Veterans for Common Sense

November 11, 2007 – Every step mattered.

Corporal Patrick Murray focused hard on his balance and gait as he approached the commanding officers of his Marine battalion one hot Sunday in July. Murray was due for a medal honoring his exemplary courage and spirit in the months since he and his gathered comrades returned from war. And he was determined not to let on how he’d earned it.

As he snapped to attention, there wasn’t a hint that Murray was missing his right leg, lost, above the knee, to a roadside bomb blast in Fallujah, Iraq. Or of the long, grueling months of surgeries and physical therapy. Or the ingenious computerized titanium leg on which he had learned again to walk.

Only after Lieutenant Colonel Brian Sulc pinned the Naval Achievement Medal on his uniform next to the Purple Heart did Murray stumble.

As he saluted and pivoted, the artificial limb inside his camouflage pant leg buckled, and he began to fall. His fellow Marines pressed forward to assist; Sulc and two other commanders helped Murray as he righted himself.

It was, they reflected afterward, a quietly symbolic moment. The pride, the fragility, the support, the grit – the values of the unit were all right there. These Marines have always been there for one another. And in this hard year home, especially, they have had to be.

The First Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment – the reserve infantry unit based in Central Massachusetts and known as “New England’s Own” – has a proud history in modern America’s many wars, including a record of exceptional valor, and devastating casualties, on Iwo Jima. When they returned home from Iraq last fall to Veterans Day speeches, parades, and accolades, there was more distinguished service to celebrate. And more devastation.

The 878 men who came home have struggled to come to terms with the fact that 11 did not; that 68 others, like Murray, suffered combat wounds; and that many more were hit with injuries less visible but with long-term effects, like bomb-blast concussions.

It is as if they all shared in those losses, and, in a real sense, most did. A Globe survey of more than 130 members of the battalion found that nearly 60 percent report one or more symptoms of war trauma – anger, depression, nightmares, hypervigilance – even if they have not been diagnosed with the disorder.

Many hasten to add that they are doing just fine, picking up life right where they left off. It is, in the main, a proud, resilient group, not much given to complaint. Service, most say, changed them irrevocably, and for the better.

But fully half say the transition back to civilian life has been hard. Money, for some, is tight, relationships with loved ones bruised, frustration with the government veterans bureaucracy real and growing. Reserve units like theirs have, in particular, reported problems with medical screenings for brain injuries.

There is also a powerful consensus that while most of their neighbors appreciate their service, civilians don’t quite get it. A sense of isolation grows out of that, particularly in New England, where military bases are few and hostility to the war runs high.

More than a few of the Marines have doubts about this war, too. But their focus is on their duty – and on getting well, or helping others to do so. In that, members of the battalion report some ringing successes but also some shameful failures as the nation delivers, unevenly, on its pledge to care for those wounded in service.

“That’s a pretty sacred promise,” said Captain Brendan Fogerty, a company commander. “And I just don’t think the system has done a good enough job living up to it.”

After Murray regained his balance, he returned to formation, flashing his signature Irish smile to his fellow Marines. They were all looking for that grin.

The command may have been honoring him for his service, but his fellow Marines depend on his spirit. Murray, 23, of North Kingstown, R.I., has a gift for making others laugh, even at the hardest moments. He has no time at all for sympathy or self-pity. Neither does the man who was sitting next to him in the Humvee when the blast hit Sergeant Terrence “Shane” Burke, a Boston police officer.

Burke lost his left leg in the explosion when Murray lost his right. “We like to go shopping for shoes together,” Murray quipped, getting a laugh from a circle of Marines.

Later, Murray explained: “These are guys whose actions saved my life. A lot of them have had a hard time in a lot of different ways. The least I can do is show them that I’m OK and keep them laughing. I owe them that much.”

The Globe interviewed scores of Murray’s fellow Marines over the last year, and many said that, in crucial and surprising ways, the 12 months home have been harder than the seven months in combat.

Indeed, it can be a particularly tough adjustment for reserve units like New England’s Own, who train together only one weekend a month. There’s not much time together to work things through. And so they’ve sought out one another through the Internet and late-night phone calls when memories of combat get in the way of life.

Often those are memories of one disastrous day – a day that, more than any other, decided for this battalion who would return home whole and who would not.

It was Sept. 4, 2006, another scorching summer day in Fallujah, Iraq, where the five companies of New England’s Own were scattered across three bases.

They had been mobilized for almost a year, and had been in Iraq since March. The word had come down and they were due to head home in a matter of weeks. Everyone was on edge. The pace of insurgent attacks had been rising with the heat.

The first order of business that day was a memorial service for a Marine, Corporal Jordan C. Pierson, 21, of Milford, Conn., killed by a sniper on Aug. 24.

As a lone trumpeter played taps and the Marines of C Company lowered their heads in silent prayer, the Humvees from Weapons Company patrolled the perimeter, guarding against mortar attacks on the funeral gathering – a tempting target.

Then, one of the Humvees in “Whiskey 3,” as the third platoon of Weapons Company was dubbed, rolled directly over a pressure plate planted by insurgents in the dirt track. The plate triggered the detonator on two buried 155mm artillery shells that had been wired together, a “Ramadi speed bump,” as it’s known in Iraq.

Murray was in the gunner’s turret of a Humvee approximately 100 yards away when he heard the blast and saw the smoke. His squad responded instantly.

They pulled Corporal Cody Hill from the flaming Humvee. He was left with severe burns and internal injuries. Three others were killed instantly.

Murray and his squad were ordered to secure the area. As they searched for insurgents they encountered Captain Fogerty. “Who was it?” they asked.

Fogerty shook his head. It wasn’t time to go over the casualty list. But when Murray and others insisted, Fogerty delivered the news: Lance Corporal Eric Valdepeñas, a 21-year-old from Seekonk, Mass.; Corporal Jared Shoemaker, 29, a police officer back in Tulsa; and Navy Corpsman Chris Walsh, an EMT from St. Louis, had all been killed. Hill was the only survivor.

Murray felt a wave of anger and grief tear through him. He and Fogerty had attended the same Catholic school as “Val,” a brilliant student and star athlete who had been pursuing an engineering degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before he enlisted in the Marines. He had it all.

The other two, “Doc” Walsh and Shoemaker, were men Murray and the rest of the company knew less well but had come to admire deeply, even as they mocked their midwestern “John Wayne” drawl.

The Whiskey 3 squad was revered throughout the battalion. They’d helped free Iraqi civilians held hostage by insurgents in a medieval dungeon and saved the life of an infant girl who needed emergency medical care. They had built schools and taken on other “hearts and minds” projects that to them defined the purpose of the US presence in Iraq.

Murray recalls turning to Burke to say, “They really were the best we had.”

Weapons Company regrouped back at the base, a cluster of buildings known as Camp Baharia, on the fringe of Fallujah.

In Burke’s hooch, Murray and Fogerty talked, over coffee, about Valdepeñas and old days at Bishop Hendricken High School, in Warwick, R.I. Fogerty said the platoon needed to suit up again, straight away. There were no complaints.

As they headed out, Sergeant Mark Wills, 38, of Waltham, Mass., another close friend of Valdepeñas, stopped by. They had a cigarette and said little. Then Wills put his arm around Murray and said: “Keep your head down out there. Get back safe.”

As the doors of the Humvee slammed shut, Murray could see that Lance Corporal Jonathan Goldman, the assigned driver, was exhausted. Murray offered to drive and told Goldman to take the turret. At 8:45 p.m., dusk in the desert, the convoy of seven Humvees, led by Fogerty, set out.

As Murray looked back on that moment, he recalled “a real bad feeling” in the air that night.

“For the first time, I really felt like I wanted to get the hell out of there,” he said. “I was, like, OK, I want this to be over now.”

Through a narrow slit of bullet-proof glass, Murray guided the Humvee down the main roadway, past mud-brick and stucco buildings occasionally lit by thin strips of neon. Every heap of trash or donkey cart or bump in the road seemed a potential IED. Every open window in a building was a possible sniper’s nest. Wills dubbed the patrols on this road, “the roulette wheel of death.”

As an evasive measure, the Humvees often jumped the center divider of the four-lane road to throw off insurgents planting road side bombs. Murray did just that about one mile from the base, and as the Humvee bumped over the median strip, it hit a pressure plate, another Ramadi speed bump.

For the second time that day, an explosion of shrapnel tore up through the belly of a Weapons Company Humvee. Murray was thrown more than 50 feet from the vehicle, “like a Kung Fu fighter flying around on fire,” as he later put it. Goldman was popped from the turret like a champagne cork. Burke remained trapped in the passenger side of the crippled Humvee as it careened to a stop. He was pulled out just before it burst into flames.

Murray remembers trying to crawl to the curb for protection as insurgents opened fire. Sergeant Scott Parish of Andover, Mass., ran out and covered Murray, returning fire. Humvees circled like a wagon train to protect the wounded.

Back at Camp Baharia, Wills was lying on his bunk, writing in a journal about the devastating loss earlier in the day of his friend Valdepeñas.

“Moments ago,” he wrote, “we learned Whiskey 3 was hit. My little buddy Val is gone. Hill is in critical. I can’t believe this.”

Then Wills heard an explosion outside the wire. A desperate voice came over the radio, calling in “mass casualties.”

Realizing from the radio calls that it was Murray and Burke who were hit, Wills quickly suited up and formed a convoy that followed the glow of the burning Humvee through the darkness.

