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.