New Ways Needed To Help Disabled Veterans

Four disabled veterans, including two who continued to serve in the military after losing limbs, said the government must rethink the way it delivers benefits to new veterans.
by Rick Maze

In a Friday panel discussion at the National Symposium for the Needs of Young Veterans, hosted by AmVets in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, Ill., young disabled veterans said the military first must carefully weigh keeping disabled veterans on active duty if this is physically and mentally possible, because technology has reduced the limitations of disabilities.

That job security in the military is everything, said retired Army Sgt. 1st Class Dana Bowman, who lost both legs in a 1994 mid-air collision with another member of the Golden Knights parachute team.

I had to fight to stay in, said Bowman, who noted that times already are changing. Some 18 soldiers are now on active duty after losing limbs, a sign that technology has opened up another door, she said.

Former Marine Sgt. James Wright, who stayed in the Corps for two years after losing both hands and injuring a leg in Iraq, retired in May on disability.

It was the hardest decision I made in my life, he said. One of the biggest problems is what to do when we are no longer in the military. Give somebody something to do when they leave other than collecting a pension and slowly dying…

Another issue that must be addressed is how to persuade veterans to apply for benefits, panel members said.

Former Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson, who was briefly held as a prisoner of war in Iraq, said military people have great pride, and sometimes that gets in the way of us getting better.

Johnson said she avoided counseling for the trauma of being a POW until members of her family ganged up on me and said I was going.

Navy veteran Luz Rebollar, an AmVets national service officer and naturalized American citizen who enlisted in the Navy, was seriously injured and medically retired before her 20th birthday, said, part of the problem is getting people to come in and ask for help.

If they don’t, the great program doesn’t mean anything, she said.

The symposium is looking at ways to get that message to veterans. One facet of this issue, said AmVets service officer Nelson Eddy Rivera, is that some veterans’ service officers are sitting in the office waiting for veterans to come in. You have to go out there and find them.

Wright, who continued in the Marine Corps as a martial arts instructor after his injury, suggested it might be possible to arrange for lists of veterans’ names to be given to veterans’ groups so that the groups know when someone who might need assistance is coming to their area.

That idea has been reviewed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, but privacy questions are involved. Even the VA has had trouble giving its field offices a heads-up on locating returning combat veterans because most information includes a service member’s home of record which is not necessarily the place where they are going to live.

The symposium, which began Wednesday and ends Saturday, has featured 36 working groups that are expected to make recommendations about how to improve treatment of veterans of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.