At the end of that day, Wills retreated to his bunk and his journal, a place where he had found solace through his worst days, like June 25 when his friend, Lance Corporal Paul Nicholas King of Tewksbury, Mass., died in his arms from a sniper round. Wills usually cast his writing as a conversation with his wife, Charlotte. He picked up his entry for Sept. 4 where he’d left off:

“Same (expletive) day. Hours later. Another platoon was hit by an IED. This time my buddy Murray lost his leg as well as Sergeant Burke lost his leg. Honey, I’m not feeling good about the rest of my time here.”

Back at Fort Devens, the aftershock of that bloody day hit home almost immediately

Lance Corporal Michael Stubbs, of Medford, was one who felt it. Stubbs, 24, had been wounded in Fallujah and was back at the fort in the status known as “medical hold,” still on active duty, but awaiting treatment.

A turret gunner, Stubbs had survived three IED blasts. But one, on May 25, left him with a concussion. He walked away from the blast and tried to shrug it off.

For weeks Stubbs toughed it out. His fellow Marines kept urging him to seek medical treatment. Finally, he went in to see a doctor, who recommended he be sent home for a medical evaluation. His command didn’t agree.

“Don’t be a pussy,” he remembers being told. “You’re fine.”

But the dizzy spells made it impossible for Stubbs to keep up during patrols. The Marines in his platoon begged the medical staff to take another look, saying they feared for his health and their safety as a unit. Finally, on Aug., 6, he was declared unfit for duty and sent to the Bethesda, Md., Naval Medical Center.

Stubbs’s medical records indicate he was diagnosed with a concussion and with injuries to his back and knees. Two days later he was shipped to Fort Devens and told there would be follow-up medical appointments.

That hasn’t been the case, he said.

“No one was there to help me,” he said. “There were no follow up appointments. I was told my records were lost.”

And to this day, Stubbs says he has never been screened for Traumatic Brain Injury, or “TBI,” a condition caused when the brain is shaken by a blast wave. But he suffers the symptoms – such as disorientation, depression, and anger – which can take months to surface.

Stubbs was having nightmares and suffering from sleeplessness – and drinking heavily as a way to self-medicate. But the command saw no physical injury and ordered him to perform work details, including painting the headquarters’ hallway.

And that’s what he was doing on Sept. 4 in the late morning. With the time difference in Iraq, it was approximately 12 hours after the explosion. Stubbs heard the squeaking sound of a pen on a white board in the command center. He watched an officer write out the news: “KIA – Shoemacher, Valdepeñas, Walsh. Gravely wounded: Burke, Murray, Hill.”

“I read that and it was like getting punched in the gut,” Stubbs said. “I went outside and coughed up my breakfast. I couldn’t stand up. I was a mess. It’s harder to be far away on a day like that and know there is nothing you can do.”

The blast wave was also heard as a knock on the Seekonk, Mass., door of the home of Dr. Jesus Valdepeñas and his wife, Anne-Marie.

At 6 p.m. on Sept. 4, two Marines in dress blues pulled into the driveway.

Lance Corporal Valdepeñas, the youngest of the couple’s eight children, had called just a week earlier, sounding excited about coming home. His mother was already in touch with Charlotte Wills, Mark’s wife, about planning a homecoming ceremony.

Then Dr. Valdepeñas looked out the window, saw the Marines, and knew why they were there. He threw open the door, blurting out, “It’s Eric, isn’t it?”

The Marines stood straight, and one of them said, “We want to thank you for your son’s service to our country.”

“I couldn’t breathe,” Dr. Valdepeñas recalled, during a visit this fall to his son’s grave. “I felt like my life ended right there. He was my youngest. . . . He was going to take care of us.”

The power was off, the air conditioning down, and the hallways dimly lit by emergency lights. The elevators were out as well, so Patrick Murray walked down three flights of stairs on his one good leg to sign in a visitor.

After a whirlwind of treatment and surgeries in Iraq, Germany, and Texas, Murray was in Malogne House, a dreary residential facility attached to Walter Reed military hospital in Washington. It is a holding tank for veterans, like Murray, who are transitioning back home.

“It’s not that bad,” said Murray, not one to complain.

He’d been the beneficiary of military trauma care, the best in the world by some accounts. But now he felt the victim of the frayed system of ongoing care for the wounded veterans.

A Veterans Affairs Administration official came by to brief Murray on his benefits and the paperwork required at a time when he was in great pain and heavily sedated. In graphic terms, Murray told him off. The counselor never returned.

Murray also remembers being tested for TBI and told that his memory loss and the trembling nerves in his hands could be traced to the day he fell out of a tree as a child.

“The doctor who did that test had the credibility of Dr. Seuss,” he said.

Captain Fogerty, 32, of North Kingstown, R.I., is slow to anger, but now he was irate.

He had been making a round of visits to Murray, Burke, Hill, and other Marines from his company who suffered wounds, and what he’d found didn’t sit well at all.

A particular concern was the treatment of Cody Hill, who suffered burns over 60 percent of his body as the sole survivor of the IED attack on the morning of Sept. 4. Hill and Burke, who had lost his leg on Sept. 4, were both sent to the Brooke Army Medical Center, in Texas, reputedly one of the best in the armed forces. Treatment records show that the young corporal saw a burn surgeon on Oct. 5, 2006, and that no one had prescribed a long-term rehabilitation plan for him until May 4, a delay that jeopardized his recovery.

Fogerty began to ask tough questions and says he and the Hill family were told by a nurse in the East Burn Ward that Cody “seemed to have slipped through the cracks.”

The nurse’s words infuriated Fogerty, and, in May, he banged out a memo outlining his findings. He addressed it up his chain of command, ultimately to a congressional committee investigating problems with the care of veterans.

He wrote of Hill’s falling “through the cracks,” of paperwork routinely lost, of military families unaware of what benefits they are entitled to, and of the maddening inability of the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs Administration to work smoothly together.

Cody Hill’s father, Carlyle, had quit his job on an Oklahoma ranch to help his son heal. He dressed his son’s burns and slept by his bedside. He never thought about it, he just did it.

The family was struggling financially, but no one showed them they were entitled to benefits – $29,000 in compensation and $100,000 in insurance. Paperwork went missing and the claim was delayed for months.

Fogerty tracked the lost paperwork back to a civilian-contracted physician who had been brought in to help an overwhelmed medical staff at Brooke. The folder lay on the doctor’s desk for months before disappearing altogether. Burke, who lost his leg, has suffered similar bureaucractic delays at Brooke, which have left him lingering in “medical hold.”

A spokesman for Brooke would not comment on Hill’s situation, but conceded that failures to coordinate care occur. The center, he said, plans to address the problem with a new staff position.

Sitting in his office one recent day, Fogerty said, “Not that much gets me steamed. But to tell you the truth, this is outrageous. . . . If I ran Weapons company to the standard that this bureaucracy is doing, I’d be fired, and deservedly so.”

It was Sept. 30, 2006, just five days before the battalion was to depart Iraq, and Sergeant Terry Rathbun was out on patrol. It was a tense time, but he was starting to feel pretty confident he’d get home to Norwich, Conn., in one piece.

Then a shot rang out. Captain Harry Thompson, his platoon commander, was hit and struggling to stand up. Rathbun lunged forward to keep him down and, at that instant, the sniper shot that might have killed Thompson struck Rathbun in the face.

On a hot, dusty day at Fort Devens this August, Rathbun, 36, received the Bronze Star for his heroism.

Rathbun had nothing but praise for the care he says he received at Bethesda Naval Hospital. But once he was released into the custody of the VA, he said, it was “one nightmare after another.”

His records never followed him from Bethesda. He wasn’t checked for TBI for nearly seven months. And when the tests confirmed he did have TBI, he was told the local VA did not have a rehabilitation program. Finally, after months of delays – delays that can do long-term harm to TBI patients – he was placed with a private therapy center in Groton, Conn.

Adding insult to injury, Rathbun kept getting medical bills and collection notices from the VA, even though all of his care was supposed to be fully covered. After six months of haggling, the situation was corrected, but not before Rathbun suffered a drop in his credit rating.

“You don’t want to complain about it because you figure, hey, there are a lot of guys who didn’t make it back at all,” says Rathbun, who suffers from dizziness, confusion, and depression. He has been unable to find work, and his marriage has broken up since he returned from war.

“I have to figure out how I am going to put my whole life back together,” he said. “I guess you think there is going to be a support system for you when you get back. But there really isn’t. You have to do it all for yourself.”

Mark Wills came home from war a changed person, and not necessarily for the better.

He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t control his anger, and he couldn’t clear his mind of the image of Nick King dying in his arms.

Even the roads around Boston were a problem. As he drove from one job to the next, tending lawns in suburbs around Route 128, the divided highway sometimes triggered memories of the IED-pocked thoroughfares of Fallujah.

But then he sought help at the VA in Jamaica Plain for counseling and found it to be helpful. Group therapy sessions gave him “the tools” he needed to recognize what was going on inside him.

PTSD has swept the battalion. Several Marines confided they have contemplated suicide. Wills never allowed himself to slip that far. He owes it to his wife and two children, he said.

But there are still bad days, like the week before, when he threw a rum-and-coke at his computer screen after hearing a heavy metal song on the radio that he’d often listened to with King.

He confided this one night in the small office in his home in Waltham, a sanctum dedicated to the war. There are photographs of the fallen and a flag signed by the members of his platoon. His desert boots, still splattered with King’s blood, are neatly placed in a corner cabinet.

