterans in the country lives in Los Angeles County. And Los Angeles is farthest behind any VA jurisdiction in doing what needs to be done.”

Healing acres

The problem comes down to real estate. The West Los Angeles VA is adjacent to the exclusive Brentwood and Westwood communities. “Serving the needs of veterans became subservient to the interest of homeowners and real-estate people on this side of town,” Blasi says.

No one imagined this conflict when a U.S. senator and a Los Angeles businessman donated 387 acres to the federal government in 1888 with the stipulation that the land be used to “permanently maintain a national home for disabled volunteer soldiers.” The Pacific Branch of the National Veterans Home opened later that year with about 1,000 veterans in temporary quarters. The federal government added a hospital and permanent housing. A post office, churches, theaters and a 10,000-volume library followed. Veterans tended gardens, put on plays and rode the trolley to Santa Monica beaches. By 1922, West Los Angeles was home to about 4,000 veterans. “People had lives,” Rosenbaum says, “and they healed.”

The Pacific Veterans Home eventually became part of VA, but the agency quietly stopped accepting new residents in the late 1960s or early 1970s as a swell of Vietnam War veterans appeared and upscale neighborhoods grew up around the West Los Angeles VA. The war’s unpopularity provided political cover for wealthy Westside interests to lean on the VA. “There was hostility misdirected to Vietnam veterans coming back,” Blasi says. “It certainly made it easier for people developing property around the West Los Angeles campus to apply pressure to decrease the number of veterans living there.”

Sensing opportunity when the government-downsizing Congress came to power in the mid-1990s, private developers wanted to purchase the West Los Angeles VA and build another Century City shopping center, a behemoth Los Angeles complex with nearly 900,000 square feet of retail space. West-side political forces killed that deal as well. “The only thing Brentwood people hate more than homeless people,” Blasi says, “is traffic.”

VA has since leased ground to private companies. Details are sketchy, and VA has never fully disclosed the terms of the leases or how it spends the proceeds. “There has been no public accounting of any of that revenue,” says Melissa Tyner, who runs a legal clinic for homeless female veterans for the Inner City Law Center. And VA has stymied efforts to get those details, even in court.

Indeed, VA referred all questions for this story to the Justice Department, citing ongoing litigation. And the Justice Department also declined to comment.

Skid Row

Without access to housing at the West Los Angeles VA, mentally disabled veterans have been effectively pushed to the streets. Thousands subsist on Skid Row, 50 square blocks of downtown Los Angeles where the city has tried to contain its homeless population for 40 years. It is the greatest concentration of poverty west of the Mississippi, says Adam Murray, executive director of the Inner City Law Center.

About 1,000 people sleep under a crazy quilt of tarps, blankets, cardboard and tents on Skid Row sidewalks. Some 4,000 live in shelters or other short-term housing, and another 6,000 live in single-room occupancy hotels that date back to the arrival of the Union Pacific Railroad more than a century ago, Murray says.

The police presence is intense and citations for petty infractions such as jaywalking are common, Tyner adds. Skid Row residents face the same sort of hefty fines and fees as the Vietnam veteran who was caught digging through the VA’s trash.

The closure of West Los Angeles VA housing also meant that scores of mentally disabled veterans don’t have meaningful access to VA health care, mental health counseling and other services.

“The class of individuals we represent are mentally impaired homeless veterans with serious needs whose very life is being threatened by this lack of service,” says Ron Olson, a prominent Los Angeles attorney who became involved with the case in part because of his admiration for his uncle, who fought from Iwo Jima to the Philippines then struggled to reintegrate when he returned from World War II. “Too many are self-medicating themselves to more serious illness and even death.”

And their numbers will increase given the injuries prevalent among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “The number of people coming back and becoming chronically homeless increased 640 percent from 2006 to 2012,” Blasi says. “There’s no reason to think it won’t continue to rise quite dramatically, and at a higher rate than expected, because of the rate of traumatic brain injuries and PTSD that VA and the military are finding among these vets.”

Send in the vouchers

VA has increased the number of Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) vouchers that veterans can use to rent apartments. That helps former servicemembers who are capable of finding their own housing and don’t have pressing health-care needs. But because of their injuries, it’s extremely difficult for mentally disabled veterans to negotiate the bureaucratic hurdles to get connected to VA benefits, much less apply for a HUD-VASH voucher or find permanent housing.

“Imagine living on the street, trying on a daily basis to have your basic needs met, dealing with mental health issues and trying to get services from very entrenched and backward bureaucracies,” Tyner says. “It’s impossible.”

HUD-VASH vouchers also isolate homeless Los Angeles veterans from the VA services they desperately need, Tyner says. That’s because the vouchers don’t cover the high price of an apartment near the West Los Angeles VA, where there’s a huge hospital, a polytrauma center, a domiciliary, mental health counseling, dental care and other services that were easily accessible when veterans were allowed to live on the campus. Instead, voucher-dependent veterans have to live miles from the campus and deal with the city’s complex bus system if they want to get to the West Los Angeles VA. Based on her experience working with veterans with significant mental disabilities, having to take even one bus greatly diminishes the chances a mentally disabled individual will connect to care, Tyner says.

“You might as well give them a ticket to the moon,” Rosenbaum adds.

VA does lease a few buildings on the West Los Angeles campus to nonprofit groups that provide transitional housing. The capacity is limited and veterans have to be clean and sober to qualify – which excludes the veterans most in need of help.

Proven solution

The most effective solution is to “put them in permanent supportive housing without conditions and then support their recovery,” Blasi says. People who work for VA have done much of the research that validates this approach, known as Housing First. “It has been ignored by the people in Los Angeles,” he adds.

