I served on active duty in the United States Army from 1994 to 1998 as an Arabic linguist and military intelligence. I then transferred to the United States Army Reserve, where I served from 1998 to 2004. I was activated and stationed stateside right after 9/11 for about two years. I went through this system twice, once before 9/11 and the current wars and once after, and I personally witnessed a complete transformation in the way the process was handled. In 1998 I received a complete and thorough end-of-service physical. As part of the out-processing system, a VA representative sat with me and reviewed every single page of my medical file and filled out a VA disability claim for me.
In 2003, with thousands upon thousands of Reserve and National Guard servicemembers being deactivated through Fort Bragg, they told us if we wanted an end-of-service physical we would have to wait at Fort Bragg for six to eight weeks or longer, in these run-down World War II barracks out in the backwoods. The message was clear. Don’t ask for an end-of-service physical. In addition, there was no VA representative helping people file a claim or reviewing our medical files. There was nobody telling us that we were eligible or how to get into the system. When a soldier is leaving the military, you have a window of opportunity to get into the VA system, but if you miss that opportunity it’s so much harder to get in afterwards.
When I left the Reserves, I finished my education. I really wanted to continue serving veterans, so I decided to work at the VA. In 2004 and 2005 I did internships at the VA in Georgia. After I graduated I got a job at the VA in Richmond, Virginia where I worked as a research assistant on a study looking at Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and traumatic brain injury, because the symptoms of these two illnesses are incredibly similar.
The research group wanted to develop a mechanism to screen returning soldiers for traumatic brain injury. There were a lot of incredibly educated, well-informed people establishing this traumatic brain injury screening. Before we could make it happen, I was on a conference call when somebody said, “Wait a second. We can’t start this screening process. If we start screening for traumatic brain injury, tens of thousands of soldiers will screen positive. We do not have resources to take care of these people. We cannot do the screening.”
Medical ethics say that if you know somebody has a problem you have to treat them, so they didn’t want to know about the problem since they didn’t have the resources to treat it. But I think it’s incumbent upon all VA workers to find every area that we need addressed, and to demand that we get the resources to meet those needs.
Former VA secretary Jim Nicholson said that to meet the needs of returning veterans, they wanted to prioritize OIF and OEF veterans, which sounds great. Prioritizing always has a nice ring to it. But if you prioritize one group of veterans, another group has to do without. The VA needs to address the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of new veterans entering a system that has not grown to meet the demands of these two occupations. No veteran should have to go without.
The VA’s mission to care for our nation’s veterans is one of awesome responsibility. I personally believe that the best preventative health care for our soldiers is not to use them to fight illegal occupations. But so long as our government is going to force soldiers to continue fighting, I would call upon all workers at the VA to remember our pledge to serve and provide for our returning veterans.
It’s also important to realize that we do not lose our free speech rights just because we’re federal employees. We all know that behind the red tape there are just not enough resources to treat people. It is incumbent upon all VA employees to continue fighting, and fighting vocally, until we have all the resources necessary to take care of our veterans.