While most talk shows focus their content on makeovers, celebrity gossip and recipe tips, one special television program in Contra Costa County, Calif., is eschewing these topics and bringing important news to veterans and the families and communities that care about them instead.
Veterans’ Voices, funded by a $25,000 grant from the California Department of Veterans Affairs, airs once a month and provides a forum for discussion about all issues facing veterans. Marine Corps veteran Nathan Johnson and Kevin Graves, regional outreach specialist for the California V.A. serve as the show’s hosts. Graves’s son, Spc. Joseph Graves, was killed in 2006 while serving in Iraq.
Veterans’ Voices tackles topics like coping with post-combat stress, preventing veteran suicide and supporting veterans’ caregivers. “We can have an actual dialogue about these issues that is straight from the veterans,” Johnson tells the San Jose Mercury News.
The show features special guests who are making a difference in vets’ lives, such as former combat medic Jason Deitch, whose project War Ink documents how veterans express the stories of their service through tattoos.
Every episode introduces a veteran to talk about some aspect of his or her experience. “It may be an event that they’ve experienced or a challenge that they’ve overcome, or even just who they are as people, who they are as service members,” Johnson says.
The hosts encourage veterans, military members and civilians to call in or email with their questions for discussion on the show.
Graves stresses, “It takes a complete community to help reintegrate and support our military. By having a show like this where we can bring guests on and make the public more aware of what veterans’ needs are, the intent is that those needs will be met better.”
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Tag: V.A.
This Army Vet Has Driven 165,000 Miles to Help His Fellow Soldiers Receive Medical Care
Prowers County, Colo. sits in the rural southeast corner of the state on the Kansas border, more than four hours away from Denver. Its remote locale makes it difficult for the elderly and disabled veterans who live there to get to their far-flung medical appointments.
Luckily, these American heroes can count on champion volunteer driver Cliff Boxley, who doesn’t hesitate to set out at 4 a.m. — sometimes up to four days a week — to bring them to their doctors’ appointments in Denver, Pueblo, La Junta and Colorado Springs.
Boxley himself served in the Army from 1972 to 1980 and has kept close to his fellow vets, in part through his serving of four terms on the Board of Governors for the First Cavalry Division Association.
In 2007, he started driving veterans in Prowers County to their medical appointments and has since racked up more than 6,000 volunteer hours — driving a total 165,000 miles in that time.
“I started driving because I got a call from Carol Grauberger one day. She was the person who started this service in Prowers County for the veterans. That was seven years and over 150,000 miles ago,” he tells Russ Baldwin of The Prowers Journal.
For all those hours on the road, Boxley was honored with the 2014 AARP Andrus Award for Colorado, which is given to outstanding volunteers making a difference in the lives of seniors from each state.
“Rural veterans tend to be short-changed when it comes to VA healthcare, with few advocates for them in this region. In the military, we always took care of each other, so this is my way of doing that,” Boxley tells Baldwin.
MORE: This Special Volunteer Has Spent More Than 150,000 Miles Behind The Wheel Helping Vets
This Woman’s Brother Didn’t Receive the Care He Deserved, So Now She’s Working to Help Other Veterans
One North Carolina woman is proving that sometimes no one can look out for you the way a sister can.
Ciat Shabazz’s brother Harry Smith served in the Marines from 1972 to 1975, and when he came home, he expected for the Veterans Affairs (VA) medical service to help him take care of his health. In 2005, he began to suffer stomach pain and a number of other alarming symptoms. Despite repeated visits to the W.G. Hefner VA Medical Center in Salisbury, North Carolina, doctors didn’t take his concerns seriously and sent him home with painkillers or antibiotics instead of ordering an x-ray or colonoscopy.
Finally in 2006, Shabazz took her brother to Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, where doctors diagnosed him with a stomach tumor. His health had diminished during the year he didn’t receive treatment, and two years later, he died.
Shabazz turned her grief into a mission by forming the nonprofit Harry’s Veteran Community Outreach Services, through which she helps vets with their battles with the VA in addition to a variety of other services. On the nonprofit’s website is a link to click: “How can Harry help me?”
Shabazz’s office is always buzzing with phone calls and visitors, and her file cabinets overflow with the paperwork that she’s helping veterans complete. Recently, two Vietnam vets whose claims had been denied by the V.A. came to see her for help in filing appeals. “It looks to me that their records clearly indicate that their injuries are service-related,” Shabazz told Scott Sexton of the Winston-Salem Journal. “The appeals process can take up to two years. It looks as if the VA is dealing with its backlog by just denying the claims and moving them into appeals.” Her hunch may be right: In March 2013, the VA reported a backlog of 611,000 cases, according to Sexton.
Shabazz will help these veterans and all the others who come to her as a way of honoring the memory of her brother. “My brother died because the VA failed to diagnose and treat him in a timely manner,” she said. “As a result of that, I’m in pain. I feel the men and women who served this country deserve to be treated fairly and be compensated for injuries sustained during the time they served our country.”
With Ciat Shabazz on their side, many more veterans are likely to get a fair shake.
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