PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Von Wiggins laughed at the small troubles he got into back in his Army days.
“One time I was hanging around the female barracks (at Fort Meade) and I didn’t leave when they told me to,” he recalled last week over breakfast near his home in Rhawnhurst.
It was around 1971. He was 23, just back from Vietnam, feeling carefree.
But the memory of that bloodied old man hunched over those rocks still haunted him. So did the wave of terror he’d felt when that flapping motion outside his bunker revealed itself to be a hand in the moonlight.
He was already dulling these traumatic memories with hard drugs.
A lifetime of trouble lay ahead.
Bearded, soft-spoken, and diabetic, 66-year-old Wiggins is one of hundreds of thousands of ex-military personnel carrying an other-than-honorable discharge from the service: what vets call the “bad paper,” which often hobbles their search for employment and denies them Veterans Affairs benefits such as housing, education, health care, and disability payments.
As the nation celebrates Veterans Day on Wednesday, however, there is new hope for veterans whose psychological wounds from combat may explain the misconduct that earned them that bad paper.
Thanks to a federal lawsuit brought last year on behalf of five Connecticut veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in September 2014, ordered all discharge review boards to give “liberal consideration” to applicants with claims of combat-related PTSD.
Last week, Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic, which represented the five plaintiffs, reported that the Army’s review boards are now finding in applicants’ favor in small but record numbers.
After two decades of rejecting more than 95 percent of upgrade requests, Yale found, those review boards granted upgrades this year to 67 percent of applicants submitting formal diagnoses of PTSD.
The numbers are few - just 201 cases - and the Navy and Air Force have yet to share their statistics, but the implications are significant.
“Tens of thousands of eligible veterans have not yet applied to the boards for relief,” according to the report, which said 260,000 Vietnam veterans left service with other-than-honorable discharges. Of those, about 80,000 had PTSD, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates.
While veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts are now routinely screened for PTSD as part of their separation from service, the VA did not recognize combat trauma as an official diagnosis until 1980 - five years after the end of the Vietnam War.
As a result, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records for decades “consistently disregard(ed) later evidence of PTSD, making it nearly impossible for veterans with bad discharges arising from conduct due to undiagnosed PTSD to get discharge upgrades,” Rebecca Izzo, a lawyer who studied the issue, wrote in the spring issue of Yale Law Journal.
The Hagel directive has encouraged Wiggins, who said he only this year began to link his combat experience in Vietnam with his long, though ended, drug use; depression; scrapes with the law; chronic underemployment; and the impulsive lapse in judgment that led to his other-than-honorable discharge more than four decades ago.
“My story almost sounds unbelievable when I look back,” Wiggins said, sitting at a McDonald’s restaurant on Castor Avenue near his row house apartment in Northeast.
He and his wife, Darlene, a self-employed events planner, rely heavily on his supplemental Social Security and irregular work as a security guard, but they still have a hard time paying bills.
And without health-care benefits, his diabetes went undiagnosed for years, leaving him with permanent, painful nerve damage to his feet and legs.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “it feels like I’m walking on rocks.”
He might have enjoyed a lifetime of veterans’ health-care benefits. But “young and naive,” he signed those away unwittingly 41 years ago.
As he tells it, he had done all his paperwork prior to his scheduled discharge in 1972, but his separation got held up for reasons no one could explain.
“The company commander said there was some kind of ’discrepancy’ and told me to just hold on,” he recalled. He did - for 48 hours. Fed up, he split Fort Meade for civilian life in Annapolis, Md.
But “something was wrong,” he discovered. “I was not the same guy I was at 18 and 19.” He was still “dippin’ and dabbin’ ” heroin, which he’d taken up in Vietnam to “ease the scare” of combat.
Early in his tour of duty, Wiggins said, his lieutenant had ordered him to shoot a man crouching by a river. Last week he sobbed into his hands as he recalled his horror on seeing the bloody entry and exit wounds on the man’s head and neck - and discovering he had been about 80.
“The lieutenant said he was setting up a mortar,” he said, “but I thought: ’Is this what I have to do? Kill old people and children?’ “
Months later he was standing watch in a bunker when he saw a flapping movement. Then a shaft of moonlight revealed it to be the hand of a Viet Cong soldier, beckoning to his comrades to start an attack.
Wiggins was so terrified he felt “paralyzed.”
He nevertheless roused his mates, fired off a flare for backup, and began a firefight that lasted hours.
But he wept again as he told how he has never forgiven himself for his “cowardice” for feeling scared.
Soon after leaving Fort Meade, he served 10 months in Maryland for an unarmed robbery, he said, and later served 90 days for driving into a gas station with a legal but loaded pistol on the seat.
When he got out of jail the second time, two MPs were on hand to greet him. He was told he was AWOL and escorted back to Fort Meade, where a lieutenant offered him a devil’s bargain.
“He said I could either stand court martial for desertion and go to prison,” he said, “or I could sign these papers and take an OTH (other-than-honorable) discharge.”
“I took the OTH.”
Eight months ago, however, he paid a visit to the Veterans Multi-Service Center on Fourth Street. A nonprofit service organization that relies on government contracts and private donations, it provides benefits and services primarily to homeless veterans and those at risk of it.
About half the clients suffer from combat-related PTSD, traumatic brain injury, or sexual assault, said Tyrone Beach, a service officer at the center, and many have bad paper.
“Within five minutes” of meeting Wiggins, Beach said, “it became apparent to me he had PTSD,” and Wiggins became his client.
Together they applied to the Army’s discharge review board asking for a discharge upgrade for Wiggins. Beach also arranged through Veterans Affairs for Wiggins to start seeing a therapist “on humanitarian grounds.”
“He needed counseling,” Beach told The Inquirer with Wiggins’ permission. “But treatment records will also serve as supporting evidence for a discharge application,” although he might need a formal medical diagnosis of PTSD to win his case.
“Von Wiggins is a perfect example of the kind of vet who deserves an upgrade,” Beach said.
Wiggins said for now he is just focused on healing.
“I say to (my counselor) sometimes that I wish I could just sit here and cry,” he said. “Maybe just cry all this stuff out.”
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Information from: The Philadelphia Inquirer, https://www.inquirer.com
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