Veterans for Common Sense

On February 14, 2008, Veterans for Common Sense testified before Congress and demanded accountability for VA’s catastrophic inability to provide timely and accurate claims decisions to disabled veterans.   VCS specifically called for the removal of Daniel Cooper, VA’s Under Secretary for Benefits, as the top person responsible for VA’s claims fiasco.  

On February 28, 2008, Cooper unexpectedly resigned.  VCS wishes him well.

In light of Cooper’s decision to cut and run, VCS believes today presents a rare opportunity for President George W. Bush to appoint an aggressive veterans’ advocate to overhaul VA’s broken and obsolete claims system.   Now is the right time for Congress to implement the sound and reasonable recommendations made by the Veterans Disability Benefits Commission.

COOPER AND NICHOLSON – A TRAGIC LEGACY OF FAILURE 

Not only is massive reform vital, so, too, is a history lesson in how the wheels came off at VBA.  Here is a chronology showing how Daniel Cooper was fully aware of VBA’s claims crisis well before he became Under Secretary.  However, Cooper failed to use this knowledge and deliver for veterans, even after six years as the top VA official responsible for disability compensation claims:

 • In early 2001, then-Secretary Anthony Principi recognized challenges at VBA, and he created the “Claims Processing Task Force,” naming Cooper to lead it, even though he had no experience with VA.  Cooper was a retired Navy Vice Admiral who served on the board of directors for Exelon, a nuclear power company, and USAA, an insurance and banking company.

 • In October 2001, Cooper issued his Task Force report, which made dozens of thoughtful incremental recommendations, including holding VBA employees accountable.  In November 2001, the full House Veterans’ Affairs Committee held a hearing to discuss the work of the Task Force.  After 9/11 and after the invasion of Afghanistan, Cooper told the full Committee, “In my opinion, today, there are enough resources in VBA to do the job that has to be done,” a disturbing mantra repeated until the Walter Reed scandal blew the cover the shabby way this Administration treats our veterans.

 • In December 2001, with more troops pouring into Afghanistan and with plans on the table to invade Iraq, Cooper provided additional written answers to the questions from Congress about VA staffing resources.  Cooper wrote, “At the hearing, I specifically stated that new resources (i.e., FTE) should not be provided.”  Given that there were hundreds of thousands of claims from half of our Gulf War veterans, everyone wants to know why did Cooper not plan for nor act on the needs of a new generation of war veterans when he became Under Secretary in 2002?

This disgraceful pattern of under staffing and under funding VA continued from 2001 through 2008.

 •  In February 2007, former VA Secretary Jim Nicholson told Congress, “The President’s 2008 budget request provides the resources necessary to ensure that service members’ transition from active duty military status to civilian life continues to be as smooth and seamless as possible.”  Nicholson, who relied on Cooper to run VA’s benefits programs, told Congress, “We expect to improve the timeliness of processing these claims to 145 days in 2008…. In addition, we anticipate that our pending inventory of disability claims will fall to about 330,000 by the end of 2008…”

 • In VA’s press release dated February 4, 2008, VA once again promised to cut the backlog to 300,000 claims and process claims in an average of 145 days. However, VA’s most recent reports confirm the claims backlog of unfinished work stands at more than 400,000, and veterans wait an average of 183 days.  Cooper and Nicholson were repeatedly and catastrophically wrong, and our veterans and their families paid a very steep price. 

COOPER’S EXIT LONG PAST DUE 

Veterans for Common Sense believes Under Secretary Daniel Cooper’s departure was long overdue, just as Nicholson’s was.  Cooper’s tenure was identical to disgraced former VA Secretary Jim Nicholson: both were incompetent and forced out of office because they failed to provide timely and quality assistance to our nation’s veterans.  Their failures reflect on the string of poor choices made by President George W. Bush, who appointed unqualified VA leaders and who chronically under funded VA for years.

