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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. For this Veterans Day, it's thing number 39, 100 years of how we treat our veterans, roughly from World War I, which was a turning point in this history to the present. By how we treat our veterans, we mean the benefits they're granted from the government upon completing their service, especially on the front lines of war, how they're received by the broader society, how well they're set up to heal physically and emotionally from the horrific experience of war and return to civilian life. I'm also interested in how decisions about going to war are shaped or not by the life experiences veterans have to share. With me now is James Ridgway. He's a partner at the law firm of Bergmann & Moore, LLC, based in Maryland, which focuses on what they call providing quality representation to veterans and their families. He's also adjunct professor of veterans law at George Washington University and author of the textbook Veterans Law: Cases and Theory. James, thanks for some time on Veterans Day, which must be very important to you. Welcome to WNYC.

James Ridgway: Oh, thank you for having me. This is the type of thing I always do on Veterans Day, try and get out and spread the word about the system.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I'm so glad. let's actually start with veterans of the Civil War. Was that a turning point in establishing veterans benefits of any kind? How are they experienced those veteran benefits after World War I?

James Ridgway: The Civil War was a huge turning point. The story of the Revolution, The War of 1812, the Mexican American War, was all very big promises that were not delivered upon. The Civil War veterans initially were not treated well either, but because they were such a huge group, 2 million veterans in a nation of 35 million people, they had the political power to really demand that the country provide for their needs.

It was a slow build over time, but by the end, Civil War veterans were very well taken care of, but this led to a political backlash as they declined, and so by the time World War I rolled around, the public was just exhausted with the cost that had been paid for the Civil War veterans, and we returned to the political norm of very little support.

Brian Lehrer: What happened after World War I?

James Ridgway: The World War I veterans came home with all the needs of every generation since the beginning of civilization. They had physical and mental health issues, and they had real big needs on finding ways to readjust back into society, to get jobs, to buy houses and farms, and none of those were taken care of. This led to the World War I veterans organizing politically, which every generation has.

These World War I organizations are notable because they became the organizations for veterans of all conflicts. These are the organizations you know, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans. All of these organizations arise after World War I to advocate for the needs of the World War I generation.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, throughout our 100 Year series, we've been opening the phones for your personal oral histories. For today, who has a story to tell of how you felt served or not served by veterans benefits and your experiences as a vet of other kinds as well after your service, especially if you served in a war, any war? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Again, who has a story to tell of how you felt served or not served by veterans benefits and your experiences as a vet after your service, especially if you served in a war? 212-433-9692.

If you want to add to that, you can say, how good you think the law serving veterans is today. 212-433-9692. Are you a veteran of World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, which we'll certainly get to in this segment. Maybe your parent or grandparent fought in any conflict over the last century. You can tell something from their story.

Anybody hear any stories from your forebears of being a World War I veteran even? How did their experience in war affect you growing up? Maybe we'll get to some of this as well. Secondary PTSD or a certain kind of national pride, their storytelling or silence about their time in war is another part of this arc of history. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 on any of those things about your experiences coming home from war as a vet or those of your parents or grandparents, For James Ridgway, among other things, author of the book, Veterans Law: Cases and Theory.

James during World War I, just stay on World War I for another couple of minutes, is when we hear the term "shell shock," for the first time. Is that what we now call PTSD?

James Ridgway: That was what it was called during that era. It's something that's always existed. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics that have been interpreted as the first written signs of PTSD. During the Civil War, it was called soldier's heart. This generation called it shell shock, but it was nothing new. In fact, the very first person to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge was a World War I veteran by the name of Harold Wobber. He was walking with another person, because he used to be able to just walk across, and they got to the middle. He said, "Here's where I get off," and he jumped over the side.

Brian Lehrer: Woah. The new industrial age of war technology in World War I, devastating technologies, left veterans of World War I with physical ailments that were probably new to many people's awareness at the time, I imagine. Trench foot is one I've heard about, but take us deeper into the newer, most common ailments that World War I vets experienced.

James Ridgway: I think the true transformation again happened at the Civil War with the development of industrial weapons like first machine guns, but medicine helped the World War I veterans survive in greater numbers than ever before. They had traumatic injuries to their bodies. Tear gas-- or not tear gas, but mustard gas and other chemical weapons had been used, so many of them had horrible respiratory conditions. A lot of them contracted disease, which has always been a problem. All of these were very important issues.

At the time, we had retirement homes for elderly veterans, but no hospital system. That was one of the initial triumphs of the American Legion and other organizations, was the creation of a hospital system for veterans, which started small and then grew after World War II.

