28 January, 2015

An Open Letter to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs

The Honorable Mr. Robert A. McDonald

Dear Mr. Secretary,

Congratulations

1. Firstly please allow me, as a Veteran, to take this occasion to congratulate you on recently having been found worthy of both nomination and confirmation to such an august position as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. There are millions of Veterans among the population of our Nation who have earned by their service, occasionally at the risk of life and limb, such post-service support as deemed appropriate by our elected Representatives. Just as the citizens of our country have found themselves, from time to time, being defended, protected and/or served by our Service men and women, so we as Veterans now find ourselves served by the dedicated members of the Department headed by you. I sincerely hope that at the end of your term, you view this honor and opportunity with as much personal reward and fulfillment as you must have felt upon that first day at finding yourself having been granted the statutory authority you have been entrusted to wield on our behalf. Such a trust by your fellow citizens would easily be held as the culmination of a lifetime of successful accomplishment by virtually any one in our country. Thank you for your agreement to serve.

A Commitment To Pay Not Kept 2. Secondly though, the circumstance which causes me to write to you is that while I

may be having a serious problem with your Department failing to deposit money into my account as they committed to do, in the process I’ve discovered that you have a much greater problem with your Department failing in the same way to deliver on its own commitment to hundreds certainly, and more likely thousands, of my fellow Veterans. Here’s what happened.

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3. On Thursday 18 December I received a letter here in Las Vegas, NV from the Reno Regional Office dated 16 December notifying me that having been found qualified to receive an award as compensation for disabilities resulting from gunshot and shrapnel wounds and other injuries and conditions, all “related to your military service”, and with such conditions resulting in an 80% disability rating, I would henceforth be entitled to receive a payment each month at the rate of $1,551.48 per month, with an effective date of 5 December, and a Payment Start Date of 1 January. Consequently, on Monday 22 December I made a trip out to my local VA Hospital to sit down in person to ascertain whether or not I understood exactly what was about to happen. A Benefits Counsellor delved into my records on her computer and on Tuesday 23 December called me back and assured me that I could count on receiving the first payment, prorated over 27 days of December, on the Payment Start Date of 1 January, but probably on 31 December, the First being a holiday. This should have been a trivial fiscal action, since I was already receiving a far lesser amount ($133.17) by a previously established direct deposit from an earlier disability claim – only the amount of the payment needed to be changed. As it turned out I received only the old, lesser amount on 31 December. None of the promised increased amount arrived then or on any of the 28 days since.

Your 800 Number Call Center

4. So on Monday 5 January I called the 800 number for assistance and selected the choice provided specifically for pay problems.

What I Expected

5. What I confidently expected to find were officials trained to recover and analyze my payment account, confirm the failure as I reported it, intervene right while I waited on the phone, followed by being told I would find the missing money deposited in my account within 2 working days and if it didn’t happen, to call them back personally at their own number and refer to a Case Number which I had been assigned.

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What I Found Instead

6. The young man I got was able easily to find on his computer display the 16 December letter, and we were both in complete agreement about what was written there, specifically the Section titled:

“You Can Expect Payment”

“Your payment begins the first day of the month following your effective date. You will receive a payment covering the initial amount due under this award … Thereafter, payment will be made at the beginning of each month for the prior month. For example, benefits due for May are paid on or about June 1.” and also in that same letter, “Your … effective [date is] December 5, 2014.” and in a table format under the column heading “Payment Start Date” was the entry “Jan 1, 2015”.

7. But after hearing that I had received no such payment on 1 January, he expressed amazement as to why I was expecting any payment before 1 February, this being only January. So in a second attempt I pointed out again that the 3-word term “Payment Start Date” said “1 January”, not 1 February, and unambiguously meant: “The date upon which payments would start – that is, when a payment would be made by the VA and received by me”, but that in fact no payment had been received by me. His reply was to quote again that , “ … payment will be made at the beginning of each month for the prior month.”, so I should expect to receive nothing until 1 February.

8. Concerned that someone trained and assigned specifically to handle pay problems was stuck in reciting a script he had been given and was not open to analyzing the particular facts of the case in front of him, and thus not able to see the commitment made and the failure to meet it, I tried for a third time by pointing out that while I understood and agreed completely with the concept of a month of accruing entitlement followed by payment of that accrued amount on the following First of the month, I was not calling to inquire about a payment due 1 February which would contain January money, I was calling about money which would have accrued during December, beginning on the Fifth, which should have been paid to

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me on the First of January – now four days past, but had not. His reply was to quote again the schedule whereby money accrued during one month would be paid on the First of the following month – in total disregard for the facts displayed in front of his eyes on his computer screen and vocally expanded by me that accrued money – December – had not been paid on 1 January, as committed to in the 16 December letter. It was like talking to a brick in a brick wall.

9. Since in my opinion the twin concepts of ‘Effective Date’ and ‘Payment Start Date’ were capable of unambiguous expression in only 5 words, I deemed the issue to be easily within the intellectual capacity of a Middle Schooler, but for some reason beyond the capacity of the person entrusted by the VA to handle this specific issue in their National Call Center, so, in deference to the classic definition of expecting a different outcome using the same inputs as being that of insanity, and unwilling to go around for a fourth time, I gave up on him and requested I be put in touch with his Supervisor. He took my contact information and informed me that I would be contacted within 24 hours.

Your Reno Office

10. On Tuesday, 6 January, not having heard from the Supervisor at the National Call Center, I decided an Official at the Office which had drafted the letter to me and personally made the commitment would be more likely to want to see any failure attached to it corrected. I also hoped that being a Regional Office, that location would contain what we would call in the Marine Corps: a Disbursing Office, headed by a Disbursing Officer and full of Disbursing Clerks, keeping everybody’s pay straight. When I called the Reno Office, the Official there understood immediately why I was concerned and concurred that I had every right to be, also saying he would be back to me as soon as possible with a solution. ‘As soon as possible’ turned out to be within only a half hour. He gave me the name and contact information of a Counsellor located here in Las Vegas.

11. Within less than 10 minutes that Counsellor called to inform me that she had received the assignment from Reno and would be back to me when she had a chance to assess the problem. She was back within a half hour, telling me her research showed the issue was driven by constraints within something called the ‘Omnibus VA Budgeting Bill’ and while she had no means to personally intervene

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and put corrective instructions into the VA pay system, she wanted me to know the source so I could do any further research in pursuit of a solution on my own. It now seemed clear to me that, unlike individual units and/or Bases in the Marine Corps, neither Reno nor Las Vegas was home to a ‘Disbursing Office’ and despite timely, highly motivated responses within Nevada, the solution to my problem was not going to be found locally but back within the VA 800 number system. The response of these two Nevada VA employees was as quick and responsive as one could ever hope to encounter – in the second case even attempting to find a solution when it was beyond her skill set – a very nice experience.

The Phoenix Call Center

12. On Wednesday 7 January, within 48 hours rather than 24, I received the promised return call from a Supervisor who turned out to be calling from the Phoenix Call Center. Every one of his responses was in complete contrast to the Call Center attendant of two days earlier. He agreed immediately that I was correct in my understanding that the funds due me had been accruing since 5 December and with a Payment Start Date of 1 January I was fully justified in expecting the money to have been direct deposited in my account on that date, or the day before. It was such a stunning contrast with the VA person who had handled my initial request for assistance, that I felt akin to wandering out of a dark tangled forest where I had become lost but then suddenly finding myself stepping into a pleasant open meadow bathed in sunshine with puffy white clouds and birds singing. Finally, sanity!! While completely refreshing to hear, that introduction turned out to be where the good news ended and together he and I both stepped back into the forest of Grimm’s Fairytales. He went on to say that it didn’t surprise him at all that the events to be expected by any Veteran reading the letter had not happened at all. He indicated that such a contrary outcome often occurred, that in fact he himself fielded “hundreds of calls each month” from Veterans reporting promised money not arriving.

13. Despite being in complete shock to hear that such a situation as promised money failing to show up was so common, I posited that perhaps the date of the approval of my case, the 16th of the month, was sufficiently late in the month as to make it unlikely or impossible to get the payment started, but if that were the case,

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wouldn’t the VA already have the experience, with millions of payments every year, to predict very accurately how long they would require to get one started, even easier in my case because it entailed only changing the amount in an already established direct deposit payment from one amount to a new one, and if my case was decided too late in the month to allow the new payment to arrive on the First, didn’t the VA have a duty to say so in their letter, and thus not lead me to count on an unreliable commitment? He agreed that they did have such a duty to advise us of such a circumstance and should never mislead Veterans, but such an admission of ‘it’s too late in the month to make a payment by the First possible’ was not a part of VA notification letters. When I offered that reporting this oversight to his superiors along with a draft of a proposed paragraph to include in such letters ought to lead to a change of policy and prevent it from happening again, he indicated that his superiors were almost certainly aware of these kinds of oversights, but in any case they wouldn’t respond to a report from him that such things were taking place, no matter how numerous, and he had no authority to make, or even recommend that changes be made, to VA letters to Veterans. I was left in stunned disbelief that I was being told that senior VA personnel would know Veterans were being left adrift from missing payments, but such a situation would result in no sense of alarm or urgency on their part, and apparently no mechanism was in place to immediately correct the failure.

14. I was surprised at the apparent absence of any responsive means for VA personnel taking reports of Departmental failure directly from Veterans, to report problems and recommend solutions up their chain of command, no matter how trivial (or serious) the issue and no matter how common sense and urgently needed was the solution. The equivalent in the Marine Corps would be failing to provide a radio or telephone to a sentry posted on the front lines to specifically alert the leaders of any problem activity. Every one of my fellow Veterans will relate completely with the principle at work in this scenario, not even having to be a Marine or having experienced ground combat - it applies equally to a clerk in a supply warehouse in CONUS. No responsible leader in any human endeavor would operate without a system in place to immediately and reliably alert them to the presence of hazards so they could be removed or disabled, but all the evidence encountered by me would say the VA operates otherwise.

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15. In any case the Supervisor was convinced, as I was, that in today’s world, 15 days before the end of the month was more than sufficient time to make a change in the amount of an already established payment, so since my payment wasn’t made, why wasn’t it? He said he had no means to look into my payment account and so had no means to answer that question. This struck me as ludicrous for a Supervisor tasked to oversee shifts of VA employees sorted out by the menu prompts at the 800 number to specifically hear and resolve ‘pay problems’. It’s as if the VA staff is there not to correct any failure – but instead they appear to be able only to repeat information to shed some feeble light on a problem - not at all to actually solve it. Pretty stunning.

16. Since this Supervisor then went on to declare himself and all other persons to whom he was empowered to connect me to be equally without authority or means, and thus helpless to make any entry in the VA pay system to produce the missing money, offered as the only solution to my missing funds: “wait until next month and hope it clears up by then.” I take this as clear evidence that among the nearly 280,000 VA employees at hundreds of medical facilities, clinics and benefit offices scattered across this country with a 2014 budget request of $152 Billion, there isn’t a single official, supervisor or clerk with the technical means and/or authority to generate entitlement money into the hands of qualified Veterans when the regular system has failed to make that happen. (And a simple engineering estimate calculation that occurs to me without any supporting research on my part is that if your Department issues 1,000,000 payments per month and achieves an admirable accuracy rate of 99%, that still means there will be 10,000 failures/errors each month – so how can your Department possibly exist without having an Office dedicated solely to the timely rectification of those 10,000 unintended failures? Mulling just that much over, makes my head hurt.) And if it should turn out that there is indeed such an Office or Staff tasked with the mission to make up for money which goes missing, then it’s obvious that the VA personnel manning the phones receiving calls coming in to report payment failures, are unable, unwilling or incapable of connecting the stranded Veteran with those personnel. It’s as if the crewmen in the engine room of the Titanic were provided with no means to alert the bridge, “Hey, we’ve got a leak down here!” – and even if they did, neither the Captain nor any of the Mates tasked

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with the responsibility for running the ship could be bothered to tell any of the crewmen to, “Man the pumps!”

And Then We Arrive at the Secretary Level

17. But the Supervisor did go on tell me that my one means of calling attention to the missing money and getting the failure rectified, was to write a personal letter to you, the Secretary of his entire Department - as the sole person within your Department who “might” (his term) possess sufficient authority to order immediate corrective action …… and he went on to add that the timing was particularly fortuitous for me because you were newly appointed. Shocking!! …… Outrageous!! …… Pathetic!! …… on so many levels!! Replacing a missing payment can only be accomplished by the Secretary himself??!!

18. In my career experience this would be the equivalent of being in charge of a unit of 200 shooters taken by bus each day out to a rifle range for a week of firing practice and upon reporting back to my commander in the rear on the first day that our scheduled hot lunches had failed to arrive, being told that not only would no “make-up meal” be immediately prepared and dispatched to our relief, but that we were to simply wait until tomorrow and hope the next regularly scheduled meal would arrive, but if I felt strongly about the oversight, I could always write a letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Such a recommendation would suggest there was no one in the entire Marine Corps between me at that lonely outpost and the Head Man in Washington, DC capable of performing what by any measure ought to be a routine, everyday matter. But apparently in the VA it is not only not soluble every day, but only subject to solution once a month, and maybe not even then, and then only by the Head Man himself.

How It Appears To Me

19. So my letter to you on this occasion is, sadly, driven by my duty to inform you, hoping you didn’t already know, that letters sent bearing your Department Letterhead and authorized by a signature and/or title of an Official acting on your behalf, committing your Department to paying a qualified recipient Veteran an amount of money as compensation for injuries/disabilities determined under

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lawful statute and applicable regulations to be due them, will, not exceptionally but rather routinely, in the first instance they’re tested, turn out to be not worth the paper on which they’re printed. Compounding the consequent damage to your credibility and integrity by what I genuinely expected initially would turn out to be unintended oversight or simple human error, was my discovery that when I called the 800 number published for my particular issue (missing money) , which turned out to be the Phoenix Call Center, I fully and confidently expected to find the VA Person assigned to receive my call, much less the Supervisor of that VA Person, easily capable of comprehending the failure of your Department, and either fully empowered to correct the failure by their own actions, or capable of connecting me with someone who did have both the training and authority to speedily rectify the lapse. But sadly to the contrary I found not only was there no surprise among your appointed subordinates that this failure to pay happened to me, but the Supervisor (who may be only one among dozens or hundreds of others similarly situated) told me he himself handles “hundreds” (his own term – which would infer “thousands” or “tens of thousands” in total) of such calls each month – and for each and every one of them he claims he has no tools or authority to manually intervene and correct the error himself, nor does he have the means to make available to me or other Veterans any other Office or Official tasked specifically with intervening and immediately correcting the failure. On this planet? - in my country? – in this century? – unbelievable!!

20. And while the second worse part is that the Pay Officials I contacted were surprised that I should expect it to be any different – that I was so naïve as to expect to find concern for my welfare and a sense of urgency to correct your Department’s failure – the very worst part is that the Supervisor not only was convinced no one up the chain of command in his Department would pay any mind to alarms he, a seasoned professional on the front lines every day, might raise, but that only the plea of an outside victim personally to the Department Secretary had any chance at all of generating timely intervention, but even that was fleeting and possible only because you were recently placed in authority – implying that only during some “honeymoon period” do you have the freedom of action to differ from Departmental policies established by your predecessors without criticism to yourself, but that after such a period it is accepted as fact that within the Department no one expects even the Secretary himself to correct a

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failure because to do so would require an admission that a failure while he was in authority had occurred at all. In my opinion this condition is guaranteed to bring poisonous paralysis to any organization which allows it to fester.

21. At the risk of resorting to the left-handed compliment of: ‘here’s how we did it in my outfit’, the Marine Corps in particular, but all other Services to varying degrees, has a reputation for setting and demanding Members meet high and exacting Standards. What is less stressed but generally acknowledged even by the Public, is that the Corps can confidently expect those Standards to be met because we mete out a consequence that is swift and certain in a system that is elementary in its stark simplicity: if you screw up, we nail your hide to the wall. Now we do have appropriately various degrees of nailing, but none of them are pleasant. We also acknowledge that everyone’s success (from the Commandant to the newest Private) is built on the precious experience gained by each of us from our previous best efforts and whatever failures may have followed – and while everyone fails to some degree at some time, it’s the ‘some more than others’ that separates the wheat from the chaff. As successful as I was to complete Honorably 27+ years of service, every success I had was to some degree the product of some previous failure, just thankfully not terminal, and I have the nail holes in my own hide to show for it – as we all do who managed to go on and serve beyond the very first day of our arrival in the Corps.

22. But since the Corps does recognize openly that we will have to deal with failures, we are as well known for holding accountable through courts-martial, early discharges and other means, those who act in a manner which endangers our ability to achieve our assigned mission. We view the admission that some Marine failed and brought shame to our Corps by their poor judgment or conduct, not as a sign of failure per se, but as a guarantor of our future success, because when we own up to the lapse publicly by announcing it throughout our Corps, as we do by publishing the offense committed and the consequent punishment in our Base newspapers, it illustrates for all to see that raising an alarm will always be appropriately responded to (we won’t leave you out on the front lines stranded by yourself) and those who may fail to raise that alarm and leave some poor wretch to his fate alone, are drummed out of our Corps and not allowed to occupy positions, whether lowly or quite senior, which may endanger others. In your line

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of work you won’t encounter those ejected by us with the most punitive Discharges because they also fittingly lose their right to VA benefits – but don’t thank us …… we’re glad to do it. So in that same vein I submit that success for the VA isn’t basking in the blissful but misleading false silence of stifled and ignored pleas for help from victims of your own Department’s failures, it would rather be public accounts from Veterans about the swift and aggressive corrective action that Members of your Department took every time they became aware of some error or failure adversely impacting a Veteran. I’m just saying.

The Impact on Me

23. I only returned across 3,000 miles to Las Vegas, NV (driving the last 600 of them) to attend a local high school 50th Year Reunion in October, arriving on the 11th, and remained for a rare family reunion 3-14 November. Then instead of departing before Thanksgiving and being gone no more than 6 weeks, I delayed into the latter part of November to use the opportunity for access to my permanent records stored here to have the Reno VA Office reconsider again my claim submitted originally in 1994 and again in 2011, which was finally recognized on 16 December, 2014. Not only was I visiting Nevada on a shoestring budget, but I was facing the burden of having to return in the Spring of 2015 with my income tax refund in hand to have the hundreds of dollars in repairs done on my car which I couldn’t afford now, but which were necessary to remove the one year Nevada Smog Inspection Probation under which my car has been operating since September. So the unanticipated but happy consequence of suddenly and unexpectedly receiving this VA entitlement is that I might be able to have the work done now and not have to return to Nevada in a whole separate trip later this Spring. But making the choice to remain here in Las Vegas until the VA money was paid to me, meant spending the money budgeted for my return trip toward the expense of remaining here instead. I made that choice to stay based on the commitment in the 16 December VA letter and the subsequent confirming assurances of the VA Counsellor. So I made all the arrangements involving lots of other people and lost work for me while I was absent in Nevada.

24. Then came the failure of the VA to send the money. Not having the promised funds arrive, means that now I am ‘stranded’ in Las Vegas until they do arrive.

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And upon sounding the alarm to the VA, instead of immediate relief in days, I’m told “sit around and wait until next month and maybe it will work itself out.” So now if the money arrives on 1 February and the work on the car can be accomplished within 2 weeks I’m facing having been away for 4 months instead of my original 6 weeks. Now, I won’t starve or be living out in the cold, but I have been camping out in an unfurnished single-wide mobile home that’s a worksite for remodeling, sleeping on a camp bed and heating meals in a table-top microwave with a gas furnace for heat, but no hot water. I drive 3 miles over to my sister’s house for a shower. I’ve endured worse, but the failure of your Department just added insult to injury – no pun intended. In a just world where the failures of the VA to make funds available were randomly distributed, it gives one pause to consider the case where you yourself might have been attending a conference out here in Las Vegas and upon preparing to return discovered that the travel funds you had been told would be there had failed to materialize. Would your VA staff’s response be: “Mr. Secretary, you’ll just have to wait until next month and hope the error corrects itself”? – or would some Staff act to make the funds immediately available. One can only guess.

25. It’s well known by the public that in all the Services, one major way we enforce discipline is by means of a rigid class structure where titles and rank provide privileges, but you might be unaware that, peculiar to the Marine Corps, when we eat in the field the diners are served in reverse Grade order, the most junior Privates (who are otherwise required to salute and address me as, “Sir”) get fed first and the Officers, junior to senior, are fed last. Just an old tradition, but It ensures everyone gets fed, the Brass are aware of what’s being made available to eat, everyone has a choice of the same things, and you can guess how often it is that the cooks run out of something with people still standing in line to be fed. The equivalent mechanism producing the same desirable result at the VA would be to have all the career Civil Servants continue to be paid by the Civil Service, but have all the Political Appointees in the VA depend on receiving their pay from the same persons operating the same system used to pay the Veterans. What a concept.

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The Impact On Other Veterans

26. For Veterans comfortably settled, the delay in receiving their earned amount on time might be no more than a minor nuisance and hardly noticed. Unfortunately as I said, that’s not currently the case with me. I won’t go hungry and I will sleep dry – but I’ve had to use credit to provide funds I wouldn’t otherwise have had to do because of the failure to pay me on time. For other Veterans who are homeless the failure of the VA to pay them their earned amount on time can possibly be devastating – not too dramatic to say even life threatening – think living under an underpass this winter, where the ability to buy, or not be able to buy, a coat, wool socks and boots can make the difference. Fortunately, that’s not the case with me. So I submit to you that the particular circumstance of the Veteran due an entitlement, whether well off or destitute, whether a famous “War Hero” or anonymous clerk never deployed and safely far in the rear, whether a General Officer or career but Honorably Discharged Private, should be of no determining consequence whatsoever. While sad cases of plight might be more emotionally heartrending, that ought to be immaterial to the performance of the VA. Only the earned title of Veteran should matter – and each is equally worthy of being served by a competent VA Public Servant.

No More, But No Less

27. Each Veteran ought to get what they have earned, when it’s supposed to arrive, every time – no more, but no less – no money unearned, not merited and not paid early, but every penny that is due, arriving on time …… and I’m of the opinion that the Veterans Affairs Department, and you as its Secretary, have an obligation to see that every Department employee and all the equipment and systems at their disposal, are focused unerringly to the accomplishment of this mission.

28. Despite the apparent inability to correct a simple matter by VA personnel and their casual acceptance of that inability, I have had the great good fortune to have never encountered this attitude and inability on the part of virtually any other Federal Government employee previously – which gives me hope and confidence in the dedication and competence of Americans serving their fellow Americans. Nowhere during my service in the Corps, nor on the part of my fellow Postal employees where I worked before I joined the Corps, nor from either of my best

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friends from high school who between them served in the Corps during Viet Nam (and then raved about the superlative treatment he received for treatment of his wounds at the VA hospital in Palo Alto over a 40 year span), as a civil engineer for the Department of the Navy, as a lawyer for the General Services Administration, and as a civil engineer for the Mine, Safety and Health Administration, did they act in a cavalier or careless fashion toward their fellow citizens themselves, nor permit it by their subordinates, nor let it pass in silence if perpetrated by their seniors, truly believing and acting with pride in the concept of Service inherent in being a Public Servant. I would like to think that concept is a generational attitude, inherited by my Generation from the Greatest Generation, but perhaps that’s a bias and wishful thinking on my part and precludes a fair assessment of the Generation now stepping up to fill our shoes – but I wonder? – I’m not seeing it commonly in practice. So I find this recent encounter with the VA to be contrary to my past Federal employee encounters and a source of hope that in the future Americans who choose to work to serve Veterans in the VA can find a change of leadership which demands and accepts nothing less than timely competence that will have every VA Public Servant rightfully and demonstrably proud to say they work for the VA.

29. Some do now. I believe it’s no accident that both Nevada employees with whom I dealt displayed an uncharacteristically and aggressively helpful can-do attitude, despite ultimately lacking the means to correct the VA’s error. I happen to know they both served in the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps in their previous working lives and bring those attitudes and habits with them, and in the case of the second employee, she didn’t agree to be hired by the VA just to ‘get a job’, but rather because of her family’s prior history in Service as well as her own and that of her husband’s, she sought out a position within your Department specifically so she could serve Veterans– all to the great benefit of your Department. In chemistry and mathematics, having such individuals with their work ethic joining you in your mission to serve Veterans, would be characterized as ‘necessary but insufficient’ – Necessary because without such Staff as these, no amount of systems and supervisors can be made to produce success, but also Insufficient, because even with Staff such as these, they still can’t produce success without the proper tools to accomplish their goals. The heartening news is that since such people are

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seeking you out because of allegiance to your worthy Mission, if you can only get them the tools they need, they can carry us all across the goal line.

So Sir,

Good luck correcting the deficiencies in your Department and feel free to help yourself in instituting any of the attitudes and philosophy of service among your subordinate leaders that I’ve noted above. And if along the way you can solve my ‘missing money’ problem, that would be nice, too.

Respectfully submitted, Steven M. Lowery Major USMC (Ret)

PS Sorry about the length, but I think it all matters. And incidentally, the reports of “Just call me, Bob” that have been related to me by numerous VA peersonnel, strike me as motivating. Good for you.

PPS Since I wrote this and before I could get it mailed, it happened that the January money for me did arrive on 30 January (Thank you very much) - but the December money is still Missing in Action. So now it’s 2 months gone and the only solution in sight is to go back to hoping again that maybe it will show up next month - in March.

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