Does The Way We Celebrate Veterans Day Alienate Some Veterans?

The past few days have been slow posting days. That’s partly because I’m exhausted by the passing of another Veterans Day.

This year, I’ve seen quite a few essays encouraging Americans not to objectify veterans (examples here and here). It seems like winds are shifting for the media herd, and I take this as a sign that the country is heading in the right direction—namely, sanity about the complex implications of military service. But we’ve still got a few things to learn.

Civilians probably don’t realize this, but Veterans Day is a source of great alienation for many veterans. To some veterans, even if individual volunteers have laudable reasons for enlisting, and even if history vindicates a certain cause, the violent context of their service militates against open celebration. I’ve spoken with a quite a few vets who share my preference for avoiding the festivities.

The prevailing norms don’t help. We are told that Veterans Day is “not about politics,” but it sure is difficult to coherently frame military sacrifice without placing that sacrifice in a political context. War fetishists leap at the opportunity to cheerlead on the sly: Some do it with loaded phrases like “fighting for our freedom” that are at odds with military history; others blare the names of specific conflicts that add nothing to their point.

Of course, it would be uncouth to challenge the simplicity of these ideas as they are blasted to a cheering crowd from ten-foot speakers. Better hope you can compartmentalize that lingering guilt over a mistaken checkpoint shooting, because we didn’t stand in the cold for an hour and a half to hear about that.

On the other hand, some veterans take part in the celebrations and the parades with toothy smiles. Not all of them support the political decision to initiate and/or continue the wars in which they fought. This just reinforces my belief that very few generalizations hold true across the “veteran” category. Get enough veterans together and they will agree on almost nothing except the desirability of VA benefits and the undesirability of losing their friends. I hope that our national observances will continue to move in a somber, reflective direction that doesn’t validate some veterans at the expense of others.

‘Thank You for Your Service’

At Bloomberg, Elizabeth Samet is disturbed the spectacle of thanking military veterans for their service:

Conscience-easing expressions of gratitude by politicians and citizens cloak with courtesy the often bloody, wounding nature of a soldier’s service. Today’s dominant narrative, one that favors sentimentality over scrutiny, embodies a fantasy that everything will be okay if only we display enough flag-waving enthusiasm.

My thoughts from a few years ago are published at Tom Ricks’ blog.

Nowadays I’m more empathetic to the notion of giving thanks solely for offering one’s own life in defense of others. Some people surely do mean to isolate their thanks to this theoretical sacrifice and do not extend it to walking around in circles in Iraq trying not to get blown up for nothing. That said, I’ve met plenty of assholes who are clearly happy to have sent me off to die and in my flawed human memory, they tend to overshadow the more reserved folks.

I am also concerned that the contributions of all nonmilitary government employees are diminished by the militaristic practice of thanking only military veterans. Without the service of civilian employees in unrelated departments of government (and others in the nonprofit sector), there wouldn’t be much for military servicemembers to defend. I find it nonsensical that “serving your country” has come to be synonymous with military service alone. Missing the forest for the trees.

Getting VA Backlog News from the Internet: A Story

As our story opens, it’s noon today and I’m on the website of one Leo Shane III, a reporter with Stars and Stripes. Looking back through my browsing history, I have no idea if I the link I clicked on to arrive at his site was on Facebook, Twitter, or another of the half-dozen open tabs on my browser (some of which are related to unfinished blog posts from days ago). Shane has graphed the VA disability claims backlog from 2010-present. When I saw that Shane superimposed the backlog on the entirety of pending disability claims, I decided to have fun asking questions about the story at work here.

Credit: Leo Shane III

The number of pending claims was slowly increasing until the last quarter of 2010, when it suddenly skyrocketed by what looks like around 150,000. Because the VA defines a backlogged claim as one that has been pending for more than 125 days without a rating decision, the jump in pending claims took an additional quarter to show up in the backlog.

