The VA Brush-Off for Spc. James Eggemeyer

James Eggemeyer in his trailer in Stuart, Fla.Darrell Jones photo

Politics
The VA Brush-Off
The Department of Veterans Affairs routinely delays disability claims by wounded soldiers for months and years, often shunting them into homelessness. But there’s a simple way for the government to get disabled veterans the help they deserve. It can trust them.
By: Aaron Glantz September 17, 2008

Twenty-five-year-old Spc. James Eggemeyer injured himself before he even set foot in Iraq, while jumping out of an AC-130 gunship during parachute training at Fort Bragg, N.C. As he leapt from the plane, his arm got tangled in one of the lines of his parachute. Instead of drifting gently through the air to the ground, he was dragged alongside the plane as if on a short leash. “My parachute was twisted up like a cigarette roll, and I hit real hard,” he says. “My ankle and my knee and my back and my shoulder (got hurt). I tore my rotator cuff. I feel like a 50-year-old man.”

Military doctors prescribed several drugs: the painkillers Vicodin and Percocet and the steroid hydrocortisone. Then, in April 2003, they ordered the heavily medicated soldier deployed to Iraq. For the next year, Eggemeyer drove a Humvee, running supply convoys all around the country. His convoys were attacked twice. His worst day occurred early on, when the military truck in front of his Humvee hit a civilian vehicle.

“One of the cars in the oncoming traffic hit another car that was coming toward us and caused that car to swerve across the intersection and slam into the truck in front of me. The truck in front of me hit it pretty good and killed everyone inside,” he says. He slammed on the brakes to avoid adding his Humvee to the pileup. Then he got out and loaded an entire family of dead Iraqis onto an American helicopter.

“A Black Hawk had come in when my first sergeant called the medics, and they flew, and the people got taken out,” he says. “But they were already dead, and so they just got transported: a little girl, two adult females and a guy.” After that, Eggemeyer’s condition worsened. The longer he stayed in Iraq, the worse his body felt. He also started to take more of the painkillers and the steroids the military had given him. The more he took them, the more he needed to dull the pain.
But violence wasn’t the only thing Eggemeyer had to deal with overseas. While he was in Iraq, he filed for divorce. Then Eggemeyer checked his bank account, and, he says, $7,000 had somehow gone missing. So, for the duration of his time in Iraq, Eggemeyer’s parents took custody of his son, Joseph, who had been born just two months before his deployment.

Returning to Fort Bragg in April 2004, Eggemeyer was quickly discharged from the military. Already experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, he started fighting with his captain and was given a “general discharge under honorable conditions,” which allows him to use the services of the Department of Veterans Affairs but denies him access to benefits of the GI Bill. Eventually, his PTSD and other injuries led him to become homeless, and he filed a disability claim with the VA. He continued to live literally on the street, sleeping in vehicles, for more than nine months as the VA bureaucracy sorted paper and asked for more, piling delay on delay.
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