Unbelievable

Vet must prove injury BY STEVE WALSH Post-Tribune staff writer

When a roadside bomb detonated in front of his Humvee, Steve Foss' body armor saved his life. But nothing seems able to save him from the mountain of paperwork he faces after leaving the Indiana National Guard.
A fragment from the explosion pierced his shoulder and lodged near the base of his neck. He was rushed to a field hospital just outside of Tal Afar, Iraq, in December 2005, where doctors removed frayed muscle and skin and sent him back to his unit.As odd as it sounds, Foss is now having difficulty proving to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that his wound is related to combat. He recently received a letter from the VA asking for more documentation, after he had filed a claim with the VA in November in which he included all the documents he has from his service record.He folded his arms, shook his head and pointed to the lines where the VA asked for notes from nurses and doctors, documenting his injury. When he was carried into the hospital in December 2005, the field hospital had just opened inside a tent on a wind-swept base in northern Iraq, a few miles from the Syrian border. The doctors told him he was the first American they had treated."I don't know what else they want. I gave them all the paperwork they gave me at the hospital in Iraq," said Foss, who works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and lives in Michigan City with his wife and three children. In October, he retired from the military with 21 years of service.He's not uniqueFoss is not alone. Many returning wounded veterans have become casualties of an overburdened VA system -- a system that hasn't seen a significant number of combat veterans since the mid-1970s. According to experts and the VA's own data, the system is backlogged and understaffed. Troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan see mounting delays in receiving benefits."The Department of Defense is focused on fighting a war and once you can no longer help them fight a war, you drop off of their radar screen. Six years ago, I wouldn't have said that but now I do," said Jerry Manar, deputy director of national veterans services for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who worked 31 years for the VA.The backlog is enormous. As of Monday, the VA had 403,989 cases pending; nearly 30 percent of those cases were more than six months old. The same VA report shows Indiana has 8,436 cases pending, 29.4 percent of them being more than six months old. Unlike the previous three decades, many of claims are coming from newly wounded soldiers.In many ways, the VA has lost the funding battle since the war began. The agency did not receive approval to hire new caseworkers to clear away what was destined to be the largest influx of new combat veterans since Vietnam.In 2003, Congress deadlocked on a Bush administration request to hire 35 new caseworkers for regional offices. In the current budget, the president has asked for 450 new caseworkers. The House has increased the request to 1,100 people, though so far the budget has not passed, said Manar, who works with veterans having difficulty with the VA claim process, including helping with appeals.The VA went to a mainly electronic health record system beginning in the late 1990s. The Department of Defense started similar initiatives but it has been slower. The world's most high-tech military still uses many paper records, which are shipped with soldiers as they move from field hospitals in Iraq to Army medical facilities in Kuwait, Germany and the United States. The electronic medical histories that do exist are not accessible to the VA, Manar said."They are still years away from being able to talk to one another," Manar said.Troops like Foss, who finished his service in the Indiana National Guard, have a particularly difficult time. All health records for active duty military personnel go to the national archives in St. Louis. But files of guardsmen and reservists may be with hospitals or the individual units, wherever they are located around the county, Manar said.At times during the war in Iraq, guardsmen and reservists made up half the personnel serving. The large number of tough-to-find records adds to the VA's backlog of cases, he said."The Department of Defense does not do as good of a job keeping track of records for guard and reserves. If he was in the Army, they'd know where to look but with guard and reserves there are 1,000 different places. Sometimes they can locate them, sometimes they cannot," Manar said.Moving forwardThe VA officials believe they are improving as the war goes into its fourth year. The process is being streamlined. The Defense Department and the VA are working on projects, like merging the patient care at Great Lakes Naval Base north of Chicago, with Hines VA Hospital in Maywood, Ill., said Ryan Steinbach, VA public affairs person for the Great Lakes Region."A vet needs to be their own best advocate as much as possible," said Steinbach, who was an Illinois National Guard troop, injured in a 2004 training exercise in Kuwait, as his unit prepared to be deployed to Balad, Iraq.He said his own experience with VA care was fairly seamless, taking just under four months to complete the paperwork, from when he was released from a military hospital in Fort Knox, Ky.He kept all of the paperwork given to him by military doctors, as he passed through the system.Steinbach said the VA also recommends soldiers use the advocates offered by veterans organizations like the American Legion and VFW, to help them navigate the two bureaucracies.Foss said he also turned in all the paperwork he received, when he went through surgery outside Tal Afar. He became the first of at least 43 Purple Hearts issued to the 113th Engineer Battalion during its year in northern Iraq.As an Army Ranger he fought in the original Gulf War. Some of his claims to the VA covered incidents from his active-duty military career. But it is the VA's continued questioning of the wound he received in Tal Afar during a roadside attack of his convoy that bothered him, he said.He is working with a retired VA officer who lives down the block to come up with new documents to highlight his injury, though he is not giving up."I don't want to taint my 21 years of military service with what may seem like whining," Foss said. "I have to believe that if I have given honest service, that if I'm owed something, I'll be given it."