I immediately began searching for explanations to the sudden increase in 2010. Some folks will probably assume that it results from the influx of veterans filing claims as US participation in Iraq and Afghanistan winds down. For a moment I hypothesized that veterans advocates are increasingly breaking through the military culture of service as a one-way street in which servicemembers are taught that it’s selfish and unpatriotic to claim one’s benefits upon one’s honorable discharge. But these would seem to result in more gradual increases than the one depicted in the graph. I headed to the website of the Veterans Business Administration (VBA) for more details on the claims process.

In the VBA’s Monday Morning Workload Reports, for every answer I found, I discovered another question. Why, for example, are such large percentages of pending claims coming from Gulf War and Vietnam-era vets? By this point, I was really excited at the developing opportunity to show off my analytical skills and policy expertise. It’s not easy to make an interesting subject, original thoughts, and writing motivation all happen at the same time.

Next, I realized that Brandon Friedman had already resolved my pontifications, rendering my original post totally obsolete. The sudden leap in pending disability claims in 2010 was a result of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s decision about how to address the backlog:

On the January afternoon Eric Shinseki took over as the nation’s seventh VA secretary… the former Army chief of staff faced a paper mountain of 391,127 separate disability claims—filed by veterans from every conflict since World War II. Nearly a quarter of the claims (more than 85,000) had been languishing in the system for more than six months.

One of Shinseki’s first acts in addressing the backlog, then, was to recognize that 180 days was neither useful as a measurement, nor fair to veterans: VA had to turn around claims faster—and the department had to hold itself to a higher standard.

Therefore, the new standard for deciding a disability claim became 125 days.

The bad news for VA—at least from a PR standpoint—was that it immediately added 62,000 claims to what then became known as the “backlog.” The 85,000 or so claims in the backlog pile nearby doubled to 150,000 overnight, putting it well into six figures for the first time.

In addition to lowering the threshold for what constitutes a backlogged claim, Shinseki expanded eligibility for two groups. For Vietnam-era vets, he lifted prohibitions on eligibility for certain disabilities related to Agent Orange exposure. For Iraq and Afghanistan era-vets seeking a PTSD rating, Shinseki dropped the requirement (nearly impossible to meet after the fact of service in a chaotic war zone) to prove exposure to a specific traumatic event.

Then the VA expanded outreach to veterans of past eras, many of whom had previously given up on the disability claims process. Together, these policies dramatically increased the number of disability claims even as the VA was facing pressure to reduce the backlog.

And that leaves us where we are today. Ultimately, if the VA wants to process disability claims in a timely manner, it needs to do so with the aid of computers and the internet. Friedman finishes his report by noting that the VA is finally, legitimately, transitioning to a digital claims process:

…in January 2010, VA began to conceive of plans to automate the claims process. Planning for a fully electronic system was complete by June 2010 and the Veterans Benefits Management System, or VBMS, was well on its way to becoming a reality.

The process of planning, procuring, pilot testing, and deploying in limited areas took nearly three years. But by December 2012, VA was fielding VBMS department-wide.

By May 2013, the system was in more than 90% of VA regional offices.

At this point, VBMS is still a work in progress, and the IT infrastructure on which it is built is still not completely renovated. But there is no doubt it is coming online.

The idea that the VA would, in 2013, even be in the partially finished process of transitioning from the recording of information on dead trees still seems like a comically outdated absurdity (my disability claim and ultimately successful appeals were all on paper in 2006-7), but Friedman’s report is heartening at least.

In the last quarter or so, pending and backlogged claims have tracked closely in decreasing by about 100,000 to 489,390 as reflected in Shane’s chart. This is largely due to an April decision to “make provisional decisions on [claims more than a year old].” Once a provisional decision is made, the claimant has a year to submit additional evidence before the claim is ruled permanent and can only be changed via the formal appeal process.

Thus the immediate-term decrease in pending claims we’re seeing may be somewhat misleading since some of these provisional decisions will undoubtedly be appealed when the time comes. Friedman asserts that “many, if not most, will not” but doesn’t substantiate his assertion. For now, we can only hope that most claimants find their provisional decision a fair one.

Then as I was writing my revision, the VA tweeted this (along with an updated chart):

VA claims backlog drops to 479,926 this week. The backlog is down 20% since March. pic.twitter.com/dND7kkbPBn

— Veterans Affairs (@DeptVetAffairs) August 19, 2013

Credit: Department of Veterans Affairs

So, in the end, there was good news for disabled vets today.

