OPINION: VA finally turns to help vets with PTSD
Martin Schram, who writes for the Scripps Howard News Service, is the author of "Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles."
Viewed through the media's close-up lens, last week's bureaucratic midcourse correction at the Department of Veterans Affairs looked like just another slow-mo replay of an ocean liner turning, ever so slowly, on the high sea.
But viewed through a contextual big-picture prism that has monitored the VA's decades of dysfunction and injustice for those who fight our battles, watching the change was like witnessing that same ocean liner flipping up like a teenager's skateboard, executing a 180-degree reversal and plopping back into the sea without making a splash.
President Barack Obama's VA Secretary, Gen. Eric Shinseki, showed decades of top-level VA non-doers how easy it was to end decades of official inaction and unfairness. Just act. Which is to say, just care enough to act.
Shinseki issued a simple regulation declaring an end to the old rule that VA adjudicators used for decades to deny service-related benefits to tens of thousands of veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The old rule required that veterans had to provably identify a specific combat-related "stressor" incident that caused their PTSD.
But the reality of war, as psychiatrists have long maintained, is that there often isn't one single stressor that can be cited definitively as having caused a service member's PTSD - even though the affliction is real and requires treatment.
House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner (D-Calif.), said Shinseki's action "will immediately help combat veterans get the help they need." Gen. Shinseki has never met former Army military policeman Eric Adams of Tampa, a veteran of the Gulf War and Iraq War. But the MP's case is precisely the sort of injustice Shinseki sought to rectify this week.
While leading a truck convoy in Iraq, a roadside bomb exploded in front of Adams' van and a huge truck slammed into him from behind, leaving him seriously injured. On other missions, he saw colleagues blown up and burned. He also carried home the memory of a truck running over an Iraqi child.
Returning to Tampa in 2004, Adams was diagnosed by two VA psychiatrists as suffering from PTSD. But a VA adjudicator denied his request for service-related benefits, insisting he hadn't fought in combat. When Adams appealed, demonstrating he was in combat situations, a VA adjudicator found a new reason for denying: "although you currently are diagnosed with this mental disorder, service connection remains denied because we cannot confirm your in-service stressor."
Was it seeing his buddies die? Or that Iraqi boy run over? Or the bombing? Or being rear-ended?
For a little context: The VA also rejected an Iraq War shrapnel injury benefits claim from Illinois National Guardsman Garrett Anderson with this mind-numbing adjudication: "Shrapnel wounds all over body not service connected."
After his two VA denials, MP Adams said: "It was just like a slap in the face. Here I've done everything I could to serve my country in combat in two wars. And this is the response from the bureaucrats who hide behind their desks. . . . They're not just letting me down, they're letting our country down when they do things like this."
Here, the general and the MP are of one mind. "This nation has a solemn obligation to the men and women who have honorably served this country and suffer from the often devastating emotional wounds of war," Shinseki said in a statement last week.
After battling America's enemies overseas, the general and the MP apparently have one more thing in common - they are now battling an entrenched common enemy on the home front.
"I think secretary Shinseki is a soldier's soldier," said Adams. "He's determined to do a good job. But he's fighting the inbred dysfunctionalism of the bureaucracy."
