Update

My battle buddy Steve Cooper won his lawsuit against the VA. The first of many.

Arizona man awarded $2.5 million

Look for help elsewhere

VA Doctor: What’s wrong?

He looks at his computer monitor with an annoyed looked on his face as I sat down in the chair.  I have been waiting in the lobby of the Long Beach VA for 2 hours now.

Me: My left foot. I have been having pain in it for years.

I start to remove my shoes and socks. He still looks away from me.

VA Doctor: Oh yeah…..

I sit and wait. I thought it was kind of rude of him to not even look at me or greeted me when I walked it, but whatever. He must be having a bad day. I stare down at my bare feet.

He continues to stare at the screen of his monitor.

VA Doctor: Well….I don’t really see anything from your previous x-rays.

That’s it. I don’t really recall the rest. Maybe it’s because he didn’t really do or say anything of importance for me to remember this day. All I can say for sure is that he treated me like I was an annoyance. Like a Doctor House, but without the actual talent. That was the last time I ever went to the VA.

Years later I finally got a job with health insurance and I went to a civilian doctor who sent me to Physical Therapy. Turns out all those years of waking up in the morning and feeling a stabbing pain in my foot was all due to having a flat foot. It took the Physical Therapist 15 minutes to figured it out!

This is some minor shit here. Imagine if I had a bigger problem. Like cancer. Well an Army buddy I know is dying of cancer. Cancer which should have been discovered by the VA. They didn’t and now he’s dying. Learn a lesson here. Go to a civilian doctor if you can and always try to get a second opinion. It just might save you years of pain, or even save your life.

BTW – read my friend’s story here: $50 million civil trial

 

I’m back….sort of.

Man, I totally forgot about this blog! How’s everyone? Things are certainly different since last April. How about an update –

We bought a house!

Never thought this would happen. Houses are crazy expensive in my area. My wife and I have been looking for a house since December of 2015. Went through a lot of drama with our first agent, which I might blog about later. Learned that people are not too kind towards buyers with VA loans. We finally found a house in a great area and moved in late August of last year.

Took more classes –

The Post 9-11 GI Bill is awesome. They paid for 70% of my tuition fees. It’s 70% for me based off my active duty time in service. Guess 11 years of reserve time doesn’t add up to much but whatever. I took 3 programming classes which were pretty challenging. I’m nowhere near the level of a programmer that can make things and get paid, but it has helped me understand my job better. Even helped me get a pretty good bump in pay. So go back to school if you can! You can never stop learning.

Anyways, I have been seeing a lot of craziness on my Facebook lately. Most of my Army buddies have vastly different views of the current political environment than most of my “civilian” friends. It’s sad to see people attacking each other over the littlest of things these days. What happened to civil debates? Seems like extremes on both sides are getting the better of us. Mushy wishful thing on my part, but I would like to think we can all at least be cool to the people around us and work towards making each day a little better than the next.

 

Busy

Just wanted to say “sorry” to the few readers of this blog. I haven’t been posting as often as I would like. I recently had a chat with one of my battle buddies about going back to school. I looked at where I was at in my life and I felt that I should go back to school in order to improve my current situation. So I enrolled in an extension program at a local university with the 9-11 GI Bill, which I would like the thank you, taxpayer.

Anyways, learning computer programming is kicking my ass so I need to spend most of my evening studying. Funny how I barely studied during my college days. I promise to continue blogging so please keep an eye out for future posts.

D.A.

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces:

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944. Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory.

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

The List

People make lists for all sort of reasons: packing lists to make sure nothing is forgotten on a trip, shopping lists to keep from having to make that unwanted trip back to the market, Amazon wish lists so someone can pay for that Breaking Bad complete Blu-ray.

I made myself a unique list, which I have been striving to complete since 2003. I never thought I would make one of those cliche what-I’m-going-to-do-when-I-get-back-home lists, until a few friends of mine almost got killed while making a resupply run to one of our outposts in downtown Baghdad.

That wake up call finally forced me to sit down on my cot one night and jot down a few goals I wanted to achieve (in no particular order) when I got home.

Welcome to Kuwait

There’s a saying in the Army, “Hurry up and wait.” It basically means we always make a big deal of getting together and moving out as a group as fast as possible, only to end up waiting for hours before we actually get anything done.

It was mid March 2003 when we finally got orders to head to the terminal at Biggs airfield on Fort Bliss. We had been training since November and were eager to finally do our jobs. We woke up extra early so we could move out of the barracks, load our gear on the trucks, and check our weapons out of the arms room.

On March 18, 2016March 22, 2016 By Softtop SoldierLeave a comment

Vacuum from the Heavens

It was one of those few rare days when we had a little down time during Basic. Of course, down time didn’t mean we could watch TV or take a nap. We spent today’s downtime cleaning our rifles outside.

So we were cleaning and mostly bullshitting about our lives back home, when we heard a loud smack of plastic and metal hitting the pavement. We immediately jumped to our feet and ran towards the source of the noise.

Around the corner from our drill pad was a mangled husk of what used to be 2nd platoon’s vacuum cleaner. How or why this happened never entered my mind, because I could only think about what would happen if our Drill Sargeant found out.

F U

Drill Sergeants like to mess with soldiers. I think they partly do it out of boredom. I mean, they spend more time with us than their own families.

One day the Drills started messing with this 1st platoon Private who was unfortunately named “Fu”. Fu was a quiet Asian American kid with coke bottle glasses who kept his head down and went unnoticed for  the first few months of Basic Training.

Dead Cow Souls

I’m not sure if they still do this today. It has been at least 20 years since Basic Training.

Basic, as we called it, didn’t start so dramatically like you would see in movies and TV shows. We spend the first few days, or weeks depending how unlucky you were, at In-processing (I will spare you those details for now).

Anyway, the real shit wouldn’t start until we got picked up from In-processing by these large silver cattle cars (trailers) which were towed by a semi truck. I remember staring at this gigantic silver twinkie, wondering how many poor cows were hauled away to their deaths before this thing was repurposed for Uncle Sam.