Printer Friendly Page

DISABLED IRAQ WAR VET STILL WAITING FOR VA BENEFITS

A YEAR LATER -- Billy Carter is not angry with the VA. He is

not angry with the Army. He just wants his neighbors to

understand what it means to be a veteran caught in limbo.

 

 

Story here... http://www.thehawkeye
.com/Story/iraq_war_vet_080207

Story below:

-------------------------

Disabled Iraq war veteran waits for benefits

West Burlington's Billy Carter feels left behind.

By KILEY MILLER
kmiller@thehawkeye.com

WEST BURLINGTON -- Billy Carter is not angry with the Veterans Administration. He is not angry with the Army.

He just wants his neighbors to see, to understand, to feel for a moment what it means to be a veteran caught in limbo.

"It's kind of like you're in a convoy," Carter said Monday in an interview at the home of his fiancee's mother, "and you get a flat tire and the rest of the convoy drives off and leaves you."

Now unemployed and living part-time in a rental house without running water in Fort Madison, the former member of the Iowa Army National Guard's 224th Engineer Battalion began the process of applying for disability benefits a year ago this month. He continues to wait for the first payment as his bills pile higher and his life unravels, and he said there are other Iraq war veterans in the area who share his plight.

Carter decided to take his story to the media after learning of a group of injured Iraq veterans who sued the Veteran's Administration in federal court last week.

Richard Braley, the director of the regional VA office in Des Moines, acknowledged Monday that it takes eight months on average to complete a new claim, but he also said Carter had missed an appointment for an examination that has to be made-up before his application can be finalized.

"In a process that already takes a long time, we really do encourage veterans to be responsive to requests we have and not to string it out," Braley said.

Hidden weapon, hidden wounds

Carter's story begins in April 2005 in Ar-Ramadi, Iraq.

He was at the controls of a machine called a scanner that day, hunting for improvised explosive devices hidden on the streets of the city within the deadly Sunni Triangle. He had been in country for four months, just one man among nearly 500 soldiers deployed from southeast Iowa with the 224th.

As Carter tells the story, two vehicles, one of them a 24-ton "buffalo" equipped with a robotic arm for scraping up bombs, already had covered the section of road he was navigating when a tone in his ears told him he was rolling over a possible IED. He maneuvered until the sound was at its strongest, then halted to mark the spot with a shot of spray paint from a mechanism at the bottom of the scanner. He would not get the chance

It seems likely now the enemy had been watching. Perhaps an insurgent with a detonator was nearby, waiting for one of the Americans to stop. All Carter can say for sure is that he heard the initial crack of an explosion but not the concussion that followed. He opened his eyes to a cab filling with smoke.

The scanner was supposed to break up in a blast. Wings on the sides were designed to shear away, freeing the cab to shoot into the air above the explosion.

The wing's on Carter's vehicle, however, clung fast. He is convinced the added weight slowed the machines ascent, allowing shrapnel the split-second necessary to sweep upward and crash into his left window. Five layers of bullet-resistant glass shattered. The final two spider-webbed but held. A soldier who witnessed the explosion would later tell Carter it was as big as three 155mm Howitzer rounds going off.

The scanner dropped into the blast crater. Somehow, though, it still functioned. Carter was able to drive it up and out of the hole.

He, too, had held together remarkably well. The hearing was gone in his left ear, but he remained lucid and whole.

In a testament to the weight of responsibility the 224th bore, Carter says an officer immediately got on the radio to ask if he could continue scanning.

"I think you could kick in this window," Carter remembers firing back. He was ordered alongside an M1 Abrams tank to shield himself from sniper fire.

In truth, though, it was already too late. Two invisible rounds had struck Carter, inflicting wounds that were no less real for the fact that they could not be felt at the time.

One was in Carter's mind. The fear created in that moment when death reached for him then pulled back would metastasize into what Veterans Administration psychiatrists now say is post-traumatic stress disorder.

Carter also has been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI, a condition that is all too frequent in survivors of IED explosions and a new point of concern for the military.

"TBI may not manifest itself for months," said Lt. Col. Greg Hapgood, spokesman for the Iowa Army National Guard, "so it's important that soldiers know what the symptoms are ... and if (they) feel them or know that someone else is getting them, then (they) should not be afraid to speak up."

Had anyone realized the jarring Carter's brain and his emotions had absorbed, he might have received immediate care. Instead, he claims a medic gave him two 800-milligram tablets of Ibuprofen and sent him back to his unit. He would spend eight more months in Iraq.

And he would keep working. Carter says his willingness to climb back into a scanner the day after the explosion was one of the reasons he was recommended for an Army Achievement Medal.

But the medal only tells part of the story.

Carter admits to "freaking out" in one of his first missions following the explosion, kicking and screaming in panic at the roar of planes overhead. That incident led to a dispute between Carter and his superiors, one that he refused to talk about on the record.

Still there is plenty to say. Since returning home from Iraq in December 2005, he has followed the course of so many others before him, becoming a veteran adrift.

"Our government invented a cause called No Child Left Behind," he wrote while gathering his thoughts for this interview. "Maybe somebody should invent another great cause and call it No Veteran Left Behind."

An ongoing struggle

By the time the 224th arrived in the United States, Carter knew the explosion had done lasting damage. In fact, he might have avoided some of his current troubles had he been upfront during the battalion's demobilzation period at Fort Sill, Okla.

Instead, he pretended nothing was wrong. When that wasn't enough, he actually flipped his headphones around during a hearing test so that sounds meant for his deafened left ear were coming in the right.

