First, it was two VA psychologists who had a secret web site that claimed that many veterans and active duty soldiers were either lying or exaggerating about their PTSD and TBI symptoms, and that they were malingerers. They also posited that the reasonable doubt rule should be eliminated, essentially implying that any doubt should be resolved against the veteran. Now, a West Point graduate and professor, there, Lt. Col Dan Gade, is adding to this giant load of bullshit by claiming that the military and VA disability systems are actually an incentive for disabled soldiers and veterans not to work.

According to Gade, if you receive disability compensation, you are likely to “abuse drugs and alcohol”, although he offers not a shred of evidence to support this despicable contention. Lt. Col. Gade, to be fair, lost his entire right leg in Iraq, so I guess he has some perverted right to make his miscreant claims about his fellow veterans and soldiers who will never have the chance to retire with the expansive benefits and six-figure money that he will get, once he retires. As it is, as an 0-5 over 16, he’s raking in almost $8,000 a month. And there is zero chance, despite his pontificating about those less fortunate than he is, that he will give up his VA disability compensation, or his Combat Related Special Compensation, which will make a significant portion of his retired pay tax-exempt. So, let me make this clear: Gade and these two VA psychologists are total and complete pieces of crap who aren’t worthy of carrying my, or my fellow disabled veterans’, soiled underwear. The psychologists have no business working for the VA, and Gade should not be teaching at West Point for pushing this extremist, right wing point of view.

Over the past 11 years, I have worked full time as a volunteer service officer for Vietnam Veterans of America. I retired in early 2004 after working for 24 years as a graduate  teaching fellow at Georgetown, public defender and capital defense investigator. In 1993—at the age of 46—I was rated by the VA, for the first time, for PTSD, injuries to  a knee from an explosion, and tinnitus and hearing loss, caused by the same explosion. My first combined rating was 60%. I did not stop working and continued to work full time for another 11 years, even after being rated for Type II Diabetes in 2001, due to exposure to herbicides during my 18 months in Vietnam.  This got my combined rating to 70%. Technically, at that time, I could have sought a 100% rating due to unemployability, but did not; I continued to work for another 3½ years. In early 2004—at the age of 57—after working for eight years as a capital defense investigator, I retired because I could no longer deal with blood-soaked crime scenes. They were too reminiscent of the many scenes of US and enemy bodies I was exposed to in Vietnam, where one of my jobs as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal specialist was to check them for booby traps and unexpended ordnance.

After I retired, I applied for vocational rehabilitation from the VA. I asked them to pay to send me back to school to become a certified arson investigator. They denied it, telling me I was too old and too fucked up to make the expenditure worthwhile and that, at my age, and with my disabilities, it was doubtful that anyone would hire me. It was only at that point that I sought a 100% rating for unemployability, which was granted. In addition, because of my legal training, I applied for several jobs with law firms doing legal research and writing, and never even got an interview. I suppose, according to Gade’s warped logic, that I should have gotten a minimum-wage job at Taco Bell. In 2005, I helped found Central Oregon Veterans Outreach, in Bend, Oregon. This program provides a full range of services to disabled, disadvantaged and homeless veterans. I was a full-time volunteer handling VA claims, board of corrections petitions, discharge upgrades, and military pay issues such as Combat Related Special Compensation. I also handled claims for soldiers who were facing medical discharges, largely for combat-related injuries, during the Physical Evaluation Board process. I now do these claims from my house.

I guess the point I’m trying to make, which applies to virtually all of the veterans and soldiers I have assisted, is this: none of us asked to be injured or affected by war the way we were. I didn’t ask to be blown up trying to move a damaged piece of ordnance in an ammo dump that had been attacked three times by Viet Cong Sappers. I didn’t ask to wake up at three in the morning drenched in sweat after having Technicolor nightmares that the VC were attacking my house. I didn’t ask to get nauseous when I was working on a capital case and viewing crime scenes, including dead bodies, that were soaked in blood and shot or stabbed full of holes. These types of reactions are suffered by almost all of the veterans and soldiers I have represented in claims for PTSD and none of them asked for this shit to happen to them. More importantly, contrary to the false assertions by Lt. Col Gade and the two VA douchebags, virtually all of these men and women  continued to work for many years and only a very small percentage of them eventually ended up getting rated at 100% for unemployability. Virtually none of them abused alcohol and, except for smoking pot (and many of them had medical marijuana cards), not one of them was a drug abuser. This line of garbage has been pushed for years by extreme right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and a number of members of Congress, most of  whom never had the balls to raise their right hand and swear to defend our country with their life.

