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thedrifter
09-07-09, 09:35 AM
MILITARY UPDATE: Troop support has changed since the Vietnam era
By Tom Philpott
Published: Saturday, September 5, 2009 2:16 AM MST
Vietnam War veterans will nod with understanding over many of Noel Koch’s comments contrasting support for wounded troops and veterans today compared to how it was 40 years ago.

During the Vietnam War, he said, “we got very good at saving people’s lives on the battlefield. But we never got good at giving them a life worth living once they got back here,” Koch said. “We just warehoused them in VA hospitals, and that’s part of the scandal of the times.”

Koch is director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Transition Policy and Care Coordination, an entity less than a year old. He’s responsible for how well DoD and the services implement very ambitious initiatives and reforms to ensure this generation of warriors gets the support it needs to stay in service or move smoothly into civilian life.

Koch noted that he’s a member of Vietnam Veterans of America.

“Our basic motto is, ‘Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.’ You may take from that a certain sense of grievance,” he said, “but that’s not the important part. The important part is this: that (Vietnam) generation is determined to take care of this generation.”

In the wake of the scandal that rocked Walter Reed Medical Center more than two years ago, several commissions and internal studies produced recommendations to improve support of wounded warriors. Seemingly before the ink dried on commission draft reports, Congress had passed legislation.

Meanwhile, the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs established the Wounded, Ill and Injured Senior Oversight Committee, co-chaired by the deputy secretaries of VA and DoD. The committee was to ensure that wounded warrior legislation was implemented properly and that key task force recommendations were adopted and resourced.

The spotlight has dimmed, and the committee survives but, within DoD, it’s Koch’s Office of Transition Policy and Care Coordination, with a staff of 30 and rising, taking over day-to-day oversight of dramatic warrior transition reforms. Here’s a rundown from our interview with Koch in his Alexandria, Va., office Tuesday:

Disability Evaluation System pilot

The pilot gives ill or injured service members a faster, more seamless disability review and rating process. The pilot will expand soon to seven more military treatment facilities, enough so that half of all service disability evaluations will be done in the streamlined system.

Since November 2007, nearly 4,000 members have enrolled in the pilot. Through August this year, 534 members had completed the process. Nearly half have been awarded disability retirement. Thirty-eight percent are returning to duty. Only 13 percent have been separated.

Under the legacy system, DoD and VA each conducted physicals and do their own ratings. It takes an average of 540 days to complete. The pilot effectively cuts that time in half. Koch said the pilot is popular with participants. He suggested the process would be even faster except that now the focus is on the service member: his or her sacrifice and his or her personal goals.

“We’re not looking, in the very first instance, at moving these people into veterans’ status. We’re looking at where we can continue them in service. That is a pretty profound and encompassing procedure,” Koch said.

Recovery care coordinators

The Army still calls them wounded warrior advocates. To Marines, they’re members of the Wounded Warrior Regiment. To Koch and his staff, they are recovery care coordinators, managing the nonmedical care of war wounded until they recover or are separated or retired. Often, the contact doesn’t stop then. Marines, for example, try to maintain contact with all of their seriously wounded vets to ensure they’re getting the support they deserve.

Koch couldn’t guess the number of military and civilian personnel across the Defense Department now engaged in transition assistance efforts. The Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., said recently that 10,000 soldiers are in, or running, warrior transition units.

Physical Disability Board of Review

Koch’s shop oversees the board. Under a law passed two years ago, as many as 77,000 veterans separated since Sept. 11, 2001, with disability ratings of 0 to 20 percent are eligible to have ratings reconsidered and, perhaps, upgraded if their physical evaluation board didn’t use the more liberal VA rating schedule in effect at separation. A rating of 30 percent or higher means disability retirement, rather than a lump-sum severance, and TRICARE eligibility for veteran and family.

The Disability Evaluation System pilot, the Physical Disability Board of Review and the recovery care coordinators, Koch said, all show “we’re trying to do things differently.”

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Ellie