Medical care in the Army and afterwards

Medical care in the Army and afterwards does NOT have to be second rate!

I know this from experience, and I know it as an enlisted man, as an officer, and as a veteran. I also saw how a Republican administration victimizes veterans -- and, as we are currently seeing -- victimizes wounded troops as well.

When I was an E-2 private back in 1965, assigned to the 25th Infantry Division, stationed at that time at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, a routine chest x-ray turned up some lesions in one lung that definitely got the attention of the Medical Corps doctors. Sufficiently so, in fact, that I was sent the next day to Tripler Army Hospital, in Honolulu, despite the fact that I felt fine. (The possible diagnoses I was sent with included "metastatic disease" (meaning cancer that had spread), pisiticossis (or something like that, some peculiar disease caught from poultry), sarcoidosis, and some deviant form of tuberculosis.

Well, Tripler was indeed a first rate military hospital. It was spotlessly clean, very well maintained (generally, if they knew what was wrong with you, and you were allowed out of bed, you helped maintain your ward to the best of your ability), and well staffed. Probably because I had an "interesting" condition (all doctors love interesting cases), I saw a lot of military doctors. But, interestingly enough, so did the other soldiers in my ward, most of whom did not have anything as unusual as I did.

A Brigadier General even flew in from Japan to look at me (okay, as one Captain later advised me, the general had also played some golf while in HI, but still...). They found a lesion on my eye, which was surgically removed, and well done. They performed a liver biopsy (not fun), and, because any hospital of that level is also a teaching hospital, it was done by a Captain, although he was surrounded by Majors and Colonels, all of whom advised him continually. (I would have been nervous as a witch if I had been that doctor!).

They did a definitive diagnosis (sarcoidosis), and they returned me to duty. I was able to compare that hospital stay with one in the private pavillion of Lenox Hill Hospital, on Manhattan's upper east side a few years earlier, and, although the nurses were better looking at Lenox Hill, the care was just as good in the Army.

Subsequently, after I got commissioned, I got a shoulder dislocation, which was dealt with promptly and appropriately by the Medical Corps doctors at the Post Hospital at Fort Belvoir, VA. While there, I also got several teeth filled by the Dental Corps. Those were amalgam (silver) fillings, and I still have most of them more than 40 years later. You can't knock that kind of workmanship!

Later, after I was out of the Army, I decided to see if the Veterans Administration could provide equally good care.

Yes, there was paperwork. First I had to establish that my disabilities were service connected, and this process took about a month from my first inquiry to receipt of rating of disability.

Then I realized that to qualify for actual medical care I needed to get a more than perfunctory disability rating. This took a bit longer, perhaps 3 months. I will admit that I did afford myself of the assistance of a "service officer" -- a veteran employed by the American Legion (or the Disabled American Veterans, actually I forget which) -- who advised me how to fill out the forms.

Two VA doctors saw me during this process, and although they were not as sharp as the Medical Corps doctors I had seen when I was on active duty, they were quite professional.

Then came the Reagan years. At that point things took a decidedly different turn. I got a letter from the VA saying that they wanted to check on my "progress". I showed up for my examination, and expected things to be as they had been before -- I expected that the VA would still care about the Veterans.

Things had changed. When I asked the doctor for ways that I could improve the mobility of the shoulder I had dislocated, he told me that he was unable to provide me with any care, that his job had recently become entirely and strictly that of reducing disability ratings. We talked for a few minutes, and it became clear that he was not really happy to no longer be practicing medicine as a VA doctor, but instead looking for dull-witted veterans who could be induced to say that they no longer had any disabilities so that their disability benefits could be reduced or eliminated.

My rating was not reduced -- in fact, one of the service officers suggested that I probably could get it increased if I wanted to push it -- but the change in the political climate was crystal clear.

It was clear that the relationship between the government and the Veteran was now an adversarial one. From the recent news from Walter Reed Army Hospital it is clear that things have only gotten worse.

A few good things about a military draft....

In case you think that there is nothing good that can be said about compulsory military service, I happened to note a few on Terry Cowgill's blog recently.

They are in comment #11 on the blog entry that follows:

http://tcextra.com/terrycowgill/2007/01/11/a-grim-little-talk/#comments

I'm glad, as always, to have comments.

Call me "Out of step with the regiment"

Relationships with Iran then -- and now

In a former life, I was a compliance and loss prevention weenie at Citibank, now Citigroup.

Back then, a couple of decades ago, an entity called Bank Melli had been identified by the Treasury Department as an official bad guy, an agent of a hostile state, namely Iran.

Bank Melli had a fancy office on Park Avenue, accounts with Citi, and a fancy international clientele. I can remember jumping through hoops to close down everything Citi had that even SOUNDED like Bank Melli. We kept them on the "pink list" -- the official paper listing that circulated to all the branches -- as "No Further Dealings" for several years. That list had sufficient weight in the institution that if some poor branch person should happen to process a wire transfer to an entity on the pink list, or, God forbid open an account for such an entity, they could be confident that their job was history and they would have an appointment with the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York.