There are a lot of things, he says, that he can’t let go of.

“I wasn’t ready for that, having a buddy die in your arms,” he said.

Wills is open about his struggles. And he has been encouraging his fellow Marines to get therapy. It is his role, he figures, to show them there is nothing wrong with a man, even a Marine, seeking help.

For Murray, Burke, and Hill, Sept. 4, 2006, is what wounded Iraq veterans call their “alive day.” The day they cheated death.

And so on Sept. 4 of this year, Wills invited a close circle of Weapons Company to his house to celebrate the living and remember the fallen.

Murray and Burke were there along with Hill. Stubbs also showed up. He was drinking heavily and was off the medication for PTSD that the VA had prescribed. To him the math was easy. The VA charged $40 for a copayment on a prescription for Celexa, the antianxiety drug they dole out to combat veterans.

“A 30-rack of Budweiser at $22 seemed like a better deal,” Stubbs explained.

Fogerty came as well. He still seemed haunted by the decisions he made in the field, saying later: “I don’t think that there’s a day goes by I’m not thinking about those guys. . . . What could I have done differently? I’m responsible for it. . . . In the end, God will judge me for that.”

In all, about two dozen Marines and their wives and girlfriends gathered in small clusters on Wills’s porch. They lit one cigarette after another and pulled hard on the tap of a keg.

For the family, the pain has never gone away. Dr. Valdepeñas quit his practice. He is consumed with depression. He and his wife rarely leave their home, they said, except to say the Rosary at Eric’s grave every day. The gardens he once tended to with Eric’s help have been taken over by weeds. There are pictures and shrines to their son at every turn in the house.

The parents were given a brochure from the VA about benefits, which provided a toll-free number for grief counseling. But their daughter, Nora Lough, 32, said they had never opened the brochure. They have relied on their faith to find comfort. She said that many of the Marines, including Fogerty and Wills, have stayed in touch and helped her parents in any way they could.

The military system, she feels, did what was required for the funeral but not much beyond that.

“I am surprised that no one follows up with the parents,” she said. “My parents really need help. To lose a child is very difficult.”

Three weeks after this Sept. 4 anniversary, Murray was packing up his room at Walter Reed.

He had finally been “med boarded” out of the military and was on his way home. He had landed a job as a foreman with Turner Construction and was excited about the future.

As he stuffed his belongings into large duffel bags, he held up a 4-inch-thick pile of paperwork he said he’d have to present to the VA. Within a week, that paperwork would go astray, and he found himself registered at the wrong VA center.

It’s a disgrace, he said. He hopes the private insurance that comes with his job will save him from having to rely on the government for help.

Murray slung his backup prosthesis over his shoulder as if it was a rifle and wheeled a cart loaded with his belongings out of his room. He loaded it all into his Jeep and began the journey back home to Rhode Island.

“It’s been a long, hard year,” Murray said. “I think I’m ready to let all that go. I want to move on.”

But there was one last mission. Murray went to the battalion’s weekend training session the third weekend of October. He wanted to say goodbye to his comrades. Wills was also there, turning in his gear and signing out of the military so that he could return to his lawn business.

Murray arrived in jeans and a sweatshirt, sporting a goatee and holding a can of root beer. After the battalion formation, the men in fatigues looked tired and dirty from a wet, cold weekend of training. There was sober talk among them of when the unit might redeploy to Iraq. But their faces lit up when they saw Murray, and they huddled around him.

Soon enough, he was telling them a story. And as he did, he was waving his arms and flashing that smile, and once again he had them all laughing.

Charles M. Sennott can be reached at sennott@globe.com.

November 10, 2007 – Daniel Bozorgnia was honorably discharged from the Army in 2006 after his convoy blew up in Iraq. The blast slammed him to the ground, but adrenaline kept him going until days later, when the back pain became unbearable. Though offered a desk job, he wanted out if he couldn’t be on the front lines.

A flag signed by soldiers who served in Iraq with Daniel Bozorgnia hangs in Mr. Bozorgnia’s Grand Prairie home. He was happy to be home in Grand Prairie with his wife and two daughters, but that’s when the nightmares began. The former squad leader would fall asleep and find himself back in Iraq – wounded, stranded and dying.

The tension spilled into his daytime routine. “When you go into crowded areas, people come up to you. You push ’em back,” he said. “People back here don’t respect your bubble. You can hear them breathing.”

With his frustration boiling into rage and his marriage at risk, he went to the Dallas Veterans Affairs hospital and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Now he’s getting help.

Mr. Bozorgnia, 29, blends into North Texas suburbia on one level: He’s a family man you might see at the grocery store or run into at a school event. He’s also part of a growing population of war veterans who have returned to find that adjusting to civilian life is a battle in itself.

It’s not just about recovering from their injuries, but adjusting to regular life after the stress of war. They struggle to keep their families together, find work, pay mortgages, secure disability pay, recover from war wounds and relieve post-combat stress. Yet services for them are largely uncoordinated, sluggish and confusing. And many are in poor shape to slog through the system.

“You see us and we’re not full people when we come back,” said Orlando Castaneda, an Army combat veteran from Arlington. “When we come back, we are fragments of human beings, mentally and physically. We’ve been in the thick of it.”

The Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have acknowledged their failure to prepare for the large number of casualties that came with the prolonged insurgency after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.

Now, after a string of damning reports and stinging congressional hearings, there is a rush to help these wounded warriors. A massive mobilization across the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments – with crucial assistance from veteran advocacy groups and nonprofit organization – is under way to help veterans transition from combat to civilian life.

The result is a cornucopia of services that remains extraordinarily difficult to navigate, even with perseverance and the help of others who know how to work the system.

There’s a hesitancy to talk about these personal struggles, especially among former war fighters trained to guard emotions. But those interviewed said they want outsiders to understand the frustrating complexity of returning to civilian life and to encourage fellow veterans to keep pushing.

“A lot of guys, for whatever reason, are just not connected,” said Robert Lee Aiken III, a Marine veteran and Purple Heart winner who has worked his way through the system. “They don’t know. They’re not willing. They’re not able. They don’t have support.”

‘Every case is different’

Tamara Uhrich is a caseworker for the Army’s Wounded Warrior Program. Most of the clients who come into her Dallas office are men younger than 30 without a lot of education and no easily transferable skills. They enlisted for education and other opportunities, some hoping to make the Army a career. They typically were deployed two or three times before getting wounded.

“Every case is different,” she said. “I have yet to meet anyone with the same circumstances.”

An office wall map displays a thumb tack in each place she has a client. In a cabinet, she has color-coded files for each one. The green folders mean traumatic brain injury. The reds are for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The blue means an amputee. The manila files indicate disfigurements.

Better medical technology, improved treatment techniques and beefed-up armament means soldiers survive wounds that would have killed them in past wars. Using a narrow definition, the Defense Department reports that more than 28,000 troops have been wounded in Iraq, while just over 3,100 died from combat wounds.

Those numbers mean the wounded-to-killed ratio is around 9 to 1. As a point of comparison, 3.2 service members were wounded for every fatality in Vietnam; 2.3 were wounded for every one killed in World War II, according to a VA figures.

Caring for the nation’s wounded warriors will have a lasting effect on the economy, both in direct outlays for disability entitlements and in lost productivity from disabled young people.

Harvard researcher Linda Bilmes estimated in a January report that disability compensation benefits and medical care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will probably cost the federal government $350 billion to $700 billion over the next 40 years.

Yet many Americans feel somewhat removed from the war.

“The war is so separated from everybody,” said Mrs. Uhrich, herself an Army veteran. “Unless you know somebody in the war or work for a veteran agency, you’re so detached. You don’t really experience it.”

Others can’t turn off the experience. Among her client, the red files – for those with PTSD – are the most challenging cases to manage.

Mental challenges

Deeply rooted survival instincts kick in when fighters enter a combat zone. But it’s not so easy to turn off that hyper-vigilance. After a while, the euphoria of coming back can give way to depression and feelings of inadequacy.

The most common ailments afflicting returning service members are brain-related – either physical damage (traumatic brain injury) or lingering mental trauma (post-traumatic stress disorder).

“Being over there, I got this heightened sense of security,” Mr. Bozorgnia said. “I had a couple really close calls, but I didn’t realize how close they were until I got back because the adrenaline is running.”

Memories of dying friends torment him. He’s haunted by an 8-year-old boy who threw a grenade at his convoy. Almost anything can trigger flashbacks, he said, from honking horns on the road to crowds in the bookstore.

“I feel like I didn’t give the ultimate sacrifice, and that bothers me,” he said. “It just really eats at you. I try not to think of that stuff. I try to think of the good times, but it’s hard.”

More than 48,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD, according to a Veterans Affairs spokeswoman. VA psychologist Patricia Jackley said her Dallas-based unit has enrolled more than 300 patients from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“War affects people. It [the problem] may not present in the first month. It may be a year or five years down the road,” Dr. Jackley said. “We like to say we’re the Motel 6 of mental health. We’ll leave the light on for them.”

The Army has started post-deployment check-ins to try to reduce the stigma of asking for help for mental problems. As of October, every soldier in the Army should have received some training about identifying and treating PTSD, said Lt. Gen. James Campbell, who pushed the effort at the Pentagon as director of staff for the Army.

“In conflicts past, we’ve given less attention to the wounds that are not so visible,” Gen. Campbell said.