In 2006, as the VA claims crisis worsened, Cooper and Nicholson quietly handed out millions of dollars in cash bonuses, up to $33,000 in some cases, to top VA executives – during a time when more and more veterans waited longer and longer for VA benefits.  That’s right, while veterans couldn’t feed their families and pay their bills due to disabilities, top VA executives got huge cash rewards.  A reasonble person would conclude VA leaders were rewarded for failure.  The bonuses should have gone to hard-working and over-burdened claims processors and other VA staff.  Or the bonus cash could have been used to hire more employees.

In another strike against Cooper, in 2007, Veterans for Common Sense and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation filed an ethics complaint about Cooper because he appeared on a video, using his name and government title, to raise money and promote his personal views of religion, which violates our Consitution.

As reported by Aaron Glantz at Inter Press Service, “Cooper has been under fire for using his office to proselytise for evangelical Christianity ever since he appeared in a 2004 fundraising video for Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.  In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, ‘It’s not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that’s more important than doing the job — the job’s going to be there, whether I’m there or not.'” 

STARK LESSONS 

The lessons from the Nicholson and Cooper resignations are stark and tragic: the Bush Administration failed to monitor and then to plan for the massive tidal wave of hundreds of thousands of unexpected patients and disability claims as a result of the Iraq War fiasco.   The end result of Cooper’s and Nicholson’s catastrophic failure is that 400,000 veterans wait an average of more than six months for a VA disability claim decision.

No veteran should ever have to wait more than 30 days for a VA decision.  We must put veterans first.  As World War II General Omar Bradley said while leading VA, “We are dealing with veterans, not procedures – with their problems, not ours.” 

VCS believes Cooper’s departure represents an opportunity for the President and Congress to honor our nation’s commitment to those who protect and defend our Constitution.  It is also an opportunity to let more than 200,000 hard-working dedicated VA employees know that desperatey needed help is on the way.

The future looks tough.  VA is expected to spend up to $700 billion dollars providing disability payments and healthcare to 700,000 or more Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans over the next 40 years, according to a Harvard University report. 

In 2009, VA expects to treat 333,000 – yes, a third of a million – Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran patients.  Older veterans continue pouring into VA as our domestic economy worsens.  Plus hundreds of thousands of Vietnam War veterans are flooding into an already overburdened VA with PTSD and serious illnesses related to Agent Orange dioxin poisoning.

WHAT NEXT?

These facts present President Bush and Congress with two simple choices for VA:

 • They can either ignore VA’s claims crisis and the urgent need for substantial overhaul, and then watch helplessly as hundreds of thousands more veterans slip through the cracks into despair.

 • Or, they can name an aggressive veterans’ advocate who will reform and modernize VA’s broken and obsolete claims system following the recommendations of the Veterans Disability Benefits Commission, VA union employees, veterans’ groups, and veterans’ advocates.

One of the first reforms that would have an immediate impact is automatically approving Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans’ claims for traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as VCS recommended in our Congressional testimony in July 2007 and again this month.  Real reform begins by listening to the veterans forced to wait and the veterans living on meager benefits, veterans so far ignored by this Administration.  Real reform means listening to VA rank-and-file employees with experience and ideas who were ignored for the past seven years.

With 11 months remaining in Bush’s lame duck term, now is the right time for VA reform.  Let’s hope the President finally fights for veterans by naming a high-quality replacement for Cooper and by treating VA’s fiasco with the urgency it deserves.

The advocate group Veterans for Common Sense (which called for Cooper’s removal two weeks ago) has collected information they say outlines the growing problem.  According to VCS executive director Paul Sullivan, the VA has a backlog of 404,999 disability claims (as of February 16). Claims by veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan make up 38,693 of those pending cases. But the VA also faces a total of 245,034 claims filed by Iraq and Afghanistan war vets that were not anticipated.  Sullivan says “veterans wait an average 183 days to get a preliminary decision from VA – that’s more than six months without money.”

February 29, 2008 (CBS News) – The man in charge of overseeing benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs – Retired Vice Admiral Daniel Cooper – is stepping down after 6 years on the job.

The VA announced late yesterday that Cooper’s last day as Under Secretary for Benefits will be April 1. VA Secretary James Peake said in a statement that Cooper’s “leadership, management savvy and personable touch were indispensable.”

