The Veterans Administration is one of the largest agencies of the US government. As such, they consume the lion’s share of the finances in their administration of benefits and medical services to Veterans. At last count, I believe the annual budget was $140 billion and still climbing. They’re asking for $154 billion next year. One would suspect this comprehends the influx of severely disabled Veterans coming home from their recent travails in Southwest Asia. Nothing could be further from the truth. What rathole the funds are disappearing into certainly doesn’t encompass increasing numbers of totally disabled Veterans.

Oddly, the numbers of 100% disabled Veterans remain static. In any interpretive model, statistically, there should be “lumps” in the funding python that roughly correspond with our proclivity to wage war. Witness the first two World War conflagrations, a smaller Korean lump and finally the unmistakably pregnancy after the Vietnam Boundary Dispute. We now see a corresponding rise in fatalities and, of even more concern, a huge rise in injuries where our servicemen/women incur massive insult to body and mind and miraculously survive. In each successive conflict larger numbers survive due to the improvements of medicine. Invariably, they are living to a ripe old age in spite of their infirmities. Most are indisputably100% or more disabled and no one would argue that.

In each of these scenarios, by rights, the actual numbers of the totally disabled should cause a corresponding bulge in 100% compensations from VA. I joined with another fellow Vet to investigate actual numbers and was startled to find a static model that has not varied more than a few percentage points over five decades. That means the large numbers of Veterans who survived the meat grinder in Vietnam could not have been accorded the proper ratings for their disabilities unless, or until, some from a prior war expired and made room for them. In fact, many died before attaining what was rightfully due them. Even today, Veterans are dying at a shocking rate of 53 a day while waiting to join this exclusive club. If someone has a better explanation, I am open to conjecture. However, I categorically reject VA’s “gecko” theory that some grow new arms and legs and thus have their ratings reduced due to manifest improvement. In VA medical parlance, this is called Immaculate Regeneration and has no scientific explanation. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is extremely prevalent among disabled Veterans.

On November 7^th, I posted this vignette on my site concerning VA’s inflated idea of their claims accuracy– /https://asknod.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/va-claims-65-70-claims-grant-rate/. After further investigation, I asked an accountant to look at the figures and extrapolate backwards with VA data I acquired going back several decades. The numbers were inexplicably flat-both from a total number of individuals and by percentage of ratings awarded. In layman’s terms there were virtually no more (or less) a number of Veterans rated 100% in the late seventies than there are now. Similarly, all the other percentages exhibited the same dichotomy. It defies logic.

What is glaringly obvious is something that isn’t discussed in polite Veterans Service Organization (VSOs) circles. Having dealt with these folks since my first claim in 1989, I was struck by the fear the service officers had of vindictive raters. I finally won my tinnitus claim at the Board of Veterans Appeals and was awarded 0%. Instead of fighting for the higher, deserved rating of 10%, my Disabled American Vets representative admonished me not to be greedy. It was politely suggested that we come back in a few years and beg for what I was due then. Each succeeding NSO voiced the same concerns-“We don’t want to piss them off or they could take everything you’ve won so far.” Which brings us full circle to the Roberts Redux.

Keith Roberts was a squid stationed in Italy at a Naval Air Station in the late sixties. He watched an aircraft nose gear collapse and squish a buddy he’d gone through AIT with. When he attempted to extricate Gary with a forklift, he was ordered to stand down for fear of damaging the aircraft. Apparently aircraft mechanics have less intrinsic worth than aircraft. This and another event created some bent brain issues and Keith dutifully filed for them after his discharge. As we all know, 85% of these claims are denied. Keith’s claim was no exception. PTSD, as a disease, had not been invented yet either. Nevertheless, Keith persevered and finally prevailed many years later in 1998. He then set forth to retrieve his earlier effective date for his disabilities. He met with marginal success and eventually succeeded in obtaining an effective date in 1992. Still unhappy with this, he was in the process of pursuing an earlier date when he and his American Legion service officer noted what appeared to be an anomaly in his claims file-to wit- missing records they knew they had filed. I suppose we could categorize this as the precursor to 2007’s VA famous Shreddergate where whole files evaporated into Immaculate Nothingness.

Keith promptly fired off a complaint to the VA’s Office of the Inspector General, which has the authority to investigate these things in-house. What he did provoked the ire I spoke of above. Screw the missing documents. The OIG turned around and illegally began an investigation of Keith. They had absolutely no authority to investigate claims fraud and never have. It is the provenance of VA’s Office of General Counsel in the first instance and the FBI who were never brought in initially. When the OIG tried to inveigle the Feds, they refused to investigate due to the obvious blatant violation of due process.  In a protracted fit of anger, the OIG, acting unilaterally, went so far as to contact numerous sailors and ask them their recollections of the 1969 event. Most had vague memories but none that would contradict the essence of Keith’s recital of events. VA, in the course of this illegal investigation, maintained Keith wasn’t even on duty that day. This doesn’t comport with all those accident investigation pictures of Keith in uniform in the hanger during the aftermath. In fact, VA cherry-picked individual testimonies from several individuals who “couldn’t remember” Keith being there and excluded all others’ testimony that might have been exculpatory. If that wasn’t enough to roll your socks down, they then refused to give him the file on the accident investigation to rebut the accusations.