Yet, from what I heard upstairs, despite all of Citi's efforts at being good guys in this, we still got pretty badly abused for having dealt with Bank Melli BEFORE they made the "big time" -- the Treasury Department list.

Now, I understand that a Chinese firm that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange is the prime mover behind a multi-billion dollar loan to.........wait for this...........IRAN, for the purposes of developing their nuclear industry.

The NYSE, evidently having little sense of history, appears to have decided to stonewall, rather that summarily delist the firm in question. (This sort of action -- cessation of all business relations -- was evidently something that Citi was expected to have done voluntarily back in the old days, even before Bank Melli made the Treasury List).

HOWEVER, the Chinese firm is an oil company.

I could leave this right here right now, and I probably should, once I suggest that the likelihood that the Treasury Department, under the current administration, would put that company on "the list" is very low -- and if, going a step farther, bowing to political pressure, Treasury should happen to do add them to the list, the likelihood that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York would be permitted to discreetly mention this fact to the New York Stock Exchange is remote in the extreme.

Friends of Cheney, you know.

The Whacko Generation....

All within a fairly short period of time, I've seen: (1) an article about a 12 year old girl, a special education student, who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for wetting her pants at school. (2) My daughter came up with some scandal from a high school in Texas where some of the girls were (gasp!) taking pictures of each other holding objects (not penises) with condoms on them and generally being disrespectful of adult authority -- like giving a teacher the finger. (3) And the New York Times had a scare article about the successor community websites to www.myspace.com -- most specifically scary for them was www.stickam.com -- where people as young as 14 might be permitted to exhibit live webcam pictures of themselves on line with no web nanny ensuring that they did not do SOMETHING that would bring the world to a speedy end.

The world of soccer has independently been screaming -- this time with extremely good justification -- about the ADULTS who scream at the kids, the refs, the coaches, and each other during games of kids as young as FIVE (5) years old.

Synthesis:

--I am quite willing to cut special ed students a lot of slack, simply because they have some otherwise-ableness that puts them in that category, and because they universally have to put up with a ton of crap about "riding the short bus" and so forth. Arresting one because she pees in her pants, even if it appears to be a defiant gesture, is a far greater indictment of the adults involved than it is of the kid.

--As my astute daughter points out about the Texas cheerleaders, Newsweek must have been awfully hard up for prurient content to print the article. (It reminds me of the five page spread US News and World Report did a few years ago about the legion of fifth graders who were allegedly fellating every male in sight.) The "cheerleader" tag was probably what made the story even moderatly titillating. Otherwise, it was just a story about kids behaving normally (for adolescents) and adults being completely over the top.

--I took some time and looked at stickam.com and have to say that it is pretty tame and routine stuff. There are a lot of kids from about 13 and up (some no doubt fudge their ages -- when did kids NOT fudge their ages?) of both sexes, a few older people (some older women, but mostly men in their 30s chatting up the teenage girls), and not very much at all in the way of prurient content. Most of the girls have something in their profiles to the effect of "If you ask me to show my boobs I will ban you".

Okay, COULD one of the men strike up an on-line acquaintance with one of these tamales and arrange a meeting? Yeah, sure -- if the girl wants to. And something perhaps is different from my own teenage years, when I saw girls I knew having surreptitious meetings with older guys from the surrounding towns? I'm sorry, but the way kids are instructed today about the perils of the internet, beginning in elementary school, no girl goes with a guy she meets on the web without full knowledge of exactly what she is doing.

I would say that live webcam chatting probably makes things safer for the kids than the previous text-only chatting, in fact! As the cops note, it is easy for them to pretend they are a 13 y.o. girl and by promising sex lure a dirty old man to a bust when using text-based chat room contact. It would be a whole lot harder to do with both parties face to face via webcam.

--With regard to soccer adults, I'll say that the adult behavior is downright appalling. I run a summer soccer program at Trinity Church, in Lime Rock, CT, and I do hear what the kids say about some of the parents/adults they encounter in local recreational soccer, middle school soccer, and travel team soccer. From what the kids report back, it's pretty clear that Goshen, CT, wins the title for the most egregiously offensive adults in my area, but the ongoing commentary in the Youth Soccer world about problem parents -- and problem adults in general -- makes it clear that there are similar whackos elsewhere, probably in even greater numbers.

--What has been going on for the last several years in Washington, DC, in terms of selfish, irresponsible and hypocritical behavior by adults in high level elected positions provides only more evidence that the generation that followed mine is completely bonkers. They are clearly the antithesis of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" -- namely the generation that preceded mine.

Interestingly, the generation that followed the whacko generation -- today's kids, teens, and twenty-somethings -- seem to be a whole lot more sane. Witness the special ed kid peeing in her pants, the Texas cheerleaders, and the www.stickam.com clientele. Their behavior is actually quite age-appropriate. It's a shame that the whacko generation can't deal with it!