Seven Months Without Care After a
Heart Attack in Iraq

My name is Sean McNabb.  I served in Iraq with the New Jersey National Guard. On August 16, 2006, I had a heart attack in Iraq. I was shipped to Germany for further care. In Germany they inserted a stent into my heart. I was in intensive care for 2 to 3 days. I really don't know the exact time.  I was heavily drugged. I then spent a few days in the ward. On my last day the cardiologist told me that I had heart damage and it would never recover. He told me that when I got to the states I would be put on Community Based Outpatient Care (CBOC) and he wanted me to take 30 to 60 days of convalescent leave, then when that was over to have a cardiologist put me in Cardiac Rehab.

When I arrived at FT Knox I was sent to the care station there.  I explained what the cardiologist had wanted and showed the doctor the paperwork I was given. I was told that the convalescent leave was not needed because they would have me home in a matter of a week or two. As I was rushed through the process, I started to wonder what was happening.  I was told that I would get the care I needed when I got to my home state.  At the end, I realized that I was getting the run around.

I started asking for someone to put it in writing. I told the people in charge that I wasn't leaving until I got assured I was going to get the care I needed.  My wife received a call that stated that everything was fine.  I was going to be put on CBOC.  I was going to be put on 6 months of orders to complete it. This assurance was left on the answering machine.

The Major in charge of the med hold company at Ft Knox called me into the office to ask what the problem was with me.  I told him that I was concerned that I would not get the care that was recommended by the Army assigned Cardiologist in Germany.  He told me to wait outside.  I waited.  He called me back in and told me, “You have been medically cleared by our doctor and you will get the HELL of the post ASAP.”  He also stated it was not his job to make sure what happened to me was "Right".  It was his job to get me to the next station.

I was flown to FT McCoy and out processed.  The out processing took about 1 day and I was flown home the next day.  Since then I have not received the care I was promised.  The state of New Jersey has done everything they can to help but, the Army has not budged.  I was put in for Military Retention Processing Orders (MRP).  The request was denied by the Office of the Surgeon General.  An appeal was sent forward with the supporting documentation they asked for and it was again denied.  It has been 7 months since I had the heart attack and I still have not received my care.

Disabled Service Members - The 30% Shell Game
       Or
How DOD is Short Changing Our Disabled Veterans

Congratulations, young man or woman! You were a patriotic member of the United States All Volunteer Military. You volunteered to serve with the full expectation that “Support the Troops” was not just empty rhetoric piously mouthed by politicians, generals, and the yellow-ribbon-displaying American public. You served honorably, sometimes with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, you returned damaged to the point that you can no longer serve because of wounds, injury, illness, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). You must be discharged from active service. You have just earned entry into the official 30% Shell Game.

There are two players in the 30% Shell Game: the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). You are the pea.

Ah, but you ask, “What is the prize in this Game?” The answer is your health care and your family’s health care for the rest of your lives, as well as other benefits to which retired members of the Armed Forces are entitled.

How, you ask, is the game played? Let me explain and you will see:

The first player is the DOD who has already decided that you can no longer serve on active duty. They get to decide your level of disability. In this process, the DOD is not your friend.

The magic hurdle is a designation of 30% disability. At or above that hurdle you are retired from the military with full benefits for you and your family including Tri-Care, the health insurance that allows you and your family to acquire care in the civilian health care system. The catch for DOD is that they have to pay for both retirement pay and benefits.

Below the magic 30%, you are passed on to the next player, the VA. Now guess how eager the DOD is to keep you on their rolls. If you guessed not much, you would be correct. If you guessed not much and were in the Army, you would be twice as correct as if you were in the other services. The other services are almost twice as generous with the magic 30% disability designation as the Army; although, the Navy and Air Force are still pretty miserly. The Army rated less than 19 percent of those discharged for disability at or greater than 30% (<4% permanent and <15% temporary) while the Navy (includes the Marine Corps) was about 35 percent and the Air Force about 24%.  Oh sure, there are appeals and enough bureaucracy to give the appearance of fairness and due process -- if you have a lot of time and if you have the money to hire lawyers to fight on your behalf. “The Chain of Command,” you ask? Forget it. Let's just say that if you were short of the magic 30% hurdle with DOD in the first place, you're unlikely to clear it on appeal.

You are now the VA’s pea in the great shell game with a few thousand dollars in severance from DOD. In all likelihood, if you deserved the 30% disability rating, you will get it from the VA.

Congratulations, you are now entitled to care in a VA facility and you get a lifelong disability check. Not so bad, huh? How about your family’s medical care you ask, forget it. How about if the nearest VA facility is hours away? Too bad. How about if you have PTSD? The VA mental health system is already overwhelmed. To add insult to injury you will not receive any disability payments until the severance pay you received from DOD has been fully repaid to the military.

Welcome to the world of “Supporting the Troops”

The logical question is, “Why a service member who volunteered and served honorably should be deprived of medical care for his family because he or she is forced to leave the service, where his or her family has medical care, due to a service connected disability that resulted for his or her honorable service?”   This sure does not sound honorable to me.  The next logical question is, “What should be done about it?”

Change the Law

Empowering Veterans, Inc. has drafted legislation and is currently circulating it in the Congress that would do the following for service members who are being discharged due to a service connected disability:

• Assign the VA the sole responsibility for determining the disability rating for a service member who the service has decided must be discharged due to a service connected disability.
• Retain a service member in an active status with full pay and benefits until the VA assigns a final disability rating.
• If the final disability rating is 30% or greater, the member will be retired from the military service with full benefits and will be immediately eligible for any additional benefits due from the VA.
• If the final disability rating is less than 30%, the member will be immediately eligible for any VA benefits due from the VA.  Additionally, the member's active health care benefits will be continued for 180 days from the date of discharge to allow for an orderly transition to the civilian health care system for the member and his or her family.