Addressing the 90/10 Loophole in Veterans Education

I watched this morning’s Congressional hearing on improving education outcomes for US military veterans. The hearing was held by the Senate’s committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The hearing centered on a law known as the 90/10 rule, which prohibits for-profit educational institutions from deriving more than 90% of their revenue from federal financial aid. The 90/10 rule was enacted to defeat predatory for-profit entities that vacuumed up federal aid from vulnerable students in exchange for classes of such dismal educational value that no rational consumer would pay for them.  One of the law’s quirks is that GI Bill benefits are not counted as a source of federal revenue. As a result, for-profit institutions hovering around the 90% mark are incentivized to accept veterans over other students. This might seem like affirmative action policy for veterans, but the law applies specifically to for-profit institutions because such schools have been implicated in past predatory business practices that target veterans.

One such practice touched upon in the hearing is the misrepresentation of a school’s accreditation: Veterans tend to be both goal-directed and underinformed about the higher education system. As such, they’re vulnerable to deceptive advertisements suggesting that for-profit degrees will make them employable when in fact these degrees are not recognized by the regional accreditation bodies that oversee most well-respected programs. Speaking as a panel witness, Sergeant Christopher J. Pantzke, USA, Ret. recounted for the Committee how he was saddled with over $90,000 in debt and a “useless” photography degree that employers later told him was not well-received by the professional photography community.

Senator Tom Coburn, Ranking Republican-in-more-than-name-only from Oklahoma, identified the problem with a Barry Goldwater quote, probably paranoid-sounding when the National Defense Education Act was being debated in 1958 and certainly not very instructive today, warning against the “inception of aid, supervision, and ultimately the control of higher education in this country by federal authorities.” Senator Coburn then likened the 90/10 rule to the “government picking winners and losers among colleges that have already proven themselves,” conveniently forgetting the fact that the 90/10 rule was implemented to protect the public from colleges that had already proven themselves to be predatory leeches. Senator Coburn did make a decent point that schools misrepresenting their accreditation may be investigated by DOJ for fraud within broadly accepted free-market principles.

On the panel, Senator Coburn’s reflexive private-sector deference was matched by that of former Congressman Steven C. Gunderson, President and CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, who disrespectfully spoke over Senator Claire McCaskill and freely ignored the substance of her questions. Congressman Gunderson emphasized that for-profit universities provide rural low income students the opportunity to pursue distance education when they might not be able to afford to travel to a brick-and-mortar university. He expressed willingness to abide by the same restrictions as non-profit universities but decried the 90/10 rule as a discriminatory measure against low-income students since some students who rely on federal aid may be forced out or rejected by a school that is close to the 90% threshold.

The crux of the issue is in Senator Coburn’s insistence that outcome-based measures such as a school’s rates of retention, graduation, and employment be the only measures on which punitive government responses hinge. Logically, outcome-based measures are ideal for a system that rewards best educational practice. In practice, it is extremely difficult to measure the contribution of one’s education to one’s workplace performance (and one’s other contributions to society). Among other complications, the lag time between education and later employment (ideally, one would want to observe employment across several years to get a solid picture) means that external variables may contribute to employment in ways that are impossible to disentangle from the prior effect of education.

Nor is it entirely clear which educational outcomes should be measured. In the case of predatory practice, rewarding high graduation rates might perversely incentivize predatory institutions to make their poorly-respected classes easier so that students graduate more often by virtue of needing to learn less. Education studies have had difficulty identifying a suitable regime of outcome-based measurement and reward. Instead, policymakers have relied on proxy measures like the willingness of informed consumers to pay market price for the education. It’s only reasonable to acknowledge the possibility that universities close to the 90% threshold will deny access to some low-income students in order to avoid taking in an unlawful proportion of federal aid. The logic behind the proxy is that, whatever number of low-income students are denied access, many more will be protected from predators who create diploma mills solely to soak up federal aid while providing as little value to students as possible.