He warned that the emphasis will result in higher numbers of veterans diagnosed for mental problems. “The normal response would be that’s bad news because the numbers are going up,” he said. “But it means now we can address it.”

Mr. Bozorgnia said his weekly VA sessions are invaluable. Doctors increased his PTSD meds, which gave him the stability needed to start classes at Tarrant County College. But complications from back surgery in October forced him to drop out for this semester. His goal is to get a degree in business and architecture and start his own business.

He has an American flag on the wall in his living room with the names of men he served with. He wears a silver bracelet with the names of three fallen friends. A tattoo on his left arm says “Psalm 91:11-13,” the soldier’s prayer: For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways …

Employment is another huge challenge for this new crop of war veterans. Many return home to face what should be their most productive work years, yet some lack the skills or stability to move into new lines of work.

A helpless feeling

Yolanda Jones, a supply sergeant who was stationed in Iraq, has had trouble holding a job since returning to Texas in March 2005. She came back with hand, hip and ankle injuries and with a broken spirit. “Every person has a breaking point,” she said, “and I never knew mine until I got there.”

On her first Thanksgiving back, still waiting for disability benefits and feeling hopeless, she tried to kill herself by swallowing a half-dozen sleeping pills. It didn’t work, but it helped her realize that life was worth living.

Still, she struggles daily to deal with her PTSD.

A former paraprofessional who worked in a clinic before she was deployed after 11 years in the Army Reserves, she hopes to become a mental health counselor specializing in treating combat veterans.

She completed nine credit hours at Dallas Baptist University but decided the school wasn’t right for her and dropped out. After stints in a probation department, at a women’s shelter and at an answering service, she enrolled at Texas Woman’s University. She singles out four professors for being helpful and flexible about her VA appointments – keeping her on track to graduate next December.

“I’m staying above water,” she said. “All this is temporary. I have good days and bad days. I take it one day at a time.”

She lives in Grand Prairie with her 18-year-old daughter, Synthia, a college student. She also has a son in college.

Money is tight, she said, and there have been a few times she couldn’t pay all her bills. Faced with losing her car, she got help from the Veterans of Foreign Wars military assistance program.

The Texas VFW’s assistance program provides one-time financial help in emergency situations to buy groceries, pay utility bills, pay the rent or otherwise help make ends meet. In the last three months, it helped 127 families statewide; it receives about 10 applications a day.

“Who better to take care of the war vets today than the war vets from yesterday,” said Dan West, who directs the Texas program.

A grueling ordeal

Mr. Castaneda, the Arlington veteran, earned $7.50 an hour working 11- and 12-hour days at the State Fair of Texas. On weekends, he works at the Traders Village flea market in Grand Prairie. He can’t drive because of his medication, so his wife, Annette, takes him to work and VA appointments.

A corporal in the Army, he came back from Iraq to face the same financial, physical and emotional stresses that many returning warriors confront – and then, a month after leaving the Army in August 2006, he received a deportation notice.

He said his father brought him to South Texas from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, when he was 3. As a child, he played with GI Joes and dreamed of enlisting.

He said his work permit lapsed when he was in Iraq and he didn’t apply for citizenship until after he was discharged.

With three kids and a wife, the 26-year-old lived for almost a year under the specter of moving to a country where he knows no one. “My hands were tied with a piece of paper,” he said.

He tried to work directly with immigration officials and sought help from the Army, but he said he was told he should have dealt with it before he got out. In August, after someone alerted the Spanish-language media, immigration officials issued a work permit. He’s trying to become a U.S. citizen.

The ordeal left a bitter taste in his mouth, especially because he fought for his adopted country. “I was so close to giving up,” he said.

Mr. Castaneda’s situation stabilized some when Ricky Cadenhead, a patient advocate at the VA hospital, took on his case. He helped Mr. Castaneda find the right doctors, made sure the family had food when money was tight and worked through contacts to keep the family’s water and electricity from being turned off. Another VA caseworker helped arrange for the job at Fair Park.

“This is a team effort, and there’s no way to win without the team,” said Mr. Cadenhead, himself a veteran.

Mr. Castaneda said he wants to enroll at the Dallas Art Institute or open his own studio someday. But he is generally discouraged.

“There are so few people who really do care,” he said. “The little bit of people who show real concern is really what makes it work.”

PROVIDING LOCAL ASSISTANCE

While the federal government has mobilized to fix myriad problems with veterans services, nonprofit and volunteer groups in North Texas are working to fill in the gaps. Among those efforts:

Veteran advocates: Groups like AMVETS, Paralyzed Veterans of America, the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars have advocates who help veterans navigate bureaucracy. “The VA is like going into a huge city without a road map,” said Joe Chenelly of AMVETS. “We are the road map for them.”

Support grants: The Dallas Foundation has awarded $1.6 million in grants so far this year to 11 programs that serve veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The aim is to help provide services such as mental health care, child care and emergency assistance. To see what the money is supporting, go to triadfund.org and click on the map.

Transportation: The Metroplex Military Charitable Trust used grant money to buy three vans so volunteers can take injured veterans to appointments at the Dallas VA’s poly-trauma unit. The volunteers, a group of Marines who served in Vietnam, trained with VA doctors and learned to use global positioning devices and Blackberries to pick up patients who use wheelchairs.

Mental health: Mental Health America and the Dallas chapter of the American Red Cross are using grant money to offer free mental health care to at least 700 veterans and their families in a 12-county area over the next two years.

Family support: United We Serve, based in Plano, is hosting retreats for military families who need encouragement during and after deployments.

November 10, 2007 – Robert Lee Aiken III is a smart man. He knows which benefits are due him as an Iraq war veteran. He knows how to fight bureaucracy. He’s working on a new career so he can adequately support his family.

But it’s been hard. Damn hard.

And he worries about the soldiers who might not be as capable.

Mr. Aiken was about to start his senior year at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000 when he dropped out to serve in the Marines – just like his dad had served in Vietnam.

Four years later, he earned a Purple Heart when he was shot in the foot and buttocks during a firefight with insurgents in the Ramadi province of central Iraq.

Recovery hasn’t been easy. Nor has his new life as a war veteran.

Doctors saved his foot, but he still has pain and can’t sit for long. He went through a long ordeal to get his disability rating and disability pay. Adding insult to injury, he said, his Chevy Blazer was impounded and sold at Camp Pendleton while he was in the hospital – and the tow company is still trying to collect $800 for seizing and auctioning off a car he bought for $600.

For Mr. Aiken, that fiasco is part and parcel of the frustrating maze that comes with reintegration into civilian life.

“You don’t expect it to happen,” he said of the small stuff. “It’ll compound in your life. When you’ve got family, you’re just trying to keep your head above water.”

The handoff from the military to Veterans Affairs has been part of the problem. Military and veterans caseworkers assign separate disability ratings, which causes confusion. And injured soldiers are often in no shape to sort it out.

“The world doesn’t slow down for you,” Mr. Aiken said. “It really is unfortunate. You’re injured, and it’s beyond your control.”

A veteran with a 100 percent VA disability rating (and a wife and one child) gets a monthly check for $2,711. That number goes down as the disability rating goes down. For example, a veteran with a 30 percent rating (with no dependents) gets only $348 a month.

When Mr. Aiken left the military in November 2005, he had a presumptive disability rating of 90 percent, but he had to wait several months for his first check because his mailing address wasn’t in the system.

When a caseworker in the VA sent a letter saying he was only 20 percent disabled, Mr. Aiken had to travel to Washington – at his own expense – to appeal. After a panel of experts quizzed him about his injuries, he was awarded a better rating, which means more benefits and training opportunities.

“Everything has worked out well for me, but a lot of it is due to my own tenacity and determination,” he said. “A lot of guys don’t pursue it or look into it because they don’t have the capacity to.”

Mr. Aiken said he learned to work the system, which he calls “the beast,” mostly from friends who had already gone through it. Now he feels a duty to help returning Marines who are in the same spot.

At 32, he is still somewhat in limbo. He moved to Dallas in February to be closer to his mom, and he’s trying to provide for his wife, Gigi, and 2-year-old daughter, Samantha, through disability benefits and a sales job at an REI store.

He’s been working with a VA counselor since March to get admitted into a training center to become a certified helicopter flight instructor. But that process is taking more time than he expected.

“It’s a matter of conforming to their regulations,” Mr. Aiken said. “No one really sits down and tells you how it works. You’ve got to throw a lot of things at them, and have all your stuff together.”

November 9, 2007 – Although many Americans believe that the nation’s veterans have ready access to health care, that is far from the case. A new study by researchers at the Harvard Medical School has found that millions of veterans and their dependents have no access to care in veterans’ hospitals and clinics and no health insurance to pay for care elsewhere. Their plight represents yet another failure of our disjointed health care system to provide coverage for all Americans.

The new study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, estimated that in 2004 nearly 1.8 million veterans were uninsured and unable to get care in veterans’ facilities. An additional 3.8 million members of their households faced the same predicament. All told, this group made up roughly 12 percent of the huge population of uninsured Americans.

Most of the uninsured veterans were working-class people who were too poor to afford private insurance but not poor enough to qualify for care under a priority system administered by the Veterans Affairs Department. Some were unable to get care because there was no V.A. facility nearby, or the nearest facility had a long waiting list, or they could not afford the co-payments required of some veterans.

There is little doubt that lack of coverage was deleterious to their health. Like other uninsured Americans, the uninsured veterans report that they have delayed or forgone care because of costs. Half had not seen a doctor in the past year, and two-thirds got no preventive care.

