Ty Ziegel peers from beneath his Marine Corps baseball cap, his once boyish face burned beyond recognition by a suicide bomber's attack in Iraq just three days before Christmas 2004.
He lost part of his skull in the blast and part of his brain was damaged. Half of his left arm was amputated and some of the fingers were blown off his right hand.
Ziegel, a 25-year-old Marine sergeant, knew the dangers of war when he was deployed for his second tour in Iraq.
But he didn't expect a new battle when he returned home as a wounded warrior: a fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"Sometimes, you get lost in the system," he told CNN. "I feel like a Social Security number. I don't feel like Tyler Ziegel."
His story is one example of how medical advances in the battlefield have outpaced the home front. Many wounded veterans return home feeling that the VA system, specifically its 62-year-old disability ratings system, has failed them.
"The VA system is not ready, and they simply don't have time to catch up," Tammy Duckworth -- herself a wounded veteran who heads up the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs -- told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in March.
VA Acting Secretary Gordon Mansfield said cases like Ziegel's are rare -- that the majority of veterans are moving through the process and "being taken care of." He also said most veterans are fairly compensated.
"Any veteran with the same issue, if it's a medical disability, ... it is going to get the same exact result anywhere in our system," he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/11/15/wounded.marine/index.html
why haven't the war mongering republicans fixed this system?? they've had 5 years of war to work on this?
maybe its b/c all wars end, so they figured since we were only supposed to be in iraq for three months it flew beneath the radar.
He lost part of his skull in the blast and part of his brain was damaged. Half of his left arm was amputated and some of the fingers were blown off his right hand.
Ziegel, a 25-year-old Marine sergeant, knew the dangers of war when he was deployed for his second tour in Iraq.
But he didn't expect a new battle when he returned home as a wounded warrior: a fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"Sometimes, you get lost in the system," he told CNN. "I feel like a Social Security number. I don't feel like Tyler Ziegel."
His story is one example of how medical advances in the battlefield have outpaced the home front. Many wounded veterans return home feeling that the VA system, specifically its 62-year-old disability ratings system, has failed them.
"The VA system is not ready, and they simply don't have time to catch up," Tammy Duckworth -- herself a wounded veteran who heads up the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs -- told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in March.
VA Acting Secretary Gordon Mansfield said cases like Ziegel's are rare -- that the majority of veterans are moving through the process and "being taken care of." He also said most veterans are fairly compensated.
"Any veteran with the same issue, if it's a medical disability, ... it is going to get the same exact result anywhere in our system," he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/11/15/wounded.marine/index.html
why haven't the war mongering republicans fixed this system?? they've had 5 years of war to work on this?
maybe its b/c all wars end, so they figured since we were only supposed to be in iraq for three months it flew beneath the radar.
