Our veterans deserve speedy appeals rulings

By The Des Moines Register

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Recently, the Register's Tony Leys told the story of Joel Klobnak who is struggling to rebuild his life after losing his leg in the war in Iraq when he was 19. Besides his war injuries that have made it impossible to work, Klobnak is engaged in a seemingly endless battle with the Department of Veterans Affairs over benefits.

The VA cut his disability payment in half, and he's been waiting a year for a ruling on his most recent appeal. Meanwhile, he's now trying to support a family of four on $1,557 a month.

Klobnak's may not seem an entirely sympathetic case to some, given that he received $50,000 in compensation from the government. He acknowledges he wasted much of the money. And he missed an appointment with a VA doctor.

Klobnak has contributed to his plight, but it's worth thinking about how maturely any one of us might have handled the loss of a limb in a foreign war when we were a kid just a year or two out of high school.

At the very least Klobnak deserves a speedy resolution of his appeal so he and his family can move on with their lives. The reality is that hundreds of thousands of other veterans are in the same plight: The VA faces a backlog of around 1 million disability claims and appeals.

That is just wrong.

We - all of us - ask these young men and women to go off to fight on our behalf in terrible battle conditions. The least we can do is reasonably care for those who return less than whole. With the remarkable strides in battlefield rescue and emergency care, many more who might otherwise have died on the battlefield are returning with ghastly wounds that will make it a challenge to live a normal life, let alone work.

All of this has overwhelmed the Department of Veterans Affairs' ability to cope. But it is only because Congress has failed to give the agency sufficient resources and insist that it do better.

There is a lot of flag-waving and chest-thumping in this country when it comes time to send young people off to war. We should have the same passion for them when they come home and need a hand returning to civilian life.