Veteran Reduced to Tears After 50 Fight to Have VA Honor Claim

If you remember all the reports of veterans waiting too long for claims to be approved, most of the focus was on OEF and OIF veterans, but here's yet one more reminder, they are not the first group of veterans to be forced to fight.

After 50 years, injured veteran is still fighting
Tulsa World
BY MICHAEL OVERALL
World Staff Writer
December 29, 2014

After 50 years, the VA admitted that his injury was caused by a training accident. And the VA agreed to provide medical treatment.

Bell pulled over on the side of the road, put his hands over his face, and for the next several minutes, sobbed uncontrollably.

David Bell, of Tulsa, talks about his ordeal with Veteran's Affairs while visiting friends at Dan Howard's business at Richard Lloyd Jones Jr. Airport on Dec. 4, 2014. Bell was injured during a training accident at Ft. Sill back in 1964 and spent the next 50 years trying to get treatment from the Department of Veterans affairs.
JOHN CLANTON/Tulsa World

A 105-mm Howitzer weighs 4,980 pounds, supported by two long arms that stretch out in a V-shape behind the canon. Each arm — or "trail," as the Army prefers to call it — is as heavy as a rodeo bull, enough to snap a human spine like a twig.

It takes four men, grunting and grimacing from the exertion, to lift each trail and reposition the weapon.

On a spring day in 1964, three soldiers lost their grip.

"Everybody was cutting up and playing around," as David Bell remembers the incident. "And the other guys just dropped it."

He was a young private fresh out of boot camp and learning his way around a Howitzer at Fort Sill, 80 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.

The trail landed across his legs and lower back, trapping him underneath. His spine began to burn, as if his vertebrae had turned into hot coals under his skin. The other soldiers quickly lifted the weight off of him, and Bell walked away from the accident. But for the past 50 years — literally every waking moment since it happened, he says — he has been in pain.

Some days are better than others. And on the best days, he can almost — almost — forget that his back hurts. But other days — the majority of days — he can hardly think about anything else.

The back pain, however, isn't what bothers him the most.

"No," he says, fists clenched and jaw trembling with anger. "You know what really hurts? What really hurts me deep down?

The first letter is dated Aug. 2, 1965.

"I will certainly be glad to help you in every way I can," it says. Signed: Page Belcher, member of Congress.

It came in reply to a July 22 request from Bell, asking for the Tulsa congressman's help with his first appeal to the Veterans Administration. Since then, Bell has accumulated a stack of similar letters several inches thick.

April 25, 1979. Signed: Congressman James Jones.
April 3, 1980. Signed: Sen. David Boren.
Dec. 19, 2008. Signed: Sen. James Inhofe.
Feb. 20, 2013. Signed: U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine.

Bell has correspondence from every U.S. representative and senator elected in Oklahoma over the last five decades, plus eight separate White House administrations. And for him, every letter is just another broken promise.

"They all say, 'We want to help.' But nobody ever does anything."

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