From there, the OIG turned to the US District Court and proceeded to tar, feather, convict and incarcerate Keith for four years. This can only be seen as a deterrent to like-minded Veterans who are disenchanted with the brand of justice we are accorded at the good ol’ boy VA club down at 810 Vermin Ave. NW. The Adage above their door should be “Be happy we give you anything-and don’t complain”.

If the story ended there, it might not have risen to the level of public consciousness. It didn’t. Again, boldly going where no other Federal Agency had dared go before, with no legal authority, the nonadversarial VA attempted to recoup funds that were awarded to his daughters for education benefits. They even went on a protracted witch hunt to uncover any and all assets they could and confiscate them like the ham-handed IRS. All this without a shred of legal authority, mind you.

The juggernaut suddenly lost steam when someone with an ounce of legal acumen paused and pointed out this was a Bozo No-No in all fifty states. VA quietly folded up the Roberts tent and tiptoed out the door. Unfortunately, the email didn’t make it to Milwaukee. Keith’s law dog, Robert P. Walsh, had been assembling a huge file and researching who had what authority to order what for years as he carefully planned a comeback. And like Santa, he was keeping a list of who had been naughty and who had been nice. The OIG left a messy trail of e-evidence all the way up to the Director Of Compensation and Pension Services- one Renee Szybala- and others in VA’s hierarchy had compounded it with interest in their blind haste to make an example of greedy, fraudulent Vets like Keith. That made the problem far worse.  Ms. Szybala is an attorney and precluded from shenanigans of this magnitude. As an Officer of the Court, it is her duty to report unlawful actions. She didn’t and colluded with the others to disenfranchise him.  Keith had documented mental health issues independent of those he was accused of fabricating and VA freely admitted it. These service medical records clearly showed an entitlement as early as 1972 when he first filed. His local VARO had ignored all this documented evidence in their pell mell rush to saddle him up for his Texas necktie party in the preceding decades.  In a final bitchslap, the VA Regional Office in Milwaukee, Keith’s nemesis all these years, refused a remand from the Court of Veterans Appeals to reinstitute his legitimate awards. His claim is now before the Board of Appeals again in an effort to get them to right that wrong. But like an ADHD- addled adult, the VA just cannot bring themselves to admit perfidy. A good analogy would be an unreconstructed Nazi who absolutely refuses to accept the concept that eradication of the Jews was an inherently bad thing.

The party is now drawing to a close. Last week Thomas Bandzul, legislative counsel for Veterans and Military Families for Progress, played “brief fairy” and dropped copies of Mr. Walsh’s well-reasoned cease-fire order all over DC like the Sandman. Acid indigestion was probably the order of the day as VA weenies tried to comprehend just how deep the doo-doo was on their front porch. The 110-page briefing to the Board of Veterans Appeals carefully explains in DickandJanespeak what VA can and cannot do legally. It points out that more laws have been broken that there are stars in the sky. It examines the propriety of fencing out the FBI and using the OIG as a de facto jackbooted Gestapo in the pursuit of fraud. Hell, it points out so many errors as to make the Keystone Cops look like a credible deterrent to crime.

In the coming months the VA is going to be called to task and explain, hopefully to Congressman Miller and his cohorts, just how this travesty of justice came to pass.  As with most VA faery tales I suspect the OGC will lead off with their patented “Once upon a time, before the inception of the VJRA…” The other timeworn “We’ve always done it wrong this way” will probably be trotted out with the follow-on “But we promise we’ll never, eeeever do it again”.

Having recently emerged from nineteen and half years in the desert myself, I fully anticipate VA will attempt to apply their predictably perverse form of justice to my remuneration. How they will chose to apologize to Keith for his illegal four-year incarceration and illegitimate divestiture of everything he, his wife, children and their relatives owned will require some fancy, polysyllabic dancing but VA is renowned for their semantic two-step. Mea culpas of this magnitude are rare in today’s government and usually occur at the end of the news cycle on a Friday night when all the drive-by media are at Happy Hour. I doubt they will be accorded a pass on “If you like your rating, you can keep your rating. Period”

Roberts tar baby

VA Secretary Shinseki inherited this tar baby from Tony Principi but that in no way lets him off the hook. As the head honcho, Keith Roberts’ buck stops at his desk. VA’s gung ho middle management is responsible for this pathetic display of gratitude for one of our Sons of War. Keith may not have served in a theatre of war but he did serve honorably in a time of war with the full expectation that he could have just as easily ended up at Cam Ranh Bay. Somewhere in the         far-distant past, VA misplaced their mission objective statement. “For he who shall have borne the Battle, his widow and his orphan child” has been given a  twenty first century update and the codicil “and if he bitches, take it away” has been inserted (assuming it wasn’t there all along). Saying he was railroaded is far too mild a pejorative. He was drawn and quartered and a scarlet letter was affixed to his shirt. It was an ill-constructed admonition to other Veterans of what they could expect if they, too, became greedy. Justice may yet still be served but I suspect the perpetrators of this heinous crime will all take their pensions and fade away quietly as they all do before any serious repercussions ensue. Of course, they’ll get a hefty bonus for all that arduous work of making an example of Keith. And, like the unreconstructed Nazi, their plaint will be “If we’d only had more time we could have made our case to the Courts.”