Veterans for Common Sense

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, one of the plaintiff organizations, chose to look on the bright side. Conti “confirmed many of our allegations” and issued “a huge alarm bell for Congress and the VA to take action now,” said Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran.

June 26, 2008, San Francisco, CA – The federal government is subjecting veterans to long delays in obtaining mental health care and medical benefits, but the power to change the system rests with officials and Congress, not the courts, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday in dismissing a lawsuit by veterans’ advocates.

U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti said veterans’ groups had failed to show a “systemwide crisis” in mental health care that would justify the courts intervening in the workings of the Department of Veterans Affairs. And he said courts lack authority to order the sweeping changes the plaintiffs seek, such as forcing the VA to make quick decisions on whether veterans are eligible for care and ordering the agency to promptly improve suicide prevention programs and mental health care.

Conti conceded that evidence presented during a two-week nonjury trial in April showed that veterans had high rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, and that in some cases were being forced to endure long waits for medical referrals and care.

The VA is understaffed and takes an average of nearly 4 1/2 years to hear veterans’ appeals of benefit denials, and a long-range improvement plan the agency adopted four years ago is still mostly in the pilot stages, the judge said.

But Conti said, “The remedies sought by plaintiffs are beyond the power of this court and would call for a complete overhaul of the VA system.

“Congress has specifically precluded district courts from reviewing veterans’ benefits decisions and has entrusted decisions regarding veterans’ medical care to the discretion of the VA secretary,” the judge, a World War II veteran who was appointed to the bench by President Richard Nixon, said in his 82-page ruling.

Lawyers for the veterans said they would appeal.

“If the judge is correct, the VA can do whatever it wants, and all the rights (of veterans) are unenforceable,” said attorney Gordon Erspamer. “That just can’t be the law. There’s got to be a remedy somewhere for the poor slobs who are fighting for our country.”

Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, one of the plaintiff organizations, chose to look on the bright side. Conti “confirmed many of our allegations” and issued “a huge alarm bell for Congress and the VA to take action now,” said Sullivan, a Gulf War veteran.

VA spokesman Phil Budahn said the agency was pleased with the ruling.

The suit was filed last year by Sullivan’s organization, which is based in Washington, and a second group in Santa Barbara, Veterans United for Truth. They accused the VA of making mental health care virtually unavailable to thousands of discharged soldiers through perfunctory exams, delays in referrals and treatment, and a prolonged and complex system of awarding medical benefits.

They cited internal department e-mails, released in response to the suit, that reported 18 suicides a day among all veterans and 1,000 suicide attempts a month among those under VA care. About 30 percent of the nation’s 24 million veterans receive medical care from the department.

One e-mail from VA official Ira Katz in February referred to the 1,000 monthly suicide attempts and cautioned, “Shh! . . . Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”

The plaintiffs also cited a recent Rand Corp. study estimating that 300,000 troops returning from Afghanistan or Iraq suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression. They also noted a May 2007 report by the VA’s inspector general that found more than 60 percent of the agency’s health centers lacked suicide-prevention strategies for returning veterans, and 70 percent had no tracking systems for veterans at risk of suicide.

In Wednesday’s ruling, Conti said members of the two veterans groups “have faced significant delays in receiving disability benefits and medical care from the VA,” often with “dire consequences.”

But he said the evidence also showed that a majority of returning veterans are being seen within 30 days at clinics offering mental health services. While federal law entitles veterans to five years of care from the VA after they are discharged from the military, Conti said, “it is beyond the power of this court to determine when and how such care shall be provided.”

Likewise, he said, the law allows the VA to set the timetable for implementing the five-year mental health plan it issued in 2004, which includes a suicide-prevention program.

Conti also rejected the plaintiffs’ request to shake up the VA’s system of approving medical benefits and handling appeals. They argued that their rights are violated by a system that denies them the right to have a lawyer in pressing initial claims, takes an average of 4.4 years to decide appeals, and allows a VA office to reduce awards of more than eight years of benefits, or $250,000 in cash, without notifying veterans that their cases are being reviewed.

Although the system’s slow pace is troubling, Conti said, only 4 percent of veterans appeal denials of benefits, and the VA would have to divert money and staff from processing claims to meet the timetables the plaintiffs seek.

