After I was shot and paralyzed in Vietnam, I spent over a year in the Kingsbridge Veterans Hospital in New York City, learning how to live life as a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair.
My ward was the focus of a Life magazine cover story that portrayed the conditions within the hospital as a "medical slum." That issue was the second-highest selling in the history of the magazine.
As the Walter Reed scandal and subsequent revelations show, when it comes to failing to provide our wounded troops and veterans with the medical care they need, history is repeating itself.
Then, as now, some troops and veterans become so beaten down by the bureaucracy, the lack of care, and the general indifference to their situation, that in despair, they take their own lives.
I felt immensely betrayed by my country when I returned home, and it kills me to see another generation of American servicemembers grappling with the same neglect. When I became a veteran, I quickly learned that the only way to survive was to become my own advocate and the same is true for today's troops and vets if they want to survive the mammoth DoD and VA bureaucracies.
So, it is with great pride that now, twenty-two years after Craig Kubey, David Addlestone, and Barton Stichman authored the The Viet Vet Survival Guide, we here at Veterans for America have joined with them to publish a new Survival Guide.
This American Veterans And Servicemenbers Survival Guide will have twenty-eight chapters that our veterans and men and women in uniform will find invaluable in getting the care and help they need. It will be constantly improved and updated. The book can be downloaded by clicking here.
The Survival Guide will help current servicemembers navigate through DoD programs and will help veterans with critical issues like re-employment rights and homeless veterans programs. It is a great guide, and I'm trying to get in the hands of as many people as I possibly can.
Please use the Survival Guide, forward it on, post links to it. Anything you can do to help me make sure as many servicemembers and veterans know about it, would be very much appreciated.
Our veterans, servicemembers, and their families deserve far more care, attention and support than they are getting now. Please join me in doing everything we can for those who do everything they can to protect us.