Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles

Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles

by Martin Schram
Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles

Vets Under Siege: How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles

by Martin Schram

Paperback(First Edition)

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Overview

A scathing exposé of the U.S. government's deplorable neglect of American servicemen and women—in the works before the Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital scandal.

After members of our armed forces bravely serve their nation, they sometimes come home to find themselves battling another enemy—within their own government. Using decades of case histories, statistics, and firsthand accounts, award-winning Washington journalist Martin Schram exposes a shocking culture of antagonism toward veterans by the very agency—the Department of Veterans Affairs—that was formed to serve them.

Vets Under Siege reveals the shameless lack of care shown to our young servicemen and -women, from recruiters' deceptions and a lack of armor in battle to shoddy, disgusting conditions at Walter Reed and other medical facilities, and looks back to examine the innumerable postwar battles our veterans have had to wage for proper treatment, from World War II to today. Martin Schram's bold bugle call, sounded on behalf of our nation's beleaguered servicemen and -women, lays bare a chilling pattern of institutional negligence, delay, and denial, and points the way forward with definitive solutions to a national disgrace.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780312561666
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/08/2009
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Martin Schram is the author of several books and has been national affairs correspondent for The Washington Post, Washington bureau chief for Newsday, and a television documentary executive. His nationally syndicated column appears in more than four hundred newspapers.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments     ix
Prologue     1
The Unending Battles of War and Peace
The Wartime Battles of Bill Florey: E4 SPC, U.S. Army, 82nd Airborne, Persian Gulf War     11
The Peacetime Battles of Bill Florey: E4 SPC, U.S. Army, 82nd Airborne, Persian Gulf War     23
The Shaping of a National Mind-set
The Bonus Army: The Sad Summer When the Veterans Invaded Washington     47
Old Soldiers Sometimes Die-Waiting: After a Lifetime of Delays     61
Decades of Waste: How the System Spent Decades Making a One-Day Decision     75
Veterans at War at Home: DAV vs. DVA     85
The Mystery Caller: VA Help Lines Are Often Helpless, Hapless, Hopeless     95
A Government History of VA Failures: Decades of Reports About Delays     107
Outpatient Delays: Diagnosis and Cure     139
The Pain of Unseen Wounds: Slow to Learn the ABCs of PTSD     151
A New Generation of Vets: Ratings Games and Waiting Lists     161
Seeds of Dishonor and Disservice: How a System in Trouble Sows Disrespect     167
An Agent Orange Veterans Day: Retired but Still Battling     183
Living Monuments: The True Cost of the Iraq War     195
Whip-Cracking Washington: Revelations at Walter Reed     211
Solutions
Blue Ribbons and Red Tape: Commissioning Change     225
Reality Check, Gut Check: An Interlude in the Search for Solutions     253
A Department of Veterans Advocacy: Renaming the VA, Rededicating Ourselves     279
Index     291
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