A significant number of Los Angeles social service agencies and supportive-housing developers have embraced Housing First as a result of collaboration between United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. It’s far less expensive than leaving people to fend for themselves on the street, says Mike Alvidrez, executive director of the Skid Row Housing Trust. A 2009 Los Angeles Economic Roundtable study called “Where We Sleep” compared the cost of homelessness, from emergency-room visits to law enforcement interactions, with the price of providing housing and support services. The average homeless person costs the county nearly $3,000 a month and the sickest upwards of $100,000 a year, Alvidrez says. By contrast, it costs about $600 a month to provide these individuals supportive housing.

“It’s absurd, when we’re paying hundreds of thousands (of dollars) a year to keep people on the streets,” Alvidrez says. “It’s the worst outcome with the highest price tag.”

In short, “without housing, we’re not going to have an impact,” Tyner says.

That’s one of the reasons Bobby Shriver and other homeless advocates began pushing VA to again provide permanent housing for disabled veterans at VA’s largest campus. There’s plenty of space in its more than 100 empty buildings. “Ten years have gone by, two wars have been fought, and VA has not moved on that,” says Shriver, a former Santa Monica mayor and city councilman who is now running for the Los Angeles County Commission seat with zoning jurisdiction over West Los Angeles.

A coalition including the ACLU, Blasi, the law firms of Arnold & Porter and Munger, Tolles & Olson, the Inner City Law Center and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe filed their lawsuit on behalf of thousands of homeless veterans in June 2011. Last fall, a federal judge in California ruled that VA’s leases with the private schools and private businesses were illegal. Enterprise Rent-a-Car and Marriott have moved out. But the judge also rejected the plaintiff’s argument that VA is required to provide housing to mentally disabled veterans. Both sides appealed.

The coalition representing homeless veterans contends that VA is compelled to provide permanent supportive housing under the terms of the original deed as well as laws mandating services for disabled individuals. VA contends that it has the prerogative to lease parts of the West Los Angeles campus, given that it owns the property. UCLA joined VA in its appeal, arguing that the judge’s decision to void the leases leaves the university’s baseball program “homeless.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Henry Waxman persuaded Congress to pass legislation prohibiting sale or commercialization of the West Los Angeles VA property – a measure VA seems to ignore. They also pushed through legislation authorizing the renovation of two buildings for therapeutic housing. Only one of the renovations is funded.

There are other catches. “It is so far removed from the concept of permanent supportive housing that it won’t work with our clients,” Blasi said. “It’s restricted to therapeutic housing which is, by definition, temporary. And it comes with the assumption that you have to be clean and sober before you get a bed. If it’s not amended, it will fail.”

The solution is obvious to those who demand change. Rather than serving up halfhearted measures or tying up the case in court, VA should provide veterans the care they earned. The buildings are already in place at the West Los Angeles VA. Making them available for permanent supportive housing is a simple executive decision.

“(President) Barack Obama can make that housing happen with one phone call,” Bobby Shriver says. “You know that ad that says one phone call could save you 15 percent? Here, one phone call could save 2,000 lives.”

This story originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ACLU, Bobby Shriver, Brentwood, By Ken Olsen, Gary Blasi, Homeless veterans, HUD-VASH, Inner City Law Canter, Laurence Tribe, Mark Rosenbaum, Melissa Tyner, Mike Alvidrez, Pacific Veterans Home, Ron Olson, Skid Row, Skid Row Housing Trust, The American Legion Magazine, UCLA baseball, Vietnam veteran, West LA VA, West Los Angeles VA, Westwood | 2 Comments

Last Rites : As demand at national veterans cemeteries soars, VA scrambles to add burial space – and one community takes matters into its own hands

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

Kristie Roberts’ family was disheartened to learn that she didn’t qualify for burial in the national veterans cemetery near their home in upstate New York. It was Roberts’ wish when she first enlisted in the National Guard in 2002, and her last request when she died in August 2012.

Kristie Roberts

“She left a note when she committed suicide that said her wish was to be cremated and buried in the cemetery where her grandfather was buried,” says Roberts’ mother, Cindy. But interment at Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery or any other VA burial ground wasn’t possible, her family learned, because Roberts’ deployment orders said she’d been on training missions instead of active duty.

That was unacceptable. “Both my husband and I felt like there wasn’t anything else we could do for her,” Cindy says. “We had to fight until there were no options left.”

Tens of thousands of other veterans’ families share the Roberts’ determination to bury their loved ones in these revered national burial grounds. “A national cemetery is maintained at a very high level,” says Ami Neiberger-Miller of Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS).“It honors service and sacrifice in a way that is very beautiful for families.”

This sentiment, an aging veterans population and increasing awareness of burial benefits have VA scrambling to add cemetery space at the fastest pace since the Civil War. Demand has tripled in the past 20 years and isn’t expected to peak until 2017. VA also wants to increase the number of veterans who choose national cemeteries.

Nearly 4 million veterans from every conflict since the Revolutionary War are interred in 131 national veterans cemeteries run by VA in the United States and Puerto Rico (the Army administers Arlington National Cemetery). The agency has opened 19 new cemeteries since 1997 and is in the process of adding five more. It also offers a few burial sites in national cemeteries that are officially full when remains are removed and reinterred elsewhere. (That’s the case at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, for example, where the remains of previously unknown Korean War veterans have recently been identified and moved.)

VA is expanding existing national cemeteries, funding veterans burial sections in community cemeteries, and providing grants to states and tribes to build their own veterans cemeteries. Overall, some 90 percent of veterans should have “reasonable access to a burial option within a 75-mile radius of their home” as of this fiscal year, the agency says.

That still leaves millions of veterans and families without convenient access to national cemeteries. Eleven states with a total of 1.8 million veterans don’t have one. Six of those states – Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota – are hundreds of miles from the nearest national cemetery.