This bill will eliminate the current "gap" as the service member transitions from the military to civilian life and add a measure of justice and stability for his or her family.

Empowering Veterans wants the story of your first person experience with the 30% shell game. Please go to the website http://www.empoweringveterans.org/ and click on “Record Your Story” -- we will publish it on the site as well as circulate it on the blogs.  See Paula Span’s story in the February 25 Washington Post Magazine for the account of a real soldier caught in the 30% Shell Game.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022200891.html

Captain Ralph Parrott Supply Corps, US Navy (retired) gives a layman’s analysis of the unheeded lessons of Viet Nam:

My name is Ralph Parrott.  I am a 65 year old retired Navy Supply Corps Captain and retired businessman from Fairfax Station, Virginia.  I served in the US Navy from March 1963 until September of 1990, over 27 years. 

I make no claim of being a war hero.  My service in the Viet Nam war consisted of two Tonkin Gulf deployments in USS Intrepid CVS-11 in 1967 and 1968.  As a Supply Corps officer I served in a support role.  But unlike our President, Vice President and most of their neoconservative fellow travelers, I served. 

I have been drawn to political activism by the realization that my generation is failing in its obligation to leave this country to future generations in better shape than we found it.  We are failing, I believe, because we have failed to incorporate the bitter lessons of Viet Nam into our national life and our national strategy. 

“Army Bill” Lahue decries the Administration’s hyping the threat and stoking fear among the population

After enduring a week of Presidential speeches on the grave threat that Islamic terrorism poses to our nation and way of life, I feel compelled to (expressed in the vernacular of an old soldier) raise the Bull Shit flag. Am I to believe that the President, Vice-President, and our other senior leadership, really believe that a few thousand fanatics pose a grave threat to future of the most economically and militarily powerful nation in history? Do they truly believe that the powerful ideals of democracy and the prosperity brought by American style capitalism are in danger of being eclipsed by Islamic fanaticism? As a retired military officer, I find this simultaneously troubling, disappointing, and ultimately unbelievable.

If our leadership was leading instead of manipulating our fears for political gain, perhaps they would put 9-11 and the threat from Islamic extremism into perspective for us. As terrible as 9-11 was, the present situation in the “War on Terror” is not comparable to WWII. There are no Islamic fanatics leading world powers comparable to Nazi Germany or Japan that had world-class militaries with global reach. The so-called axis-of-evil countries that are suspected of supporting terrorism are militarily weak, politically isolated, and economically poor. Comparing the power of these countries to the US and Europe is the equivalent of matching a high school football team against an NFL Super Bowl winner. There is simply no comparison.

The reality is that terrorism is not as grave threat to the United States as our present leadership wants us to believe. The 9-11 attacks were shocking in their barbarity, however they pale in comparison to the economic and social costs associated with other terrible events that occur routinely in the USA. Hurricane Katrina was far more devastating than any terrorist attack is likely to ever be, yet, you don’t hear anyone in this administration saying that our way of life is in peril >>>>from potential natural disasters.

The cynical manipulation of the American public by the Republican Right for its own political benefit is deplorable. With elections arriving in a few weeks, its time for Virginians to stand up and elect leaders who believe in the United States. It is time to elect leadership that will not allow ideological and religious extremism triumph over truth and science. It is time to take Virginia and America back from the Republican Right. It is time to vote for Jim Webb.

Bill Lahue
US Army (Retired)

Lt. Colonel Dan Sullivan’s First Person Story of the “Hollowing Out” of the Third Marine Division

I watched as almost every last infantry unit in Okinawa and other pointy-end forces throughout the theater departed to take up arms in Iraq, a completely different theater; stripping away the resources promised the theater commander in the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan. Paper tiger? Hollow force? Certainly for any immediate response to a developing strategic or operational challenge in the Pacific. The entire theater was left uncovered for months at a time without a MEU, despite what the JSCP, Rumsfeld’s document, promised. We had to beg, borrow, and steal a MEU bound for SW Asia to respond to the tsunami in SE Asia because ours was already on the ground in Iraq.

Units deploying from home station on rotation to Okinawa, found themselves suddenly redeploying to an entirely different theater. Individuals who were transferred to Okinawa on permanent assignment with families in tow, found themselves ordered for months at a time to Iraq to augment various staffs, leaving their wives and children twice displaced. Equipment readiness was a story in and of itself. All a shell game. As a result, it is impossible to measure the add-on cost to the effort in Iraq.

I participated in sessions for security concepts that we had no idea how we were going to execute if the plans we wrote to support them were ever ordered. We wrote some pretty imaginative plans that only Stephen King could rival. But, the Secretary has surrounded himself with sycophants who either are woefully inadequate military professionals (they accepted our plans) or who won’t say the truth because that would be professional suicide.

And I haven’t even talked about the way our allies and potential coalition partners view us. At the behest of a strategically challenged administration Secretary Rumsfeld has crippled the national security posture apparatus. They have thrown out the “Win-Hold-Win” doctrine and replaced it with the “we can respond to any challenge at anytime, anywhere, throwing anything at it and bully our way to success” philosophy that is working so successfully in Iraq. “Hold-Borrow-Rattle the Saber” is the new reality.

Dan Sullivan
LtCol USMC retired
former N-5, COMPHIBGRU-1