When Jeffrey Taggart came home from Iraq, what did your "support" really mean?

A report by the Government Accountability Office this year says there are 392,000 pending appeals. The average takes 657 days, according to the GAO. Jeffrey Taggart’s has taken more than two years.

When you hear about the backlog of claims, those are just the claims and not the appeals. Then again, some people think they are just "claims" and not wounded veterans waiting for the government to live up to their part of the deal for their willingness to go where they were sent, do what they were sent to do and return when they were told to come home. Would be really nice if someone had the VA live by the same rules, but they don't. They never have. Again, let me remind you, when I write about the VA, it means the way it is run and not about the people working for the VA. They don't get to make the rules or decide how fast or slowly they move. The bosses do. Congress does.

Too many veterans are falling into the chasm that used to be a crack. With all of the numbers of them realize and finally understand most of the time there is a family suffering right along with them in a system that is more adversarial than advocacy. While this story is about one of them, Jeffrey Taggart, there are another 391,999 stories just like his. One thing that Jeffery said in the interview you can watch at the link below is that we don't have a clue and he's right. Two thirds of the American people don't even know what PTSD is. Until they do know, take the time to learn as fast as they managed to slap a magnetic bumper sticker on the back of their car, too many will pay the price for the kind of support the American people have been willing to give. Are you finally starting to wonder what support really should mean?

Wounded veterans battle for treatment at home
02:34 PM CST on Thursday, January 1, 2009
By BYRON HARRIS / WFAA-TV
For tens of thousands of American families, the holidays this year are not the same as they were five years ago.

They are the families of men and women wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For many, when the war ended for their military loved ones, it only began again when they came home.

Painfully, families are learning that it’s up to them to support the former warriors, and to wrestle with the system to get the benefits their loved ones deserve.

Jeffrey Taggart of The Colony fought in Iraq.

Now his parents are fighting the war’s aftermath in their home. Sitting at a kitchen counter with a stack of paperwork in front of her, Jeffrey’s mom sums up her frustration.

“It’s totally, totally wrong,” she says. “I think it’s time that someone woke up and realized the way vets are being treated today. And the harassment that they’re being given.”

Jeffrey is a compact man, now who now sports a red goatee since his discharge from the Army two years ago. His wounds are physical and financial: a traumatic brain injury, a stroke, the consuming terror of post traumatic stress disorder, and just trying to get by.

He says society doesn’t have a clue of what wounded veterans are going through. “They worry more about saving the banks and the big three unions,” he says, “than saving soldiers that are suffering."

Jeffrey was a medic during his six years in the Army. He served a year in Iraq, and potentially more stressful as a medic, nearly two years at Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany, where the most severely injured servicemen and women from Iraq and Afghanistan are brought for treatment.

In Iraq, Taggart was usually the first on the scene after a mortar strike, firefight, or roadside bomb, trying to keep his comrades alive. Tough duty. But Landstuhl, he says, was worse. “The first time I walked into and ICU room and saw one of my former medics as a double amputee with an open head injury, I went weak in the knees and passed out,” he says. “No words can describe how that feels.”

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