“Think of the families who don’t get to go see their loved ones,” says Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev. Titus, the ranking member of the House Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs Subcommittee. She is on a mission to change that. “A national cemetery has a higher standard and better management and oversight,” Titus says. “You shouldn’t be denied that privilege just because you happen to live west of the Mississippi.” VA has plans for an additional 18 national burial facilities over the next 10 years, she adds. Surely one or two of the national cemeteries could be in one of these six Western states.

‘WE FOUGHT FOR THIS NATION’

Under VA’s strict population criteria, at least 80,000 veterans must live within a 75-mile radius of a potential national cemetery site. By Titus’ calculations, 170,000 veterans alone live in the Las Vegas area, which is part of her southern Nevada district. But VA says that not enough live within the required radius to justify a site.

So instead of constructing a national cemetery in Nevada, VA is buying a section of burial plots for veterans in a local cemetery in Elko, Nev., 430 miles to the north. The agency also notes that all the states without national cemeteries, including Nevada, have at least one state veterans cemetery.

But a state cemetery doesn’t address the needs of many veterans and families, says Janet Snyder of Las Vegas, legislative chair of the National Society of Military Widows, and a member of American Legion Auxiliary Unit 149 and other veterans organizations.

“A state cemetery is kind of second-class,” says Snyder, who placed a memorial marker for her late husband, Tom, at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City because she felt like she didn’t have any other option. “I would have preferred a national cemetery. It seems much more prestigious and more of an honor for our military heroes.”

Although it’s a nice facility, there have been problems at the state cemetery over the years, Titus adds. “There was an example where they didn’t follow the rules, and the crews were taking the old gravestones and building patios out of them,” she says. “And one veteran who was interviewed for a little TV spot on this topic said, ‘We fought for this nation, not this state. We deserve to be in a national veterans cemetery.’ I think that says it all.”

It’s also a major undertaking for Snyder and other widows to visit Boulder City, though it’s only an hour away. Like Snyder, many of them don’t drive.

“We’ve got World War II widows whose husbands are buried at Boulder City,” says Snyder, 73, whose husband served in Vietnam during his 20-year Army career. “Last time one of them got carsick. She said, ‘I’m not sure I can do this again.’”

“If it was here in the Las Vegas area,” she adds, “I could ride my bicycle or take a bus.”

The hassles extend beyond getting to the cemetery for birthdays, the anniversary of a loved one’s death and Memorial Day. When friends and family visit Snyder, they also want to go out and place flowers or a flag at her husband’s marker. “It takes a lot out of the precious time they are here,” she says.

‘I WOULD MOVE MY LOVED ONE HOME’

Some states have given up on landing new national cemeteries and plan to tap VA’s grant program to build their own facilities. Last summer, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez announced plans to establish up to four veterans cemeteries to serve her state’s rural reaches, hundreds of miles from the national cemeteries in Santa Fe and Fort Bayard, N.M., or Fort Bliss, Texas.

The governor has asked communities to apply to host one of the new cemeteries. Under her plan, the state will recoup a large portion of the costs from VA.

Carlsbad has decided to build a veterans cemetery to national standards even if it’s not selected. The southeastern New Mexico community has been trying to get a veterans cemetery for 20 years, says Adon Rodriguez, who is spearheading the Carlsbad Veterans Cemetery project. Since the latest effort was announced three years ago, “I’ve had 10 families call me and say, ‘If we had a veterans cemetery, I would move my loved one home’” from the national cemetery in Santa Fe, he says. These aging families can no longer travel to see their loved ones’ graves.

The city has donated 4½ undeveloped acres in an existing cemetery called Sunset Gardens, and there’s the promise of additional land in the future if needed. “We have a beautiful location a quarter mile from the Pecos River, real quiet, farm fields all around it,” Rodriguez says.

The Carlsbad Veterans Cemetery project is attracting cash donations from citizens and companies, as well as pledges of free labor and material from local contractors. The Eddy County Commission has offered to pave the parking lot and driveways. A consultant is helping ensure that the cemetery is constructed to VA’s national standards. With any luck, Rodriguez says, VA will one day adopt the Carlsbad cemetery.

“We’re shooting real hard, hoping we’ll be a national cemetery,” says Rodriguez, who served six years in the National Guard in the 1950s. “If we finish this cemetery, maybe I can qualify to be buried with my fellow veterans.”

For the Roberts family, Kristie’s burial in the Saratoga national cemetery was about more than laying her to rest with her fellow veterans and honoring her service as a paramedic. She took her re-enlistment oath at her grandfather’s grave in 2010, noting how proud he was to see her in uniform just before he died on Christmas eight years earlier.

“She first enlisted at 17. She had always been patriotic, a volunteer from the get-go,” Cindy Roberts says. Both Kristie and her grandfather, Robert, an Army veteran, were members of American Legion Post 374 in Lake George, N.Y. “She was a granddaughter to make her grandpa proud.”

Bob Roberts, Kristie’s father, shovels a path to his daughter’s headstone.

Kristie’s parents started contacting public officials for help soon after she died. “I felt like it was one brick wall after another,” Cindy says. They eventually connected with TAPS, which helped them apply for a burial waiver, which can only be granted by the VA secretary. U.S. Rep. Bill Owens, D-N.Y., also worked on their behalf. Thirteen months later, they received permission to place Kristie’s ashes next to her grandfather, a kindness made possible in part because her grandmother relinquished her burial plot.

“I was pleased,” Cindy says. “She would have gone anywhere in the world they sent her without question. We should not have had to fight that hard to finally get permission for Kristie to be laid to rest in the national cemetery. No veteran’s family should.”

