ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS

Numerous trees have been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness to iterate and reiterate that the VA is “veteran friendly”. We hear it so frequently that it tends to deflect like water off a duck’s back. While I’m sure that those employed by the VA believe it in its entirety, I’m not sure the PR flacks are getting their point across quite as adroitly as they think they are.

Veteran friendly is a state of mind. Yes, in all honesty, one can say the VA is Veteran friendly in their demeanor. That is where the comparison ends and the distinction begins. Often coupled with the phrase is the expression “non-adversarial”. This is mostly used in the context of a judicial proceeding. Most decidedly, VA is adversarial in subtle ways. VA employees operate on the We, Us, Team concept like unions. Everything is a compendium of commingled effort. There is no I at the VA. Hence, there is no pride of ownership, no satisfaction of  a job well done. The phrase “Too many cooks spoil the broth” is  the more germane metaphor. If an error occurs, the raters will say it was the Development team. The Development team will blame the designated “Doctor/ARNP  who opined the faulty nexus. She/he will blame the mail room guys for delaying the evidence to her, causing her to miss her deadline to submit. And I submit there is a forest of fingers pointing  if the remand rate is 60%. So actions begin to speak louder than words.

In an environment that is decidedly stressful, it becomes an Us versus Them with the Them being Veterans. One would have to live in Zimbabwe to be unaware of the dissatisfaction Veterans feel with the claims process.  This rivalry manifests itself in a “who cares?” attitude that leaves the Vet holding the short straw. VA examiners are so overloaded that they lose sight of the goal. They become automatons and blindly crank out decisions  that even they know are riddled with errors. Their mantra is that it will come back another day and they can fix it then. The high error rate simply becomes a natural default setting. A good week with a 50% error rate would go unnoticed.  VA doesn’t keep track of  dismal prognostication that way. Call it creative statisticalology. This way the PR team can honestly say ” Well, statistics don’t bear this theory out, unfortunately for the Vet. We feel there’s something else at play. Our policy is to grant every benefit to as many as we legally can”. (So don’t watch our actions; read our lips).

When we were in the service there was a legal axiom we understood. The UCMJ held that we were guilty until proven innocent. A good example is Line of Duty (LOD) determinations. If you were in an automobile accident off-duty, you were assumed to be guilty until LOD was stamped in the medical chart. If you were NLOD, any lost time would be added onto your enlistment like being AWOL.  Some of you Mormons might not have known this. Judicially, the assumption of guilt, or to be fair a neutral stance, is far different from beginning with the presumption of innocence. VA examiners operate on this principle. You present your evidence and testimony. VA examines it and looks for anything they can use to deny it. This is a far cry from an impartial process where the evidence is assembled in two piles-for and against. If everything you submit is critiqued like a police detective looking for the smoking gun or a flaw in the alibi, objectivity flies out the window. Suddenly, subjectivity is the order of the day.  Any semblance of it being non-adversarial becomes a coincidence. And then actions begin to sound louder than any words.

The unwritten rule is the operable one in VA  decision making. I’m sure VA employees will all uniformly agree that they are diligently working for the Veteran. I’m sure there were diehards at Ford who extolled the inherent safety of Pintos right up until they were recalled to fix the gas tanks-and perhaps afterwards, too.  This is more a case of indoctrination by word of mouth than by published directive.  For he who shall have borne the battle becomes the patriotic rallying cry. The rubber meets the road in the M-21 manual. It is impersonal and doesn’t care about fair and balanced. It is written by the pooh-bahs who make the rules. The rank and file rater has to follow the book. The book is his Sheppard. He shall not want. Therefore he is blameless. Since it is now virtually computerized, raters input all the variables and could care less what it spits out for a decision. It is what it is.  He didn’t decide it. The book dictated the outcome. Suddenly, a book’s actions are speaking louder than words.

Non-adversarial can and does imply many things. Being excruciatingly polite while saying no is non-adversarial. However, when all the available evidence and testimony point towards service connection,  a denial is hardly non-adversarial. When the facts are twisted and ignored it appears for all the world to be adversarial. When 60% of all decisions that are appealed to the Court are reversed  or vacated for procedural or due process violations, we can safely say that  our “non-adversarial forum” is a misnomer-because actions speak louder than words.

Before we blame our VA raters, let’s look at the system. Fifty years ago, back in 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgrim conducted an experiment to test obedience to authority. Yale students were signed up as test subjects to help do a “scientific study of memory”. They were asked to push a button that delivered a shock to a person in another room who was not visible to them. If the person in the adjacent room missed a question asked by the “tester”, they were ordered by a superior to push the button and “punish” him with the electric shock. What the test subjects didn’t know was they were the guinea pigs in this game. Dr. Milgrim was measuring them to see how far they would go when ordered to in punishing the “subjects” in the other room-no matter how loud the screams.

You ask yourselves, huh? What does this have to do with the VA? Gentle reader, the test subjects are the VA raters. Dr. Milgrim represents the VA hierarchy. The button? Why the M-21, silly. This isn’t what we signed up for.