But, his resignation comes on the heels of much criticism that the VA has failed to reduce the enormous backlog of veteran claims. One veteran told CBS News some frustrated vets call it the “delay, deny and wait until I die” system.

The advocate group Veterans for Common Sense (which called for Cooper’s removal two weeks ago) has collected information they say outlines the growing problem.

According to VCS executive director Paul Sullivan, the VA has a backlog of 404,999 disability claims (as of February 16). Claims by veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan make up 38,693 of those pending cases. But the VA also faces a total of 245,034 claims filed by Iraq and Afghanistan war vets that were not anticipated.

Sullivan says “veterans wait an average 183 days to get a preliminary decision from VA – that’s more than six months without money.”

In the VA’s announcement of Cooper’s resignation he was quoted from a 2003 interview in which he said “we’re going to make sure [those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan] receive the best possible service when they come home.” The VA credits Cooper with helping guide VA benefit programs onto the internet.

February 27, 2008, Washington, DC — Undeterred by President Bush and Senator John McCain proudly pointing to progress in Iraq, Congressional Democrats are trying to mount new lines of attack against the administration’s war policies.

In a shift from last year’s failed legislative efforts to force a reduction of troops, the Democrats’ new approach is aimed primarily at framing the issue for the November elections by focusing on the financial cost of military operations and on the war’s implications for the nation’s troubled economy.

With the fifth anniversary of the war fast approaching, the Democrats, citing testimony by the Pentagon’s own commanders, are also emphasizing the strain on the armed forces. In addition the Democrats contend that the war against terrorism should be waged primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan, not Iraq.

The change in tactics by the Democrats is one of necessity. The closest they came last year to forcing the administration to alter its war plans was in September, when they mustered 56 votes — 4 short of the 60 they needed — to advance legislation that would have required troops to be given as much time back in the United States as they spent overseas before being redeployed.

The Democratic presidential candidates have seized on the Pentagon’s announcement that when the troop escalation ends in July, there will still be 8,000 more soldiers in Iraq than when the so-called surge started because some support units will remain.

And on Monday a coalition of Democratic advocacy groups, with support from John Edwards, who ended his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, announced a $20 million public awareness campaign to highlight “the crushing cost of the war.”

“We have to send a message here,” said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate and former Army paratrooper who has emerged as one of the Democrats’ most authoritative voices on the war.

“We have to have a long-term sustainable strategy; 140,000 troops is not sustainable in the longer term,” he said.

While they sought to focus last year on the all-consuming chaos in Iraq, Democrats now acknowledge that there have been recent security gains. But they say those gains may prove temporary, that political progress has been too slow and that given domestic concerns, the human and financial cost is just too steep.

Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, say they are happy to spend a few days talking about Iraq.

“We welcome a discussion,” Mr. McConnell said Tuesday, “which would give us a chance to talk about the extraordinary progress that has been made in Iraq over the last six months, not only on the military side but also with civilian reconciliation beginning to finally take hold.”

The war issue had faded from focus on Capitol Hill early this year as lawmakers spent the first weeks of the term negotiating an economic stimulus package. But it came gusting back onto the Senate floor on Tuesday with debate over two bills sponsored by Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.

The first bill would restrict the financing of military operations to fighting terrorism, protecting American troops and training Iraqi forces. The second would give the Bush administration 60 days to report to Congress on its global strategy for defeating Al Qaeda and would limit the length of troop deployments.

On war-related measures last year, Republicans repeatedly blocked Democrat-backed bills outright. But on Tuesday, Republicans appeared so confident and so eager to talk about the war that they voted overwhelmingly to bring Mr. Feingold’s first bill up for 30 hours of debate.

That vote was 70 to 24, with 43 Republicans joining 26 Democrats and one independent in favor of debating the bill, while 20 Democrats, 3 Republicans and one independent voted against it.

Mr. Feingold’s bills, which are certain to be defeated, are the first of several efforts by Democrats to press the war issue.

Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts returned from a trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan warning of a resurgence of Al Qaeda because of the continuing concentration of resources in Iraq.

And on Thursday the Joint Economic Committee, led by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, will hold a hearing on the costs of the war.

This flurry of largely uncoordinated activity suggests that Democrats will take an aggressive stance ahead of the next report by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, who will testify before Congress in early April.

General Petraeus is expected to recommend that the reduction in troop levels now under way be halted for at least a short period, starting in July, to assess the progress that has been made.

Despite the recent military gains, Senator Reed and other Democrats said they were confident that voters remained as weary of the war as ever.

“I think they are beginning to ask themselves questions like, ‘O.K., now that everyone says we have made real progress on the ground, why can’t we start coming out more dramatically?’ ” Mr. Reed said. “And now with the economy becoming such a central issue — $190 billion a year — why are we spending there instead of here?”

The Democrats are also focusing on the strain on the military.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, said, “The cumulative effects of the last six-plus years at war have left our Army out of balance, consumed by the current fight and unable to do the things we know we need to do to properly sustain our all-volunteer force.”

The majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, said Democrats would continue to emphasize the cost of the war.

“We are not going to lose this subject; it’s too important to the American people,” he said. “If this war goes on another year, we will have borrowed a trillion dollars to pay for this war in Iraq.”

February 26, 2008 – Kennebunkport, Maine — Calling President George Bush “the worst president in the history of the United States,” Independent U.S. Senate candidate Laurie Dobson stood on the steps of Town Hall Tuesday and called upon the town to indict Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as war criminals.

Saying that both had “made killing fields of many countries,” Dobson urged town leaders to issue a warrant for their arrests.

“There is compelling, undeniable, irrefutable evidence that crimes are going on,” she said.

Dobson filed a copy of her indictment with Town Manager Larry Mead and later read it aloud for gathered media members overlooking Walker’s Point, the summer home of the President’s parents. Flanked by campaign manager Bruce Marshall and human rights lawyer Harold Burbank, Dobson said she will do what she can, from appearing at meetings to gathering petitions, to see that the issue makes it on to the town warrant in June.

The central focus of Dobson’s campaign has been calling for an end to the war in Iraq and the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. If impeachment doesn’t happen, though, she wants both to be indicted as war criminals and for “crimes against our Constitution.”

As for the indictment, Dobson said she was following in the footsteps of Brattleboro, Vt., who adopted an indictment resolution in that town.

Things weren’t looking quite as simple in Kennebunkport.

“Under Maine law, towns have no power to indict,” Mead said.

Further, though Dobson called upon the police to arrest both Bush and Cheney should they come to town, that doesn’t appear likely either.

“It’s my understanding that the town has no authority to make an indictment,” said Deputy Police Chief Kurt Moses, “so it’s a non-issue.”

Mead said he will take Dobson’s request to the Board of Selectmen on Feb. 28.

“They can decide whether they want to move forward,” he said.

Selectman Kristy Bryant got an advance look at the indictment, as she happened to be stopping at Town Hall while Dobson was giving her press conference.

While Bryant said Dobson’s request would be discussed at a future meeting, she also called it, “a shameless plug for her campaign.”

If the selectmen choose not to move forward with the indictment, Dobson’s next recourse would be to gather the 210 certified signatures needed to have the issue placed on the June town warrant.

At that point, Mead said, the town would need to seek legal advice.

“We would seek advice from counsel,” Mead said. “We would need to know if what we were asking people to vote on was within our legal right.”

For her part, Dobson urged residents of the town she calls the “home of my heart” to refuse to allow “barbaric individuals who mistreat people” to have any right to come within town lines. And while she acknowledged that hers was just a “small campaign,” she said she planned to use it to follow her conscience and make a difference.

Quoting Abraham Lincoln, she said, “Let us have faith that right makes right; and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it.”

