By Scott Malone
BOSTON, March 3 (Reuters) – Five Vietnam War veterans sued
the U.S. military on Monday, saying they were denied some
veterans services after receiving other-than-honorable
discharges for actions that resulted from post-traumatic stress
disorder.
The men, including one who was the victim of a poison gas
attack on his first day in Vietnam and another whose duties
included sorting through body parts of soldiers killed in
combat, called on the military to upgrade the discharges of
veterans of the conflict who suffer from PTSD.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut,
seeks class action status for what it estimates are tens of
thousands of veterans who can now be shown to suffer from PTSD,
a condition not recognized by the military in the 1960s and
early 1970s at the time of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia.
“The military gave these service members other than
honorable discharges based on poor conduct such as unauthorized
absence without leave, shirking, using drugs, or lashing out at
comrades or superior officers,” the lawsuit said. “These
behaviors, however, are typical of those who have recently
experienced trauma and were symptoms of the veterans’
underlying, undiagnosed PTSD.”
A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuit,
which names the secretaries of the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force
as defendants.
PTSD has received wider attention in the United States in
recent years following wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lawsuit
notes that the U.S. armed forces now have procedures in place to
diagnose PTSD and will offer honorable discharges to soldiers,
sailors and airmen who suffer from the condition, but have not
retroactively applied those benefits to Vietnam veterans.
“Isolated and impoverished, they have struggled to cope not
only with their war wounds, but also with the shame of other
than honorable discharges,” the lawsuit said.
The five named plaintiffs are Conley Monk of Connecticut,
George Siders of Georgia and Kevin Marret of Indiana, all former
Marines, and James Cottam of California and James Davis of New
York, both U.S. Army veterans.
Each man was 17-20 years old when he enlisted in 1967-70 and
are all in their 60s today.
The lawsuit grew out of Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal
Services Clinic, a program started in 2010 in which law students
helped veterans navigate the bureaucracy of the Veterans
Administration. Law students prepared the lawsuit on behalf of
the five veterans.
After repeatedly running into cases of veterans with PTSD
who were effectively being denied benefits because of their
condition, the students realized they were facing a bigger
problem, said one of the interns, who goes by the name V
Prentice.
“We realized the VA wasn’t the place to find justice because
there were not consistent and medically appropriate standards
being applied there,” Prentice said.
(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and
Grant McCool)
