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VIETNAM VETERAN LOST IN A JUNGLE OF VA RED TAPE --

"This guy is clearly eligible for disability benefits, healthcare,

pension and they're sending him to Catholic Charities."

 

 

Story here... http://www.denverpost.com/
headlines/ci_5828125

Story below:

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Vietnam vet lost in jungle of red tape

By Diane Carman
Denver Post Staff Columnist

Robert E. Lee is 60 years old - "a young 60," he said - and grinning proof that a sense of humor is the last thing to go.

The skinny Vietnam vet with an American flag on the wall in his southwest Denver house puts his thumb on the hole in his misshapen neck when he needs to speak.

With each word huffed through the plastic voice box in his mouth he displays the scrawling, garish Marine Corps tattoo on his right forearm. Once a tough guy, now half an hour of conversation leaves him exhausted.

For all those driving around with a decal on the SUV, this is your man. He's a walking, artificially talking testament to the brutality of war and its bitter aftermath. He illustrates what it really means to "support our troops."

Or not.

Lee was 17 when he joined the service. "My dad didn't like children so he forged the date on my birth certificate and took me to a recruitment office," he said. "When I should have been graduating from high school, I was killing people."

He did two tours, mostly in the DMZ. He survived the Tet Offensive in 1968 and was honorably discharged in April 1969.

"I saw things done no boy my age should ever see," he said, staring at the floor.

Lee finished high school, trained to be a machinist and moved to Colorado in the '70s.

Over the years he managed a couple of McDonald's restaurants, a Wal-Mart store. He married, divorced, reared four daughters, paid his bills and minded his own business.

"I was never right after I got back from Vietnam though," he said.

His voice was always gruff. "When I went to doctors, they always said it was a cold."

He also saw a VA psychiatrist for a while. "I had PTSD before anybody knew what to call it."

Then in December 1999, he blacked out.

"I was out for 11 minutes," he said. Undiagnosed tumors in his neck had blocked his windpipe. He was rushed into emergency surgery.

"They cut me from ear to ear," he said. "They took everything out, my larynx, thyroid gland, lymph nodes," and he endured two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation to halt the spread of the disease.

"In 2005, Wal-Mart let me go," he said. "I had too much sickness. I couldn't keep up with the hours.

"They were kind and polite, but I was still out of work."

He burned through his unemployment compensation and all of his savings. "Cancer ate that up real quick," he said. Now, for the first time in his life, he gets his clothes out of trash barrels, his groceries from food banks. He's broke.

When he went to the VA office in Denver to apply for disability benefits, the outpatient social worker sent him to Catholic Charities.

Lee said he first applied for help from the VA in the mid-'90s. "It never got processed. They said it was lost or maybe stolen. I don't know." He reapplied last January.

When Mike Collins, another Vietnam vet with an artificial voice box, learned of Lee's troubles, he reacted with outrage. He told Lee, "You're being railroaded."

Collins met with Lee and called two other Vietnam vets, Jim Hudson of Denver and Bill Holen, who handles constituent services in U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter's office. The three of them went to work to navigate the VA bureaucracy, a kind of DMZ all its own.

"The major issue is that there's no real social work at the VA," said Hudson, who noted that the problems reported at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are rampant throughout the whole VA system.

"It's kind of amazing," he said. "This guy is clearly eligible for disability benefits, health care, pension and they're sending him to Catholic Charities."

Collins said cancer of the larynx and thyroid are considered "presumptive" outcomes of Agent Orange exposure - which Lee experienced throughout his time in the DMZ - so one look at Lee and his service record should confirm his eligibility.

Rebecca Sawyer Smith, public affairs officer for the Denver regional VA office, said if a veteran is found to be 100 percent disabled, his benefits would be $2,500 a month or more.

Holen said he called the VA office "and they indicated that an adjudication officer had processed the initial part of the claim and sent letters to the civilian hospitals around April 12 to get his medical records." But when Holen contacted the hospitals, they said they'd never received the requests from the VA.

"The whole adjudication system is in trouble," Holen said. "The VA has been woefully underfunded since this administration took office."

Smith said the backlog of applications for disability benefits at the Denver office, which averages 1,194 applications a month, is 116. But, she said, emergency cases often are expedited.

Lee admits he's not exactly savvy about navigating the system. "But there are a lot of guys like me out there who don't know how the claims work. Nobody ever told me how to get help. When I got out of the (VA) hospital after my treatment, they didn't say anything. All they did was call me a cab."

Collins is passing the hat for Lee at a local VFW hall and will accompany him to his eviction hearing Monday to see if he can buy him some time.

Collins speculates that the bureaucratic delays at the VA are not entirely unintended.

"They figure a guy like Robert is just another typical Vietnam-era jarhead," he said. "If they ignore him long enough and drag out the process, he'll go away."

Lee doesn't laugh off the prospect.

"Here's the only benefit they promised me," he said, moving the thumb off the hole in his neck long enough to pull a sheet of paper from a thick file.

"It's my burial benefit," he said.

"It's a whole $300."

Diane Carman's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 303-954-1580 or dcarman@denverpost.com.

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Larry Scott  --