Brian Lehrer: Let's move on to the era of World War II veterans. Am I right to say that this can be thought of as the golden period for veterans in the United States, or maybe we should say for white veterans in the United States because of the GI Bill?

James Ridgway: Absolutely. In surveys, the World War II generation is the only generation that says they are better off for having served overall. That was really the product of the GI Bill, which came about because of how poorly the World War I veterans had been treated and how much the service organizations wanted to make something different for the next generation?

FDR had come in by cutting $400 million in benefits for veterans in order to pay for the new deal. He was not liked at all by the veteran community, but he understood the need to take care of veterans. When the American Legion proposed the GI Bill or the Bill of Rights for GI Joe and GI Jane, he immediately seized on it and said, "This is what we need to do." This became politically popular, but it was a very difficult bill to ultimately get passed.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about the passage of that bill and what it did take. I know this is important to you.

James Ridgway: This is an incredible story. What happened was that the American Legion had spent months popularizing this bill, but it was in the jurisdiction of the House World War I Veterans Committee. The chairman, John Rankin of Mississippi, wanted to overhaul it and limit the rights, as he had done with the original Social Security bill. He was from Mississippi, and he wanted to craft the legislation so that African Americans would generally not be eligible, as he had done with Social Security.

You ended up with this impasse between the original Senate version, as proposed by the American Legion, and a separate House version, which was supposed to make a lot of positions that African Americans held in the military ineligible for all of the benefits, not just education, home loans, farm loans, employment, rights to surplus property. What ended up happening was that you had a conference committee between the two versions.

John Gibson, a member of the House from Georgia, ultimately decided that he wanted to break ranks and vote for the Senate version. He gave his proxy to Rankin because he wasn't feeling well and went home to Georgia in order to get treatment, but Rankin, on the Friday of the committee meetings, refused to vote by proxy and declared that you had to be in person to vote. The committee adjourned at six o'clock in the evening, with the final vote scheduled for 10:00 am the following morning.

When the American Legion saw what happened, they realized that they had to get Gibson back to D.C. by the following morning. They tried to call down to Georgia to get him, but the phone lines could only get them as far as Atlanta. Gibson lived in Douglas, Georgia, and so the Atlanta Journal Constitution started trying to use their contacts and reaching out to radio stations that started broadcasting out to say Gibson needed to urgently contact the American Legion.

When he finally got home for medical treatment at 11:00 pm, he got the message and found out that he was needed in Washington, D.C. and had to fly up there. The nearest airport was a army airport in Waycross, Georgia, 40 miles away. The American Legion arranged for a police escort there, but there were no working planes. After that, he had to get to Jacksonville, Florida, where the hub of Eastern Airline was, which was another 70 miles away, but there was no way he was going to make it in time, even with a police escort, by the last flight out at 2:20 in the morning.

The American Legion reached out to the national traffic manager for Eastern Airline, who happened to be the World War I flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker, who grounded the plane and said, "You're not leaving without Gibson." He finally gets to the airport deep in the middle of the night and manages to catch the last flight that had been held for him and land at D.C. in the morning in time to cast the deciding vote to get the bill out of committee, where it ultimately gets passed 379 to nothing and signed into law in June 22nd, 1944.

Brian Lehrer: That is a heck of a story that I never heard before. Go ahead.

James Ridgway: [unintelligible 00:12:57] The only thing I don't understand about this story is how it hasn't yet been a Steven Spielberg movie starring Tom Hanks. There's more to it, like he realized on the way he didn't have his wallet and the Legion had to send people to a nearby poker game at the airport to collect money for his ticket. It's just an incredible story.

Brian Lehrer: Well, talk more about the exclusion of Black veterans. Was that explicitly written into the law, you started to describe some of that, or set up more through subterfuge, like just excluding certain jobs in the military during World War II that Black service people were more likely to have, or ignorance of different life circumstance-- What happened there?

James Ridgway: The House version would have excluded certain classes of people who were not in combat, which included a lot of positions that African Americans held. Now, in practice, the Senate version wasn't exclusionary, but benefits were awarded by regional offices. Generally, each state has its own regional office, and so Black veterans could be denied at the local level.

One of the notable aspects of the VA system is that historically it simply has not captured information about the race of veterans. We have recent data, and the Yale Law School clinic has been really pushing to try and rectify this, to really bring to light the disparities of treatment and try and end that. It was basically put into a black box as to how different races were treated and made easy to ignore.

