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DISABLED ALASKA VETERAN LOSES SOME BENEFITS

AFTER VA RE-EVALUATION -- Loses Aid and Attendance

after VA downgrades status of his traumatic brain injury.

Worries compensation might be lowered even more.

 

 

Story here... http://www.adn.com/
front/story/8944723p-8844689c.html

Story below:

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Government cuts wounded Alaska soldier's aid

Tyler Hall of Wasilla was hurt so badly in Iraq that Army medics zipped him into a body bag.

By GEORGE BRYSON
Anchorage Daily News

Sometimes from a distance, it's hard to tell that 26-year-old Tyler Hall of Wasilla is disabled. On a good day, when his prosthetic leg isn't causing him any pain, he walks as well as anyone.

So well, in fact, that his mom, Kim Hall of Wasilla, tells the story of how her son was recently challenged by a stranger who saw him park his truck in a handicapped spot in front of a local grocery store.

"Are we feeling a little disabled today?" the man asked sarcastically as Hall walked toward the store without a hitch.

"Yeah," the ex-soldier answered, meeting the man's gaze while pulling up the cuff of his ankle-length pants to reveal the shiny metal pole of his artificial leg. "As a matter of fact, I am."

That might have been putting it mildly. In truth, Hall is about as beaten up as a war vet can be. Which used to really amaze him, considering the 11th-hour surprise of it all.

BOMB IN THE ROAD

When Sgt. Tyler Hall arrived in Iraq four years ago, in April 2003, the three-week-old invasion of Baghdad had already concluded. One month later, the president announced that all major combat operations were over.

By then, the Wasilla High graduate's own four-year enlistment had nearly ended as well. In years past, short-timers like him serving overseas were usually sent home three months before their dates of discharge to provide a "clearing period" that would allow them to complete their tours stateside.

But four months later -- on Aug. 22, 2003 -- Hall was still in Iraq, riding in the back of a 5-ton truck in the middle of the night while guarding an ammo depot north of Tikrit. That's when the unexpected happened.

Someone detonated a homemade bomb that exploded in the road directly under the 150-gallon fuel tank of Hall's passing vehicle -- which sent all the truck's occupants flying. When Hall was finally pulled from the burning wreck, he was no longer conscious.

One of his men revived him with CPR, but Hall blacked out again and started to fade. By the time the medics arrived in a helicopter, they couldn't detect a pulse. His buddies later told him they put him in a body bag.

"I may have 'died' at the time that they put me in there, but I came back ... coughing up blood," Hall says today. "I was pressing on the bag. And obviously the medic knew -- 'Hey, there is somebody in there who's alive' -- so he unzipped it and hooked up all the equipment."

In Baghdad, the emergency-room doctors worked furiously to stop Hall's bleeding. Besides all his broken bones, his aorta was severed and one of his lungs was punctured. He beat their expectations by living through the night.

Still unconscious three days later, Hall was airlifted to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, for advanced care. Doctors put him into a medically induced coma that lasted nearly two months.

When he finally came to at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Hall learned that not only had he lost a limb -- the bones in his lower left leg and foot had been fractured in more than a hundred places -- but his face was crushed so badly it had to be rebuilt with metal plates serving as cheekbones.

In addition, Hall lost 10 teeth and suffered a broken back with three fractured vertebrae, a badly broken arm that needed to be reinforced with a rod, third-degree burns to his hands that required skin grafts, a damaged lung infected with pneumonia and -- perhaps most serious of all -- a dangerous pocket of fluid on his brain.

A DIFFERENT SON

Now, back in Alaska four years later, Tyler Hall still grapples with the effects of all that, from pain in his back and truncated leg to short-term memory loss that stems from brain damage.

He has nothing but praise for the medical treatment he's received, though he's suffered some frustrations with the people who handle the paper.

After he was admitted to Walter Reed, for example, the Department of Defense quit paying him. His mother tried to find out why, and the medical center's finance officer told her he was officially listed as dead.

"He isn't," Kim Hall said. "He's right here in the hospital."

"I understand that," the officer said. "But in the system, he's dead."

Later she learned that the bookkeeping error was traceable to the fact that medics who treated her son in Baghdad on the day of the attack didn't expect him to survive.

After The Washington Post launched an inquiry, the department redesignated Hall as living and delivered his missing pay.

Most recently, after a determination that his health is improving, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs proposed a reduction in his monthly disability compensation. So even though Hall loves his country, he can't help posing a question: "Do they think my leg is going to grow back?"

