The VVA Veteran: Letters

January / February 2009

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LETTERS

A PLASTIC SPOON

Philip Caputo, who was featured in your November/December issue, may have been in my unit in Vietnam in 1966. I believe this is the same Phil Caputo who is on the front cover of a book called Larry Burrows’ Vietnam. I am in a picture with five or six Marines standing in prayer holding hands. I am the Marine with the plastic spoon in his top pocket.

John Barber

By Email

FISHING EXPEDITION

Fly fishing has in many ways saved me. I know the peace that it brings and the artistic approach that is necessary. As an Army MP, I was at Red Beach when you landed in Danang in 1965, Mr. Caputo. Thanks for all that you have written over the years. Come to Telluride and fish with us.

Richard Arnold

Telluride,Colorado

CLASS OF VETERANS

Thank you for the very interesting article about our incarcerated brothers in Angola Louisiana State Prison. Long ago, we veterans at Chapter 190 at the Holman Unit in Alabama helped their chapter and many others to form. Your assist to Allen Manuel is very much appreciated by our veterans. We usually only get bad press or are ignored.

Craig R. McLaren

Atmore, Alabama

WHAT MATTERS INSIDE

The VVA Veteran has a lot of good information in it. My chapter, Incarcerated Chapter 833, just had its banquet, and we were able to give the proceeds to the Homeless Fund and to the Old Vets Home here in Missouri.

I’m damn proud of them; they worked hard to get the money together. These men show and care more about other people than most folks on the outside do. They are trying to make amends and go straight so they can become good people again.

Truman Syicox

Bowling Green, Missouri

CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

Having had an Eleven Bravo MOS, I’m inclined to feel sympathy toward the convicts discussed by Terry Hubert in the November/December issue.

However, although Hubert did a fine job of humanizing the convicts, he just called the murder victims “a police officer” and a “workplace shooting.”

Victims of crimes have names, ages, occupations, and family members. Victims of crimes have as many hopes and dreams, as many good traits and bad, as criminals do.

If Hubert wants to be more successful in humanizing those incarcerated, he must be more intellectually honest about crime victims. I say these things not to be critical or negative, but to be helpful and constructive.

Bob Johnson

By Email

IN SERVICE

I sent a letter to you looking for a soldier pen pal I had when I was thirteen. Thanks to The VVA Veteran and the opportunity it provided to do a nationwide search, my soldier’s name was recognized by a friend who had lost contact with him. He decided to see if he could help.

He searched, found information, and then contacted my pen pal. He told him about my search. I received an email from “my” soldier. After confirming that he was my soldier, I finally had the answer I wondered about for 39 years: My soldier made it home. I was able to send back his letters for his scrapbook, and the two friends are getting together for Christmas.

Thank you for all your hard work and service.

Karen Raynor

By Email

WHAT’S NEXT?

The VVA Veteran is the most popular item on our membership table at the VA Medical Center and is the most difficult to keep in stock. Everyone loves it. It’s an attractive and colorful veterans magazine, more attractive than the “dirty” Veteran. Advertisers take up about half of the Veteran, maybe a little more. I read the articles: stories and reports from our officers.

Naturally, the glossy magazine is more expensive to produce. I have to admit it is more pleasing to the eye; obviously our advertisers—from Alzheimer cures to fancy watches—feel the same. But I fear that if the advertising is not soon capped, the editorial skills of M. Keating and M. Leepson will soon be reduced to a few pages, the rest swallowed by our advertisers. The first to fall: Father Phil’s obits. Granted, we can go on-line to view them, but what’s next, our book reviews, locator, chapter news?

I hope our magazine will not become another fundraising venture where we lose sight of what we are about and simply begin to look only at the bottom line. Let’s keep The VVA Veteran the award-winning magazine it is with a healthy balance of print and advertising.

Bill Messer

Phoenix, Arizona

NOT IN VIETNAM

I regularly enjoy the reviews of military books in The Veteran. The review of Shelby L. Stanton’s Special Forces at War, however, demands a response. Stanton is referred to as “the former Vietnam War Green Beret.” This is not the case.

He apparently lied about his Vietnam service and heroic exploits over several decades. His military record is devoid of any mention of Vietnam service or the numerous awards and decorations that he is shown wearing on the book jacket of one of his earlier books.

I have not had the opportunity to examine his latest book and have no intention of buying it. Any such misrepresentations contained therein, or photographs of the author wearing unauthorized awards or decorations would, most likely, constitute federal crimes under The Stolen Valor Act of 2005.