Text of Laurie Dobson’s call for indictment:

“Shall the Kennebunkport Board of Selectmen instruct the Town Attorney to draft indictments against President Bush and Vice President Cheney for crimes against our Constitution, and publish said indictments for consideration by other authorities, and shall it be the law of the Town of Kennebunkport that the Kennebunkport Police, pursuant to the above-mentioned indictments, arrest and detain George W. Bush and Richard Cheney in Kennebunkport of they are not duly impeached, and prosecute or extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably content to prosecute them.”

February 25, 2008 – One year after Bob Woodruff spoke about his brain concussion on an ABC documentary, he is busy flying around the world on assignments and continuing to draw attention to the signature injury of the war in Iraq: traumatic brain injury.

His recovery seems miraculous, considering how the shrapnel from a roadside bomb had ripped into his skull on Jan. 29, 2006. Woodruff, 46, is back at work at ABC news, although he does not have his previous job as a news anchor — at least not yet.

“I don’t know if I could do that,” he says. “I think it’s possible. But one thing that I know for sure is that I’m going to remain as a journalist because I have always loved journalism.”

Woodruff now works with a team to produce more in-depth assignments. He can better cope with longer projects because his traumatic brain injury (TBI) caused a language disorder that makes it hard for him to come up with words. And for a journalist, nothing could be more frustrating.

Woodruff continues to improve and often speaks with ease and confidence. But he still occasionally runs into a roadblock in his brain.

In a recent interview at his office, Woodruff described how reading and writing have helped his brain improve. After he got out of the hospital he was not willing to just sit at home, he said, “watching sports on TV all day long with a — what do you call the thing that controls the TV?” He couldn’t come up with the term remote control.

Woodruff has a disorder called aphasia. It happens when a stroke or TBI affects the language side of the brain, usually the left side. The National Aphasia Association estimates that 1 million people in the USA have it.

In particular, Woodruff has expressive aphasia, which means that he can understand a word but cannot always say it. Fortunately, he does not have receptive aphasia, which occurs when someone cannot make sense of the words that they see or hear.

Those, like Woodruff, who have expressive aphasia may have different types of problems. In some cases, a person may only have trouble coming up with a specific word during a conversation; others may speak in choppy and incomplete sentences; and still others may use the wrong words, says Steven Flanagan, associate professor of rehabilitation medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Woodruff says that sometimes he cannot come up with a word that he had used often before his injury. When he woke up in the hospital, he couldn’t name any states. “I couldn’t even remember the word for a hamburger or an egg sandwich,” he says.

When he came home from the hospital with his wife and four children, they used flash cards and word games to help him snap back. It has been most difficult for him to recall nouns. He can easily say the names of his immediate family, but he says it’s harder to recall more distant family members.

And at first, an incorrect word would sometimes slip out when he was speaking. Once when his now-7-year-old twin daughters were in the car, he told them to put on strappers, instead of seat belts, his wife, Lee Woodruff, recalled in a phone interview.

He had to figure out how to access words in his brain. “In the very early days, he’d say ‘I feel one thousand dollars better today,’ ” Lee says. He had intended to say “one thousand percent,” but he would mix up dollars and measurements and miles and inches. “All of those things must be housed in some retrieval area, like a filing system,” she says.

People with expressive aphasia not only have different verbal problems, but they also rely on different techniques to retrieve words. Some can sing songs even when they have trouble saying words, says Flanagan, whose patients include Woodruff.

Woodruff says reading and writing have most helped him recover. Not long after he came home from the hospital, he and Lee started writing their book, In an Instant, recently out in paperback. “I would write things and give it to Lee, and she would write things and run it by me. We would edit each other. It improved me every single day, faster and faster, as weeks and months went by.”

Woodruff even started taking Chinese classes because he had lived in Beijing before he became a journalist. He wanted to see if that could strengthen his English.

“I started taking lessons a couple days a week for a few months, but I’ve run out of time to keep studying,” he says.

Woodruff says it’s much harder to remember a word if he only hears it. “When you tell me a word, even though I know what it means, I can’t really see the vision of it in my head,” he says. He needs to see words in writing.

Even if Woodruff works hard to read and memorize a word, it doesn’t mean that it will always come to his mind when he needs it. People with expressive aphasia may find that words can slip away, especially if they are too tired or nervous, or don’t use a word very often, Flanagan says.

