As we loaded our cars with weekend groceries, the woman with the pickup with three "support our troops" stickers and yours truly with a naked Honda, we chatted. "I sure would like to see them come home," she said, "but they're doing a great job over there." Being a bit of a piss, I harumphed, "Some homecoming if you're wounded and dependent on Veterans' Affairs." She looked puzzled and wary. "They get real good medical care," she said. There was an "uh-oh" in her voice: "Uh-oh, one of those anti-Bush people."
I don't blame her. The post-combat treatment of vets probably doesn't get much play on the media she's tuned into. It should. There's a new bumpersticker in town (but not on her truck, yet) which says, "I don't believe anything in the liberal media." That's a pity. It's the "liberal media" which is helping to dig those kids out of the hell they find themselves in when they get home. That establishmentarian pinko Washington Post broke the story months ago. The left-wing, elitist New York Times has joined the fray.
Seven months after news accounts detailed the appalling neglect of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, Congressional investigators have found promised repairs already lagging at the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs.
It still takes almost half a year for the average veteran’s claim for disability benefits to be decided in a tortuous process that can involve four separate hearings. The promised pilot program to make a single efficient system out of dueling military and veterans bureaucracies — the knotty heart of a mammoth backlog running into hundreds of thousand of cases — should have begun last month. Now the promise is slipping into next year. At the same time, the Army’s plan for creating special “warrior transition units” to deliver more personalized care at 32 national centers is bedeviled by staff shortages that mean close to half of the eligible troops are unable to get the service.
A dozen Congressional and executive agencies and blue-ribbon commissions are investigating. Unfortunately, there has been no comparable surge of creativity or commitment from the White House.