This story originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Ami Neiberger-Miller, Carlsbad Veterans Cemetery project, Cindy Roberts, Janet Snyder, Ken Olsen, Kristie Roberts, military suicide, national cemetery, National Society of Military Widows, Rep. Dina Titus, TAPS, The American Legion Magazine, VA | Leave a comment

‘We are not giving up on him’ — A Colorado community and The American Legion rally around the family of an Army veteran lost in last year’s historic floods

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

Gerry Boland

Before Gerry Boland went missing, he made his way to Lyons Elementary School to make sure the lights were on for people taking refuge from the floods ravaging Colorado’s Front Range last September. Then the 80-year-old retired teacher and coach braved the storm to find his wife, Cheron. He had lost sight of her after they attempted to leave Lyons in separate vehicles.

At the same time, Cheron was searching for him. She was rescued moments before the rising water engulfed her car, but Gerry vanished. A week later, his body was found a few hundred yards from the ruins of the couple’s home. “What the two of them did was so heroic,” daughter Amy Hoh says. “They went back to look for each other without thinking, ‘Will I be safe?’”

That’s the couple’s legacy: stay focused on helping someone else, to the very end.

“Mr. Boland didn’t simply pass on,” says Adam Mack, who grew up a mile from the Bolands and was one of Gerry’s sixth-grade students. “For the last 50 years, he’s been passing down his leadership skills, his sense of direction, his humor.”

The week it took to find him, marked by false sightings and futile searches, was wrenching for the family, friends and community who loved him. “Everyone mobilized,” says Holli Stetson, Gerry’s oldest daughter. “Everyone said, ‘We’ve got to find Mr. Boland.’”

It’s easy to understand why he was regarded as the sort of self-reliant individual who would find a way to ride out the deluge that dumped more than 12 inches of rain in the first two days of the storm alone. Gifted with an optimistic, can-do attitude, he was known for his love of the outdoors and leading the local Boy Scout troop on 50-mile canoe trips. “At that time, there were a couple hundred people missing,” Mack says. “I really thought he had found his way to the home of a neighbor who had no power and no phone.”

Born in Kansas, Gerry Boland was 8 when his parents divorced. His mother supported them by cooking in a café and bringing home leftovers. “He would reflect on having French onion soup for breakfast,” Stetson says. To extend the life of his shoes, he’d use discarded cardboard boxes to make insoles.

Gerry served in the Army in the early 1950s. The armistice was signed four days before he was scheduled to go to Korea, Stetson says. Using the GI Bill, he enrolled in what is now the University of Northern Colorado in the fall of 1955. Seated alphabetically, he found himself next to Cheron Cruise in all their freshman classes.

“He was very handsome,” Cheron says. “I was impressed.” The couple got to know each other over coffee at the student union. Meanwhile, Gerry started singing with the college’s show choir, the Choral Aires, which followed Bob Hope’s troop-entertainment tour through Korea and Japan in the late 1950s.

Gerry and Cheron married in August 1959 and moved to Lyons, where Gerry got a job teaching high school science and Cheron was hired to teach fourth grade. They soon purchased the house near the North St. Vrain River where they raised Holli, Amy and son Brent.

Five years into his teaching career, Gerry took over Lyons’ sixth-grade class but continued to coach high school basketball and football. Both daughters had him as their teacher, calling him “Mr. Dad.”

“He told me I had to work twice as hard because I was the teacher’s kid,” Stetson says.

Stetson especially appreciated her father’s rapport with students after she became a high school teacher and volleyball coach in nearby Longmont. “They knew he cared about them. As a teacher and a coach, I know kids need that. Not everyone gets that at home.”

Gerry’s stewardship went beyond the classroom. He started an outdoor education program called Eco-Week for his students near Rocky Mountain National Park. He was involved with several service organizations, including American Legion Post 32 in Longmont.

Busy as they were, Gerry and Cheron never missed their children’s sporting events. Gerry sat down with them after games to talk about their performances. That included asking his son how many assists he’d made during a basketball game instead of how many points he scored. “I considered that a disappointment,” Brent says. “Now I realize he wasn’t teaching basketball. He was teaching life. It’s not about you. It’s about the people around you.”

During the 52 years Gerry and Cheron lived near the river, there was never a flood warning. So Gerry was skeptical when the evacuation order came at 2:30 a.m. last Sept. 12. Cheron persuaded him to move. They headed for Stetson’s house about five miles away, taking separate vehicles with the idea that they would save both their car and pickup if the flood came. When they got to the south end of Lyons, they saw that a bridge was washed out, so they turned back toward town. But there were no streetlights, and they lost track of each other in the darkness and rain.

Cheron pulled over in a restaurant parking lot and waited for Gerry to drive by. Meanwhile, Gerry went to the elementary school, the official shelter and the place he taught for most of his 30-year career. The school still had power, so he turned on the lights, asked people if they had seen Cheron, and left to search for her.

Meanwhile, Cheron waited a few hours, then left to look for her husband. Her car stalled in rising waters as she got to the edge of town, and she called 911. A half-hour later, a wetsuit-clad rescue team used a front-end loader to get to Cheron. They put her in a life jacket and drove her to the elementary school in the muddy loader bucket. “I had a few bruises, but I made it out,” she says. “All the people up on the cliff were cheering.”

A bystander recorded the rescue with a mobile phone, and the footage made the news. Even as they watched it on TV, Cheron’s children didn’t recognize the car or realize that the woman being carried to safety was their mother until Stetson got a call reporting that she was at a shelter.

“Where my mom’s car stalled, there are signs that say, ‘In case of flash flood, climb to safety,’” Hoh says. “That scared me as a little girl. And my dad would say, ‘It’s never going to flash flood.’”

Early on, the family assumed Gerry had made it back home and was stuck there. They didn’t realize the St. Vrain had jumped its banks and plowed right through the house. A FEMA rescue team wasn’t able to get inside the house until late on Sept. 13, to discover that Gerry was not there.

The family’s fraying emotions were pummeled by false reports. They received one call saying that Gerry was on the last evacuation bus out of Lyons. The family searched every shelter in the area. The next day, a resident told them Gerry’s body had been found in his truck, also not true.

