“To fulfill President Lincoln’s promise
to care for those who have served in our nation’s military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors.”
The following news item appeared this morning and got my attention: Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) has invited Adam Mulvey, an Army veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to be his guest at the Joint Session of Congress tonight. Mulvey was fired last month just one month from completing his probation from the James Lovell Federal Health Center in North Chicago
To understand why, beyond the injustice of firing veterans, this is important to me, I have to backtrack a bit. My husband joined the Navy in 1966 in order to avoid being drafted into the Army. He had been attending college but had to drop out to earn some more money. Once he was off the college register, he became A1 fodder for the war in Vietnam.
He took his boot camp in San Diego and was shipped off to a year long tour of in country Vietnam. He was assigned to an LST which had actually operated during WWII. The ship’s job in Vietnam was to ferry supplies to different bases up the Bassac River and down the Mekong. From 1961 to 1971, during the Vietnam War, the chemical herbicide known as "Agent Orange" was sprayed in massive quantities across Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to clear foliage and crops
During my husband’s first tour, the jungles along the rivers were regularly sprayed with the defoliant Agent Orange. The only preventative actions the Navy took were to tell the sailors to go below while the spraying was taking place.
I met him on his return to the states as he was on his way to Great Lakes Naval Training Center to train in a specific type of Naval gun – the 5”54. A year after we met, we were married in the chapel on base, and two months after that in 1969, he returned to Vietnam this time on a destroyer. His work was the maintenance of the gun on which he had just trained. He had a hiatus of shore duty while the ship was in dry dock, but in 1970, eight months after returning, he was back in Vietnam for a third time.
He requested a shore billet in Guam working on the Naval magazine so our family (now increased by one) could be together. While serving there, the effects of his three-time exposure to Agent Orange began to manifest. Once he was told that if he remained in the Navy he would never again be promoted, he took the offered medical discharge. He was advised to file for disability with the Veterans Administration which he did and was rated 20% disabled. We were too ignorant to know how inadequate that was. That was in 1972.
The VA now presumes that any veteran who served in Vietnam was exposed to Agent Orange, meaning they only need to prove a related health condition to receive benefits. We had no idea at this point that he was suffering from Agent Orange. We now know that veterans exposed to Agent Orange may experience health issues like cancers (prostate, bladder, leukemia), diabetes, Parkinson's disease, peripheral neuropathy, and birth defects in their children.
As his health deteriorated, he would again file for increased compensation. He was raised to 40% in the 80’s, 70% in the 90’s, then 90% after 2000. Later, after getting an assist from the Disabled American Veterans, he was awarded 100% service connected disability in 2009.
During all these years, he was treated at the VA facility closest to us. He had some good treatment, but he also got some life-threatening treatment. He was misdiagnosed and prescribed the wrong medicine.
In 2007, while visiting Illinois, he went to the emergency room at Great Lakes Veterans Hospital. He was very ill with a multitude of symptoms. He was first seen by a former veteran who was working as a Physician’s Assistant at the VA. This veteran immediately recognized that my husband had been given incorrect treatment. Thanks to his expertise, my husband was seen by an appropriate specialist.
I have no doubt in my mind that this veteran PA is responsible for the fact that my husband is still alive. We eventually moved to Illinois with proximity of the Lovell Hospital as one of our major reasons. The ongoing treatment that he has received at Lovell Federal Health Care Center has resulted in his becoming, as his endocrinologist said at yesterday’s checkup, “the poster child for long term diabetes.”
Now, thanks to the ham-handed firing of Veterans Health employees, veterans may not get the quality of care that saved my husband’s life 18 years ago. Eighteen workers have been terminated at Lovell so far.
Thanks to the incompetence of the current Secretary of Defense, will we see another Agent Orange fiasco taking place?
Is the Secretary for Veterans Affairs going to step up?
Veterans lives are in the balance
.