For ideologues who show up to hearings with a manifesto full of solutions to the only problem they believe in, a discussion of the difficulty of getting education right isn’t especially relevant. Personally, I don’t have the information in front of me to know whether closing the 90/10 loophole would protect more veterans than it would hurt low-income students. But loophole closure seems like an adequate fix in the absence of a resoundingly win-win solution to this fairly mundane issue.

War Before Lunchtime

Don Gomez writes of his postwar transition in the Guardian:

It is the dark looks in the classroom from fellow students who were in grade school when I was in Baghdad. It is today’s lesson in hubris and failure to be dissected and discussed in an hour before grabbing lunch.

It is being called the hero and the villain simultaneously, and wondering.

Read the whole thing at Carrying the Gun.

Something About the Duality of Man

James Jeffrey, a former British Army lieutenant, has an excellent ten-year retrospective  in the Guardian. It’s rich with similes and metaphors that make it as much a work of art as an expository piece. It’s difficult to pick a sufficiently representative excerpt, so I encourage you to read the original. H/T Don Gomez.

I don’t know exactly where the attraction lay. Perhaps the synthesis of man and machine up above, all-powerful with a bristling array of weaponry trained on insurgents, omniscient with night vision and radar systems, or knowing it had my back and could be called on no matter what, but there was something seductive about such moments.

And yet, at the same time, I know how wrong these experiences were – especially Basher-75 circling malevolently in the night sky; how, while I was bouncing off the inside of my turret with glee, Iraqi children huddled and wept in their beds, scared out of their minds by fire fights raging around their homes and the ominous rumble of armoured vehicle columns; how the market stall dangling off that barrel – which we all had a good laugh over – represented some faceless Iraqi’s livelihood.

Antiwar Sentiment Deepens Among Post 9/11 Vets

Christian Science Monitor reports on the trend.  According to Mike Hanie, executive director of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, the cause of this trend is traceable to the civil-military divide:

The veterans’ “families, friends, neighbors, and colleagues do not understand, or seem to care about our all-volunteer military and the sacrifices they have made defending our freedom,” [Hanie said].

But the political challenge posed by the civil military divide is obscured Hanie’s reference to “defending our freedom.”  In the Post 9/11 Era, the civil military divide is not symptomatic of a nation of ingrates, as this weekend’s many parades will make clear.  What families, friends, neighbors, and colleagues do understand but are never allowed to mention is that the sacrifices that veterans have made have not been in defense of their freedom because their freedom is not at stake.  It’s obvious that counterinsurgencies fought on the other side of the world are not all that stands between Americans and some new, less free way of life.  The disinterest with Iraq and Afghanistan that some describe as American apathy is partly that, but it’s also a sense of perspective.  When veterans and servicemembers insist that Americans maintain a sacred assumption that sacrifices made in Iraq and Afghanistan are in defense of freedom, they are inhibiting an adult discussion about the wars.

I have a lot of personal acquaintances to remember on Memorial Day.  I don’t tell myself that they died defending freedom.  They died because other people made unwise and unethical decisions [and, not incidentally, seem to have avoided any real consequences for those decisions].

Memorial Day is meant to honor our nation’s war dead but the current approach leaves much to be desired.  I don’t see the honor in sending the next generation of servicemembers to Arlington by refusing to acknowledge the political context of past deaths.

How Vets Were Changed by Iraq

Good friend and former Executive Director of Iraq Veterans Against the War Kelly Dougherty appeared (embed not working) on PBS Newshour with three other vets to discuss the ways in which Operation Iraqi Freedom changed her life.

Members of Veterans For Freedom usually grate on me when speaking in their official capacity but Lt. Zirkle was tolerable.

The one who really needs to be exposed is Major Ewing, who is transparently full of boloney and doesn’t belong on the news except to be exposed as such. What civilian viewers might not realize is that he’s using his rank (the most senior on the panel) to shut down his fellow panel members without honest debate. He wants us, with no independent examination of whether he has demonstrated his knowledge of the subject matter, to take him more seriously than the rest because he holds a higher military rank.  This goes a long way toward explaining why he, with such unqualified authority, references the “big picture” as if he knows something the rest of us don’t about how the Middle East, riven by revolution and a nuclear arms race that appears increasingly likely to go kinetic, is more stable than it was in 2002 and about how Iraq’s democratic government, in which there’s an arrest warrant for the Vice President and in which many army divisions identify on politicized lines, is functioning.  As a vet and a Marine, one picks up on these things.

