Veterans for Common Sense

A Maui widow’s plight highlights a computer error that wrongfully denied certain benefits.

December 20, 2008 – The Department of Veterans Affairs will begin issuing retroactive payments this month to eligible surviving spouses of war veterans who have been wrongfully denied up to millions of dollars in government benefits over the past 12 years.

The problem was pointed out to VA director James Peake last week by Sen. Daniel Akaka, chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, after the Hawaii Democrat received a complaint from Ruby Sasaoka of Kula, Maui, who was told by the VA that she wasn’t entitled to her husband’s last pension and disability check of $2,669.

Her husband, Raymond Sasaoka, died last December and she had used his last VA check to pay for funeral expenses. He had served in the Korean War as an Army corporal and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and hearing loss.

In January, the VA told Ruby Sasaoka to return the money and nine months later the U.S. Treasury took the money out of her checking account.

However, Congress passed a law in 1996 giving veterans’ spouses the right to keep their spouses’ final month of benefits.

But the VA never updated its automated computer systems, which sends out checks and notification letters. As a result, spouses were either denied the final month of payment or asked to send the checks back. If the checks were already deposited or spent, the U.S. Treasury moved to seize the money directly from their accounts.

“This flawed practice has caused serious hardship for many widows,” Akaka said last week. “Now that this problem has been brought to light, I trust that surviving spouses will receive the benefits they are due.”

Based on Akaka’s inquiry, Peake established a special task force to identify and pay the beneficiaries who never received the benefit or were inadvertently required to repay the money issued for the month of a veteran’s death.

The task force is reviewing VA’s payment records for veterans who died after Dec. 31, 1996, and who are survived by a spouse. The review will identify those to whom VA owes retroactive benefits for the month of the veteran’s death.

Because there are deceased veterans for whom VA does not have marital status information, a special Survivors’ Call Center has been established for spouses who believe they may be entitled to this retroactive month-of-death benefit.

Surviving spouses are encouraged to contact the Survivors’ Call Center at (800) 749-8387, Mondays through Fridays. Inquiries may also be submitted through online at www.vba.va.gov/survivorsbenefit.htm.

Akaka’s committee estimates that 50,000 surviving spouses each year since 1996 could be affected, based on VA numbers. Out of that 50,000, some spouses might have received the payments they were due if they called the VA at the time to inquire about their rights.

December 15, 2008 – With a Silver Star medal clipped to his Air Force jacket, 1st Lt. Thomas Cahill spoke humbly about his efforts to pilot a rescue helicopter through enemy fire while flying low over eastern Afghanistan’s snow-capped mountains.

His “uncanny skills,” his citation read, for keeping the Pave Hawk airborne in thin air at low rotor speed with mortar rounds whizzing by, resulted in saving three men during that mission on March 3, 2002.

“As dark as it was, impacting the terrain was my first enemy,” he said five years ago after his award ceremony at Nellis Air Force Base. “I would say it was probably luck.”

In the years since Operation Anaconda, Cahill’s enemy changed. So did his luck.

His enemy became post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, an anxiety condition that stirs nightmarish memories of terrifying ordeals from the battlefield. It can cause sleep loss and erratic, impulsive behavior and make a person short-tempered.

As for his fortunes, he became a court-martialed captain this year. He was confined in the brig at Nellis until his release a month early in September for good behavior.

Cahill’s attorneys argued that his PTSD caused him to lose focus in his job with the 561st Joint Tactics Squadron and do things out of character.

“It was one of those cases where the hero has feet of clay,” one of his attorneys, Craig Mueller, said days after Cahill’s case concluded.

“Who rescues the rescuer?” Mueller asked. “The Air Force admitted they didn’t recognize his PTSD and change of behavior until the end of his tour. There are eight or nine people today who wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for him.”

In the general courts-martial, Cahill pleaded guilty May 27 to charges related to off-base thefts after his arrest by Las Vegas police in 2006 for stealing a car-haul trailer in the southern Las Vegas Valley.

He also was charged with stealing an all-terrain vehicle, a race boat, making a false official statement, conspiracy to commit larceny, conduct unbecoming an officer, receiving stolen property and obstructing justice. The race boat and all-terrain vehicle theft charges were dropped from his guilty plea, but the other charges stood.

Cahill was sentenced to five months’ confinement. In lieu of a $10,000 fine, he paid $8,000 in restitution to cover the thefts, a Nellis spokeswoman said Friday.

Part of his sentence entailed counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s called “cognitive behavioral therapy,” or changing thoughts to change behavior.

For his plea, Cahill’s attorneys said, he will be allowed to retire honorably from the Air Force as a captain, enabling him to pursue veterans benefits and continued counseling for PTSD through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Cahill declined to be interviewed but offered an apology in a handwritten statement that went on to state, “My decision is based on my fear of any retaliation that could come from my speaking out about the lack of proper treatment for my PTSD.”