Later that weekend, a detective called to say that Gerry’s pickup had been found near a neighbor’s house, but the high, swift water made it unsafe to try to reach the vehicle. One day later, they learned that Gerry wasn’t with his truck. Cheron remained resilient. “Mom said, ‘We are not giving up on him until we hear that final sentence,’” Hoh says.

A week after the evacuation order, Gerry’s body was found a few hundred yards from his house.

More than 1,000 people attended his memorial service a few weeks later, including people who sang with him in the Choral Aires.

Ralph Bozella of The American Legion’s Department of Colorado immediately called the Boland family and offered help. “They were the first of any organizations to reach out,” Hoh says. “And they reached out in a big, big way. My mother was so touched by it.”

The way the community turned out to search for Gerry and comfort his wife and children was his final gift to his family, years in the making. “He made a huge impact on people,” Hoh says. “The love from his community came back to love us when we needed it.”

This story originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged By Ken Olsen, Gerry Boland, North St. Vrain River, The American Legion | Leave a comment

On The Edge: Doctors over prescribe opioid painkillers to young veterans, leading to addictions and accidental overdoses

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

By the time Justin Minyard discovered the video of himself stoned, drooling and unable to help his daughter unwrap her Christmas presents, he was taking enough OxyContin, oxycodone and Valium every day to deaden the pain of several terminally ill cancer patients.

“Heroin addicts call it the nod,” the former Special Forces soldier says of his demeanor in that video. “My head went back. My eyes rolled back in my head. I started drooling on myself. My daughter was asking why I wasn’t helping her, why I wasn’t listening to her.”

Seeing that video jolted Minyard out of a two-year opiate stupor. He asked a Fort Bragg pain specialist to help him get off the painkillers his primary care physician had prescribed. “I was extremely disappointed in myself,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t do that to my family again.”

There are thousands of post-9/11 veterans like Minyard – men and women whose bodies were broken by roadside bombs, bullets or jumping out of helicopters and Humvees day after day, deployment after deployment, wearing 80 pounds of body armor and battle gear. Some have traumatic brain injuries. Some have PTSD. Some have deteriorating knees, shoulders or spines. All have pain.

Overwhelmed primary care physicians have responded with ever-increasing doses of prescription opioids. There has been a 270-percent increase in VA prescriptions for four key opiates since 9/11, according to an analysis by the Center for Investigative Reporting. VA patients are twice as likely to die from accidental drug overdoses as civilians, according to a VA study published in the journal Medical Care in 2011. Yet opioid painkillers provide “only modest medical benefits in treating chronic non-cancer pain,” a separate VA study found.

In Minyard’s case, as in so many others, “the treatment regimen was as bad as the disease,” says Dr. Tony Dragovich, an Army pain specialist now in private practice in Virginia who helped get Minyard off opioids.

MULTIPLE INJURIES

A series of debilitating injuries led to Minyard’s massive painkiller habit. The first occurred when he and other members of the 3rd Infantry Regiment spent six weeks moving piles of rubble at the Pentagon following the 9/11 attacks. He then volunteered for language school, and by the time he deployed to Afghanistan in 2004 as an interrogator he was already taking aspirin, ibuprofen, Vicodin and muscle relaxants, and was being administered epidurals for his back pain. “I was only 25,” he says. “And if you looked at an MRI, I had the spine of a 60-year-old.”

The injuries mounted. Minyard fell two stories during a combat operation in Afghanistan, on top of the wear and tear that comes from riding in a helicopter – the vibration in a Black Hawk is particularly hard on the spine, Dragovich says – and running around in full combat gear. He had surgery to replace two discs after he returned from that deployment. By then he was alternating between Percocet and Vicodin and should have stayed home. But because the Army was short of soldiers fluent in Arabic, he volunteered to go to Iraq in 2007.

“Looking back, that was probably one of the worst decisions I made,” Minyard says. “It had a lot of ripple effects beyond my health. I left when my daughter was three weeks old.”

His pre-deployment physical was a quick conversation with a physician sitting behind a desk, who asked if he “needed any meds.” Minyard doesn’t blame the doctor. “Probably half of the people coming to his office every day are trying to get out of deployment,” he says. “And he has to deal with 500 guys who are in line behind me. He probably doesn’t care about Justin and his back problems.”

The op tempo in Iraq was as furious as the strain on Minyard’s body. Before his unit rolled out on missions, he gave himself injections of a super-strength anti-inflammatory called Toradol. Between them, he visited the medical tent for epidurals and additional pain medications. “That was a double-edged sword,” he says. It eased his pain while enabling him to continue harming his back.

Minyard’s pain was severe enough, however, that he went to the doctor while home on R&R. Fort Bragg physicians told him the damage to his spine was so significant that he shouldn’t return to Iraq. For him, that would have meant abandoning his platoon. “I chose my military family over my real family,” he says. “I chose the military over my personal health.”

The accumulated damage caught up to him. Minyard collapsed as he climbed out of a Humvee in August 2008. He was airlifted to Balad, where he sustained a concussion and additional back injuries after a nurse dumped him on the floor during a mortar attack, he says. Once home, surgeons at Duke University installed eight titanium rods to hold his spine in place – a procedure called an “anterior-posterior interbody fusion.”

Before doctors could operate, however, Duke had to bring in an outside team to figure out how to treat Minyard’s post-surgical pain given his high tolerance to opioids. They settled on ketamine in combination with other drugs that allowed Minyard to disengage from reality, he says. It worked. But by that time he was confined to a wheelchair and weighed 280 pounds.

For the next two years, Minyard struggled with PTSD, depression, severe cognitive challenges, the loss of his military career and anger over his injuries. He took ever larger doses of “big league opioids,” as he puts it. “No one said, ‘This is a problem.’ This was offered to me.”

