SUCH A BUREAUCRACY’S UNTENDER MERCIES…
(…ill-serves all those who have served)

Every year, almost like clock-work, another VA failure seems to pop up out of the woodwork.

This latest episode concerns its apparent systemic practice of putting ailing veterans on a special – Wait List – for critical medical tests, just so its servicing stats will look good enough to warrant hefty end of year bonuses for itself. Meanwhile, ailing veterans die because they don’t get those tests in a timely way that might save them. Such a bureaucracy’s untender mercies…ill serves all those who have served.

Yet, this is not just about one more addition to the litany of wrongs racked up by the VA’s bureaucracy over the years. It’s about its disdain for anything else except for a focus on crocheting procedures rather than performing the TLC mission intended for it.

More distressing, however, is that this indifferent way of performing that mission is simply a reflection of our country’s real attitudes about its veterans. Attitudes which reach as far back as the Revolutionary War, with the thanks of a “grateful nation” for their service mostly expressed by, and limited to, just pious ceremonial platitudes about their sacrifices for duty, honor, and country, while making promises to them never intended to be kept…leaving them to suck hind tit as best they can.

If this seems an unduly harsh cynical perspective of the situation that’s because for too many years we have heard loud promises to fix or reform the VA. For too many years there have been countless congressional hearings to do just that, to no avail. For too many years we’ve had Secretaries of it make their own promises to that end, as they came, and went. For too many years we’ve had to write about these things, over, and over, and over again. And, much too often, we have had to storm in as a personal advocate to help specific brother veterans to get what they needed and deserved…going so far on one occasion to lambast a Vice President, and some of those Secretaries…just to get something done that should have been done, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Well, I’m one of the lucky ones who came through that service with few, if any, physical or emotional dings and scars from that service, and forever grateful because of that, for not having to deal with such a bureaucracy’s “untender mercies”. Even so, I can’t help but have a bitter taste in my mouth when thinking about how so many of my less fortunate brothers and sisters-in-arms are treated by it…leading me to ask myself…what in the hell did any of us ever serve for?!

Sadly, the only answer to that question that comes to mind is this: we who serve have always kept our faith…unlike our nation which seemingly can’t…and never will.

CENTURION