And the situation has been getting worse. Despite a shrinking population of working-age veterans, the number of uninsured veterans increased by 290,000 between 2000 and 2004, propelled by a steady erosion of health care coverage in the workplace and a tightening of enrollment criteria for veterans’ care.

The V.A. has long focused on caring for recent combat veterans, those with service-connected disabilities or special needs and the poorest veterans. Other veterans were served to the extent that resources were available. Unfortunately, in recent years enrollment of higher-income, nondisabled veterans shot up so fast that long waiting lists developed and budgets failed to keep pace, forcing a freeze on enrollments in this category.

One solution would be to make all veterans eligible for care in appreciation of their service to the nation. Bills pending in Congress would end the freeze, opening the way for hundreds of thousands of veterans, possibly even a million or more, to qualify for V.A. care at a cost that could reach above $1 billion the first year and almost $9 billion over five years. An even better solution would be some form of universal health coverage for all Americans. Then even veterans who live far from a V.A. facility, and a host of dependents who are not now eligible, could get the care they need.

November 8, 2007 – Derick Hughes joined the Marine Corps right after he graduated from high school. “I didn’t want to end up on the streets, so I joined the military,” he said.

But three years later and after one tour in Iraq, on the street is exactly where Hughes found himself. “Me and my wife were living in my car for awhile,” said Hughes.

Tall and fit with a friendly smile and warm eyes, Hughes doesn’t look like the stereotypical homeless person. But he found it tough to find a job after being discharged. “When soldiers and troops come back from overseas they get this big parade,” said Hughes. “Then what? Then everybody goes home.”

Looking back, he said he should have learned a trade while he was in the Marine Corps. “I wanted to be in the infantry, so that left me few choices when I got out,” said Hughes.

He doesn’t like to talk about what he saw while he was at war, but he admits he has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “I have PTSD, extremely, I have seizures,” he said.

Hughes’ behavior became more erratic and like so many other veterans, he began using drugs and alcohol. “Then a few people pointed some things out to me,” he said. That’s when he found the Sacramento Veterans Resource Center or SVRC.

The Department of Veterans Affairs teams up with SVRC to provide a multitude of services to homeless vets.

Reed Walker-Haight is a homeless coordinator for the V.A. She works closely with SVRC. One of her biggest challenges is outreach. “Some homeless veterans choose not to come to the V.A. because the V.A. is way too closely associated with the military in their mind,” she said.

Others, like Hughes simply don’t know resources exist. “I didn’t even know about the V.A. for about seven to eight months,” he said. “I didn’t know what the V.A. was. It was like here’s your discharge papers, you’re out, you’re done, thank you.”

Hughes spent 58 days at SVRC. Along with a safe place to sleep and eat, the center provided him with treatment, counseling and job training. “I’m getting help now,” he said.

While Walker-Haight is disturbed by a new study that showed more than 25 percent of the homeless population in the United States are military veterans, she sees a silver lining. “Twenty years ago the number was more like 30-35 percent, so it’s getting better,” she said.

But both Walker-Haight and Hughes are worried that resources will soon be flooded with a tsunami of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are in desperate need of help.

“What we learned from Vietnam is that veterans didn’t come back and immediately become homeless drug addicts,” said Walker-Haight. “They came back and dealt with symptoms of PTSD and mental health problems and their lives deteriorated over time.”

Hughes is hoping his fellow Iraq war vets will find the kind of support he did through the Sacramento Veterans Resource Center. “They’ve helped me,” he said. “I now have a job I have my own place you know everything’s going fine, I’m getting back on my feet slowly but surely.”

November 9, 2007 – BOSTON — Retired Staff Sergeant Andy Sapp spent 10 months in Iraq with the Massachusetts National Guard. Shortly after he returned home to Billerica two years ago, he felt broken.

“I’m not the person I was and I never will be,” Sapp said.

Andy would look out the window like he was guarding a watch tower or run in a panic from a mall looking for his rifle.

“A loud noise would make him jump. It was sort of a complete withdrawal from us and the world,” said Sapp’s wife, Ann.

Andy realized he needed help and sought it. But the stigma of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is so strong that many soldiers don’t seek help.

For those who do, it’s a long course of treatment. The VA hospitals and clinics only guarantee two years of care. After that soldiers must apply for disability and wait.

“A lot of vets who are bumping toward the end of two years are desperately waiting to have disability claims approved,” said Harvard professor Linda Bilmes. She authored a study on the long-term health care costs of war.

Some at the VA support Bilmes’s idea to immediately approve a backlog of 600,000 disability claims, a quarter of a million from this war alone.

Advocates say it’s necessary to prevent a tragedy.

“They run into a 26-page claim form, a bureaucracy completely overwhelmed and at hospitals, if the vets show up suicidal, in some cases they are turned away,” said Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense.

Such was the case for Jeff Lucey of Belchertown. The Marine Reservist suffered severe PTSD when he returned from Iraq in 2003.

His family says the VA told him he had to get his alcoholism under control before they could treat him. Soon after, Jeff hung himself. His parents are suing the federal government for negligence.

“They have in my judgement a very legitimate case for the negligence of individuals who don’t pay attention to a clear cry for help,” said U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-MASS.

VA New England tells Team Five Investigates patient care is on track.

Their most recent numbers show 99 percent of mental health patients were seen in less than 30 days. But keeping up will be an enormous challenge and could seriously tax the system. Over the next few years, an estimated 900,000 troops will return.

“It’s a tidal wave,” said Harvard University’s Bilmes. “When the soldiers who come home have really experienced the worst of the war, they’re going to have the most serious mental health issues. And we are going to see a significant increase in those veterans who need long term care.”

Massachusetts has five VA hospitals with a combined 78 psychiatrists and psychologists to treat that tidal wave of troops. Community-based vet centers are stepping up trying to help soldiers cut through the red tape.

“I’ve known people who’ve finally gotten to the point they admit they have a problem,” said Sergeant Sapp. “They’ve gone into the VA and because of bureaucracy they’ve walked out. The temptation is to walk away and not deal with it.”

Several bills and proposals are in play to extend healthcare benefits from two to five years, and to streamline the system so soldiers get disability benefits sooner.

But some wonder if it will happen quickly enough for the hundreds of thousands of returning soldiers.

November 10, 2007 – Tomorrow is set aside to honor all those who have served in the nation’s armed forces. Always celebrated on Nov. 11, Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day to commemorate the end of World War I, which took place at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month in 1918. A year later, Armistice Day was proclaimed. In 1954, Congress changed the name to Veterans Day.

So the question today is, “Are we honoring our veterans?” Certainly we did a poor job of this when the Vietnam War ended. On the surface it appears that no matter what one’s views on the Iraq war are, our veterans are being respected. But are they really? As I read the reports about the health needs of our military personnel and their families, I am not alone in determining that we are not respecting our veterans. Our vets and their families are in need of medical attention and to allow this need to continue without adequately dealing with it is shameful.

A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) published on www.medicalnewstoday.com calls attention to the increasing mental health needs of military personnel and their families. The report, developed by an APA Presidential Task Force on Military Deployment Services for Youth, Families and Service Members, notes that while service delivery efforts by individual military mental health providers are laudable, the military system falls short in its ability to meet the psychological health needs of deployed personnel and their families.

This is a sad statement. Our young men and women go off to war and suffer tremendous trauma and stress. Their families are under stress each day as they wonder if their loved one is dead or alive. Finances are tight. Mothers are left to raise babies without spouses and vice versa. In some instances both parents are gone. When a vet returns and is struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), everyone in his or her family also is struggling with the resulting depression, illness, violent behavior, and even suicide. And yet far too many of these vets and their families are ignored.

According to Iraq Veterans against the War (www.ivaw.org) many of our troops have already been deployed to Iraq for two, three, and even four tours of duty averaging eleven months each. Combat stress, exhaustion, and bearing witness to the horrors of war contribute to PTSD. Depleted uranium, Lariam, insufficient body armor and infectious diseases are just a few of the health risks. Finally, upon a soldier’s release, the Veterans Administration is far too under-funded to fully deal with the magnitude of veterans in need.

One need not search too long to find too many instances in which our veterans’ needs are being brushed aside. Occasionally we see evidence in the headlines, but those headlines are the tip of a large iceberg. Not only do we involve our young men and women in a war that should never have been, but then we neglect them when they return in pain, struggling to get their lives back together again. As Americans we should all look hard at this reality as we seemingly celebrate Veterans Day tomorrow.

We can do better than this. We must do better than this. Our veterans deserve more. They deserve to be honored.

Mary Friedel-Hunt is a freelance writer, a publisher (Voice of the River Valley) and a licensed clinical social worker who has been a psychotherapist for 32 years. Her column runs weekly in WellBeing. You may contact her by writing to: P.O. Box 189, Lone Rock, WI. 53556.

November 7, 2007 – Veterans Day gives us the opportunity to remember that we would not enjoy the freedoms we have today were it not for the willingness of our troops, and our veterans, in every generation to fight on our behalf against America’s enemies. 

We must also remember our obligations to them while they are deployed and when they return home.

Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteered to serve their country in the War on Terror and are doing so courageously and without complaint. 

They are fulfilling the obligations they agreed to when they enlisted.  At home, though, we are too often falling short in meeting our duty to them.    

For several years we had the wrong strategy in place in Iraq , at great cost to our troops.  Thankfully that has been remedied by General Petraeus and his plan, now achieving great gains and a reduction in violence in Iraq .