Somewhere in that haze he came close to killing himself.

“To go from a very successful career as a soldier to hiding out in our guest bedroom with the shades closed for weeks at a time, taking pain pills and being ashamed … I considered taking the whole 30-day supply in one shot,” he says. “It would have been incredibly selfish on my part.” Though not unusual. Seven of his friends died in combat. Fifteen have killed themselves since coming back.

Minyard attempted to kick opioids three different times. “It was the most unpleasant, horrible, excruciating time of my life,” he says. In the middle of moving to a different home, he came across an unlabeled video, popped it in the VCR, and watched in horror as his near-comatose self couldn’t even help his daughter unwrap her Christmas presents. He asked his primary care physician at Fort Bragg to refer him to a pain specialist.

ACCIDENTAL DEATH

An untold number of other veterans don’t get the sort of help that saved Minyard. A 43-year-old retired Army veteran died four days after back surgery in the fall of 2011. The Arkansas State Crime Lab ruled the cause of death as “mixed drug intoxication” complicated by back surgery. His widow, Kimberly Stowe Green, told the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, “My husband – Ricky Green – died as a result of VA’s skyrocketing use of prescription painkillers.” Ricky’s medication list included oxycodone, hydrocodone, Valium, Ambien, Zoloft, Gabapentin and Tramadol. This despite her husband’s repeated requests that VA doctors treat the root cause of his medical problems – knee, back and ankle injuries acquired over his 23-year career as a paratrooper and military policeman – and reduce his prescription opiate painkillers, she said.

VA declined to answer questions regarding Green’s case, noting that it does not comment on specific patients. Overall, the agency says it has “worked aggressively to promote the safe and effective use of opioid therapy.” VA clinicians discuss benefits and side effects of medications with patients. Opting for opioids is “a collective decision between the veteran and their health-care team,” VA says. In addition, VA connects patients and families to “pain schools,” support groups and other resources.

VA has also adopted regulations aimed at reducing the risks of prescription painkiller use – a strategy it emphasized during that same congressional hearing. But VA hospitals and clinics are not adopting those changes, Green says. “They were repeatedly violated in my husband’s case – and he had to pay with his life.”

There are several other factors fueling the prescription painkiller epidemic, according to congressional testimony from The American Legion. Veterans can receive overlapping prescriptions from DoD, VA and TRICARE, and Medicaid or Medicare providers. Physicians often have difficulty distinguishing between TBI, PTSD and pain issues. The result is over-reliance on painkiller prescriptions. In addition, there is a significant need for prescription painkiller oversight among VA providers, the Legion says.

Meanwhile, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are at the greatest risk of addiction and accidental overdoses are the most likely to receive opioid painkillers from VA, according to a VA study published in 2012. This was particularly true if the veteran also had PTSD.

“People at the greatest risk of addiction and overdose are the people who are going to have the most distress from their pain,” Dragovich says. “If a patient comes to you with a lot of psychological distress and a lot of pain-related distress, most physicians are going to give them opioids.”

STANDARD PROCEDURE

High doses of opioids became standard protocol for pain treatment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dragovich says. When that protocol is applied to a military base with 1 million primary care visits a year, the result is a lot of opioid prescriptions. Because young soldiers build tolerance to opioids quickly, he adds, doctors escalate the doses quickly.

Severely injured servicemembers also often come out of the hospital receiving high doses of opioids for traumatic battle injuries such as the loss of an arm or leg. Then they are faced with the excruciating work of getting off opioids for good. That’s not an easy sell no matter the patient.

It took Minyard six months from his first meeting with Dragovich to agree to try the doctor’s plan for helping him kick opioids. Dragovich used a drug called Suboxone to ease Minyard’s transition off the painkillers. He also arranged for him to get a spinal-cord stimulator that uses electrical impulses to short-circuit pain messages before they reach the brain. He calls it a pacemaker for pain.

“(It) was like a lightning bolt,” Minyard says.

“I felt like this was going to be the one thing that helps turn me around.” It did. Today he’s out of his wheelchair, has lost 100 pounds and regularly bicycles.

The Army supports the use of spinal-cord stimulation, but there are few specialists to guide soldiers to such alternatives. Fort Bragg had two board-certified, fellowship-trained pain specialists while Dragovich was stationed there. As a result, it may take three or four years of other treatments before injured troops see someone with Dragovich’s expertise.

It’s also difficult to get a referral to a pain specialist in VA, says Minyard. And it’s quite difficult to receive spinal-cord stimulation at VA. “You have to fail at all other treatment plans,” he says. “Is failure an overdose? Or is failure when you are a full-blown addict?”

VA says it has expanded its alternative medicine offerings, and provided spinal cord stimulation to 36 patients from fiscal 2011 to fiscal 2013. Beyond that, its treatment includes “timely access to secondary consultations from pain medicine, behavioral health, physical medicine and rehabilitation,” VA says.

Minyard, who is 90-percent service-connected for his injuries through VA, has charted his own recovery. He took his last opioid painkiller in October 2011. At his Army retirement ceremony in March 2012, he thanked Dragovich for saving his life. He feels so passionately about staying off opioids that he has a medical directive prohibiting the use of narcotics without his consent. And if he’s unable to provide that consent, his wife has to agree to it. He tested that directive when he was struck by a truck while bicycling at Fort Bragg – an unsolved hit-and-run. But he has no second thoughts about opioids.

“I consider myself extremely lucky,” he says. “I was able to push through the maze of providers … and find the doctor who knew the secret. Many soldiers aren’t so lucky, and are left to the crushing reality of lifelong opioid dependency. Or worse.”

Group sees spinal-cord stimulation, other alternatives as better way to treat veterans’ pain.

By Ken Olsen

When veterans seek help for pain problems, their first treatment option usually involves the most potent and highly addictive opioid medications, Justin Minyard says. Alternative treatments – without any of the destructive side effects – are last on the list.

