Maine Veterans Services Director "veterans with PTSD were really just “lost” or “depressed.”

Maine Voices: The Veterans’ Services director is failing at his job
Peter Ogden needs to work with younger veterans to implement recommended changes or step aside
Portland Press Herald
BY ADRIAN COLE
SPECIAL TO THE TELEGRAM
January 18, 2015

Of the 132,000 veterans who live in Maine, about 60,000 come from the most recent wars. It is these veterans who are falling through the cracks, a state report says. Amelia Kunhardt/Staff Photographer

TOPSHAM — The director of Maine’s Bureau of Veterans’ Services, Peter Ogden, is failing in his charge to support all veterans. While his efforts to help care for aging veterans and memorializing those who have passed are commendable, he has shown a consistent disrespect and lack of concern for anyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I attended a meeting in December in Brunswick with state legislators, where Ogden laid out his agenda for the coming year.

He referred to the roughly 60,000 Maine veterans of America’s most recent wars as “kids” so many times that I lost count. This was only part of the insult, though, as his policy stance and inaction as a leader, revealed during the course of the meeting, proved more egregious than his insults.

For example, the report stated that returning veterans today are reluctant to seek help or take advantage of benefits for fear of being a burden on the system. But when Ogden was asked about the problems faced by this generation of veterans, he said, “Well, I think the kids today are saying, ‘You owe it to me, give it to me.’ If you push a red button and nothing happens, I think that’s the problem. I can tell a World War II guy, ‘Your claim, it will take a year to do your claim,’ he will be happy. If I tell a young kid today, (he’ll say) ‘Uh, I mean, why can’t that happen?’ ”

The report advised his office on many ways in which to reach out to veterans, centering mainly on information technology-based solutions. Ogden stated, “The young kids today come back and we don’t communicate the way they do. I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I don’t do Facebook. I can barely answer my emails.” After citing staffing issues as an excuse as to why his office has failed to implement any of these recommendations, he then indicated that he would not be doing so any time soon.

At one point during Ogden’s talk, he gave a textbook definition of post-traumatic stress disorder and then told the room that veterans with PTSD were really just “lost” or “depressed.”

Adrian Cole of Topsham is a former Army captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq as an artillery officer with the 101st Airborne Division. He serves as the adjutant for the Bath Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7738.
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