[“At no point in history,” the report notes, “has a greater
share of veterans been denied basic services intended to care and
compensate for service-related injuries. (See
[link removed]) ]
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“OTHER THAN HONORABLE?” VETERANS WITH “BAD PAPER” SEEK LONG
OVERDUE BENEFITS  
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Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
November 11, 2019
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_ “At no point in history,” the report notes, “has a greater
share of veterans been denied basic services intended to care and
compensate for service-related injuries. (See
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, Veterans for Bernie

 

On Veterans Day this year, in a nation now reflexively thankful for
military service of all kinds, nearly 500,000 former service members
are not included in our official expressions of gratitude. 

These forgotten men and women had the misfortune to leave active duty
with what’s called “bad paper.” That means they were discharged
under conditions “other than honorable,” a determination made
without the benefit of consistent standards applying to personnel
decisions by all military branches or even individual commanders.
In civilian life, when a coal miner or construction worker gets fired
from a hazardous job--for cursing out a supervisor, fighting  with a
co-worker, or engaging in other misbehavior--their loss of employment
doesn’t render them ineligible to receive state or federal workers
compensation for a documented job-related injury or illness (like
black lung or asbestosis).

Yet, in each branch of the U.S. military, when you’re drummed out
for misconduct in uniform, the punishment is loss of similar
benefits—including Veterans Administration (VA) healthcare,
disability pay, and access to GI bill programs that make higher
education and housing more affordable for those who have served.
 
Among those adversely affected by this disqualification are many men
and women who need specialized treatment for traumatic brain injuries
or PTSD which they acquired during repeated combat deployments or
through military sexual assault. Soldiers who might have performed
well before experiencing such physical and mental wounds often
misbehave as a result of them—getting into fights, going AWOL, or
abusing prescription drugs and alcohol. The result can be an “other
than honorable” discharge that denies them later VA care.
 
A MODEL MARINE

Consider, for example, the experience of 36-year old ex-Marine Tyson
Manker, now the lead plaintiff in class action litigation handled by
the Veterans Legal Service Clinic at Yale. As the _New York
Times _reported last year, this lawsuit alleges that the Navy appeals
board which considers “bad paper” cases “currently denies
upgrades even to veterans with clear diagnoses of PTSD whose
enlistments ended with a single instance of relatively minor
misconduct.”

Manker is one of those veterans today, but fifteen years ago, his
record was exemplary. He was the top-rated Marine in his platoon, the
first promoted to corporal, and then, during the 2003 invasion of
Iraq, was put in charge of his own squad.
At the end of his combat deployment, Manker was given a one-page
questionnaire to screen for post-traumatic stress. As reported by
the _Times, _his completed form disclosed personal exposure “to
nearly every type of trauma listed, including seeing dead civilians
and Marines, killing enemy fighters and civilians, and experiencing
nightmares and hyper vigilance.”

There was no follow up response from the Marines. Yet his commander
acted much faster when Manker was caught smoking marijuana back in the
U.S., near the end of his enlistment period. His “other than
honorable” discharge, pitched him back into civilian life, with none
of the social supports that VA coverage and GI bill benefits provide.
That’s a fate shared by 125,000 other post-9/11 veterans.

Fortunately, Manker had “supportive friends and family who cared
about his well-being,” during a period of personal misfortune that
included “a random, near fatal stabbing attack.” He was able to
get costly private treatment for anger, depression, suicidal thoughts,
and substance abused caused by PTSD. With the help of student loans,
Manker put himself through college and law school, becoming a licensed
attorney and business law professor in Illinois.
 
In 2016, he was national coordinator of Veterans for Bernie and also
ran for district attorney in a heavily Republican county in rural
Illinois. His platform called for greater use of court diversion
programs for veterans guilty of minor crimes. He's now working on a
book about the history of veterans’ benefits, while awaiting a
federal judge’s ruling on the government’s motion to dismiss his
class action case.
 
AN UNPRECEDENTED ABANDONMENT

Manker’s campaign for justice for vets with “bad paper” has been
embraced by veterans’ organizations like Swords to Plowshares in San
Francisco, a major source of private help for former military
personnel who are jobless or homeless.

A recent Swords report, found that veteran benefit disqualifications,
based on bad paper discharges, now affect “6.5% of all who served
since 2001, compared to 2.8% of Vietnam Era veterans and 1.7% of World
War II era veterans.”

