Photo by Sinenkiy - Getty Images
Military veteran
In 1968, when I was 20 years old, I volunteered to serve with the Marines in Vietnam. I was trained to be a Navy Corpsman (medic) and attached to the Marines. I was only there five weeks before being seriously injured. I was with a company of 83 Marines when we were given orders to go to the top of a mountain, where we became completely surrounded by 1500 North Vietnamese regulars. It is impossible for me to describe what it was like to be the target of 1500 machine guns firing all at once.
Eighty percent of us were either killed or wounded in the first 10 minutes of the battle. During a lull in the firing, I was able to reach a horribly injured Marine. When the firing quieted down again, I belly crawled over to a Marine whose left arm was blown off and that’s when I was shot in the hip. My hip was blown off.
For the past 50 plus years, I have been cared for by the VA healthcare system, the Veterans Health Administration. I have watched, with admiration, as the system has consistently improved—sometimes remarkably—over those five decades. And now, I watch, with alarm, as former President and current candidate for another term, Donald Trump, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, and their allies at the Heritage Foundation threaten the very existence of the kind of care veterans like me depend on.
They Want to Outsource the VA
Trump and Vance and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 accuse the VA of making veterans dependent on care they don’t really need. They attack the kind of dedicated nurses, doctors and countless others who have cared for me as being bad apples and callous sadists and claim that our PTSD is nothing more than a bad hair day. They want to outsource veteran care to private sector doctors and hospitals that don’t know anything about our complex medical conditions, and ultimately privatize the VA.
Let me tell you more about that my journey and about the care I have received.
After being hit in the hip, I lay, with an open wound, in the dense jungle for the next five days before help could reach me. After being rescued by helicopter, it took seven days at a field hospital for surgeons to stabilize me enough to be flown to a much larger Naval hospital in Japan. My whole right hip joint was destroyed, plus my hip was horribly infected with osteomyelitis (a recurrent life-threatening bacterial infection). The kind of care I received back then at the VA was too often hit and miss, so I stopped going only to return in the mid 1990’s to find that things had radically changed for the better.
|
|
The change was obvious when I walked in the door. This staff’ attitude toward us was wonderful. The whole VA staff had learned a lot about how to manage the complex symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). When I went to the VA for care, I knew I needed help dealing with psychological and emotional issues, not just my physical illness and injury. I was angry and thought I had every right, even the responsibility, to be angry. VA has helped me find the options I needed to deal with my anger.
Pain management has also been another major challenge for me as well as many other Vietnam veterans (and now veterans from Middle Eastern conflicts). If I hadn’t constant care from the VA, I strongly believe I wouldn’t be here today. I have watched the VA transform itself over the past five decades. After having experienced and witnessed the worst care in the 1970s, I now know I get the best care, and I wouldn’t go anywhere else.
This is why I urge other veterans as well as non-veterans to pay close attention to the anti-VA messages that are being broadcast by folks who just want to send veterans to private sector doctors and hospitals. If proposals to privatize the VA embedded in Project 2025 are implemented veterans, future generations of veterans who have sacrificed for their country, will get the kind of care that has literally saved my life.
Mark Foreman is a Vietnam veteran, who taught art in the Milwaukee public schools for 20 years.