June 26, 2008 – Jim Hinde was the real deal. He was born and raised in Ohio. He was a Vietnam Vet who rambled homeless and broke in the early ’70s, lived in the skid road missions, and rode the freights. He settled in Seattle as a father and musician, and wrote a whole bunch of songs. He became such a solid force in the Seattle busking scene that when he died unexpectedly the morning of June 9, the whole city gasped and half of the Pike Place Market went home early.

The wind blew real hard all that day. Jim didn’t like the hard winds because they reminded him of the typhoons when he was in the Navy. That was a time that haunted him. It kept him from sleeping and woke him up with night sweats–Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the shadow partner that Uncle Sam gives to his military veterans. Jim would spend the last years of his life pursuing his claim for service-related disability benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Not just for himself but for all vets. Maybe it wore him out.

Jim was one of the founders of the Pike Market Performers Guild, an organizing body of Seattle street performers. With his work ethic and background, he was an enormous asset for getting all the nuts and bolts in place to create and produce the annual Pike Market Busker Festival. Organized collectively, the Guild seeks to raise the profile and legitimacy of street performers, who by nature are a little outside the social norm. Jim could bridge that gap. The festival has now become an established part of the city’s culture, and busking a celebrated art form.

Jim Hinde loved the Pike Place Market and he spent a great deal of time there. One of his favorite sayings was, “If you’re going to milk the cow, you have to feed the cow,” meaning that if he was going to make his living there he was also going to support it. And he did. He won an Emmy for his work on the PBS documentary “Pike Place Market, Soul Of A City.” In his voice-over you can hear the love and connectedness. In many ways he was the voice of the soul of the city.

When the Iraq War kicked in, all the vets got a jolt of emergency adrenalin and Jim began his final campaign–countering the national jingo fever with songs of peace and social justice written from the perspective of experience. He knew because he’d been there. Songs like “Marching To the Border” where the singer says “no” to America’s war and heads for Canada, taking half the inductees with him; “Frank Dennis and Me,” about his old shipmates in Vietnam, and how marching to someone else’s gun kills the soul of a person; “The Perp Walk,” about the arrest of Bush and company for war crimes; and the great anthem “Shout Down the Wind,” a call for all of us to take to the streets and stop the machine in its tracks. Jim was a frequent presence at anti-war rallies and demonstrations in Seattle. As a member of both Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Of America he became a driving force for change. Before he died he was working as one of the main organizers for the national VVA convention. He never did anything he couldn’t give a hundred percent to.

When Jim began to work seriously on his PTSD claim he went to the VA hospital and was diagnosed with high levels of cortisol, a hormone in the blood which is a responder to stress. In combat situations this is the stuff that makes a person hyper-alert and helps them to survive. But over time it eats at the tissues of the heart, and in a PTSD veteran that hyper-alertness does not go away and the cortisol is always there. Jim died of a heart attack. A case can be made that Jim’s combat experience killed him 35 years later, like a real slow bullet.

June 26, 2008 – The Hollywood couple made the donation via their charity, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

The money will go to the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict and will help 8,000 children who have lost parents, homes or the opportunity to go to school.

Jolie is known for her charity work and is a goodwill ambassador for the UN’s Refugee Agency. She has visited Iraq twice in the past year.

The actress said in a statement: “These education support programmes for children of conflict are the best way to help them heal.”

The couple hope other Hollywood celebrities will follow their lead and donate a portion of their earnings.

“We hope to encourage others to give to these great organisations,” said Pitt.

During her last trip to Iraq in February, Jolie spoke of the urgent need for aid in the war-torn region.

“There are over two million displaced people and there never seems to be a real coherent plan to help them. There’s lots of goodwill and lots of discussion but there seems to be a lot of talk at the moment and a lot of pieces that need to be put together,” she said.

The 32-year-old Tomb Raider star is currently in France awaiting the birth of twins.

Their arrival will take the couple’s brood to six – they are already parents to Maddox, six, Pax, four, Zahara, three, and Shiloh, two.

Earlier this month it was reported that Jolie had given birth, sparking a worldwide media frenzy, but the story turned out to be a hoax.

June 24, 2008 – Air Guard members often do short tours of duty overseas, but still may experience the stress and brutality of war, said Cathy Cook, a retired member of the Vermont Air National Guard.

Because of their short tours, Cook said, the U.S. Air Force doesn’t give them a critical document — DD form 214 — which would recognize their service as active duty and make them eligible for the full array of veterans services.