His mother, Susan Peek, also declined interview requests. She testified on Cahill’s behalf, as did his brother.

Air Force officials at Nellis wouldn’t comment about Cahill’s case but confirmed he has returned to duty with the 99th Mission Support Group.

They said they don’t have a specific program to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder among active duty troops but focus on awareness and hope that those with PTSD voluntarily seek help through the base’s mental health program.

“What we do in the Air Force is a lot of prevention education,” said Lt. Col. Kevin McCal, a Nellis psychologist, who served in Afghanistan and commands the 99th Medical Operations Squadron.

“Awareness is a big piece of this, and the second piece, of course, is because there’s awareness we’re getting support and resources” for preventive education.

An airman, soldier, sailor or Marine deployed for extended periods in the war zone “can come back a different person,” McCal said.

“When you come back, will your morals have changed, and will your beliefs change? It’s possible that … some of those things might be challenged,” McCal said.

“It’s unlikely you’ll come back and say something like, ‘It’s OK to beat my wife,’ when it wasn’t before. Or, ‘I think I want this in the store, so I’ll just take it.’ You’ll still recognize right from wrong.”

Still, he said, there may be an inability to adjust to life away from the battlefield. “You’re blowing off whatever you thought was important, rules, morals, whatever it was.”

“You could come back an individual that has a shorter temper because your patience is not what it used to be. You could come back and be an individual that doesn’t sleep so well for whatever reason. And that could be directly because of symptoms of nightmares and so forth.”

Some who suffer from PTSD don’t seek help because “in their eyes, they’re like, ‘Oh. I’m strong enough I should be able to handle this.’ And therefore they stop talking, and the symptoms get worse.”

Among the symptoms are forgetfulness, fatigue and family problems.

“Mental health has always been a tough thing to deal with, because there is no blood test. There’s no black-and-white answers to what we have or what they’re dealing with,” he said.

McCal said although numbers of active-duty PTSD cases at the base have increased since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some cases will fall through the cracks.

“All you can do is keep getting those cracks smaller. There’s always going to be someone out there that won’t come forward.”

And few of those who check in for help are pilots.

“I won’t say they’re scared of mental health, but they don’t like to go anywhere which may risk their flying status. … That’s their bread and butter. That’s who they are,” McCal said.

Helicopter rescue pilots, he noted, have a more close-up view of the battlefield than, say, a fighter jet pilot.

“Rescue pilots have to land usually under hot fire, pick up somebody who is hurt or injured, more likely severely if they’re called in. So, they have a higher degree of danger.

“I don’t think the public needs to be scared that the military is getting wiped out by PTSD, or that parents have to worry that all kids that go to war are going to come back with some kind of four-letter disorder, because they won’t, all of them,” McCal said. “But they do need to know that if their kids come back and they’re not the same somehow and different to see if they can get them some help. Again, it’s all about education.”

December 17, 2008 –  Now for your reading pleasure, Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, a 500-plus page tome that comprises interviews with “hundreds of individuals” and a “review of thousands of documents.”

It is an official history that essentially offers the perspective of Stuart Bowen, chief of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), on efforts by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).

In short, the whole thing turned into a vast money hole into which the Pentagon poured billions.

It’s absolutely fascinating stuff. The results it documents seem, in retrospect, almost predictable. And yet. In a time of war, the president and his advisers almost always get the benefit of the doubt. Now we know the price of that generosity.

From The Post’s Karen DeYoung:

“As the United States prepares for a major expansion of its development and reconstruction programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, government investigators have described the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq as a failure that wasted billions.”

From James Glanz and T. Christian Miller at the New York Times:

“An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.”

Here’s an excerpt that Government Inc. finds particularly interesting:

“After briefly considering asking the Congress for $5 billion, [Dave] Nash [a retired Rear Admiral serving as an advisor] and his planners decided to request a massive increase in reconstruction funding for Iraq. Nash, working with CPA’s senior advisors, pulled together a long list of infrastructure projects with a cost equaling $27 billion. They then whittled it down to $20.3 billion. Bremer approved this request and sent it to Washington in early August 2003.

“On August 15, 2003, Joshua Bolten, Director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, wrote Secretary Rumsfeld, objecting to the size of CPA’s request. The White House had already told the Congress that it would not ask for more money for Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003. Bolten said the CPA would have to provide a fully-detailed justification before the Administration would go back to the Congress for more money for Iraq. In May, the CPA had hired Tom Korologos, a veteran lobbyist, as its congressional liaison. He addressed Bolten’s concerns in a memo to Bremer on August 17, 2003.

“‘To delay getting our funds will be a political disaster for the President,’ he wrote. ‘His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.’ Korologos added that he did not believe that the Congress would turn down the supplemental request because “the faster the Iraq CPA succeeds, the quicker ‘our 150,000 boys over there’ will start coming home.”