Also, I find it hard to believe that any Iraqi told him in honesty that they wanted the US military to deliver “freedom” from the insurgency.  They may have used the word “security” or “stability,” but in my experience the only ones in Iraq throwing around the word “freedom” were US servicemembers.

It’s unfortunate that the format of the panel did not allow for PBS to challenge him on his fantastical political assessment.  Military officers, especially those on active duty, need to be challenged immediately on such public statements.  And if their military duties don’t allow them to arrive at certain assessments in a public setting, then they should not be asked the questions in the first place because they cannot be trusted to give the truthful answers on which television news is predicated.

The Psychological Toll of War at Joint Base Lewis-McChord

A local veterans group calls it “a base on the brink”:

Over the last two years, an Iraq veteran pleaded guilty to assault after being accused of waterboarding his 7-year-old foster son in the bathtub. Another was accused of pouring lighter fluid over his wife and setting her on fire; one was charged with torturing his 4-year-old daughter for refusing to say her ABCs. A Stryker Brigade soldier was convicted of the kidnap, torture and rape or attempted rape of two women, one of whom he shocked with cables attached to a car battery; and an Iraq war sergeant was convicted of strangling his wife and hiding her body in a storage bin.

In April, 38-year-old combat medic David Stewart, who had been under treatment for depression, paranoia and sleeplessness, led police on a high-speed chase down Interstate 5 before crashing into a barrier. As officers watched, he shot himself in the head. His wife, a nurse, was found in the car with him, also shot to death. Police later found the body of their 5-year-old son in the family home.

“I can tell you that in the last two years, we have had 24 instances in which we contacted soldiers who were armed with weapons,” said Lakewood Police Chief Bret Farrar. “We’ve had intimidation, stalking with a weapon, aggravated assault, domestic violence, drive-bys.”

via Stars and Stripes.

What Did We Fight For?

Tom Ricks searches for an answer to the hypothetical question, “what did our Iraq and Afghanistan veterans fight for?”  Here’s what he came up with:

“When your country called, you answered. You did your duty on a mission your country gave to you. In our system, thankfully, the military does not get to pick and choose what missions it will undertake — that is decided by the officials elected by the people. Those officials are not always right, but they are the leaders we chose to make that decision. No matter what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have the thanks of a grateful nation for answering the call.”

If you’re interested, my suggestion for citizens seeking to relate to veterans is in the comments.  It’s timestamped today, December 15th.  For reasons you may understand once you read it, I won’t bother reposting it here.

Gingrich Gives Veterans Lesson on Social Construction; Palestinians Not Amused

The comment in question is that the Palestinians are an “invented” people, as if Gingrich knows anything about anything.

While Gingrich’s comment is noteworthy in its own right, I found it extra-noteworthy that he made the comment before a veterans forum.  It turns out that most of the other GOP candidates showed up and also said ignorant/ideological/lowest-common-denominator stuff:

Santorum said he opposed torture, but did not believe water boarding amounted to torture.

“I don’t think we torture our men and women in uniform, because our men and women in uniform are water-boarded,” he said. “To suggest the United States deliberately tortures our people … well, I just don’t believe we would do that.”

My take on political license at veterans forums here.

Money Managers Donate Lotto Winnings

Three Connecticut wealth managers who won a $254 million jackpot followed through on their promise to put the money toward philanthropy, today announcing donations to five charities that assist veterans. The first recipients will each receive $200,000. They are: The Bob Woodruff Foundation, Building Homes for Heroes, Services for the Under Served, Operation First Response and the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund…

“We are leveraging our professional experience and our collective success in money management to ensure these lottery dollars go far further than their face value,” the three winners, who formed the Putnam Avenue Family Trust, said in a statement…

Thomas Gladstone, a friend of one of the men and the landlord of their office space, told ABC News last week that a client had come to Belpoint Capital with the winning ticket and asked for their help…”These are smart guys. They want to turn the $100 million into … $400 million. The plan was to keep all this private. Youve seen people pry into other peoples lives. They want to protect their client,” Gladstone said.Gary Lewi, spokesman for the Putnam Avenue Family Trust, [said that] “The three trustees consider this the first stop on what we see as a journey of philanthropy in the months and years to come.”

via Money Managers Make Good on Promise of Philanthropy – Yahoo! News.