“There are definitely moments when you can hear him stumbling for a word, but he’s become adept at substituting or going around it,” Lee says.

After his injury, some experts feared Woodruff’s career was over. But the brain remains a mystery. “With each new discovery, more questions are raised than are answered,” says Flanagan. At least the brain is “plastic,” which means it has the capacity to change over time. “So after an injury, it adapts by making new connections,” he says.

A year ago, Woodruff says he started working by reporting on the telephone. Last month, he flew to the Sudan to work on a project. Several days after he returned to New York, he took off to research another story in Brazil. He doesn’t know if he will go back to being an anchor, but for now he’s happy to produce in-depth stories.

Even if Woodruff is frustrated when he occasionally can’t find a word, his family and friends are elated by his recovery. “I’m amazed,” says his brother David Woodruff. “Every time I talk to him, I hear improvement. And it’s still going on, two years later.”

February 27, 2008 – A British CBS journalist kidnapped in the southern Iraqi city of Basra more than two weeks ago is in good health but remains in captivity, according to an Iraqi source.

News agency Associated Press has reported that the Briton, who works for the American television network CBS but who has not been officially named, was still in Basra and negotiations were continuing for his release.

An Iraqi interpreter who was abducted alongside him on February 10 was released three days later and it was expected the journalist would be freed soon after – but he has not yet been released.

Harith al-Edhari, a director of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s office in Basra, told AP last night that the journalist was still in Basra and was in good health.

Al-Edhari said his office was negotiating with the kidnappers and that he was confident the journalist would be released.

Both CBS and the Foreign Office said they had no further public statements to make about the kidnapping.

However, public appeals for the Briton’s release have been made in Arabic in Iraq and an intensive behind-the-scenes effort is being made to free him.

February 28, 2008 — Like many of his fellow Americans who enlisted in the military after Sept. 11, 2001, Mike Totten was compelled to serve by a heightened sense of patriotism. The promise of money for college helped to seal the deal.

In April 2003, Totten, who graduated from Livonia High School in 2000, was deployed to Iraq as part of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne unit and assigned to a security detail for high-ranking commanders.

As he traveled across the country, Totten said he didn’t see any improvement in the lives of the Iraqis — and there were no weapons of mass destruction, contrary to what the Bush administration had claimed.

“It kind of got me thinking: ‘What the hell am I doing here?'”

Wednesday night, Totten, president of the Rochester chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, and other veterans who served in war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam described the nightmare of war to a group of more than 100 people at the Cinema Theater.

“Forty years later, we haven’t learned,” said Roberto Resto of Rochester, who served with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam for eight months in 1968 until he was wounded. “We are back in the same quagmire, the same war. Only this time, our weapons are more powerful.”

Totten, 26, is now a senior at Nazareth College studying social work.

He was medically discharged from the army in September 2004 for severe back pain, the result of explosions jolting the trucks that he rode in again and again.

Totten was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. On Oct. 16, 2003, three soldiers in his unit were killed in a firefight in Karbala. One of the men, just an arms-length away, was shot in the neck. He died in Totten’s arms.

“Combat is not something that anyone can train you for,” he said. “The amount of training that you can receive can never prepare you for seeing your friends get hurt — or worse.”

Once he got home, Totten said, his anti-war feelings grew.

“It really just made sense that this whole entire occupation of Iraq was for something other than what we were told it was,” he said.

Resto said his anti-war feelings grew after he and another group of soldiers took an elderly Vietnamese woman out of her hut and burned it down.

“That completely turned me against the war because that could have been my mother.”

Denique Conner, 27, of Rochester, a member of the New York Army National Guard 401st Civil Affairs Battalion, served as an administrative assistant in Afghanistan from November 2002 to July 2003.

“In the military you are trained not to think, you’re trained to follow orders,” she said. “When I began to think, then I began to be against (the war).”

The panel discussion followed a showing of a film that documented the 1971 testimony of Vietnam veterans about their experiences in combat called Winter Soldier Investigation.