We need to do a better job of ensuring that our ground forces are getting the equipment they need, such as Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, to perform their missions and reduce the risk of injury or death.  

We are also realizing that we have much more to do for our troops who return with injuries that are invisible to the eye, but very real to the spirit, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).

Army studies have found that up to 30 percent of soldiers coming home from Iraq suffer from depression, anxiety, combat exhaustion or PTSD, with those serving multiple tours 50 percent more likely to suffer from acute combat stress.

At the same time, the military mental health system is understaffed, and difficult to navigate – at a time when soldiers and their families need help the most. 

Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) complicated matters by reducing its reimbursement rate for psychologists and social workers by 9 percent.

Because the Department of Defense bases its reimbursement rates for TRICARE military health system providers on the rates designated by CMS, this led to an equivalent decrease in payments to mental health providers who treat service members and their families. 

Many psychologists and social workers have indicated they may have to reduce their caseloads or leave the TRICARE program altogether.

To address this, several Senators and I successfully included an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008 giving the Secretary of Defense the flexibility to increase mental health reimbursement rates for TRICARE if access to services is threatened.

Even more alarming than the decrease in reimbursement rates, it appears the Pentagon is ducking its responsibility to pay for the care of some afflicted with PTSD or TBI by inappropriately using a personality-order discharge to separate them from active duty.

These service members are being discharged not because of their injuries but because of their supposed “pre-existing” personality disorder.

More than 22,500 “pre-existing” personality disorder discharges have been processed in the last six years, an average of 10 service members per day.

When a service member is discharged this way, he or she often loses health care benefits and must repay any enlistment bonuses.  Either circumstance can send injured service members and their families into debilitating debt and further exacerbate the invisible injuries they have received.

This shoddy treatment of our combat veterans is inexcusable, and the Pentagon should know better.  The federal government has a lifelong responsibility to care for those who may never be whole again as a result of service-connected injuries.  

Senator Obama and I led a bipartisan group of senators in an amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization bill to limit the Pentagon’s use of personality disorder discharges.  Senator McCaskill is leading the effort to protect this amendment – which is opposed by the Pentagon – in the conference deliberations on the bill.

We ask a lot of our troops — and their families.  In return we need to ensure our leaders have the best strategy in place for victory and that our troops have the right equipment to perform their missions and the best care available when they return home.

Veterans take care of fellow veterans. The Boston Globe followed a Marine unit, “New England’s Own,” for one year, and their story was published today.  Reporter Charlie Sennot and photographer Bill Greene should earn a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for their accurate, informative, and moving accounts of our fellow Americans who stand between a bullet and our Constitution.  Please watch these three superb videos.

Back, but not at home: Battered returning vets struggle with transition

November 11, 2007 – FORT DEVENS – Every step mattered. Corporal Patrick Murray focused hard on his balance and gait as he approached the commanding officers of his Marine battalion one hot Sunday in July. Murray was due for a medal honoring his exemplary courage and spirit in the months since he and his gathered comrades returned from war. And he was determined not to let on how he’d earned it.

As he snapped to attention, there wasn’t a hint that Murray was missing his right leg, lost, above the knee, to a roadside bomb blast in Fallujah, Iraq. Or of the long, grueling months of surgeries and physical therapy. Or the ingenious computerized titanium leg on which he had learned again to walk.

Only after Lieutenant Colonel Brian Sulc pinned the Naval Achievement Medal on his uniform next to the Purple Heart did Murray stumble.

As he saluted and pivoted, the artificial limb inside his camouflage pant leg buckled, and he began to fall. His fellow Marines pressed forward to assist; Sulc and two other commanders helped Murray as he righted himself.

It was, they reflected afterward, a quietly symbolic moment. The pride, the fragility, the support, the grit – the values of the unit were all right there. These Marines have always been there for one another. And in this hard year home, especially, they have had to be.

The First Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment – the reserve infantry unit based in Central Massachusetts and known as “New England’s Own” – has a proud history in modern America’s many wars, including a record of exceptional valor, and devastating casualties, on Iwo Jima. When they returned home from Iraq last fall to Veterans Day speeches, parades, and accolades, there was more distinguished service to celebrate. And more devastation.

The 878 men who came home have struggled to come to terms with the fact that 11 did not; that 68 others, like Murray, suffered combat wounds; and that many more were hit with injuries less visible but with long-term effects, like bomb-blast concussions.

It is as if they all shared in those losses, and, in a real sense, most did. A Globe survey of more than 130 members of the battalion found that nearly 60 percent report one or more symptoms of war trauma – anger, depression, nightmares, hypervigilance – even if they have not been diagnosed with the disorder.

Many hasten to add that they are doing just fine, picking up life right where they left off. It is, in the main, a proud, resilient group, not much given to complaint. Service, most say, changed them irrevocably, and for the better.

But fully half say the transition back to civilian life has been hard. Money, for some, is tight, relationships with loved ones bruised, frustration with the government veterans bureaucracy real and growing. Reserve units like theirs have, in particular, reported problems with medical screenings for brain injuries.

There is also a powerful consensus that while most of their neighbors appreciate their service, civilians don’t quite get it. A sense of isolation grows out of that, particularly in New England, where military bases are few and hostility to the war runs high.

More than a few of the Marines have doubts about this war, too. But their focus is on their duty – and on getting well, or helping others to do so. In that, members of the battalion report some ringing successes but also some shameful failures as the nation delivers, unevenly, on its pledge to care for those wounded in service.

“That’s a pretty sacred promise,” said Captain Brendan Fogerty, a company commander. “And I just don’t think the system has done a good enough job living up to it.”

After Murray regained his balance, he returned to formation, flashing his signature Irish smile to his fellow Marines. They were all looking for that grin.

The command may have been honoring him for his service, but his fellow Marines depend on his spirit. Murray, 23, of North Kingstown, R.I., has a gift for making others laugh, even at the hardest moments. He has no time at all for sympathy or self-pity. Neither does the man who was sitting next to him in the Humvee when the blast hit Sergeant Terrence “Shane” Burke, a Boston police officer.

Burke lost his left leg in the explosion when Murray lost his right. “We like to go shopping for shoes together,” Murray quipped, getting a laugh from a circle of Marines.

Later, Murray explained: “These are guys whose actions saved my life. A lot of them have had a hard time in a lot of different ways. The least I can do is show them that I’m OK and keep them laughing. I owe them that much.”

The Globe interviewed scores of Murray’s fellow Marines over the last year, and many said that, in crucial and surprising ways, the 12 months home have been harder than the seven months in combat.

Indeed, it can be a particularly tough adjustment for reserve units like New England’s Own, who train together only one weekend a month. There’s not much time together to work things through. And so they’ve sought out one another through the Internet and late-night phone calls when memories of combat get in the way of life.

Often those are memories of one disastrous day – a day that, more than any other, decided for this battalion who would return home whole and who would not.

It was Sept. 4, 2006, another scorching summer day in Fallujah, Iraq, where the five companies of New England’s Own were scattered across three bases.

They had been mobilized for almost a year, and had been in Iraq since March. The word had come down and they were due to head home in a matter of weeks. Everyone was on edge. The pace of insurgent attacks had been rising with the heat.

The first order of business that day was a memorial service for a Marine, Corporal Jordan C. Pierson, 21, of Milford, Conn., killed by a sniper on Aug. 24.

As a lone trumpeter played taps and the Marines of C Company lowered their heads in silent prayer, the Humvees from Weapons Company patrolled the perimeter, guarding against mortar attacks on the funeral gathering – a tempting target.

Then, one of the Humvees in “Whiskey 3,” as the third platoon of Weapons Company was dubbed, rolled directly over a pressure plate planted by insurgents in the dirt track. The plate triggered the detonator on two buried 155mm artillery shells that had been wired together, a “Ramadi speed bump,” as it’s known in Iraq.

Murray was in the gunner’s turret of a Humvee approximately 100 yards away when he heard the blast and saw the smoke. His squad responded instantly.

They pulled Corporal Cody Hill from the flaming Humvee. He was left with severe burns and internal injuries. Three others were killed instantly.

Murray and his squad were ordered to secure the area. As they searched for insurgents they encountered Captain Fogerty. “Who was it?” they asked.

Fogerty shook his head. It wasn’t time to go over the casualty list. But when Murray and others insisted, Fogerty delivered the news: Lance Corporal Eric Valdepeñas, a 21-year-old from Seekonk, Mass.; Corporal Jared Shoemaker, 29, a police officer back in Tulsa; and Navy Corpsman Chris Walsh, an EMT from St. Louis, had all been killed. Hill was the only survivor.

Murray felt a wave of anger and grief tear through him. He and Fogerty had attended the same Catholic school as “Val,” a brilliant student and star athlete who had been pursuing an engineering degree at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before he enlisted in the Marines. He had it all.

The other two, “Doc” Walsh and Shoemaker, were men Murray and the rest of the company knew less well but had come to admire deeply, even as they mocked their midwestern “John Wayne” drawl.

The Whiskey 3 squad was revered throughout the battalion. They’d helped free Iraqi civilians held hostage by insurgents in a medieval dungeon and saved the life of an infant girl who needed emergency medical care. They had built schools and taken on other “hearts and minds” projects that to them defined the purpose of the US presence in Iraq.

Murray recalls turning to Burke to say, “They really were the best we had.”

Weapons Company regrouped back at the base, a cluster of buildings known as Camp Baharia, on the fringe of Fallujah.

