I can attest to the story told by this VietNam Vet about his experience with the VA.  I made an application to the VA and nothing happened for 2 years.  I assumed the delay was to let me die to settle the  application.

Screwing the Troops

What Else is New?

April 4, 2013

For a country always at war, the United States is remarkably not interested in taking care of soldiers it has broken in its wars. Having bankrupted the country, Washington sinks every available penny into the two purposes of the military: funneling money into the arms industry, and fueling imperial ambitions, in large part of pasty fern-bar Napoleons at National Review and Commentary. The Veterans Administration is way back in the chow line. It doesn’t work very well. As best I can tell, nobody cares.
What do I mean, it doesn’t work? Consider a vet blinded or nearly so in some war or other. To use a computer, which has come to be necessary life, he needs screen-reader software, such as JAWS. It costs roughly a thousand dollars retail. For a blinded vet, most likely of slight education and no resources beyond his VA compensation, this is a lot of money.
The software could be provided quickly and easily, as follows: The vet fills out an application online, perhaps prints it, signs it, and scans it to the VA. An employee of the VA receives it and keys the veteran’s social-security number into his computer. In two seconds the vet’s records come up. Yep, blind. The VA emails him a URL and download key, by arrangement previously made with the manufacturer of the software. The vet downloads it. End of story. Elapsed time: an hour, plus download.
What really happens? To begin with, the VA is so disorganized, its web sites so badly designed, its technology so primitive, its staffing so inadequate, its unending forms so incomprehensible, that few vets can navigate the system. I can’t. The kid from Tennessee, with a room-temperature IQ and what passes now for a high-school education, doesn’t have a chance. He will simply be ignored. I know this from personal experience. I have sent letter after letter to the educational-benefits office in Buffalo, and nothing comes back. This is common.
So much for supporting our boys in uniform. They are broken goods. What the hell. We can recruit new ones.
The delay and endless often senseless paperwork involved in getting anything is so great that it is easier for disabled vets just to do without or pay for it themselves one way or another. Remember, we are not talking welfare queens or entitlement parasites. These are guys badly hurt in Washington’s wars, brains scrambled by IEDs, legs still somewhere in Afghanistan.
The vet’s only hope is to have smart, tenacious representation, preferably by a lawyer. Few have this. What it comes to is that, in practice, the benefits that are supposed to exist do not. This saves a lot of money. It doesn’t help the vet.
I did have (very) good representation in a matter involving the VA. A career in journalism gives you contacts that men from small towns in the heartlands don’t have. My rep and I requested my VA records. Easy, right? They pop up on the computer? No. They exist only on paper. Scanning the records of veterans of Viet Nam, who are aging and need care, would cost money. Washington has much more interest in making new cripples in remote countries than in caring for the  cripples it has already made. My country, ‘tis of thee….
The VA said consecutively that my records were in Pittsburg, then Austin, then St. Louis, and then, God knows why, in Portland, Oregon. It took a year to get them, despite threats of litigation.
Utter confusion reigned. Over and over they sent us forms to fill out that we had already filled out, sent letters to the wrong address. This is what most face without help. The barrier is almost insurmountable, and saves the government a lot of money.
I live in Mexico, as do a lot of vets, a fair few of them disabled. (The VA seems not to understand that a world exists beyond America’s borders. Nowhere on the VA’s web site could I find answers to questions that expat vets need answered.) If a vet here makes a claim because his condition has worsened, he goes through the VA office in Houston. On average, it takes Houston 377 days just to get to him. Not to solve the problem, just for him to bubble to the top of the pile. Being technologically at the grass-hut level, the VA doesn’t know about email, and so sends and demands paper letters. These may or may not arrive in foreign lands. The VA insists on the vet’s filling out a form he didn’t receive and didn’t know was sent, so the whole convoluted process stops.
Try dealing with this if, as is the case with an acquaintance of mine, you are so riddled with shrapnel, because something big came through the bottom of your helicopter, that you are in constant pain—forty years later. You have to take so much pain medication just to get through the day that you can’t under bureaucratic letters. The consequence is….
The hell with it. The following is a letter to me from an attorney who represents vets pro bono before the VA:

“Fred: Of course, your suggestion (about screen-reading software) makes perfect sense and that's why it will never happen. Secretary Shinseki means well and has done what he can to improve the claims backlog, but no one ever expected that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would lead to the number of service-connected injuries that currently exist. One of the biggest problems is orthopedic injuries caused by the 100-pound-plus combat loads these kids have to carry. I currently have four claims for Iraq and Afghanistan kids for shoulder, hip and knee injuries, usually caused when they fall going up or down hilly terrain with these loads. Then there are the injuries caused by IEDs. The truth is that the President has given more money to the VA in five years than Bush did in eight, but it's not enough, thanks to Republicans in the House. The new budget proposes a 4% increase to $63 billion, but it does not include enough money to hire thousands of new people to work on claims. Most of the increase is to hire more medical staff, particularly mental health providers. It does no good to offer mental-health services when the vets who are suffering can't get their claims done in less than a year. It is forcing many to live on the streets, sleep in their cars or they end up in shelters. We see this right here, in Central Oregon.”
It makes me feel so patriotic I could choke.