Lt. Col Gade claims, with absolutely no empirical evidence supporting his views, that many of the disabilities are merely age-related problems, such as arthritis, degenerative disk disease, tinnitus and hearing loss. He claims, again with no empirical support, that these are just minor disabilities and, therefore, should not be compensable because they are not true disabilities. Well, excuse the fuck out of all of us who have these problems as a result of service connected injuries. I have, in fact, gotten VA decisions on issues like this where they do actually claim that the problem is, in VA jargon, “more likely than not”, age-related. In every single one of these cases, no medical evidence is proffered to support these contentions. That is, the doctors who state these opinions as fact do not explain how they arrived at their conclusions that it was more likely than not that a particular condition is age-related, as opposed to having been caused by some injury suffered when the veteran was on active duty. They just say, “Well, this guy is in his sixties or seventies, so it must be age-related.” I always appeal these nonsensical decisions and always win them at the next level, or at the Board of Veterans Appeals, because there is zero medical evidence proving these disabilities are age-related. This is exactly the kind of case where the reasonable doubt rule comes into play. If the evidence is in equipoise—it could go either way—then the doubt about which conclusion is correct must be resolved in favor of the veteran. If it were up to Gade and the two VA psychologists with the secret web site, all of these cases would be resolved against the veteran.  In fact, if people like Gade had their way, they wouldn’t even be allowed to make such “frivolous” claims.

One of the things I have to wonder about Lt. Col. Gade, is how he pushed his warped views on the men he commanded in Iraq. I can only assume that he had his current attitudes about the disability system within the Army that he has, today, about the VA disability system. The beliefs of commanders like Gade has had a deleterious effect on the men and women who returned from Iraq and who are still coming back from Afghanistan. When they return, they are required to fill out a post-deployment questionnaire, which asks a lot of questions meant to get at issues like PTSD and traumatic brain injury. The large majority of the soldiers who fill out this form do not give honest answers. This is largely due to the attitudes of those who command them that if they say they are having problems, they are pussies, malingerers, or, worse, liars. Many people reading this will recall what happened at Ft. Carson when commanders and ranking NCOs made it clear to those under their command that they were going to make life very difficult on those who sought mental health treatment and, in the end, some officers and NCOs were relieved. Even, now, many of the veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan that I assist did not answer the questionnaire honestly, which results in the VA system using this against them. They have the attitude that the veteran was answering honestly on the questionnaire and is now lying. When I have to deal with this issue, I have to point out that, because of the attitudes of people like Gade and others who commanded my clients, they were forced to lie in order not to be ridiculed or treated with disdain by those above them in the chain-of-command. In the Ft. Carson case, soldiers who were in dire need of mental health services, were afraid to seek them and, so, ended up being discharged with untreated illnesses, including PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. In many cases, because of the way they were treated by the military, they are afraid to file a claim with the VA because they still fear being branded as “mentally ill”, a malingerer, or a liar.

In the end, as far as I am concerned, people like Gade and the two VA psychologists are pukes who have no business being involved in the affairs of veterans, or men and women on active duty, including those at West Point. Why the VA psychologists have not been fired is beyond comprehension and it is shocking that the new VA secretary, Bob McDonald, has said nothing about this travesty. I can only assume that Gade is still at West Point because he’s pushing a line that the military actually agrees with. Despite the military’s claims about how much they’re doing to help soldiers returning from war with the problems that many of them face, what I see in my cases, particularly recent medical discharge proceedings, proves that it’s all a giant lie and that they have no intention of actually offering meaningful assistance and treatment, or urging soldiers to be honest about what they’re going through. With the military allowing people like Gade to push his terrible line of logic, I see no reason to believe that anything is going to change within the military structure.