“That’s insane to me,” says the former soldier, who fought his own painkiller addiction after a series of back injuries during his military career. “Why isn’t the first step an alternative like spinal-cord stimulation? You can take it for a test drive. It’s not addictive. It’s not damaging to your body.”

Spinal-cord stimulation helped Minyard stop using opioids and manage his pain. He started Operation Shifting Gears in 2013 to help combat-injured veterans quickly access alternative treatment, find jobs and deal with other hurdles in the transition to civilian life. The all-volunteer group includes a physician who looks at veterans’ medical challenges holistically. “If you have PTSD, he looks at what’s exacerbating your symptoms,” Minyard says. “He might work with you on diet and exercise or getting enough sleep.”

Helping veterans access nonnarcotic pain treatment, find a job or deal with other problems can be a life-and-death matter, says Minyard, who has lost many colleagues to suicide.

When a veteran turns to Operation Shifting Gears for help, the organization has a plan in place to address that individual’s needs in five days, including working with other nonprofits to help veterans find jobs. Minyard values that sort of collaborative approach over building a large organization. “Because we’re small, we’re able to react very quickly,” he says. “We fill in a lot of gaps where VA provides a lot of bureaucracy.”

Funded solely by donor dollars, Operation Shifting Gears helps veterans with pain issues get spinal-cord stimulation. Once the group identifies a candidate for the therapy, Minyard works with the manufacturer of the stimulator – Boston Scientific – and surgeons near where the veteran lives to get the stimulator implanted at a dramatically reduced rate. When possible, the group helps offset some of the cost.

Operation Shifting Gears has made it possible for about a dozen veterans who were denied spinal-cord stimulation to receive the therapy. Another 30 are on the waiting list.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s served in the last 10 years who is not dealing with chronic back pain or knee pain,” Minyard says. “This issue is going to get worse – and it’s going to be with us a long time.”

These stories originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Justin Minyard, Ken Olsen, Operation Shifting Gears, opioid paink killers, pain specialist, prescription painkillers, PTSD, spinal cord stimulation, The American Legion Magazine, Tony Dragovich, traumatic brain injury, veteran overdoses | Leave a comment

Veterans and widows are bewildered by VA’s unpredictable — and seemingly unfair — approach to Agent Orange claims

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Veterans' Voices

By Ken Olsen

When Mary Warner’s husband became too sick to care for himself, she took early retirement and a reduced pension to attend to his needs. It was a significant financial risk. The Warners thought they could squeak by, given Philip’s Agent Orange stipend and the promise that Mary could count on VA survivor benefits if something happened to her husband.

They were wrong.

Philip Warner in 1964

Soon after Philip died of kidney failure in September 2011, VA decided the Vietnam War Navy veteran shouldn’t have received a decade’s worth of compensation for diesases the agency acknowledges are caused by Agent Orange exposure. In fact, VA now questions whether Philip was in Vietnam at all, despite service records he provided when he filed his first claim in 2001.

“I think it’s unethical for them to come back and say he was erroneously awarded Agent Orange benefits when he’s not here to speak for himself,” Mary says. “Why didn’t they ask these questions when he was living?”

Although VA trumpets its efforts to resolve 230,000 new Agent Orange claims in recent years, its track record remains contradictory and confusing, particularly for servicemembers who cannot prove they set foot in Vietnam. In 2012, for example, one Blue Water Navy veteran’s leukemia claim was approved while an identical claim from another sailor who served on the same ship at the same time was denied. Widows like Warner find themselves in a fight for survivor benefits after their husbands die of Agent Orange-related causes. Thousands of Brown Water veterans who served on Vietnam’s rivers and inland waterways have been waiting almost four years for VA to review their cases after a U.S. senator discovered their claims had been denied without checking records of where they served.

“Thousands of veterans exposed to the toxin are left behind when it comes to vital treatment and benefits,” American Legion National Commander Dan Dellinger told a joint hearing of the U.S. House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs committees in
September. “Studies indicate that Blue Water Navy veterans may have experienced higher exposure rates to Agent Orange than those who were on the ground, due to water-desalination systems on the ships. This has never been satisfactorily addressed by VA.”

Frustration with VA’s treatment of Vietnam War Navy veterans continues to grow. Groups including Blue Water Sailors of the Vietnam War are pushing for federal legislation restoring benefits to all Vietnam War veterans suffering from Agent Orange-inflicted illnesses. H.R. 543 would reverse a 2002 rule change by the Bush administration that excluded veterans who couldn’t prove they had “boots on the ground” in Vietnam. Prior to that, all Vietnam War veterans who contracted certain diseases had qualified for benefits under the Agent Orange Act of 1991.

Two other veterans advocacy groups filed suit in August to force VA to provide Agent Orange benefits to Navy veterans who served off the coast of Vietnam during the war and are now suffering the consequences.

Mike Hodge is one of those sailors. He served with the gunnery crew on USS Diamond Head, which delivered ammunition to other ships along the Vietnam coast from March to December 1967. Hodge developed Type 2 diabetes in the 1970s, despite being in his 30s and having no family history of the illness. That was followed by neuropathy, ischemic heart disease, blood clots in his lungs, a stroke and an abdominal aortic aneurysm. He’s been unable to work since 2008.

“I felt like my body was giving out,” says Hodge, who lives with his wife, Sharon, in an apartment in Sarasota, Florida.

Hodge has filed four Agent Orange claims since 2001. All were denied. “This is so absurd it’s ridiculous,” Hodge says. “Here I am stuck at home. I have to put my wife to work to pay the bills.” Sharon works as a nursing assistant six days a week – including a 16-hour shift on Mondays – to help support the couple.

