Posted on: Sunday, September 2, 2001
A call to all veterans
By John Griffin
I've always been proud of serving in the Navy during and right after World War II. Among other things, that first brought me to the Pacific and Asia, a focal point of my life.
Still, I've never joined what I call Hawai'i's veterans' establishment, which is an active yet diverse subculture in our multiracial society.
Now that may be changing as I, like most veterans, get older. Many of us at least should ponder the place of that subculture, as well as what medical and other benefits are available.
My long uninvolvement is hardly unique. The last census showed some 113,000 veterans in Hawai'i and other American Pacific islands. Yet 75 percent of them don't use federal or state veterans' facilities or belong to the many private veterans' service organizations. (Only 16,000 seek the various veterans' state automobile license plates that are available at no extra cost.)
Reasons are diverse, ranging from ignorance to apathy to feeling unqualified to having a nonjoiner personality to generational hostility about the Vietnam War and other old hang-ups.
Now that may be changing. The 70-year-old U.S. Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) is, with help from the state, actively seeking out vets of all kinds to sign up for its expanded medical plan and other benefits.
As the Marines were looking for "a few good men," now the VA and state are looking for a lot of good men and women who served their country.
Part of this is a race with time. Veterans as a group are getting older and fewer. Nationally, World War II vets are dying off at the rate of maybe 1,200 a day. Vietnam vets, many now older than 50, now outnumber the WWII group. The number of vets in Hawai'i declined by 7,000 in the 1990s, and the death rate is increasing.
Point people here for the VA effort to recruit and help as many vets as possible are two energetic and widely experienced local boys who operate from impressive facilities on the grounds of the Tripler Army Medical Center complex.
One is David Burge, a Kamehameha Schools grad and Vietnam vet with much Washington VA service. His title is director of the Spark M. Matsunaga VA Medical and Regional Center, or VAMROC in the federal lexicon. His area includes Guam, the Northern Marianas and American Samoa and employs more than 600 professional and medical staffers.
The other is Walter Ozawa, a much-traveled retired Army colonel, former businessman and city government Cabinet member. He is director of the state's Office of Veterans Services, which has a relatively small budget and staff on all islands but works closely with the more affluent VA.
Burge stresses their effort to let vets know that federal law was changed a few years ago so that all veterans now qualify for medical benefits, not just those who have service-connected disabilities or are poor.
The veterans center
A promotional video quotes impartial researchers as saying the VA now operates "the best health care delivery system in the nation." This may surprise older folks, who recall VA care that rated much lower, and those who feel that military medical care (such as vets get at Tripler hospital) is not equal to the private sector.
In Hawai'i, VA facilities now includes the year-old separate $65 million Matsunaga outpatient facility, named for the former U.S. senator and outstanding World War II vet.
Adjoining Tripler hospital, the center opened last year and is already attracting thousands more vets with benefits that include $2 prescriptions (soon to go to $7 but still a great bargain from what's called Hawai'i's most modern, automated pharmacy). The center is strong on mental health care.
Burge notes that it's not necessary for vets to give up other medical plans. They can use the VA system as a fill-the-gaps supplement. Call 433-0600 for information.
For what it's worth, I went through the medical sign-up process and found it painless and polite. You are even assigned your own civilian doctor.
The Tripler campus is bigger and more diverse than most Hawai'i people realize, with some 1,600 military personnel and 2,100 civilians working there. There might be enough room for the University of Hawai'i medical school, as well as planned biomedical research facilities.
The VA programs there and elsewhere in the Islands are part of Hawai'i's overall veterans establishment that includes maybe one in 12 people here, plus their families.
Dave Burge notes that federal VA programs — which include medical benefits, cash payments, housing and other benefits — total some $220 million a year going into the economy.
And, of course, the vets' subculture involves more than 200 service organizations.
The range is impressive. It includes the American Legion (with some 20 posts), the Veterans of Foreign Wars (three dozen posts listed), Disabled Veterans, the Desert Storm Veterans' Association, Filipino-American Veterans, Catholic and Jewish organizations, Korean War and Vietnam groups (including a motorcycle club), Pearl Harbor Survivors, several retired service groups, various women vet organizations and ladies auxiliaries, the Society of Military Widows and many more.
And, of course, any list includes the various Nisei veterans groups, which are both part of the establishment yet also almost a subculture of their own: the 100th and 442nd clubs and their sons and daughters groups, an AJA vets council and more.
Group members
Some veterans' groups are fading as members age and memories grow dim, part of the national picture. There are also sometimes generational differences between vets from World War II, Vietnam and the Gulf War era.
Yet despite these divisions, veterans here as elsewhere retain a collective political and social influence, in some cases almost a force, in our society.
Although I sometimes deplore their conservative influence (they probably helped put George W. Bush into the White House), I would still see veterans as a stabilizing factor in our society, one with a memory as well as patriotism.
In the end it comes down to the individual to find one's place in the society of American veterans. In my case, I may not join some vets group, but I may explore the medical and other benefits.
Most of all, however, I want to be part of that honorable society, to validate my choice as a just-turned-17-year-old who quit school to sign up in a war everybody believed in.
John Griffin is the former editor of The Advertiser's editorial pages. He writes frequently for these pages.