“At no point in history,” the report notes, “has a greater share
of veterans been denied basic services intended to care and compensate
for service-related injuries. (SEE
[link removed]
[[link removed]])

One remedy to what Swords calls an “historically unprecedented
abandonment of America’s veterans” was proposed to the Obama
Administration three years ago by the Yale Law School experts now
assisting Manker. They produced a legal memo arguing that “the
President has the legal authority to pardon veterans with an
other-than-honorable (OTH) discharge whose misconduct stemmed from
undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health
issues, including pre-existing conditions.”

Instead, during Obama’s second term, his Secretary of Defense only
directed some of the DOD administrative boards that consider discharge
upgrade requests to “give more liberal consideration to applications
that include evidence of PTSD.”

In response to high veteran suicide rates, Donald Trump’s first
Secretary of Veterans Affairs authorized the delivery of emergency
mental health services for up to ninety days to veterans with other
than honorable discharges. 

This measure was expanded by Congress in 2018, but sponsors of that
legislation and some veterans’ groups were critical of how 477,000
eligible veterans were notified of their new but limited VA access.
Nationwide, less than one percent of veterans with “bad paper”
initially benefited from any short-term mental health treatment. 

Plus, as VA unions complained, the Administration did not seek any
additional funding or staff necessary to handle the larger number of
new patients who might use the program, if they could find out about
it. The narrow clinical parameters of the program left VA therapists
with with no way to address service-related physical conditions, like
chronic pain, that can trigger depression, suicidal tendencies, or
substance abuse among veterans long denied VA care.

CURING PAST INJUSTICE

The current crop of Democratic presidential primary candidates are
being pressed to improve on that Obama/Trump record. During his 2016
campaign for the nomination, Bernie Sanders, former chair of the
Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, held a veterans’ event in
Gettysburg, PA. where, according to Manker, he expressed support for
using presidential pardon powers to cure the injustice of bad paper.

This time around, with four veterans in the original field of
candidates, several other would-be opponents of Trump have addressed
the issue. In a recent interview with _Task and Purpose, _a military
affairs publication, Mayor Pete Buttigieg declared that:

 “NO CURRENT OR FORMER MILITARY MEMBER OF THE MILITARY SHOULD EVER
BE DENIED MENTAL HEALTH CARE PERIOD.  VETERANS WHO HAVE
SERVICE-RELATED PTSD AND CURRENTLY HAVE BAD PAPER DISCHARGES OUGHT TO
HAVE THEIR DISCHARGES UPGRADED SO THEY CAN RECEIVE THE VA CARE AND
BENEFITS THAT WE OWE THEM. GOING FORWARD, ACTIVE DUTY SERVICE MEMBERS
WITH A SERVICE-RELATED BEHAVIOR HEALTH ISSUE SHOULD NOT RECEIVE A BAD
PAPER DISCHARGE.
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At a Vote Vets forum, held in New Hampshire in September, California
Senator Kamala Harris was less specific. But she did agree
that “people with PTSD tend to act out” so their misbehavior in
uniform should not disqualify them from getting needed VA treatment
later on.
 
In the meantime, the current wielder of presidential pardon power has
been rattling that saber on behalf of men in uniform, whose conduct
has definitely been less than honorable. Last Spring, Donald Trump
pardoned Michael Behenna, an ex-army officer convicted of killing an
Iraqi prisoner. 

As Mark Bowden reports in _The Atlantic _this month, the White House
also “asked the Justice Department to prepare pardon materials for a
number of American servicemen and contractors who were charged with
murder and desecration of corpses, including Special Operations Chief
Edward Gallagher, a Navy Seal who stood accused by his own team
members of fatally stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner and shooting
unarmed civilians.”
 
Since then, Gallagher was acquitted of murder but convicted of posing
for a photo with an ISIS fighter killed during his fifth combat
deployment. The top Navy brass, clearly intimidated by Trump’s
personal meddling in this controversial case, ended up punishing
Gallagher with a brief pay cut and a one grade reduction in rank that
will reduce the amount of his pension, when he retires.
Via twitter, Trump congratulated Gallagher on his acquittal, saying:
“Glad, I could help.” Unfortunately, those are not words that
hundreds of thousands of vets with bad paper will be hearing anytime
soon from this president, whose lawyers continue to fight Tyson
Manker’s case and others like it. 
 
_SUZANNE GORDON IS THE AUTHOR OF WOUNDS OF WAR: HOW THE VA DELIVERS
HEALTH, HEALING, AND HOPE TO THE NATION’S VETERANS. STEVE EARLY IS
A LONGTIME LABOR ACTIVIST AND JOURNALIST. THEY ARE COLLABORATING ON A
BOOK ABOUT VETERANS’ AFFAIRS AND CAN BE REACHED AT [email protected]_

Thank you to the writers for sending this to xxxxxx.

 

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