In 1968, when I was twenty years old, I volunteered to serve with the Marines in Vietnam. I was trained to be a Navy Corpsman (medic) and attached to the Marines. I was only in Vietnam five weeks before being seriously wounded. I was with a company of 83 Marines when we were given orders to go to the top of a mountain, where we became completely surrounded by 1500 North Vietnamese Regulars. It is impossible for me to describe what it was like to be the target of 1500 machine guns firing all at once. Eighty percent of us were either killed or wounded in the first ten minutes of the battle. When the firing quieted down, I belly-crawled over to a Marine whose left arm was blown off and that’s when I was shot in the hip. My hip was blown off.
For most of the past fifty-plus years, I have been cared for by the VA Healthcare system. I’ve watched with admiration as the system has consistently improved - sometimes, remarkably - over those five decades. But now I watch with alarm as former President and current candidate for another term Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance and their allies at the Heritage Foundation threaten the existence of the kind of care veterans like me depend on.
Trump and Vance and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 accuse the VA of making veterans dependent on care they don’t really need. They attack the dedicated nurses, doctors and countless others who have cared for me as being bad apples and callous sadists, and they claim that our PTSD is nothing more than having a bad hair day. They want to privatize the system and make sure that future generations of veterans who have sacrificed so much for their country don’t get the kind of care that has literally saved my life.
Let me tell you more about my journey and about the care I have received. After being shot in the hip, I lay with an open wound in dense jungle for five days before help could reach me. After being rescued by helicopter, it took seven days at a field hospital for surgeons to stabilize me enough to be flown to a much larger and better equipped hospital in Japan. My whole right hip joint was destroyed, plus my hip was horribly infected with osteomyelitis, a recurrent life-threatening bacterial infection. The kind of care I received back in the early 70’s at the VA was too often hit and miss, so I stopped going. But I returned in the mid-1990’s to find that the quality of care had radically changed for the better.
The change was so obvious when I walked in the door. The attitude towards us by the staff was wonderful. The whole VA staff had learned a lot about how to manage the complex symptoms of PTSD. When I went back to the VA hospital for care I knew I needed help dealing with psychological and emotional issues, not just my physical illness and injury. I was angry at my country and thought I had every right to be angry, even the responsibility to be angry. VA healthcare has helped me find the options I needed to deal with my anger.
Pain management has been another major challenge for me and many other Vietnam veterans over the past five decades. If I hadn’t had constant care from the VA, I strongly believe I wouldn’t be here today.
Over the past five decades I have seen first-hand how VA doctors and nurses have evolved in their understanding of the complex issues that veterans are dealing with. I experienced horrible healthcare treatment back in the 1970s and 80s, but now I’m receiving what I consider the best care there is. I wouldn’t go anywhere else.
This is why I urge all veterans and non-veterans to pay close attention to the anti-VA messages that are being broadcast by folks whose main goal is to send veterans to private sector doctors and hospitals.