Home Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter State Terrorism George Bush, Tony Blair and the Century’s Greatest Crime What US and Britain did to Iraq is nothing short of state terrorism By Linda S Heard February 22, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - It’s been almost 10 years since the US and Britain unleashed ‘Shock and Awe’ on the Iraqi capital Baghdad ostensibly to punish a rogue dictator for hoarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in non-compliance with binding UN Security Council resolutions. In reality, Saddam Hussain had shut down his nuclear programme and destroyed Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons more than a decade earlier. UN weapons inspectors were almost certain of this fact and were on the point of giving Iraq a clean bill of health until they were leant-on by Uncle Sam. Indeed, the man who had supervised Iraq’s WMD programme for a decade Saddam’s son-in-law Hussain Kamal confirmed as much to CIA intelligence officers and UN officials following his defection to Jordan in 1995. What was done to Iraq was nothing short of state terrorism beginning with 10 years of crippling sanctions that brought Iraq to its knees and were believed to have been responsible for the deaths of up to 500,000 children who died from malnutrition, lack of medicine and disease from polluted water supplies. Rather than heed growing international calls to lift those sanctions, George W. Bush and his neoconservative band chose war which they and their British cohort Prime Minister Tony Blair then sold to gullible Western populations on lies too numerous to list. They were aided by a complicit right-wing media with Rupert Murdoch leading the charge, according to the diaries of Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell. Blair was aware that the war would be illegal in the absence of an explicit UN resolution, as his legal advisor attorney general Lord Goldsmith had determined, but he went ahead regardless even as millions of anti-war protestors thronged London’s streets. He didn’t hesitate to sign-off on an intelligence dossier for public consumption falsely claiming that Iraq could deploy WMD against British interests within 45 minutes of receiving the order to do so — and another containing tracts from a student’s thesis published on the internet, typos and all. Credible insiders who dared to challenge such nonsense such as weapons expert Dr David Kelly, who challenged the 45-minute claim, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who refuted Bush’s allegation that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from Niger, and British translator Katherine Gunn who disclosed that the US was spying on UN Security Council members, were discredited. Kelly was found dead in suspicious circumstances; Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was exposed as a CIA agent by a US government media lackey. Gunn was arrested for breaching the Official Secrets Act and sacked. One of the most respected figures in America Colin Powell signed the death of his own career when he spouted trumped up allegations against Iraq in the UN, a presentation he was to bitterly regret, calling it a painful blot on his record. World’s greatest con In short, the war was one of the world’s greatest cons. It had nothing to do with Iraq’s WMD or the removal of a dictator; it was part of a greater neoconservative plan to ensure America’s global domination as General Wesley Clark confirmed in his book Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire. “As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.” Up to a million Iraqis lost their lives as a result of the war and subsequent invasion and occupation; according to the respected journal The Lancet, over 600,000 had been killed as of July 2006, not to mention thousands of US and coalition military personnel. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz announced that the war impacted the US economy to the tune of $3 trillion (Dh11.1 trillion). And for what! The only beneficiaries of this willful blunder chiefly perpetrated by Bush and Blair have been Iran that holds sway over the Shiite-dominated Nouri Al Maliki government and various terror organisations that have used western crimes against Iraq as a recruitment call. Today, Iraq is poised on the brink of all out civil war. The Conservative MP and Minister without Portfolio Kenneth Clarke recently told the BBC that Iraq was “the most disastrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime … worse than Suez”. You don’t need Einstein’s IQ to realise that, but the Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot, and set up in 2009, has failed in its mission. It’s been characterised by the British prime minister as “an establishment stitch-up”. Where’s the public anger? American newspapers are running stories about the death of Bush’s pooch Barney and his penchant for painting while a tanned Blair has been busy accepting a Polish Business Leaders’ Award and pontificating on David Cameron’s plan to hold a referendum on Britain’s continued EU membership. The deadly duo should be sharing a cell in The Hague awaiting trial for war crimes, but as we see time and time again, victors’ justice translates to no justice at all. Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be contacted at lheard@gulfnews.com This article was originally posted at Gulf News Scroll down to add / read comments