New York Attorney General on Crusade to Save Soldiers’ Homes

He must not realize we live in a meritocracy and that everything will be fine as long as those soldiers work hard for low pay to get ahead .

…as the [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] data suggests, the number of U.S. soldiers whose homes have been illegally seized may be much greater. The head of the Service Members Law Center, an advocacy group that advises military personnel and veterans on their legal rights, told the FT that “banks may be undercounting” possible foreclosures against servicemembers.

Banks may have little to fear from the OCC, which has long acted more as a booster for the financial industry than a regulator.

This is What “Crowd Control” Looks Like

Scott Olsen interviewed yesterday.  He still has difficulty forming words.

Additional USA Today interview here.

Lt John Pike is a Marine

says Yahoo.  I’m not sure that provides much meaningful insight. There are vets of a lot of different stripes out there. All I know from the video is that Pike was clearly not acting as the unsung hero reluctantly performing his duty. He was glad to attack peaceful protestors and he was itching for the chance follow up as the remaining students surrounded the police and kicked them out of the quad.

The riot-clad police officer who pepper sprayed a row of peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters at a California university last week is a retired U.S. Marine sergeant…

Pike has been honored twice for meritorious service, including a 2006 incident in which he decided against using pepper spray on a campus hospital patient who was threatening his colleagues with scissors.

But an alleged anti-gay slur by Pike also figured in a racial and sexual discrimination lawsuit a former police officer filed against the department, which ended in a $240,000 settlement in 2008.

Another Vet of the 99%

This showed up in my Facebook feed today.  I hope to see more like it.

UPDATE – Another:

Went to the OWS March Tonight

It was huge, people were angry, and Bloomberg’s crackdown backfired. Some pics:

Many people were in attendance.

Verizon unwittingly donated their building exterior as a projection screen for the 99% batsignal, which everyone crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan could see. A lot of cars were honking as they passed the march on the bridge.

Vets of the 99%

Columbia Veteran Students at the New York City Veterans Day Parade

Those of us standing in front of the float were working for the Parade, mostly as ambassadors to VIPs including GEN Petraeus, GEN Odierno, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Greenert.  In order to make this pic happen, we basically just ran out in front of the float as it passed in front of the reviewing stand and held up the entire parade for a minute or two.  The generals in the reviewing stand seemed pretty impressed at how deep we were rolling.

British Veterans Joining UK Occupy Sites

The Guardian reports at least 15:

Other veterans at the Occupy sites also claim to suffer from problems linked to their service. Matthew Horne, 23, served in Iraq with the Scots Guards for eight months, until June 2008, and his experiences left him pondering the “futility” of war. He left the services 18 months ago, and says the Occupy movement has provided a platform to campaign for veterans who fought for a democracy but were denied support.

“I’m disgusted with the way this government deals with veterans who have left the services,” he said. Horne added that his service in southern Iraq made him wonder what they were actually fighting for.

 

Scott Olsen Makes Public Statement

via Yahoo! News:

“I’m feeling a lot better, with a long road in front of me,” Olsen wrote. “After my freedom of speech was quite literally taken from me, my speech is coming back but I’ve got a lot of work to do with rehab.”

“Thank you for all of your support, it has meant the world to me,” he continued. “You’ll be hearing more from me in the near future and soon enough we’ll see you in our streets!”

Friends say he soured on military life after leaving the service and started a now-defunct website called “I hate the Marine Corps” which served as a forum for disgruntled servicemen.

Olsen received an “administrative discharge” from the service in late 2009, his uncle George Nygaard has said, though the precise reasons for it have not been confirmed.

It will be quite a political landmark when Olsen shows up in front of another police line in Oakland.