Cook explained this problem to Dr. James Peake, new secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, during a 90-minute meeting Monday that Peake had with 150 Vermont veterans and their advocates at the Holiday Inn in South Burlington.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Peake told Cook. He directed her to provide details to his staff.

Peake, a Vietnam veteran and a surgeon, took over the top job at the Department of Veterans Affairs six months ago. In introducing him, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., praised Peake for crisscrossing the country to listen to veterans. Sanders scheduled Peake for a full day of meetings in Vermont.

“Promises were made to veterans in our country, but these promises weren’t always kept,” Sanders said. “Taking care of veterans must be considered a cost of war.”

Sanders, who serves on the Senate’s veterans affairs committee, urged the crowd in South Burlington to speak up. “If we don’t know what the failures are, we can’t do our job.”

A World War II veteran in a garrison cap asked Peake about the practice of “tranquilizing” people to help them cope with bad memories. He said he knew all about bad memories since he’d fought in Okinawa and killed three enemy soldiers.

“For the next 17 years, I nearly drank myself to death,” he said. He asked Peake, “Are we setting people up for substance abuse by giving people tranquilizers to numb their feelings?”

Peake said the VA is working hard to find the best ways to use medication to treat post traumatic stress disorder. He said medications often are intended “to give somebody a good night’s sleep without dreams.”

Jon Turner of Burlington, who did two tours of duty in Iraq, told Peake he believed there was a tendency to over-medicate veterans. When he sought help, he said he was given six prescriptions.

Nick Palmier, a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq, said the military overreacts when people seek help, seeming to view everyone in counseling as potentially unstable.

He said after he saw a buddy die, he saw a mental health counselor. Subsequently, when home on leave, he had to check in daily with his sergeant. Now that he’s a civilian, he worries his mental health record could prevent him from getting jobs.

Peake agreed that “just because you need a little help doesn’t mean you have long-term problems.” He recounted how two years after his tour in Vietnam, he was walking down a corridor in medical school when a jackhammer started up. He reacted by dropping to the ground.

“You bring up the question of how do we do what is right by people,” Peake told Palmier.

Constance Quintin’s story made clear the answer to that question wasn’t simple. The Richmond woman recounted how her husband received too little service when he needed it most. He committed suicide. She said her husband served in the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Guard for more than 20 years, including war deployments.

He had lived with bipolar disease for years, she said, but developed side effects that led to medication changes. Doctors couldn’t get his disease back under control.

“He was calling almost daily with concerns about suicide,” Quintin said. In his final days, she learned later, he rehearsed hanging himself, but again sought help. He needed to be hospitalized, “but there was no bed available.”

“It was a series of ‘oops’ that led to his death,” Quintin said. “I want families not to have to go through what I went through,” she told Peake.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Peake said. His department is beefing up efforts to manage high-risk cases, he said, “but I’m afraid we will never prevent every suicide.”

Peake fielded a question about what more his department could do to help homeless veterans.

“Homelessness in veterans is down 20 percent over the past year,” Peake answered. Still, he said, “Any single veteran that is homeless is one too many.”

The Committee on Temporary Shelter in Burlington has applied to Peake’s department for funding to establish a transitional housing program for veterans. Ellen Kane, grants manager, said the agency was cautiously optimistic about its application for capital funding to provide 15 to 18 veterans a place to live and wrap-around case management services for up to two years. The agency expects to hear in the fall.

“Put in a good word for us,” Kevin Maloney, homeless veterans’ chairman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, told Peake.

June 25, 2008 – On the eve of last month’s Senate vote on Sen. Jim Webb’s GI Bill, Patrick Campbell clicked “send” on one last lobbying e-mail to staffers. Then he broke down and cried.

Campbell, the legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, had started his message by laying out all of the latest developments on Webb’s bill.

In the final paragraphs, the Iraq war veteran shared the news that was foremost in his mind, news that he hadn’t shared with anyone outside his unit.

“Yesterday,” he wrote, “one of my buddies from Iraq committed suicide.”

It should have been a heady week for Campbell, a week in which the former staffer for Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) and other Democrats shared a rally stage with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-­Calif.), saw the Senate vote overwhelmingly in favor of Webb’s bill and graduated from law school at Catholic University.

