When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home by Paula J. Caplan

Author:Paula J. Caplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2018-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

WHAT THE VA IS DOING ONCE JOHNNY AND JANE ARE HOME … AND WHY IT’S NOT ENOUGH

The claim went in to Vets’ Affairs

And I went to see some doctors of theirs.

They accepted the PTSD as a fact,

Then cancelled the payment for bones in my back.

They never asked me about the pain,

That’s there in the evening and morning again,

When I get out of bed every day of the week,

I climb up the door to get to my feet.

—Bob Lange, Australian Vietnam War veteran1

Even with the military’s seriously flawed treatment of servicemembers’ emotional burdens, we might breathe easier if we knew that once soldiers become veterans, the VA jumps into the breach and addresses these burdens in helpful ways. Sadly, although many therapists in the VA system are trying hard, the system is riddled with problems. As with the provision of services to active servicemembers, described in Chapter 4, many problems described in this chapter relate to obstacles in the VA system that vets encounter in trying to obtain any services at all. And even when the VA does provide services, often they are not helpful. Shortly after the Iraq War began, Barry Romo, National Coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, told me that many at the VA were saying, “Get over [your emotional upset from the war]. All vets go through this.” However, he said, that upset will never go away, “because it is how we survived.” Well into 2010, he told me that this concern persisted.2

Many veterans do not even get into the VA system: Just as active duty soldiers are reluctant to seek help for emotional problems, so some former servicemembers are afraid to seek help, concerned that having this on their record might interfere with obtaining employment. (Although denial of employment or firing because of psychological problems is illegal, the burden of proof is on the employee to show that that was the reason for failure to hire or for firing, and the standards for meeting the burden of proof are high and difficult to meet.) Others who have returned to civilian life know they may be called back into service, or they may want to return; consequently, they don’t want to jeopardize their chances for advancement in the military or risk losing their pensions by being categorized as mentally ill.

Those who do ask to be served in the VA system are often subjected to intolerably long waits to be assessed or offered help. Those who apply to the VA for disability status so that they can receive appropriate compensation often have to wait unconscionably long before decisions are made, and their applications are far too often unjustifiably rejected. Glantz writes that since the start of the Iraq War, according to the VA itself, the backlog of unanswered disability claims has grown from 325,000 to more than 600,000.3 The entire claims process, he says, is designed to identify veterans who are trying to cheat the system rather than to compensate soldiers whose war service led to their injuries.

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