Word: va
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...David Lopata, a slim, bearded VA psychologist, lets the men into a conference room. It is the afternoon group therapy outpatient session for veterans suffering from a disorder called "posttraumatic stress." Several patients light cigarettes. Lopata asks softly, "Okay, where do we begin today?" A stocky blond veteran opens up slowly: "I don't feel that I trust anybody ... Maybe it's just that they don't understand. I don't know, but look at us. None of us at this table has any real friends." "How do you talk about what happened over there?" another asks...
...have been through: other vets. They literally and probably save men's lives. Last month, the House unanimously approved (388 to 0) a bill that would extend the counseling program for three years. In the same package, the House decided that Viet Nam veterans could qualify for treatment at VA hospitals if doctors determined that certain physical problems "may be associated with exposure" to Agent Orange or other chemicals. The House has also passed a program that would make qualified Viet Nam-era vets eligible for low-cost $200,000 Small Business Administration loans. Both the House and Senate agreed...
...conviction that America ?a nation that cherishes almost an ideology of its own fairness?has done him deeply wrong. The vet's first port of call, the Veterans Administration, seems to him abundant evidence that the nation he risked his skin for cares very little in return. The VA is, they say, a $23 billion-a-year bureaucracy devoted mainly to older vets (the World War II generation), a social service agency dispensing health care not to the wounded-in-battle but the merely aged. Officials of the VA answer that many of these critics are unaware of benefits...
...women who served in Viet Nam make a case against the VA as well. Their chief organizer in Washington is Lynda Van Devanter, 34, a nurse lieutenant who labored in an evacuation hospital in Pleiku in 1969-70. "Women veterans are the last minority," she says...
Darrell W. Ringer Morgantown, W. Va...