Brian Lehrer: We have a call from a World War II veteran. Gerald in Paramus, you're on WNYC in our 100 Years of 100 Things series here on Veterans Day. Hi, Gerald, thank you for calling in.

Gerald: Oh, Brian, I am so thrilled to speak to you because you're my lifeline. Let me tell you why. I'm a World War II veteran, and in my 80s, I developed macular degeneration and lost a lot of vision. Now, my retinologist was aware that there was a program that the VA sponsored called the Blinded Rehab Center. Every district in the country has one. This was developed maybe a hundred years ago because some veterans in World War II came home exposed to mustard gas, so the VA developed this program. There's nothing like it available in any other institution.

What it does, it's available cost free because the VA considers vision loss of a vet a catastrophic disability. You are available as a veteran free of cost. It's a marvelous program. It's mainly, I'd say, psychological and occupational therapy, but a great help in coping with this disability. I just wanted to throw it out to other veterans because the VA does not advertise it and many veterans are unaware of it. If they have various types of vision loss, they should contact the VA.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great service that you called with that. I know you say that we're your lifeline. Yes, for people with a lot of vision loss, of course, the radio is so important to them in so many ways, so I get you. Gerald, I guess that you're an example of the World War II vet generation feeling pretty well served by veterans benefits, as our guest was saying before, yes?

Gerald: Yes, I agree with you. They just cater to the veterans one on one. It's not classes. They take you out, they train you how to cross streets, they give you all the implements that you need if you require it. You have to stay on campus for at least two to four weeks, depending upon your ability to absorb the program. I felt it transformed my life, and I'm always honored to recognize the VA's contribution.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much, and for your contribution to our country and to this show. Thank you very much for calling in. Wow. Professor Ridgway, maybe it's worth just saying in brief what the new benefits were in the GI Bill that were offered to veterans of World War II and how much they persist.

James Ridgway: Sure. The World War I hospital system provided medical care for disabilities related to injuries suffered in service, but World War II veterans, they really concentrated on helping them readjust to civilian life, giving them access to home and farm loans, access to an education, access to surplus government property, rights to employment in positions with the federal government, basically doing everything possible so that people could find and start a civilian life, which had just been a consistent problem throughout history before that.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take one more call pertinent to World War II vets before we move on to more recent years. A number of people who had a parent serve in World War II are calling in. Let's see. How about Megan in Westchester? Megan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Megan: Yes, hi. Hello. thank you so much for taking my call. My father was a World War II veteran in the Navy and served in the South Pacific and was also landing troops and soldiers who were exposed to atomic radiation by the places atomic bombs were dropped in Japan. He subsequently suffered all types of skin cancers, very serious ones of which he eventually died, and had tried very hard over the years to access any kind of acknowledgement from the service that could have been related to his exposure, both the sun in the South Pacific on a ship and also the radiation exposure, the atomic bombs when he was in Japan.

I'm calling because that was an area that he worked very hard, wrote letters, et cetera, and never was successful in any kind of acknowledgement that it was a possibility.

Brian Lehrer: The issue, and this certainly has come up with Vietnam veterans, we'll talk about that as we go through this segment, having to try to convince the Veterans Administration that your cancer or other disease was related to your service, right, Megan?

Megan: Right. No one in his family had a history of any kind of skin cancer.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for telling that story. There's a larger story behind that individual one, isn't there, James?

James Ridgway: Absolutely. Fundamentally, we still have the World War I system today. It was locked in after the Korean War, and basically it requires that you prove that your disability is related to something that happened to you in service. For radiation exposed veterans, Congress created a system to apply for benefits, but it was very hard to access because it required a complex process of verifying the level of radiation exposure that a particular veteran had. Those records were often not well kept and many, many veterans were denied because after VA went to the required body to determine the level of radiation exposure, the answer often came back negligible, even if that wasn't really accurate.

The radiation-exposed veterans actually made common cause with the Agent Orange veterans in the '70s trying to sue VA and get the courts to get involved in trying to make their process better.

Brian Lehrer: One other thing before we leave the World War II era and talk more about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf War, there's a stereotype about World War II vets that they didn't much talk about what they experienced in war with their family members or other civilians, very different from today. We're talking about trauma is accepted and encouraged. Was this a real pattern of quiet stoicism, or shame, or survivor guilt, or whatever you want to call it among many World War II vets?

James Ridgway: I think that is the common experience for people in their families, people around them. What we saw after World War II was an incredible rise of what service organization posts, so just local buildings run by the American Legion or VFW or another organization where veterans would gather socially. It was like a bar exclusively for veterans, but they also hosted many other things.

