25 September 2003

Veteran's Affairs

The world continues its fine muddle this morning. Diplomats are talking, bureaucrats are leaking, the ship of state plows on. California is continuing the freak show of a recall election, I read an article with Arnold, the Tyrolean tyro, trying to buff his credentials as a warm human being, presumably to prop up his poll numbers. The Democrats are rallying around Gray Davis, the colorless Governor, and I prefer the politics of the West Wing last night to what is playing out on the national stage. I wish the Chief of Staff on TV was real. I trust Leo. He is a veteran, Air Force, in the story line, but that is just like being in the military..

The War of Presidential succession is confusing. I am conflicted about Wesley Clark. He is one of the front-runners after announcing last week. The boyish Four Star veteran claims to bring credibility to the weak national security background of the Democrats. Maybe it is true. Maybe only a military guy can decisively act for peace, though I regret to say that I no longer know what that might be. I'm pleased that nothing has blown up here at home since the invasion of Iraq. Moving the zone of war overseas may have been an act of genius, or maybe it is another long wasting struggle. I'm not against it, no peacenik, but I do not know how this long this road will be and fear our national morale will not stay the course.

I long for someone like Ike, who could handle this. If we are defeated in Iraq, then the bad guys come here again, or at least turn their focus to us once more. Though they may come anyway. I suppose my feelings are part of the aging process, the loss of the dramatic certainty of youth. Of course I support the troops, and of course I support the establishment of a democratic government in Iraq, where there has never been one, and I think that some leadership and strength applied to the Euphrates River is a good and ultimately stabilizing thing.

But if the President actually gets his $88 billion supplemental to fund the peacekeeping, or making, or whatever it is, I do not think the Congress will give him another trip to the well after that. We will be too close to the election. I am not sure I am quite ready for that, at least based on the ludicrous prelude in La-La Land, but the regular changing of the political calendar of the body politic is somehow soothing, despite the petulance that goes along with it.

At least Wesley Clark has led troops on the ground. At least he is a vet, and I have a hard time finding any in the Administration other than Colin Powell, and he seems like a dove. If Wes survives the primary process without imploding my vote may turn on something as simple as the fact that he has actually experienced the consequences of what the politicians have done.

I have been getting an interesting new perspective since I retired three weeks ago.

There is a pile of material from the Veteran's Administration on my counter. That Department has loomed large in my daily life for the last year. As a Public Health Emergency official, I found that the VA was eager to play in domestic preparations to deal with mass casualties dealing from acts of terror. VA's medical system serves as a backup to the Defense Department during national emergencies and as a federal support organization during major disasters. To figure out how we might work better together I made frequent trips on the Metro to the big white headquarters building near the White House. I liked the people there. They were vets and seemed comfortable with what they were doing and wanted to contribute more.

A cynic might say it was the search for a new mission, since the largest component of the the Department's client base- the World War Two Vets- are passing away at an astonishing rate. These Vets were the foundation of the great change in America, first winning the war, and then coming home to put the tools of war away and build homes and families. The VA was designed to meet their needs, and it grew like Topsy. The VA had been founded by President Hoover in 1930, to meet the increasingly strident protests of the World War One vets. They camped out in Hoovervilles on the National Mall and called themselves the Bonus Army. They served, they returned and they wanted the Nation to recognize their sacrifice. My Grandfather was one of them.

During the Depression there were 54 hospitals, 4.7 million living veterans, most from the Great War (Part One), though I bet there was still a living veteran from the Mexican War of 1848. The new Administration had 31,600 employees. Everything changed with World War Two, but then you can say that about everything. President Roosevelt signed the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944" which offered medical services, home loans and education benefits to veterans returning from the conflict. There was a population of 12 million uniformed personnel to serve. That is when the current infrastructure of the Department was built, and the scope of what the Department does was based on the fact that almost every man and a lot of women had Done Their Duty.

The Department reflects the demographics of that generation. First was support ot the wounded and education for the young people who had given so much, and a stake to buy a little tract house. To accommodate their changing needs, medical treatment for the standard ills of aging became the primary focus. My American Legion Magazine has a lot of ads for hearing aids. Recognizing the inevitable, Congress transferred 82 national cemeteries from the Army to VA, which now maintains 120 national cemeteries in 39 states and Puerto Rico. Since taking over the program in 1973, VA has provided more than 8.1 million headstones and markers.

Based on sheer bulk (and steady pressure from the Veteran's lobby), President Reagan made the VA the 14th Department in the President's Cabinet in 1989. There used to be saying about the efficiency of the Department, that things moved about as fast as they did in the cemetaries. But things have changed. There is a sort of grim efficiency that is a little unnerving.

Which is what Wesley Clark and the rest of the retired community deal with. The gigntic new bureaucracy entered my personal life with gusto. On active duty I always look to the Navy for my care and feeding. That stopped abruptly at Midnight on the first of September. I began to get ominous official-looking correspondence from the Department almost immediately. One cheery buff letter inquired about my preference regarding an education program I had signed up for in 1978. Three more letters directed me to report to medical appointments to determine my disability status. I had to limp over to the mailbox to get them. If they find that any of my ailments are connected to my service, they will award me a disability check.

I was disappointed to discover that it did not come as extra money, but was rather deducted from my annuitant compensation (we are not supposed to say "pension") from the Department of Defense. That isn't the way it works anywhere else, but that is the nature of the business. If they did compensate vets for what happened to them, shooting off aircraft carriers or jumping out of airplanes or stepping on landmines, it would break the bank.

That is the real deal of the political side of the equation. There are still a lot of us to deal with. Mostly of us are pretty gung-ho geezers. Besides Wesley Clark and me there are 26 million veterans currently alive, of whom nearly three of every four of us served during a war or an official period of hostility. If the Veterans of Foreign Wars had been worried about their prospective membership base in 1989, those fears long over. Most of the Army is deployed overseas now, and the Reserves are called up. Based on our service, 70 million of our family members are potentially eligible for VA benefits.

I hope to live a long time, but the Department has something like an eternal mission. The last dependent of a Revolutionary War veteran died in 1911. About 439 children and widows of Spanish-American War veterans still receive VA compensation or pensions and buff letters from the Department. Six children of Civil War veterans still draw VA benefits.

VA spends around $60 billion a year, pays compensation and performs an astonishing list of tasks. It manages 163 hospitals in the Lower 48, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. More than half of the physicians practicing in the United States have had part of their professional education in the VA health care system. VA does education, home loans and life insurance and cares for 100,000 homeless vets. The Department has 224,724 employees, second in size only to the Department of Defense.

It's big. It's huge. According to the buff letters in the mail, it is going to start processing me tomorrow. I will be assigned a classification for ease of tracking as I wander trough the rest of my life. They did it to Wesley, since he stopped being a General and became a vet, and now I too join the parade that leads from active duty to the logical conclusion. I look forward to an ongoing exchange of correspondence with the Department.

Except the last transaction, of course. But I imagine there will be a buff letter for that one, too.