In Burke’s hooch, Murray and Fogerty talked, over coffee, about Valdepeñas and old days at Bishop Hendricken High School, in Warwick, R.I. Fogerty said the platoon needed to suit up again, straight away. There were no complaints.

As they headed out, Sergeant Mark Wills, 38, of Waltham, Mass., another close friend of Valdepeñas, stopped by. They had a cigarette and said little. Then Wills put his arm around Murray and said: “Keep your head down out there. Get back safe.”

As the doors of the Humvee slammed shut, Murray could see that Lance Corporal Jonathan Goldman, the assigned driver, was exhausted. Murray offered to drive and told Goldman to take the turret. At 8:45 p.m., dusk in the desert, the convoy of seven Humvees, led by Fogerty, set out.

As Murray looked back on that moment, he recalled “a real bad feeling” in the air that night.

“For the first time, I really felt like I wanted to get the hell out of there,” he said. “I was, like, OK, I want this to be over now.”

Through a narrow slit of bullet-proof glass, Murray guided the Humvee down the main roadway, past mud-brick and stucco buildings occasionally lit by thin strips of neon. Every heap of trash or donkey cart or bump in the road seemed a potential IED. Every open window in a building was a possible sniper’s nest. Wills dubbed the patrols on this road, “the roulette wheel of death.”

As an evasive measure, the Humvees often jumped the center divider of the four-lane road to throw off insurgents planting road side bombs. Murray did just that about one mile from the base, and as the Humvee bumped over the median strip, it hit a pressure plate, another Ramadi speed bump.

For the second time that day, an explosion of shrapnel tore up through the belly of a Weapons Company Humvee. Murray was thrown more than 50 feet from the vehicle, “like a Kung Fu fighter flying around on fire,” as he later put it. Goldman was popped from the turret like a champagne cork. Burke remained trapped in the passenger side of the crippled Humvee as it careened to a stop. He was pulled out just before it burst into flames.

Murray remembers trying to crawl to the curb for protection as insurgents opened fire. Sergeant Scott Parish of Andover, Mass., ran out and covered Murray, returning fire. Humvees circled like a wagon train to protect the wounded.

Back at Camp Baharia, Wills was lying on his bunk, writing in a journal about the devastating loss earlier in the day of his friend Valdepeñas.

“Moments ago,” he wrote, “we learned Whiskey 3 was hit. My little buddy Val is gone. Hill is in critical. I can’t believe this.”

Then Wills heard an explosion outside the wire. A desperate voice came over the radio, calling in “mass casualties.”

Realizing from the radio calls that it was Murray and Burke who were hit, Wills quickly suited up and formed a convoy that followed the glow of the burning Humvee through the darkness.

At the end of that day, Wills retreated to his bunk and his journal, a place where he had found solace through his worst days, like June 25 when his friend, Lance Corporal Paul Nicholas King of Tewksbury, Mass., died in his arms from a sniper round. Wills usually cast his writing as a conversation with his wife, Charlotte. He picked up his entry for Sept. 4 where he’d left off:

“Same (expletive) day. Hours later. Another platoon was hit by an IED. This time my buddy Murray lost his leg as well as Sergeant Burke lost his leg. Honey, I’m not feeling good about the rest of my time here.”

Back at Fort Devens, the aftershock of that bloody day hit home almost immediately

Lance Corporal Michael Stubbs, of Medford, was one who felt it. Stubbs, 24, had been wounded in Fallujah and was back at the fort in the status known as “medical hold,” still on active duty, but awaiting treatment.

A turret gunner, Stubbs had survived three IED blasts. But one, on May 25, left him with a concussion. He walked away from the blast and tried to shrug it off.

For weeks Stubbs toughed it out. His fellow Marines kept urging him to seek medical treatment. Finally, he went in to see a doctor, who recommended he be sent home for a medical evaluation. His command didn’t agree.

“Don’t be a pussy,” he remembers being told. “You’re fine.”

But the dizzy spells made it impossible for Stubbs to keep up during patrols. The Marines in his platoon begged the medical staff to take another look, saying they feared for his health and their safety as a unit. Finally, on Aug., 6, he was declared unfit for duty and sent to the Bethesda, Md., Naval Medical Center.

Stubbs’s medical records indicate he was diagnosed with a concussion and with injuries to his back and knees. Two days later he was shipped to Fort Devens and told there would be follow-up medical appointments.

That hasn’t been the case, he said.

“No one was there to help me,” he said. “There were no follow up appointments. I was told my records were lost.”

And to this day, Stubbs says he has never been screened for Traumatic Brain Injury, or “TBI,” a condition caused when the brain is shaken by a blast wave. But he suffers the symptoms – such as disorientation, depression, and anger – which can take months to surface.

Stubbs was having nightmares and suffering from sleeplessness – and drinking heavily as a way to self-medicate. But the command saw no physical injury and ordered him to perform work details, including painting the headquarters’ hallway.

And that’s what he was doing on Sept. 4 in the late morning. With the time difference in Iraq, it was approximately 12 hours after the explosion. Stubbs heard the squeaking sound of a pen on a white board in the command center. He watched an officer write out the news: “KIA – Shoemacher, Valdepeñas, Walsh. Gravely wounded: Burke, Murray, Hill.”

“I read that and it was like getting punched in the gut,” Stubbs said. “I went outside and coughed up my breakfast. I couldn’t stand up. I was a mess. It’s harder to be far away on a day like that and know there is nothing you can do.”

The blast wave was also heard as a knock on the Seekonk, Mass., door of the home of Dr. Jesus Valdepeñas and his wife, Anne-Marie.

At 6 p.m. on Sept. 4, two Marines in dress blues pulled into the driveway.

Lance Corporal Valdepeñas, the youngest of the couple’s eight children, had called just a week earlier, sounding excited about coming home. His mother was already in touch with Charlotte Wills, Mark’s wife, about planning a homecoming ceremony.

Then Dr. Valdepeñas looked out the window, saw the Marines, and knew why they were there. He threw open the door, blurting out, “It’s Eric, isn’t it?”

The Marines stood straight, and one of them said, “We want to thank you for your son’s service to our country.”

“I couldn’t breathe,” Dr. Valdepeñas recalled, during a visit this fall to his son’s grave. “I felt like my life ended right there. He was my youngest. . . . He was going to take care of us.”

The power was off, the air conditioning down, and the hallways dimly lit by emergency lights. The elevators were out as well, so Patrick Murray walked down three flights of stairs on his one good leg to sign in a visitor.

After a whirlwind of treatment and surgeries in Iraq, Germany, and Texas, Murray was in Malogne House, a dreary residential facility attached to Walter Reed military hospital in Washington. It is a holding tank for veterans, like Murray, who are transitioning back home.

“It’s not that bad,” said Murray, not one to complain.

He’d been the beneficiary of military trauma care, the best in the world by some accounts. But now he felt the victim of the frayed system of ongoing care for the wounded veterans.

A Veterans Affairs Administration official came by to brief Murray on his benefits and the paperwork required at a time when he was in great pain and heavily sedated. In graphic terms, Murray told him off. The counselor never returned.

Murray also remembers being tested for TBI and told that his memory loss and the trembling nerves in his hands could be traced to the day he fell out of a tree as a child.

“The doctor who did that test had the credibility of Dr. Seuss,” he said.

Captain Fogerty, 32, of North Kingstown, R.I., is slow to anger, but now he was irate.

He had been making a round of visits to Murray, Burke, Hill, and other Marines from his company who suffered wounds, and what he’d found didn’t sit well at all.

A particular concern was the treatment of Cody Hill, who suffered burns over 60 percent of his body as the sole survivor of the IED attack on the morning of Sept. 4. Hill and Burke, who had lost his leg on Sept. 4, were both sent to the Brooke Army Medical Center, in Texas, reputedly one of the best in the armed forces. Treatment records show that the young corporal saw a burn surgeon on Oct. 5, 2006, and that no one had prescribed a long-term rehabilitation plan for him until May 4, a delay that jeopardized his recovery.

Fogerty began to ask tough questions and says he and the Hill family were told by a nurse in the East Burn Ward that Cody “seemed to have slipped through the cracks.”

The nurse’s words infuriated Fogerty, and, in May, he banged out a memo outlining his findings. He addressed it up his chain of command, ultimately to a congressional committee investigating problems with the care of veterans.

He wrote of Hill’s falling “through the cracks,” of paperwork routinely lost, of military families unaware of what benefits they are entitled to, and of the maddening inability of the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs Administration to work smoothly together.

Cody Hill’s father, Carlyle, had quit his job on an Oklahoma ranch to help his son heal. He dressed his son’s burns and slept by his bedside. He never thought about it, he just did it.

The family was struggling financially, but no one showed them they were entitled to benefits – $29,000 in compensation and $100,000 in insurance. Paperwork went missing and the claim was delayed for months.

Fogerty tracked the lost paperwork back to a civilian-contracted physician who had been brought in to help an overwhelmed medical staff at Brooke. The folder lay on the doctor’s desk for months before disappearing altogether. Burke, who lost his leg, has suffered similar bureaucractic delays at Brooke, which have left him lingering in “medical hold.”

A spokesman for Brooke would not comment on Hill’s situation, but conceded that failures to coordinate care occur. The center, he said, plans to address the problem with a new staff position.

