OFF THE WIRE
NBC News
Tales of 3 Marines underscore court decision blasting "unchecked incompetence" at agency.
Susan Selke, the mother of a combat veteran who committed suicide in March, appeals to the VA to do
a better job taking care of vets suffering from mental & disability ...........WTF
Clay Hunt, a Marine sniper, served two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he came home with a Purple Heart and post traumatic stress disorder, Hunt asked the Veterans Administration for help. But getting medical attention was a two-year struggle. On March 31, Hunt committed suicide in his Sugar Land, Texas, apartment. He was 28.
Philip Northcutt, 38, a fellow Marine, saw intense combat in Iraq in 2004 and was wounded. He was diagnosed with PTSD in the field, but he says he was merely given sleeping pills and an anti-depressant and told to keep fighting. When he came home, he struggled to adjust, spending time in jail and becoming homeless before he started receiving disability benefits more than four years later.When Jordan Towers, 27, came home from Iraq in 2008, the Marine couldn’t escape the feeling that he was on another night patrol in Al Anbar province, and that each step might be his last. He angered easily and snapped at people for no reason. When he called the VA, he was told it would take three months to get an appointment. He was diagnosed with PTSD a year later, but six months after the diagnosis he is still waiting to hear whether his claim for disability benefits will be approved.
Three Marines, three cases where the U.S. government allegedly let down those who risked all for their country.
The stories of Hunt, Northcutt and Towers are not unique. Similar allegations are leveled in a lawsuit against the Veterans Administration filed by two veterans groups that argue delays in the process of evaluating and treating returning veterans with mental health problems are systematic.
‘Unchecked incompetence' On May 10, a federal appeals court judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, ordering the VA to drastically overhaul its mental health care system and accusing it of “unchecked incompetence.”
In a 140-page ruling, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the agency was violating veterans’ constitutional rights by denying them guaranteed health care and benefits, citing the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment and its guarantee of freedom from unjustified governmental deprivation of property.
Reinhardt noted that some veterans with severe depression or PTSD were forced to wait eight weeks or more for a mental health referral.
Such delays can be critical, Reinhardt noted, citing internal VA communications indicating that 18 veterans commit suicide every day. The court also found that veterans appealing a disability rating to the Board of Veterans Appeal wait more than four years on average for their mental health benefits claims to be fully adjudicated.
The ruling accused both Congress and the Obama administration of failing veterans. “We would have preferred Congress or the president to have remedied the VA’s egregious problems without our intervention,” wrote Reinhardt.
The scope of the problem also was highlighted in an April 2008 study by the RAND Corp.,which found that 18.5 percent of veterans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 suffered from PTSD upon their return home. Fully one-third were seen at a VA facility for mental health within one year, it said.
'The war doesn't stop' Towers, the Marine who sought help from the VA and was told to wait three months, said the lack of support for returning vets is absurd.
“When you leave a war zone,” he said, “the war doesn’t stop there. It continues on through the nightmares and flashbacks.”
Towers was deployed to Iraq in 2007, for what he expected would be a six-month tour. At its conclusion, he volunteered for a two-month extension so he could stay with his unit. “I was really tempted to go home,” he said, “but that would’ve been too much work to just leave these guys.”
He believes one night patrol in particular is the primary source of his anxiety. He was the point man on a patrol “outside the wire,” as Marines call enemy territory. “I really did think each step could be my last,” he said, adding that the uncertainty of the silence was worse than the roar of combat. “When I was fired upon, I’d get this huge adrenaline rush. And at that moment, that fear in me would go away.”
Diagnosed with PTSD in 2009, Towers applied to the VA for disability benefits in November 2010, but is still waiting to hear if his claim will be approved. In the meantime, he is working as a social media coordinator at a veterans outreach group.
He says he is still plagued by nightmares and flashbacks and has a hard time in real-life social situations. “The only people I talk to are veterans,” he said. “I don’t usually speak with the civilian population, even though I guess I am a civilian now.”
Northcutt, the Marine who says he was sent back into combat after being diagnosed with PTSD, has also been suffering from nightmares and flashbacks. He said he also injured his back and suffered a traumatic brain injury after multiple concussions – the first of which occurred during a firefight in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, when a rocket-propelled grenade landed 10 feet away. He spent a year at Camp Pendleton in California recovering, but whenever he tried to discuss his mental state with VA doctors, he said, he was given medication rather than explanations.
“They addressed my physical injuries, but as far as PTSD, it was like it didn’t exist,” he said. “There were some pamphlets people were handing out, but that’s it. There was no real discussion about how I was coping.”
Jailed, then left homeless Northcutt, who had run his own screen-printing business before being deployed, said he couldn’t manage a business any longer. “I couldn’t remember clients’ names, I couldn’t remember dates,” he said. “The crazy part is, I couldn’t figure out why.”
He said he was given “a grocery bag full of pills,” which he started to take while drinking heavily. He was arrested in Los Angeles for possession of marijuana — which he said was prescribed under California’s medical marijuana law — and spent a year in jail. He sought help from the VA when he got out, but after finding out that it would be nearly three months before he could see a doctor, he gave up and went to San Francisco, where he walked the streets and slept on a park bench.
“How I didn’t kill myself or someone else in that time is a miracle,” he said.
Northcutt eventually found Swords to Plowshares, a nonprofit group that helps veterans make the transition to life after war. Staff there helped Northcutt get into a residential treatment center for combat veterans and
helped him file a disability claim with the VA. Northcutt, a father of three, received a low disability rating and no provision for his children. He has been waiting nearly a year to hear the outcome of his appeal.
The story of Hunt, the Marine who committed suicide, is especially poignant, given that he became a spokesman for veterans upon his return.
While he was at war in Iraq, Hunt was shot in the hand by a sniper and watched friends die in other ambushes that he survived. At home, he struggled with the demons of PTSD and the VA, which misplaced his disability paperwork for months.