Richard J. Goddard

Via Email

Editor’s Note: The author information in the 2008 edition of Stanton’s book does not say that he served in Vietnam. He is described as having served “six years of active duty as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army... as a paratrooper platoon leader, an airborne ranger advisor to the Royal Thai Army Special Warfare Center, and an advisory ranger Special Forces team executive officer in Southeast Asia before being wounded in combat in Nam Yu, Laos.”

NAMINCLATURE

I served in the USAF from 1968 to 1974 but never was assigned overseas, includ- ing Southeast Asia. Am I considered a Vietnam Veteran, even though I never saw combat in ’Nam? Or am I considered a Vietnam Era Veteran because I served during ’Nam?

I am asking these questions because of a situation I discovered in Colorado. The state of Colorado offers a special license plate with the words “Vietnam Veteran” written on the lower portion of the plate. The state’s requirement to buy and display the plate on a motor vehicle is that the veteran provide a DD-214 showing an honorable discharge and the years of active duty, at least 180 days, anywhere between 1964 and 1974. A veteran does not have to prove—nor is it required—that he actually was stationed in Vietnam.

I want to know if you think Colorado is correct in its plate nomenclature or if it needs to be changed to “Vietnam Era Veteran.”

John Damsma

Via Email

THE VA: NOT WELFARE

I am a retired military member, disabled veteran, and VA employee, and I wanted to comment on VVA’s latest well-publicized lawsuit. You obviously have no idea what it takes to adjudicate a claim for VA benefits. Do you honestly believe it can be done in 90 days?

Let me give you a great example of what we see every day. A veteran comes into the office, his application is a third of the way completed, he or she has no DD-214, no service medical records, and claims twelve disabilities. First, we have to request the records from NPRC. This process alone takes 60 to 90 days. How come you aren’t suing NPRC for this delay?

Then the same veteran is claiming hearing loss, knee pain, back pain, and individual unemployability. Ever stop to think this might have to do with age and what type of work he has done since his discharge?

Then we have the thousands of claims that include the statement “without my benefits I will lose my house, my car, can’t pay my bills, etc.” How did Mr. Veteran pay these bills before he filed for benefits?

It sure would help if VVA included all of these facts in your quest for publicity. Please keep in mind that the monthly compensation check is a benefit, not something all veterans “deserve” just because they joined the military.

We are not welfare. They are located in a different office, and I’m sure they are willing to help those who refuse to help themselves. I waited nine months for my claim to be adjudicated, and so you know what I did for those nine months? I got up every morning in pain (from three spinal surgeries in three years while on active duty), got dressed, and went to work to provide for myself and my family.

I’m sure you serve a great mission. But before you make all your claims, maybe you should do a little more research. Your organization and the others like you never mention the veteran who calls, writes letters, or comes into our office and thanks us for completing his or her claim, no matter how long it took. That group clearly outnumbers the few squeaky wheels that you represent.

Name Withheld

Via Email

CHANGE IS COMING

I am writing, as a VVA life member and a veteran of the Vietnam War, to express two strong thoughts: that the outgoing Bush administration was a disaster for veterans and that the incoming Obama administration will bring a breath of fresh air for the nation and for those of us who have borne America’s battles.

I agree with the great columnist (and friend of the American veteran) Joe Galloway, who wrote that the Bush presidency “has made the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, and Herbert Hoover look good by comparison.” Bush will be remembered for taking the country into a war in 2003 in Iraq that should not have been fought; for fiddling while New Orleans flooded after Hurricane Katrina; for taking a national budget that was in the black when he took office and sinking it into a trillion-dollar morass of debt; and then doing nothing as we plunged into the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.

Change is coming in Washington, and it bodes well for our nation’s veterans.

Edgar Bedminster

Via Email

ALL ENEMIES

The Government Relations Report in the September/October issue contains a glaring error: that the oath quoted in the first paragraph has been taken by every public officer since the time of Abraham Lincoln. The fact is that the oath was changed sometime in the late 1950s or early 60s. The current oath reads, “against all enemies foreign and domestic.” It read “against all enemies whomsoever” before it was changed.

While the change was quietly done and went essentially unnoticed, it was a monumental legal change in that the government, if any faction of it was accused of being an enemy of the Constitution, wouldn’t be considered either foreign or domestic.

The oath I took in June 1958 was “against all enemies whomsoever.” The one I took in 1964 used the “foreign or domestic” wording.

Fred Marshall, Jr.

Via Email

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