The Disability Industry

Tom Philpott’s June 1st salient article “Attorney Urges Congress to end sleep apnea claims, abuse” hit a nerve.  50% disability for sleep apnea?  Are you kidding me?  I was in the locker room at a gym on Ft. Huachuca and heard three retirees bragging about the percentage of their disability.  One muscle-bound rooster bragged about getting a wife-abusing, drug addicted, alcoholic and homeless (of course) veteran 100% disability.  It didn’t matter that all those maladies were choices.  This savior also had 100% disability.  He had just finished an hour workout lifting free-weights.  I watched him drive away from the handicapped space nearest the door.   Have you no shame?
I recently visited a V.A. counselor who immediately began a Svengali-like diatribe about how it was veterans’ “rights” to get everything they could from the government.  He didn’t consider my current disability rating high enough and, without asking if I actually had more disabilities, said “Well, we will get that raised first thing.” I felt more like a member of a Cloward-Piven swarming than a veteran.  There is a difference in definition and mind-set between “rights” and “entitlements”.  None apply to posers ripping off taxpayers like grown men sneaking gleefully out of a candy store with stolen loot.  Nor to the fully mobile (and apparently potent) Douglas Port of Entry CBP officer bragging of a 100% disability rating obtained by sleeping with a VA counselor in Sierra Vista.  Have you no self- respect?
Teddy Roosevelt said “If a man is willing to shed his blood for his country then his country owes him a square deal….nothing more and nothing less.”  That “square deal” has mushroomed into a political agenda.  It has become at worse a thinly-veiled attempt at vote-getting and, at best, cowardice on the part of politicians to set legitimate criteria for actual service-connected disability.  It started when a San Francisco physician got “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” approved for inclusion in the Merck Manual in the 1970s.  Agencies use it as the standard to qualify persons for Social Security and pensions.  As with any government program the abuses started multiplying immediately.
Returned Vietnam army captain B.G. Burkett wrote “Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History.”   It’s not only about pseudo-heroes lying about war service and decorations.  With co-author Glenna Whitley,  they documented the rampant fraud in the PTSD scam.  70% of “tormented” veterans –each receiving thousands of dollars a month in taxpayer-funded VA benefits-  had either never been in the military or never been in Vietnam.  The VA counselors responded by saying “This is a good gig for us.  The government doesn’t check and there is too much money involved for us to.”  The same thing has been happening with Agent Orange.  AO is the military version of school lunch programs.  Whereas parents are harassed for admitting they can afford to pay for school lunches, veterans are pressured to come up with something to qualify for Agent Orange symptoms to qualify for tax-free benefits.
I know real combat veterans can suffer from significant emotional re-adjustment issues –and Agent Orange maladies – but not postal clerks in Baghdad or staff weenies in Kabul or sitting in a FOB.  I recently spent three weeks working out at the Ft. Benning gym.  I didn’t hear one person in the locker room brag about his disability rating– and there were some definitely disabled men in there.  In their minds, doing so would have cast dishonor on their comrades.  Much of what I see and hear today is, in my opinion, failure to thrive as youngsters growing up realizing war isn’t a video game.  And for the last twenty or thirty years, parents who “stress” their kids by teaching them responsibility can get arrested.  A pandering recruiting and basic training philosophy only exacerbates the problem.  Young people need and want challenges but they can’t find them being provided by adults – except maybe at Parris Island or San Diego.
What needs to happen is what I saw Steve McQueen do in the movie “Sand Pebbles”.  During the Boxer Rebellion, his engine coolie is caught on the beach by anti-American Chinese.  They string the coolie up on a trestle and start “death by a thousand cuts.”  Unable to interfere in the coolie’s torture, McQueen takes careful aim and puts an ‘03 Springfield round through the coolie’s heart killing him instantly.  Disabled posers are the anti-American chinese killing the taxpayer with death by a thousand (in this case, billions of) cuts.  Someone needs to fire a proverbial ‘03 round through the fraud.  And if it hits a few posers …it’s money well spent.