“What the VA did to me 60 years ago is they tore up the Bill of Rights”

If you missed this story, Vegas Navy Cross recipient shot down by VA benefits office I strongly suggest you read it.

In this one you'll read about the story of a Korean War Veteran being denied benefits and his 60 years battle for justice. Charles Mahoney was treated to electroshock wiping out his memory for days much like 2,000 WWII veterans.

Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals, according to the report.

The VA’s use of lobotomy, in which doctors severed connections between parts of the brain then thought to control emotions, was known in medical circles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is occasionally cited in medical texts. But the VA’s practice, never widely publicized, long ago slipped from public view. Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it possesses no records detailing the creation and breadth of its lobotomy program.

If you are still under the impression that any of this is new, then please make sure you are not expressing your imbecilic opinions publicly. Lack of knowledge, refusing to do basic research and actually learn the truth are reasons why it has been this bad this long for our veterans. We've doomed them to history repeated over and over again.

Veterans say legitimate claims routinely denied or ignored
Las Vegas Review
By KEITH ROGERS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
December 13, 2014

Vietnam War Navy Cross recipient Steve Lowery isn’t alone in his battle to convince the Veterans Benefits Administration that his wounds are linked to his military service.

Lowery, a retired Marine major from Las Vegas, took a long-awaited physical examination Thursday at the North Las Vegas VA Medical Center to show a doctor that scars from shrapnel in his knee and those on his thighs from an AK-47 resulted from a 1969 firefight in Vietnam.

In 1994, the VA benefits office in Reno told him those wounds weren’t related to his military service, and he’s been fighting with the agency ever since.

The VA apparently disallowed his initial claim because the government’s archive agency failed to send his records to Reno. Bewildered by the decision, Lowery provided a copy of his personal medical file in 2010. Two years later, his claim was rejected again.

Since the Review-Journal wrote about Lowery’s case last week, other veterans have come forward with complaints about tactics employed by the agency, which demands that veterans prove their injuries were service-related but can deny claims without proving anything.

They include Phil Cushman, a Vietnam War Marine veteran from Oregon who beat the VA system there by winning a “due process” challenge in a federal appeals court that netted $400,000 in compensation. Now, through his nationally recognized nonprofit veterans rights advocacy group, Cushman is helping disabled Korean War soldier Charles P. Mahoney, of Las Vegas, with his appeal for more compensation.

Screen capture from Las Vegas Review Journal

“I’m not filing claims for the money. I want justice,” Mahoney, 82, told the newspaper. “What the VA did to me 60 years ago is they tore up the Bill of Rights.”

Mahoney, who served with the 1st Cavalry Division in Korea in 1950, suffered wounds and mental problems from a mortar blast that heaved him 15 feet into the air. After a hospital stint in Japan, he was taken to Fort Hood, Texas, where he underwent a series of electro­shock treatments in 1951 that “blotted out my memory for nine months.”

Two Army evaluation boards determined he was 100 percent disabled, but a third said he was only 10 percent disabled. The Army then told him he was cured and discharged him in 1952.
read more here

There used to be excuses for all of this happening. When? After the Revolutionary War when the Colonies had no basic understanding of the necessity to care for those who put their lives on the line. It isn't as if that generation was totally off the hook either because they did little to take care of any of them or their widows.

After 1946 when the House Veterans Affairs Committee took their seats there should have been no acceptable excuses.