From March 13 to March 16, veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will hold similar testimonies in Washington, D.C.

“We have to stop this nightmare,” Resto said. “We cannot continue to send young men and women to die in a war for oil and profit.”

Earlier this month, Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, told a House subcommittee reviewing the backlog that Cooper should be held accountable for the problems and replaced. On Thursday, Sullivan said he wishes Cooper well, but he hopes he will be replaced by someone who aggressively overhauls the claims process so “that veterans do not wait forever to get an answer from VA.” 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Veterans Affairs Department said Thursday its undersecretary responsible for benefits is leaving.  The agency has been besieged by complaints about its backlog in claims, which have escalated, in part, because of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seeking assistance.

Daniel L. Cooper, a retired Navy vice admiral, departs April 1. A VA spokesman said Cooper was leaving for personal reasons. Cooper was credited by the VA with helping the agency to strengthen its outreach efforts and improve its communication on the Internet during his six years in the position.

“Dan Cooper’s leadership, management savvy and personable touch were indispensable in guiding VA benefits programs into the Internet era and adapting the department to the needs of service members from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake.

But Cooper has faced criticism by veterans advocates for the backlog.

A recent study by the Government Accountability Office found that between 2003 and 2007, the inventory of claims awaiting a decision by the VA grew by more than 50 percent to a total of about 392,000. During the same period, it said the average number of days to process a claim grew by three weeks to 132 days.

The report noted that the VA continues to take steps to help improve claims-processing performance. However, it said the VA still experiences significant service delivery challenges, including lengthy processing times and inconsistent decisions.

Earlier this month, Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, told a House subcommittee reviewing the backlog that Cooper should be held accountable for the problems and replaced. On Thursday, Sullivan said he wishes Cooper well, but he hopes he will be replaced by someone who aggressively overhauls the claims process so “that veterans do not wait forever to get an answer from VA.”

VoteVets, a group of veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plans to broadcast a cable television advertisement attacking Senator John McCain, the only veteran in the presidential race.

The ad features a young mother and Iraqi vet, who challenges Mr. McCain’s statements that it would be fine with him if the United States spent the next thousand years in Iraq.

Holding up her infant son, the vet, Rose Forrest, said, “This is my little boy. He was born after I came back from Iraq. What commitment are you making to him? How about a thousand years of affordable health care? Or a thousand years of keeping America safe? Can we afford that for my child, Senator McCain?”

The group’s Web site is also sharply critical of Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona: “Senator John McCain presents himself as a maverick and a critic of the Iraq war,’’ it states, “but a close read of his record indicates that his position on the Iraq war has consistently matched President George W. Bush’s.”

In response to the new advertisement, the McCain campaign issued this statement that referred to the candidates for the Democratic nomination, Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York: “Senator Obama and Senator Clinton want to set a date for withdrawal -– that means chaos, genocide and an opportunity for al Qaeda to tell the world that they defeated the United States of America. As Senator McCain has said on a number of occasions, it isn’t troop presence that the American people object to -– it’s the loss of American lives.”

Mr. McCain has repeatedly defended remarks he made in New Hampshire and elsewhere that it wouldn’t bother him if the United States maintained a troop presence in Iraq and the region for a hundred or a thousand or more years. He likened keeping troops there eventually to the situations in Korea and Bosnia.

The ad buy for VoteVets initially will be aimed only at “opinion-makers and power-brokers” in the Washington, D.C. area, said a spokesman for the group, which would not disclose how much it planned to spend on the ad.

“Senator McCain needs to give us some straight talk about how much endless war in Iraq is going to cost,” said Jon Soltz, an Iraqi vet and chairman of the group. “We don’t have an endless pot of money or an endless supply of troops and equipment.”

VoteVets. Org is a nonprofit and also has a political action committee that raised $242,000 in 2007. Members of its board of advisers include retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO supreme commander and presidential candidate, Bob Kerrey, a Vietnam vet who is president of the New School in New York. Both Mr. Clark and Mr. Kerrey have endorsed Mrs. Clinton.

