The Veterans Administration Makes a Big Comeback

"First you fight the war for your country

then you fight your country for the war ."

- M. Lindsey

I first became aware of the Veterans Administration (VA) when I was fifteen years old. Back then the VA adopted a hiring program for young people. If you were 15 years and 9 months old you could work at the VA. I was offered a job in a hospital's central kitchen on weekends. Actually it was two jobs because one of my duties was to wash all the big pans after every meal and the other was to take one of the food trucks out to a ward. I had a paper route too and the local newspaper was allowing me to write obituaries, so I had more sources of income than the average 15 year old. Like most of my age I thought I knew everything,or at least half of everything, so no one could tell me anything. Then the mental patient in the elevator urinated on me, and I learned that things were far from what they seemed.

This happened at the VA. I had been there a week and hadn't even bothered to take a good look at the patients our kitchens served. I knew they were mostly alcohol or drug dependent Korean War Vets and also another kind of patient - the patient who had simply lost his mind, usually in combat. Back then they still called delayed stress syndrome, "battle fatigue." or "shell shock." They treated it with a lot of useless drugs they thought were very useful at the time. And most of the men did not get better. Ever.

Like this guy who was chasing the 15 year old me around a food truck in an elevator with his pants down and peeing all over me. It seemed like forever before the elevator stopped and I could make my escape. Seriously, I was soaked, had to be picked up by my parents, and couldn't figure out for the life of me why someone would do that. My Dad thought it was just a guy with battle fatigue. My mother said I shouldn't work there anymore. Today I know why someone might do that. People are fragile; war changes them. They are still people but they need help.

Still, I went back to the VA the very next day. Now mind you this was more than 40 years ago. The VA was a place veterans went only if they were broke, drunk or crazy. The "health care" at the VA was very aptly portrayed by Ken Kesey in the play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Little attention was paid to the quality of the service at the VA, which seemed stocked with semi-retired doctors who didn't give a damn, cock roaches, bad food, unfriendly nurses. You name it, the VA came up short in every department. Veterans, like my Dad, who could afford it, went to private hospitals.

But things change. Years later as a service-connected disabled veteran, I walked into the out-patient clinic at Jamaica Plain. I was amazed. The architecture was new, The furniture was very modern. The doctors were young, and there were medical residents, actual interns and some other medical school types from Harvard or Tufts, or B.U. It was like any medical facility in Boston. And the hospital in West Roxbuty was just as good as any hospital I had seen in Boston. There are too many ways to discuss how this transformation took place. Legislation helped, veterans organizations like the DAV. Vietnam Veterans have to be given some of the credit too, because they took the old VA to court on everything from delayed stress to agent orange to its quality of care. And they won .

The result is what we have today, a medical service that I trust with my life. I've had the same doctor for 14 years. Before that, I had one for seven years until he was transfered to a civilian hospital. You see, now there's a working relationship between the VA and other Boston hospitals, and that too has just kicked everything up a notch. The VA professional of today bears no resemblance to his counterpart of 40 -30 years ago.

But old memories die hard. There's still a reluctance by some veterans to go for help to the VA. They see it as an inferior health care system, and worse, they see it as an extension of whatever military service they were discharged from. It is neither. It is a clean, modern medical care system, staffed by doctors and nurses as qualified as their civilian counterparts, and often more qualified, because they know your experience and they know what to do about it.

The paperwork can be unnerving and the wait-time for the various qualifications can be long. This is partly the result of more vets using the VA because of its improvements. It is also because of Congress and their mis-treatment of American veterans. It's simple. They love soldiers dodging bullets. But they are not particularly fond of veterans who were unlucky enough to be hit by one of them. Every year, the Veterans Administration doesn't know what it will get for a budget. That's because the VA, unlike many other government agencies, isn't level-funded.

If you are a veteran, recently discharged or not, who is suffering from a service-connected illness, or any illness, use your VA benefits. They are yours. And I, for one, can finally Say, they are worth having.