My sense is that while they wouldn't talk about it with other people, they talked about it amongst themselves there in that safe space of people who understood. I was a prosecutor in Chicago, I did child abuse trials for a year and nothing else, and I didn't want to talk about that with anybody in my family. I talked about that with other prosecutors at bars where prosecutors gather. I think World War II veterans were much the same.

Brian Lehrer: You think that changed in subsequent wars?

James Ridgway: I think that definitely changed. The Vietnam generation really brought about the understanding of mental health issues as not some sort of personal failing, but an actual understandable medical need, and that made it much more socially acceptable for them to go outside of the veterans community and be honest about their experiences.

Brian Lehrer: Were the emotional or mental health needs of vets met in any direct way under the original GI Bill after World War II?

James Ridgway: No, not at all. The fundamental problem was that in this model of you have to have a medical condition related to service, there was no way to diagnose these problems as a medical condition because the American Psychiatric Association didn't classify it as one. That only happened because of the Vietnam generation.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with this 100 Years of 100 Things, segment number 38, 100 years of how we treat our veterans for this Veterans Day with James Ridgway, professor of veterans law at George Washington University, author of a textbook on veterans law and a general expert in the field, and more of your oral history calls. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue our WWNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. For this Veterans Day, it's thing number 39. I think I said 38 mistakenly going into the break. It's thing number 39, we're keeping score, 100 years of how we treat our veterans. My guest is James Ridgway, partner at the law firm of Bergmann & Moore, LLC, based in Maryland, which focuses on providing quality representation to veterans and their families, they say. He's also the author of the textbook Veterans Law: Cases and Theory, and he's an adjunct professor of veterans law at George Washington University.

Continuing to move through the decades, here's Jean in Holmdel, whose dad was a Korean War vet. Jean, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Jean: Oh, hi, Brian. Hi, Professor Ridgway. Great segment. My dad was a Korean War vet. He survived two attacks where he was the only lone survivor. He came home, he lost his eye, he lost his nose. A body fell on him. When he pulled it off, he spent seven years in Bethesda, I believe it was, yes, Bethesda Hospital. He used to have a prosthetic that he would have to glue on. He'd have to pop in an eye. He had all sorts of skin grafts. He spent seven years there because it was over 135 operations.

The VA was great to him. He had five daughters. We used to call him Mr. Potato Head, and he thought that was the funniest thing.

Brian Lehrer: Oh boy.

Jean: He would have to put on things and pop in. He was a true patriot, he really was. I just thought the VA helped him. Now, as far as mental, he would never admit anything anyway, but we used to wake up in the middle of the night when he had his terrors, and he'd be screaming. It was scary for us, but we didn't have that PTSD term until maybe 10 years after the Vietnam area, and then we were able to understand it better, what he was going through because it ate at him inside and out sometimes.

Brian Lehrer: The story you're telling, it's making me emotional right now because you're telling about somebody who lost many of his facial features and got called Mr. Potato Head and was very genial outwardly to people he was with, but then in the middle of the night he would have these-

Jean: Only the family.

Brian Lehrer: With the family, but then he would have these night terrors.

Jean: Yes, he used to be like, [onomatopoeia] and he lost a lot of hearing, too, from the bombardments. He was a beautiful man before, from the Bronx. He came home and my mother married him after. He looks like the invisible man when you look at their wedding pictures, because his whole head is all bandaged except for an eye and little things for his nose. She was an incredible woman, too.

He just taught us no matter how tough it is, you just got to keep going. He used to say, "Beauty fades, education fades," and that's how we were brought up. "Any man too big for a small job is too small for a big job." It was really amazing. He really was a great guy. He died young. He died at 63 because of the-- He had neuralgia in the face after a while, and it was just so painful to watch him just hold his head, and that gave his heart out.

Brian Lehrer: A beautiful tribute to your Korean War vet dad. Thank you for doing it on the radio, Jean. Thank you.

Jean: Thank you. It used to get me mad because people would say, "Well, Korea wasn't a war," and I was like, "Well, tell that to the vets." Anyway, thank you for letting me share.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Jean. What? I'm sorry I cut you off there. For letting you share and what?

Jean: I said I'm definitely buying his book.

Brian Lehrer: Jean, thank you very much. Oh, wow, James.