Sitting in his office one recent day, Fogerty said, “Not that much gets me steamed. But to tell you the truth, this is outrageous. . . . If I ran Weapons company to the standard that this bureaucracy is doing, I’d be fired, and deservedly so.”

It was Sept. 30, 2006, just five days before the battalion was to depart Iraq, and Sergeant Terry Rathbun was out on patrol. It was a tense time, but he was starting to feel pretty confident he’d get home to Norwich, Conn., in one piece.

Then a shot rang out. Captain Harry Thompson, his platoon commander, was hit and struggling to stand up. Rathbun lunged forward to keep him down and, at that instant, the sniper shot that might have killed Thompson struck Rathbun in the face.

On a hot, dusty day at Fort Devens this August, Rathbun, 36, received the Bronze Star for his heroism.

Rathbun had nothing but praise for the care he says he received at Bethesda Naval Hospital. But once he was released into the custody of the VA, he said, it was “one nightmare after another.”

His records never followed him from Bethesda. He wasn’t checked for TBI for nearly seven months. And when the tests confirmed he did have TBI, he was told the local VA did not have a rehabilitation program. Finally, after months of delays – delays that can do long-term harm to TBI patients – he was placed with a private therapy center in Groton, Conn.

Adding insult to injury, Rathbun kept getting medical bills and collection notices from the VA, even though all of his care was supposed to be fully covered. After six months of haggling, the situation was corrected, but not before Rathbun suffered a drop in his credit rating.

“You don’t want to complain about it because you figure, hey, there are a lot of guys who didn’t make it back at all,” says Rathbun, who suffers from dizziness, confusion, and depression. He has been unable to find work, and his marriage has broken up since he returned from war.

“I have to figure out how I am going to put my whole life back together,” he said. “I guess you think there is going to be a support system for you when you get back. But there really isn’t. You have to do it all for yourself.”

Mark Wills came home from war a changed person, and not necessarily for the better.

He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t control his anger, and he couldn’t clear his mind of the image of Nick King dying in his arms.

Even the roads around Boston were a problem. As he drove from one job to the next, tending lawns in suburbs around Route 128, the divided highway sometimes triggered memories of the IED-pocked thoroughfares of Fallujah.

But then he sought help at the VA in Jamaica Plain for counseling and found it to be helpful. Group therapy sessions gave him “the tools” he needed to recognize what was going on inside him.

PTSD has swept the battalion. Several Marines confided they have contemplated suicide. Wills never allowed himself to slip that far. He owes it to his wife and two children, he said.

But there are still bad days, like the week before, when he threw a rum-and-coke at his computer screen after hearing a heavy metal song on the radio that he’d often listened to with King.

He confided this one night in the small office in his home in Waltham, a sanctum dedicated to the war. There are photographs of the fallen and a flag signed by the members of his platoon. His desert boots, still splattered with King’s blood, are neatly placed in a corner cabinet.

There are a lot of things, he says, that he can’t let go of.

“I wasn’t ready for that, having a buddy die in your arms,” he said.

Wills is open about his struggles. And he has been encouraging his fellow Marines to get therapy. It is his role, he figures, to show them there is nothing wrong with a man, even a Marine, seeking help.

For Murray, Burke, and Hill, Sept. 4, 2006, is what wounded Iraq veterans call their “alive day.” The day they cheated death.

And so on Sept. 4 of this year, Wills invited a close circle of Weapons Company to his house to celebrate the living and remember the fallen.

Murray and Burke were there along with Hill. Stubbs also showed up. He was drinking heavily and was off the medication for PTSD that the VA had prescribed. To him the math was easy. The VA charged $40 for a copayment on a prescription for Celexa, the antianxiety drug they dole out to combat veterans.

“A 30-rack of Budweiser at $22 seemed like a better deal,” Stubbs explained.

Fogerty came as well. He still seemed haunted by the decisions he made in the field, saying later: “I don’t think that there’s a day goes by I’m not thinking about those guys. . . . What could I have done differently? I’m responsible for it. . . . In the end, God will judge me for that.”

In all, about two dozen Marines and their wives and girlfriends gathered in small clusters on Wills’s porch. They lit one cigarette after another and pulled hard on the tap of a keg.

For the family, the pain has never gone away. Dr. Valdepeñas quit his practice. He is consumed with depression. He and his wife rarely leave their home, they said, except to say the Rosary at Eric’s grave every day. The gardens he once tended to with Eric’s help have been taken over by weeds. There are pictures and shrines to their son at every turn in the house.

The parents were given a brochure from the VA about benefits, which provided a toll-free number for grief counseling. But their daughter, Nora Lough, 32, said they had never opened the brochure. They have relied on their faith to find comfort. She said that many of the Marines, including Fogerty and Wills, have stayed in touch and helped her parents in any way they could.

The military system, she feels, did what was required for the funeral but not much beyond that.

“I am surprised that no one follows up with the parents,” she said. “My parents really need help. To lose a child is very difficult.”

Three weeks after this Sept. 4 anniversary, Murray was packing up his room at Walter Reed.

He had finally been “med boarded” out of the military and was on his way home. He had landed a job as a foreman with Turner Construction and was excited about the future.

As he stuffed his belongings into large duffel bags, he held up a 4-inch-thick pile of paperwork he said he’d have to present to the VA. Within a week, that paperwork would go astray, and he found himself registered at the wrong VA center.

It’s a disgrace, he said. He hopes the private insurance that comes with his job will save him from having to rely on the government for help.

Murray slung his backup prosthesis over his shoulder as if it was a rifle and wheeled a cart loaded with his belongings out of his room. He loaded it all into his Jeep and began the journey back home to Rhode Island.

“It’s been a long, hard year,” Murray said. “I think I’m ready to let all that go. I want to move on.”

But there was one last mission. Murray went to the battalion’s weekend training session the third weekend of October. He wanted to say goodbye to his comrades. Wills was also there, turning in his gear and signing out of the military so that he could return to his lawn business.

Murray arrived in jeans and a sweatshirt, sporting a goatee and holding a can of root beer. After the battalion formation, the men in fatigues looked tired and dirty from a wet, cold weekend of training. There was sober talk among them of when the unit might redeploy to Iraq. But their faces lit up when they saw Murray, and they huddled around him.

Soon enough, he was telling them a story. And as he did, he was waving his arms and flashing that smile, and once again he had them all laughing.

Charles M. Sennott can be reached at sennott@globe.com

VCS Veterans Day Update – Lots of Breaking News

Dear VCS  Supporter:

One day in our future, what will it sound like in our homes when the Iraq War nightmare ends? Today’s holiday, formerly Armistice Day, was originally intended for us to gather in schools and religious sanctuaries and discuss the Great War and how to promote better relations among nations.

America needs accurate information about the serious and escalating consequences of war. Today, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars worsening by the day, I awoke to a newspaper stuffed with 41 advertising inserts – only 7 of them offering discounts due to Veterans Day. Yesterday, while attending my daughter’s volleyball game, I asked a fellow parent about their plans for the three day holiday weekend. The parent said, “What holiday?” I replied, “Veterans Day.” She said, “What’s that.”

While some Americas enjoyed a day off without actually knowing why, VCS worked to raise public awareness about our veterans’ needs. Please share our VCS e-mails because, as a society, we have an individual and collective responsibility to learn the facts about the devastating consequences the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have on our soldiers, veterans, and their families.

Now for your weekly VCS news items:

* Australia’s new SBS “Dateline” documentary features VCS.

* Our VCS National Law Journal column about our class action lawsuit against VA.

* Our VCS letter opposing President George W. Bush’s nomination of retired Army Surgeon James Peake to lead VA.

* AP news article quotes VCS about illegal discrimination against our returning Iraq and Afghanistan war Reservists.

And more important items to share:

* The Boston Globe followed a Marine unit, “New England’s Own,” for one year, and their story was published today. Please watch the videos by reporter Charlie Sennot and photographer Bill Greene – they should earn a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for their informative seven part series.

* CBS Evening News with Katie Couric plans to broadcast a two-part investigative news story about the tragic epidemic of suicides among those who served in our military. Please watch CBS News on Tues., Nov. 13, and on Wed., Nov. 14.

* New VA Development: In 2004, then-Army Surgeon General James Peake gave misleading information to Congress about Iraq War Army suicides caused by Lariam pills. VCS urges you to pick up the phone and call Senators to block Peake’s confirmation because some Senators are taking strong interest in his role causing the Walter Reed scandal.

The Iraq War tidal waves VCS accurately predicted keep crashing on our home shores: House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner estimates VA will treat 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans in 2008. And news reports indicate 1.8 million veterans lack medical insurance – a national disgrace.

Our VCS message for Veterans Day: let us remember our veterans’ dedication to protect and defend our Constitution, and let us honor our social contract so they receive prompt and high-quality medical care and benefits.

This Veterans Day, VCS launches our end-of-year fundraising drive. As a non-profit recognized by the IRS, we rely on the generosity of our supporters like you. VCS made a huge difference this Veterans Day raising broad national awareness about challenges veterans face.

If you like what we do, please donate to VCS today. Our executive director (that’s me) will be making calls soon to our previous donors asking for your continuing support.

Thank you, welcome home, and I hope you had a nice Veterans Day.

Paul Sullivan, Executive Director
Veterans for Common Sense

Veterans for Common Sense November 2007 Fundraising Campaign Goal: $10,000

Help us meet our monthly goal by November 30, 2007.

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Veterans for Common Sense
1101 Pennsylvania Ave., SE, Suite 203
Washington, DC 20003