No, but they do think one of his other injuries is healing. After a recent examination, the VA downgraded the status of his brain damage from 100 percent disability to 50 percent. Hall says that made him ineligible for in-home "aid and attendance" -- a $7,248 reduction in his annual compensation.

He'll still receive about $2,500 a month due to all his other disabilities, including the broken bones, damaged lung, missing leg and post-traumatic stress disorder. But Hall worries about the trend. What if his compensation drops even more? If he were to get married or start a family, how would he provide for them? If he loses full health-care coverage, how would he pay the dentist?

It would be different if he thought his brain injury was getting any better, Hall says, but he's pretty sure it isn't. He still wrestles with lapses in his speech and memory. He gets sharp headaches most days, just as he has for the past two years.

Though he declined to comment on Hall's medical status, Alaska VA benefits director Mike Scheibel defended the need to periodically re-evaluate veterans and adjust their disability ratings to ensure their compensation is appropriate.

"Either the condition improves or the condition worsens," Scheibel said. "So we set up future exams for those kinds of conditions."

From her vantage point, however, Kim Hall thinks her son's postwar health after four years of convalescence has probably stabilized and won't get any better. It is what it is, she says, and it's a shame he has to keep proving it.

"Pretty much with a brain injury, once you get a couple years out, that's what you're going to have," she says. "His short-term memory is not going to get better."

Relaxing now in the home that Hall shares with a friend on the western outskirts of Wasilla, Kim Hall glanced over at her son.

"You know I love you, Tyler, with all my heart," she says, listening to him talk to a reporter. Then she addresses the reporter directly: "But this is not my son that I sent over to Iraq. He looks real similar, but he doesn't have the same nose. He doesn't have the same features. He has a brain injury. ... He went in (to the Army) with an attitude, and he came out with a completely different attitude."

SENT TO IRAQ

Born in Boise, Idaho, Tyler Hall grew up just outside Fort Lewis, Wash., the eldest of his parents' four sons. His grandfather on his dad's side was career Army.

"So that was a big deal for us," Hall says. "Serving your country."

When he was 14, his parents divorced. At 16, his mother moved to Alaska and took Tyler and his brothers with her. Settling in the Valley, Kim Hall waitressed at local coffee shops while attending classes at Mat-Su Community College. Tyler made money working after school.

Approaching his Wasilla High School graduation in 1999, he talked about attending Arizona State University -- "He excelled in school. ... He had the grades to go," his mother says now -- but after talking to a recruiter, he decided to join the Army instead. He wanted to see the world.

In those waning months of the 20th century, there wasn't much in the newspapers about al-Qaida or Iraq, only violence and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. So after attending basic training in Washington state, Hall was assigned to a unit in Bamburg, Germany, where he remained for two years, serving with a special "quick reaction" unit known as the Allied Mobile Forces (Land).

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hall was eventually transferred to the 14th Combat Engineer Battalion based out of Fort Lewis, where the U.S. Army began preparations to invade Iraq from the north through Turkey. When Turkey objected, however, the plans had to change at the last minute. So the 14th Combat Engineers entered Iraq from the south instead, a few weeks after the March 19 invasion.

One month after he arrived, President Bush stood in front of a banner that proclaimed "Mission accomplished," and everyone thought they'd soon be heading home, Hall says.

"We were very hopeful it was going to be just like the first Gulf War," he says. "We had already won, so 'let's pull out. Let's go home. Let's go see our wives or significant others and get on with life,' you know?' None of us were really prepared for the tours."

'BURNED-UP POP CAN'

For Hall, what followed next wasn't good news.

The grandfather he idolized passed away, then his girlfriend ended their relationship. The hot summer months droned on. Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered a "stop-loss" on troops leaving Iraq, and Hall knew he would remain there to the end of his enlistment in September.

But he never quite made it. Soon after the late-August attack that nearly took his life, Hall was "medically retired" from the Army. The attack on his truck came so quickly he has hardly any memory of it.

"It was just instantaneous," he says. "Just sparks and things crashing all over the place, and then I was out. ... I was just hanging on, though I guess officially I died eight times. My heart stopped on eight different occasions. And I remember I woke up in a body bag."

If he did, that never became part of his official Army medical record, Kim Hall says. But his buddies insist it's true. Later, they would show Tyler a photograph of his bombed-out truck.

"It looked like a burned-up pop can," Hall says. "There was no way you'd think that anybody in it survived."

His dad (who lives in Washington state) and mom flew to Germany to see him in the hospital. While they were there, Hall remained in a coma. So they followed him to Walter Reed.

It wasn't until October or maybe November that he finally "woke up," Hall says.