But Campbell and the other soldiers in his unit had recently received notice that they’d be headed back to Iraq early next year. And then, in the midst of all that was happening in Washington, Campbell got word about his friend, a sergeant who had taken him under his wing during his tour of duty in Iraq.

Saturday afternoon, Campbell walked off the stage at the Catholic University graduation, handed his diploma to his parents and headed straight to the airport to fly to the sergeant’s funeral.

In 2007, at least 115 active-duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops committed suicide, the highest rate since the Army began keeping records in 1980. IAVA estimates that between 30 percent and 40 percent of returning war veterans will face “serious mental health injury” — especially post-traumatic stress disorder — and that those numbers are exacerbated by long tours and frequent redeployments.

Campbell says the memory of his friend motivates him to fight for better care.

A former student body president at the University of California at Berkeley, Campbell was on the Capitol Hill fast track by the time he hit his mid-20s. But sitting with co-workers at a Capitol Hill apartment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Campbell had a feeling of helplessness that he couldn’t shake.

So he walked to the still-smoldering Pentagon and asked if he could help search for bodies. He was turned away, and in that moment, he vowed that he’d become a medic himself. After a few twists and turns on and off Capitol Hill, Campbell joined the National Guard in 2003, squeezing basic training into his first year of law school.

He spent almost a year patrolling the streets of Baghdad with his unit, dodging the constant dangers that accompanied every neighborhood patrol. Although he admits that his unit was “very lucky” and he did not have to treat any major traumatic injuries, Campbell treated many Iraqi civilians.

It wasn’t always easy being a former congressional aide from California assigned to a tight-knit unit from the Louisiana bayou, but Campbell said “the sergeant” — that’s what he calls his late friend, out of respect for the privacy of the man’s family — was the one person who would always include him.

“When we would raid a house, we would have to split up into teams,” Campbell remembered. “I could tell a lot of the younger guys weren’t too excited about kicking in the door with a medic by their side. But he would always take me. … I trusted him, and he trusted me.”

After their tour of duty ended in October 2005, Campbell and the sergeant went their separate ways. Campbell returned to Washington, where he eventually signed on with IAVA. The sergeant went back home to Louisiana, where Campbell said the transition to civilian life took its toll.

“When these guys go [into battle], they learn to shut down their emotions,” said Campbell. “What helps you in Iraq is now hurting you at home.”

During a particularly rough patch earlier this year, Campbell said, the sergeant received a letter notifying him that his unit would be going back to Iraq.

“It was just too much,” said Campbell. “[The sergeant] sent a text message to someone at the armory, and they sent the police to go find him. They found him in a boat a couple days later. He had shot himself.”

Campbell said the funeral was “wonderful and horrible” all at once. It was the first time the unit had been back together since leaving Iraq. But only the sergeant’s body was there, laid out in an open casket, despite a gunshot wound to the face.

Campbell said that the transition from military to civilian life often hits Guard and Reserve troops particularly hard. He experienced it firsthand. After returning from Iraq, he said, it took a full year of his own reckless behavior and an ultimatum from his best friend before he admitted that he needed counseling for combat stress.

Even then, Campbell said he didn’t fully break down until days later, when a preview for an Iraq war film sent him over the edge. He said he spent hours in the theater, crying.

At IAVA, Campbell is helping to push for legislation that would provide returning soldiers with mandatory one-on-one screenings with mental health professionals within six months of returning from combat. He is also working toward increased access to mental health services in rural areas, a particular problem for some of the soldiers in his unit from remote parts of Louisiana.

Campbell wants Congress to lead the charge for a holistic approach to veterans’ mental health, including help for family members and targeted advertising campaigns to reduce the stigma that soldiers attach to counseling. He has also fought hard for the passage of the educational benefits in Webb’s GI Bill, which is expected to win Senate approval this week. He says the benefits would give returning soldiers a sense of purpose and “a reason to get up in the morning.”

Campbell said he’s “still on the hook” for another tour of duty in Iraq, although he does have the option of deferring it. If he does have to go back, he said he wants to go back with his old unit, even if it is a man down.

Until then, Campbell said, he thinks of the sergeant every day as he prepares for work.

At the funeral in Louisiana, Campbell promised his fallen friend that every lawmaker on Capitol Hill would someday know his story. “The last thing I said to him as I stood over his casket was, ‘I am never going to let them forget you.’”