James Ridgway: It's amazing how few people understand that PTSD was the product of VA recognizing the problems of the Vietnam generation because they couldn't grant benefits without a diagnosed medical condition. In the '70s, because it wasn't even a condition, psychiatrists wouldn't even ask about, "Were you a veteran? Did you serve in combat?" It was folks like [unintelligible 00:29:56], who was a social worker at the Los Angeles VA, and Sarah Haley, who was a nurse at the Boston VA who recognized the patterns and went to Dr. Robert Lifton, who was an expert in the problems of Holocaust survivors.

Together they formed a working group that went to the American Psychiatric Association and essentially took over a subcommittee on adjustment problems and came up with the diagnosis and all the criteria for PTSD, which was finally added in the third edition of the DSM in 1980. That was when you could finally talk about it as a condition and grant benefits for it.

Brian Lehrer: We've already talked about PTSD just now and a little bit before, and the battle over having illnesses from the Vietnam era, chemical defoliant, Agent Orange recognized as another Vietnam era thing. The backlash over Vietnam also brought about the end of the draft and the start of the all volunteer or professionalized military, including, however we should say, an economic draft for those who find it their best economic option, a class based draft, and an inequality draft in a certain way, in addition to those who serve because they really feel called. It's been 50 years now since the end of the draft. Has it affected veterans benefits or the place of vets in society, per your understanding?

James Ridgway: I don't think you can say it really has affected veterans benefits. Now, whether it should is a different question. Dr. Joel Kupersmith at Georgetown has worked a lot on this issue and published a few reports along with Bob Casey about what should we be doing to adjust our system for the reality of an all volunteer force? There's a lot of arguments that we should be thinking about things differently. I recommend his work.

Brian Lehrer: Moving into the modern era of the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, listener writes in a text message, Justin from Brooklyn, "Hi, Brian. I'm an Afghan war vet who suffers from chronic health issues. Everyone knows about Agent Orange and its impact on health in Vietnam War veterans, but less people are aware of the impact that burn pits have had on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I know an unusual amount of people that I served with that have been diagnosed with cancer over the years as well. Burn pits have had a serious impact on the health of veterans, yet the VA makes us jump through hoops to get help."

What would you say about this? We've had Senator Gillibrand on the show talking about her burn pits bill. I thought it got passed, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.

James Ridgway: The benefits for burn pits have expanded greatly thanks to legislation in August of 2022 and some VA regulations before that. This has been a very difficult issue to deal with. It was a long political struggle to get benefits for Agent Orange, but that was simple in comparison. There was one culprit. It was dioxin. We've known since 1888 that dioxin is nasty stuff.

Doing the science on one chemical is so much easier than dealing with what current veterans face, where you have burn pits where everything under the sun was burned from jet fuel to plastics to explosives. There's just so many different things and they all are combining together, and then you layer that on top of oil, fire, smoke, depleted uranium shells, anthrax, vaccines, micro fine sand particles that were blowing around. It becomes incredibly difficult to do reliable science.

The National Institute of Medicine has published report after report after report looking at each of these issues in isolation, but when you look at any individual veteran and the framework is, "Can I prove that this condition is related to something I can identify in service?" that's a very hard problem.

Congress has engrafted some other approaches. We had the undiagnosed illness law in 1988, but that was never a good fit with how medicine is practiced because doctors give diagnoses and veterans end up with a half dozen different diagnoses and not an undiagnosed condition. Recently in the PACT Act in August 2022, Congress has really, under pressure from many folks, including Jon Stewart, who had the experience with the 9/11 first responders, basically taken a much more comprehensive approach and that has been rolling out over the last year. The number of claims granted and the amount of benefits awarded in the last year has just blown everyone away with the numbers.

How this plays out in the long term, if folks feel like they've been left out of this, we'll see, but certainly we've made a great leap forward in just the last year and a half, two years.

Brian Lehrer: We arrive at the present, at the end of our WNYC centennial series segment for today, 100 Years of 100 Things for this Veterans Day, thing number 39, 100 years of how we treat our veterans, with James Ridgway, partner at the law firm of Bergmann & Moore, LLC, based in Maryland, author of the textbook Veterans Law: Cases and Theory, and adjunct professor of veterans law at George Washington University. We're so thrilled that you were able to spend part of your Veterans Day with us, essential as this is to your work and to hear some of the amazing stories from our callers. Thank you very much.

James Ridgway: My pleasure. I'm always happy to get out and spread the word. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: 100 Years of 100 Things, episode number 40 coming up later in the week, 100 Years of America as A Global Superpower. That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, Esperanza Rosenbaum, and Zach Gottehrer-Cohen. We had Juliana Fonda at the audio controls. Stay tuned for All Of It.

 

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