For three months he remained in Walter Reed's intensive care unit as various teams of doctors repaired his crushed face, mended his broken back, rebuilt his snapped arm, treated his damaged lung, grafted skin to his burnt hands, implanted new teeth and amputated his leg. By November he was able to stand on crutches. Later that month, he joined his mom for a car ride to attend a Veterans Day ceremony across town.

That's when he realized there was mischief in his brain, Hall says. He'd lost his equilibrium.

"Just riding across town was like riding on a roller coaster," he says. "It was like a feeling of vertigo ... like you're drunk all the time."

Fluid was creating pressure on his brain, Kim Hall says. The doctors tried to drain it through spinal taps, but it only built up again. The symptoms persisted, affecting Hall's speech.

So his medical team decided to implant a permanent shunt in his skull to drain the fluid from his brain to his abdomen. The shunt, a kind of tube, remains in his head to this day.

"The first year, I was just terrified of it," Kim Hall says. "If he gets a headache, I'm the panic-stricken mom. I'm checking his eyes for dilation, his equilibrium -- because they said a shunt can go bad at any time. They said, 'Six weeks, six months, six years -- we don't know. It could happen at any time.' "

After flying home to Alaska that first year to spend Christmas with his family, Hall returned to Walter Reed for a series of treatments and therapies that lasted a couple of years. Kim Hall moved into the medical center with him.

Their experience there had its ups and downs.

Hall has autographed photos of a long succession of celebrities and political leaders who visited his bedside. Vice President Dick Cheney dropped by. So did "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau and the actors Bruce Willis and Cher.

On a whim, Hall had asked if he could receive his Purple Heart from the commander in chief -- and was surprised when the White House obliged. A half-year after he was injured, Hall stood at attention at Walter Reed as President Bush pinned the medal on his chest.

Living in one of the outer dormitories, he and his mother also witnessed conditions at Walter Reed that recently prompted critical reviews of some of its half-century-old facilities. However, Kim Hall believes that the excellence of the medical staff there far outweighs the bad.

"Yes, they have some mold," she says. "And yes, they have some mice -- and rats as big as small cats. ... But you can't have it all. We had the best medical treatment there we could have possibly had. And that's what we were really there for."

THE FIGHTING GOES ON

On a gray and windy mid-May day outside Wasilla, the television set inside the modest home that Tyler Hall rents with a friend is tuned to C-SPAN. He is listening to the congressional debate on veterans' benefits.

"I mean, let's face it," Hall says, grabbing his crutches to stump across the room on one leg to turn off the set as a reporter arrives. "They can pass all the bills they want, but if they don't fund them ..."

The crutches are a bit of a setback. When he's at his best, Hall says, he gets around well on his below-the-knee prosthetic leg. He actually has three of them: one designed for running, another for swimming, a third for everyday walking.

But some designs work better than others, and even a small fluctuation in his body weight can result in a poor fit that can then lead to more serious problems. Like the recent blood clot on the end of his leg that a doctor had to lance -- forcing him back onto crutches for a month. When something like that happens, he finds himself depending more on others.

"I mean, I can jump in my vehicle and drive around and stuff, but when I have to crutch around, I have to have people put things in bags" -- in order to carry them with his crutch-holding hand.

He realizes he's not alone.

In the past four years, about 25,000 other Americans have been wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the number rises each day. An additional 25,000 troops have suffered war-related illnesses and diseases and noncombat injuries that required air transport.

Now that many of them are returning home as veterans, the dollars available to pay their disability benefits are growing increasingly scarce.

"Everyone was prepared to go to war," Hall says, "but no one was prepared to take care of the troops after."

Some of the returning vets will have to prove their disabilities to doctors and VA officials again and again if they want to continue to receive any monthly compensation. If their benefits are reduced or denied, they'll have a year to appeal the decision.

That's what Hall plans to do.

He also wants to explore his idea of taking college courses online. He has thought about a broad range of majors, from petroleum engineering to psychology, but he wants to be sure it's feasible first, considering his disabilities.

Says Hall: "I don't want to jump into something that any handicap I have will make me, like, 50 percent less effective."

He appreciates all the Alaskans and people around the country who've contacted him to offer encouragement, Hall says. He's grateful for the medical care too -- including that provided locally by VA doctors in Anchorage.

Still, he takes exception to the VA's administrative decisions to rate certain disabilities as "temporary" that he considers permanent. Like his brain injury and the permanent shunt.

His mom feels the same way.

"I mean, today he may be fine, and tomorrow he may be having brain surgery again," Kim Hall says. "You can't really plan this out."

Daily News reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.

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Larry Scott  --