His reasons were solid, though.

"They told us at (Ft. Sill) that if you have any issues to tell us now," he said. "But then they also said that if you have any issues and they're not resolved when we go home, you're not going home. You've been deployed for a year; all you want to do is go home. You're not bringing that stuff up."

Carter believes some of his friends who took the same approach and now are "embarrassed" to seek help for old hurts.

"Nobody has the market on hard luck stories," he said.

Soon after the deployment ended, Carter was out of the National Guard. He planned for a time to stick around, but decided to accept a discharge under honorable conditions following what, in his own description, were fights with individuals in his chain of command.

There were many more trials to come.

Married when he went to Iraq, Carter is now divorced and living with his fiancee. The couple bounces from here to Fort Madison and back again, relying on the VA for their $200-a-month rent and organizations such as Community Action and the Salvation Army to help with other costs.

Mostly, they borrow from family members.

"It's close to the point that when I finally do get my back pay," Carter said, "I could get a ton of money and be broke right afterward."

A hose hooked to a spigot at his mom's house next door supplies water to Carter's Fort Madison residence, but he expects the electricity to be shut off soon. And he wonders if he'll have natural gas when winter comes.

"At least we have a place we can actually call our own and where we can house our kids," said Emily Cooper, Carter's fiancee.

In truth, the ebb of his relationship with his son and daughter is one of the saddest aspects of Carter's life since the war. The two children would rather stay with their mother because she can afford to take them places and buy them things, he said. He even worries that details in this article about his living conditions could cost him visitation rights.

"How does a grown man explain (the possibility of being homeless) to a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old," he wrote in his statement. "All they know is Daddy's sick and sees a lot of doctors."

An absolute priority

A meager flow of money will begin soon. Cooper began waitressing last weekend.

As for Carter, he says he cannot return to his pre-deployment job as a casino dealer because the beeping from the slot machines terrorizes his damaged ear and doctors tell him an ear plug won't help.

It's unclear how hard he has searched for employment elsewhere, but the chief symptom of his brain injury, short-term memory loss, would likely put many other jobs out of reach.

Carter knows he has a brain injury based on assessments of Veterans Administration doctors. Which gets back to the root of his frustration -- the seemingly endless wait between the diagnosis and the confirmation of his diability.

According to Braley, the Des Moines VA office received 7,330 new claims last fiscal year. As of Monday, 4,410 claims were in one stage or another of review.

While that number might seem high, it represents a 15 percent drop from the close of the last fiscal year, thanks in part to the addition of 19 people to the office staff.

"Those service members who are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan we recognize as an absolute priority for us," Braley said.

Carter will be listed in those ranks. When his application is complete, that is. That can't happen, though, until he makes up that missed exam, and the wait may well be long.

Kirt Sickels, a spokesman at the VA hospital in Iowa City, said there are more than five doctors handling compensation and pension exams. Their workload is large, though, with 18 to 20 requests for initial exams coming in each day.

"We're busy," Sickels said. "But there's always been a demand for 'comp and pen' and there probably always will be a demand for 'comp and pen.' "

Carter figures he has made the trip to Iowa City every two weeks for the past year. Despite a $12 gas voucher and free meals from the VA, that's travel he says he can't afford to continue. In fact, he and Cooper blamed transportation trouble for missing the exam in the first place.

Carter apparently planned to begin using a regional bus service to get to the hospital, but Cooper's mother, Sherry Chamblee, said he "panicked" at the last minute.

"He doesn't want to ride in a car with anybody he doesn't know," Chamblee said.

That fear is just one of many Carter attributes to the psychological fallout from his war experience.

The National Center for PTSD defines the condition as an anxiety disorder following a traumatic event. A 2004 study found that 18 percent of Iraq veterans showed symptoms of PTSD, which can range from flashbacks to numbness to irritability.

Carter drank heavily after he returned from Iraq. That problem has evidently waned, but he remains prone to anger and his rages are all the more frequent because of his memory loss.

"He can start a pot of coffee then shut it off to go out and say something to the kids," Cooper said. "Then when he comes back in he wants to know who turned it off."

Sometimes, too, he wakes up with a headache caused by the ringing in his ears and the anger floods back into his heart.

Chamblee, who has known Carter for years, can recognize the dangerous shift in his temper. But she sees his vulnerability, as well. Five guests at a family event are fine, she said. More than that, and Carter needs to get away.

On those occasions, the only person he wants with him is Cooper. She held off on getting a job for a time because he worried so much when they were separated. She also felt she needed to be at the appointments in Iowa City to remember the doctors' instructions.

Now with a job, "I can't just keep taking days off," she said.

A paycheck every month

Just a few weeks ago, Carter made an unlikely choice. He enlisted in the military again, this time with an Army Reserve unit.

As soon as they found out, his VA doctors intervened. According to Carter, they declared him unfit to make a "reasoned" decision because of his injuries, meaning his signature on the contract was not valid.

Another door had slammed closed. One of the first things Carter had demanded of leaders in his new unit was when he could deploy again, this time to Afghanistan. It wasn't that he craved the thrill of a combat zone. He longed for the security.

"For me, it's actually less stressful over there," he said. "I know the paychecks coming every month. I know what I'm doing. It's a job I can do. I don't have to worry about the water getting shut off."

For now, the worries remain. And so does the wait.

"When I left for Iraq and when I returned, the community bonded together with a battle cry of 'we support our troops,' " Carter wrote in his prepared statement. "Now those troops are veterans and if the community is still in support of us, I strongly urge them to give a shout out to Washington."

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --