I don't know how your
ride inside this VA system
has been up until now, but
mine has been remarkably awful.

It seems that every useless
dummy on the planet works
for the VA, and I am on an
endless death-march to find
the competent, the knowing,
and the useful. There ARE
a few of those walking around
there, but Who Knew ?

One of the more common things
that I fight is the rush to
misjudgement about us girls
of earlier times in the
military and the utter
stupidity of those who are
uneducated about who I really
am, how the military used
to be, and just how wrong all
of their misguided employee
assumptions are about us.

I spend more time fighting the
ignorance of VA workers than I
do getting my needs met there.
They are empowered to write any
old stupid thing down on paper,
no matter how wrong and ignorant,
and then I - the proverbial
disabled person - am left to
fight my way out of the mistaken
rathole that they had put me in
while they go about their lives
wrecking other Veterans on paper.
MY life, howemver, is left in
perpetual turmoil, deprivation,
relentless screwups, and
litigation without a lawyer.

There is no simple process in
place to amend or correct bungled
VA paperwork once an employee
screws up our life story short
of "litigating" the Privacy
Act which the Office of General
Counsel has a standing policy
to refuse and reject every single
Veteran request on the planet
earth. This means court-level
litigation just to overcome
some asshole at the VA who
doesn't get it right on every
piece of paper in the system!

Yeah Right --- Welcome to the VA !!

At age 55, I am now getting
facial paralysis from the
muscular condition that I
suffer from stemming from pcb
exposure at Fort McClellan,
Alabama circa. 1970's.

All too often, when I get an
ignorant asshole walking into
the VA room for whatever reason
that I am there, (get this)
they almost make no distinction
whatsoever between me and a
male Vet who was DRAFTED in
the old days from Special
Education Classes, and the
fact that I am now disabled as
a result of my military service.

The VA workers themselves are
apparently never put through
a military orientation class
to get them up to speed about
the diversities of our
population group as Veterans
from an earlier day.

A guy who was drafted from
a Special Education class
in the 60's and 70's, often
was illiterate, had
developmental impairments
problems, needed to be
steered every waking hour
within the 4-walls of his
own house, and was used as a
pair of rifle hands in combat
where none of this made any
difference. [ yes I do
know of a few here in my
town who fit this spec. ]

I walk in now with some
remarkable resemblances
to cerebral palsy, and
now here we go with the
assumptions from StupidVille
by the VA employees.

Hey VA! --- Let's get
something straight !

Us girls had a HIGHER standard
to qualify under than the
males did prior to the
unified volunteer Army
of the 80's !! Yup -- nothing
is fair in this world if you
have a bra size and wear
makeup!

If we had the slightest Blip
of a flaw in our backgrounds,
guess what? --- we were NOT
allowed into the military!!
There you have it so take notes!

The guys could be drafted
against their will, and have
a criminal background 8 miles
long, with no literacy skills
whatsoever and still be taken
into uniform. If you don't
believe me, then just ask
Sammy "The Bull" Gravano of
the Gotti Crime Family!! In
an ABC news interview with
Diane Sawyer, he stated on
national TV that a federal
court judge "ordered" him into
military service during the
Vietnam years as a restitution
sentence for an already emerging
crime spree that he was rolling
on as a younger man.

Whoa----I thought !
When I think back to all of
us girls being herded into
the Recruitment Center and
getting kicked out of the
written entrance exams because
of admitting to a prior abortion,
this news flash on Sammy "The
Bull" really had me going!

Not only did we have to meet
a nearly "saintly" background
standard to get into the
military back in those days,
our physicals had to go up
to "A-1" ratings and nothing
else. To my knowledge, there
were no lesser PULHES rating
candidates who were allowed
all the way into induction if
you carried that all important
distinction of a bra in your
wardrobe.

I did NOT enter the Army
looking as I do now, so
Hey VA Employees---Listen Up!

And let's talk about the
qualifying MOS standardized
tests which determined our
career fates once we got
past the swearing in ceremony!
Holy-Tamoly!!

Illiteracy was NOT a subject
for discussion if you had
long hair and wore makeup,
thank you. We not only had
to score on the standardized
exams, we also had to score
BIG. Our pass/fail standards
were NOT the same as the men.
There were 2 separate cutoff
grades for the inducted
women and men. The men could
border on functional idiots
while the women had to be
the poster girl standard for
all of American society.
Whoa----talk about pressure!


Most of all of us had to
qualify on keyboard typing
to even get our foot in the
door for any of the top
Army schools in the country,
and if we just happened to
score high on both typing
and mechanical aptitudes,
only then were we rocking
and rolling into the all
exclusive top MOS schools.
Give me a BREAK - VA !!

The male military culture
was remarkably different from
ours at every corner, so
people who try to put us
in all the same duffle bag
at the VA are really missing
their mark for "assisting"
us.

The guys who were educated
and smart, could later on
in the post-induction cycle,
qualify and show their
excellence through a wide
array of achievement scales
that were available to them.
This could be special medals
or pins for arms qualifying,
valor performance, duty
performance, and elite team
qualifying such as Special
Forces, and so on.

Not so with us Girls, thank you.
We received one medal for coming
in and it pretty much ended there
unless you stayed for time in
service. There were "niche"
patches that we could wear, but
the VA does not really look for
patches they look for medals none
of which us girls had access to.

We were exempted from most of
these unless any of us were
in the remarkably small population
group of either being in-country
during a war period, or in the
commissioned officers/medical
corps arena where they did
receive a short line of special
qualifying pins or medals outside
of time in service.

In the Womens Army Corps,
we did not have large, elaborate
unit structures like the men.
We had a single, company
"detachment" to a base and
then we had duty assignment
units on our paperwork. The
VARO disability rating offices
are clueless and ignorant
about the way the military
used to characterize us on
paper. We show up on our
service histories as absent
and empty, even when we did
a whole lot and have alternate
things and materials to show
for it. I worked my ass off
on getting Army correspondence
course ratings which were
Infantry level graduating
certificates none of which
show up on my actual service
papers. Anybody who thinks
that taking the Infantry
NCO course on paper is easy
without being in the field
at a regular school, is really
out of touch let me tell ya!

There is no end to the
stupidity, mistake, and
bungling that the VA employees
make on us inside this
system, and perhaps the
women veterans groups should
stop wasting their time with
useless "luncheon" pursuits
and start educating these
boneheads about who we really
are prior to the unified
volunteer military of today!

It's not likely that the
VA administrators will do
anything impressive to fix
this universal employee
problem anytime soon. So like
everything else that is
put upon our sick, medicated,
and injured backs, we may
have to embark upon yet
more do-it-yourself ventures
to provide "employee
orientation" workshops just
so that we can survive the
system long enough to not be
killed by it and all their
relentless mistakes, stupidity,
and bungling.

Like I've got NOTHING better
to do with my disabled self.........!!

REPLY:

Ladies this is not the forum for
Fort McClellan which is listed further
up above on the page. This is womens
issues nationally and the discussion
sometimes attacks the failures of the
system. McClellan is up above.
Your info is duly noted but just keep
plugged into the McClellan Forum
for information. thanks

hey girls i want to join the crowd of mc cl vets
i have also got knots all over my body and in my breast tissue as well as have had a hysterectomy at age 23-24 after getting out of basic and i have hep c ut i did prove it wasnt my partners all were tested and negative so where do we go for justice do they va think being rated 100% and 2500. approx fair comp for dying,and by the way all i got was 15,ooo for back pay. justice where i can find it???????
put me on the list of fort mccellan vets patricia white 9/1/77 basic training

My liver started to fail in 1981 at Fort McClellan shortly after the Chemical School returned there and started having accidental chemical spills which they refused to take responsibility for. And that's just the start of it.

Debra ----

Please follow our Fort McClellan
Forum on this webpage for the
issues specific to the base.

The health list we are using
for matching is as follows:

** liver / thyroid problems

** skin problems requiring
extended treatment or
surgery

** gastrointestinal disease,
recurring and perhaps
becoming life threatening

** migrain headaches

** degenerative disks in the back

** tinnitus hearing condition

** premature ob-gyn problems
leading to early hysterectomy
In the men, infertility issues

** birth defects in children.

** muscular diseases such as
the crippling strain of
Fibromyalgia Syndrome etc.

** upper resperitory / asthma etc.
lung diseases starting at
an early age etc.

Hi there all!!!!

I read both of your posts and am shocked. I was stationed at Ft McClellan from October 1971 to early 1972. I just recently had major surgery for rare blockages in my Aorta Artery around the belly button and in my legs. According to my doctor, he can not figure out why I am having this serious problem at such a young age, I am 54. I also, today, found out about the environmental problems with Ft McClellan.

If either of you knows of the list of ailments that veterans are suffering from because of the exposure that we may have been involved in, please send me this information.

For the past 7 yrs the VAMC in Seattle has been claiming that I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome, when in reality I was slowly starving to death because of severe blockages in my Aorta Artery. My doctor told me that had I not had this surgery I would not have made it to Christmas, 2006. I feel like the VA has been trying to kill me off so that they did not have to pay me disability for the rest of my life.

If you can help with this please send me details to my personal email: Lummibeader2@aol.com

Thank you,

Debra G. (Heiser) Carter
US Army 1971-1976
Service Connected Disabled Woman Veteran

Sue

I, too, am getting facial paralysis and we did not know of any reason...and I'm a nurse!..and a McClellen Vet circa 1972. Cancer of the cervix at age 28 fibrocystic breasts, diabetes, fibromyalgia and now my jaw .
I'm wondering if we can file a class action suit against then for Sexual Discrimination.
There is no doubt that this would be of much higher priority if we had prostates that were effected and were males having high pressure and cardiac disease. As women, we are much easier to sweep under the table, because don'cha know "we were never soldiers anyway"....