February 27, 2008 – PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa. — Rows of hotline operators with muted voices mask the desperation of incoming calls on a recent afternoon: a soldier back from Iraq with a drinking problem and a broken marriage; an Army recruiter in the throes of depression; a Marine in Iraq eager to reach his wife after the birth of his son.

This warren of cubicles in a suburban-Philadelphia office building — with two other call centers in Arlington, Va., and St. Petersburg, Fla. — are the Pentagon’s front line for fighting the strain of war.

The 24-hour hotline program, Military OneSource, offers an array of services to soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines or their families, from tax preparation and financial advice to psychological and family counseling. It augments military chaplains and base programs.

DIALING FOR DIRECTION: Calls rise at Pentagon help hotline

A few years ago, OneSource consultants found a temporary home for a 15-foot pet boa constrictor while its owner, an Army National Guard soldier, went to Iraq. In 2005, U.S. military doctors at a combat hospital in Iraq used the hotline to find a translator who could help treat, by telephone conference call, a wounded Nepalese soldier.
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But the calls that send consultants to the “serenity room” here to chill out, or to take a walk around the building, are pleas for help from war-weary troops or their relatives.

“There’s a lot of stress (for) a lot of servicemembers who are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan,” says Amy DiMalanta, 34, who answers calls.

“They’re having a lot of issues they’re facing at home like reintegration (with their family) or just the stress of, ‘Am I going to go back (to war)?’ ” she says. “A lot of them emphasize that they have a hard time sleeping … having nightmares or they’re thinking that, ‘Oh, I’m still in Iraq,’ or ‘I’m thinking I’m going to hear a bomb go off.’ “

Through the program, operated by Minneapolis-based Ceridian Corp., callers to 800-342-9647 get up to six free sessions with a licensed therapist located no more than 30 miles from their home, says Cherie Zadlo, a former Air Force colonel who runs OneSource. The first session must be made available within three days.

Timothy Larsen, Marine Corps chief of family programs, calls OneSource “an invaluable tool.”

Once a week, there is a crisis call, often a threat of suicide, says Dan Lafferty, a licensed social worker and clinical supervisor here. Operators silently alert co-workers while keeping the servicemember on the line. Supervisors will listen in on the conversation. If necessary, authorities are contacted, Zadlo says.

“You ask them if they have a plan,” DiMalanta says. “(They say) ‘I just think I want to die. I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m desperate. I’m lost.’ And so you take it from there.”

A more common plea for help, however, is the call like the one from Army wife Angie Ayers, 36, of Lone Pier, Mich.

“They helped me deal with my teenage daughter’s anger over her dad being gone,” says Ayers, whose husband, Joe, deployed with the National Guard to Iraq in 2004-05.

Ayers’ daughter, Elizabeth, then 13, grew angrier with her dad’s absence: slamming doors, scrawling hate words on a photo of Osama bin Laden and dissolving into tears at news of a death in her father’s unit. OneSource found a family counselor for the Ayers family.

Mother and daughter attended. “She (Elizabeth) was getting better, and I noticed,” Ayers says.

Since early last year, Ceridian has operated OneSource under a bridge contract while the Pentagon has sought competitive bids for a new three-year deal.

Services from OneSource’s hotline offered to military families include personal finance management, information on educational loans, spouse employment training and career management, and self-help groups that focus on drug and alcohol abuse, gambling addiction and eating disorders.

Serious medical or psychological problems are referred to military health care, Zadlo says. But stress or marital issues can be treated by in-person counseling with private-sector therapists under a promise that the military chain-of-command will not be notified, she says.

Pentagon surveys last year show that 71{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the wives of junior enlisted servicemembers say loneliness is a serious problem during deployments. A program goal is to offer a voice on the phone for military families. There are also online chat rooms and workshops.

“We’re thinking that Military OneSource is sort of like a club you belong to,” says Jane Burke, who supervises the program for the Pentagon’s Office of Military Community and Family Policy. “We think it is the way of the future for the military to get connected (to troops and their families).”