“It’s hard, really hard,” says Sharon, who has spent countless hours working on her husband’s claim. That includes unsuccessful attempts to reach members of Florida’s congressional delegation for help. “If you were in the Blue Water Navy, nobody wants to talk to you.”

Hodge, meanwhile, says the dozen-year claims ordeal makes him bitter. “I did my duty,” Hodge says. “Now they are telling us our service wasn’t worth a s**t.”

VA, however, hasn’t treated all Diamond Head crewmembers equally. Bob Webb was granted Agent Orange benefits for chronic lymphocytic leukemia in August 2012 after pursuing his claim for more than two years. He succeeded only after thorough research and persistence, he says. That included hand-carrying information to his local VA office in Wichita, Kan., more than two dozen times. “They hope you give up,” says Webb, who was a gunner’s mate on Diamond Head in 1967. “You have to stay on it.”

In the last packet of supporting material Webb delivered to VA, he included a note that said, “I didn’t ask to get chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I hope you find in my favor.” He and his wife cried when they received notice that VA had approved his claim.

But the chronic lymphocytic leukemia claim of another sailor who served with Webb on Diamond Head during that same Vietnam tour was denied. Steve Voloshin was diagnosed with the cancer in 2004. He filed his Agent Orange claim with the VA office in Denver in 2011. That included a letter from his oncologist stating that his leukemia was likely caused by Agent Orange exposure – to no avail.

“VA said each case is different,” says Voloshin, who lives in Loveland, Colorado. “But we were on the same ship at the same time and we have the same diagnosis.”
Voloshin is appealing his case and searching for additional evidence to back his claim, including deck logs that will show Diamond Head serving in Vietnam’s territorial waters. “I’m glad they granted Bob’s claim,” Voloshin says. “But I feel slighted.”

Veterans advocates say such disparities are common. “The whole claims system is a
mishmash, with each VA regional office doing whatever it wants to do,” says Bill Miltenberger, founder of Blue Water Sailors of the Vietnam War. But there’s a larger problem as well: “(VA) ignores common sense, science, facts and maritime law when denying the majority of those Agent Orange claims.”

VA said it could not answer questions for this article because its funding had been interrupted by the government shutdown last fall.

Meanwhile, Agent Orange claim disparities play out in other ways. VA rejected Pat Rankin’s initial claims after doctors found a tumor at the back of his mouth more than two years ago. Agent Orange benefits are granted to Vietnam War veterans with cancers of the lower respiratory system – the larynx, trachea, lungs and bronchus – but not the upper respiratory system, says Rankin, who served on USS Lloyd Thomas. So he gathered information from the nation’s top medical schools to demonstrate what should have been obvious: Agent Orange-contaminated air passed through a person’s nose and mouth on its way to the lungs and other areas VA considers the respiratory system.

“How can they say this isn’t a respiratory cancer? The tumor was in a sinus cavity in my mouth,” says Rankin, who lives in Moorhead, Minnesota. In addition, Lloyd Thomas has been added to VA’s official list of Brown Water ships – vessels that entered rivers and inland waterways in Vietnam and were contaminated with the drift from Agent Orange spraying.

After appealing his case with the help of American Legion service officers, Rankin now has a 30 percent Agent Orange disability. But his claims for heart disease, high blood pressure and other issues are still pending.

Thousands of other Brown Water veterans aren’t getting any answers. In September 2010, then-Sen. Daniel Akaka asked VA to review nearly 17,000 Brown Water cases after learning it had rejected the claims without reviewing the veterans’ service records. In April 2011, VA said it had examined 6,700 cases. In the ensuing two and a half years, VA has repeatedly been unable to provide the status of the remaining 10,000 claims.

This offers little hope of a timely resolution for a widow like Mary Warner, who is on a tight budget while she works with a Legion service officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to appeal the denial of her survivor benefits. Her husband served on USS Constellation during the Vietnam War. He was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 1984 even though he was not overweight, regularly exercised and did not have a family history of diabetes. “It’s not the typical diabetic scenario,” Warner says.

Philip was granted a 50 percent disability rating in late 2002 for diabetes and neuritis. That was upgraded to a 100 percent rating in 2007 after he developed kidney disease. “I’m so thankful he had VA benefits because our medical bills would have been astronomical without them,” Warner says.

But Philip was diagnosed with oral cancer in 2009 and died of kidney failure two years later, Warner says. When she contacted VA, she was told she wouldn’t receive survivor benefits, currently worth about $1,200 a month. Among other things, VA claims her husband’s death wasn’t connected to Agent Orange exposure.

Warner is left worrying about her financial future, given that she left her job as a postal clerk when she was 58. “I wouldn’t have retired early to take care of Philip if I had known,” she says. She was already looking at a reduced pension because she was hired by the U.S. Postal Service after it trimmed its retirement benefits. And at 63, she says it won’t be easy to find another job.

“I wonder,” Warner says, “how many other veterans and families are left behind.”

A version of this story originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of The American Legion Magazine. For more about U.S. veterans and Agent Orange exposure see these other Veterans Voices stories: Rare Victory: Vietnam Navy veterans struggle to prove, and keep, Agent Orange benefits, Brown Water Bungle: Paperwork error excluded hundreds of Vietnam Navy veterans from receiving Agent Orange Benefits; Sailors Adrift: The Lingering Tragedy of Agent Orange and Still Adrift as well as Toxic Legacy: A Brief History of Agent Orange Exposure in Vietnam, and Brown Water Update: VA Partially Addresses Bungle that kept Vietnam Navy Veterans from Receiving Benefits

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Agent Orange, Blue Water veteran, Bob Webb, Brown Water Sailor, Ken Olsen, Mary Warner, Mike Hodge, Navy Veteran, Pat Rankin, Philip Warner, Steve Voloshin, The American Legion, USS DIamond Head, VA, VA claims, Vietnam, Vietnam Navy veteran | Leave a comment

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