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Community Corner

Dispatches From the VA: A Veterans Story Begins

Arthur Vinsel takes us into the Long Beach VA hospital, which has treated vets since World War II, but they sometimes seem forgotten.

 Editor's Note: Today we bring you the first of regular reports from a veteran's view of what is happening to care for our military veterans who seem to return from service and disappear into our community. We wanted to know more about how they're doing, right here in Long Beach.

Driving by the VA hospital in 1962, a teen art major at adjacent Long Beach State, with a red,'49 Mercury convertible and a whole life ahead, I'd see a lone old vet having a smoke at the wall at Seventh and Bellflower.

Had he gone ashore on D-Day or dove his Navy F3F Wildcat in dizzying dogfights with Zeros in the Battle of the Coral Sea? Had he huddled in snow in the Battle of the Bulge?

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I wondered what went on in this 10-story tower, never dreaming how soon I'd learn; how soon I'd be a soldier too, and end up walking those miles of hospital halls and walls for 20-plus years--far longer than in art school.

Major changes are occurring there now: four new buildings, planned for 30 years, are going up, costing over $100 million. But the mission, the daily masses of Department of Veterans Affairs personnel, endless streams of vets, the sights, sounds and stories remain constant.       Some outpatients drive new SUVs with patriotic bumper stickers. Some, homeless and unwashed, push battered bicycles with their belongings in backpacks or grocery baskets. Some are on crutches, electric scooters, or in wheelchairs, with tall antennae flying American Flags.

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Some wear fragments of uniforms with unit insignia, begrimed with time and pride they cling to, showing the world who and what they were in a period that stubbornly defines the lives of many.

The main entrance is closed for renovation, but inside, its stairs and halls still lead to help for men and women from their 20s to 90s who've fought or otherwise served in America's wars.

My favorite was aged 103, (cq) a peppery WW I battlefield surgical nurse, God rest her, who told rowdy tales of Paris and carousing with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, President Teddy Roosevelt's daughter. She was in the VA's tucked-away nursing home and sewed her own fancy hats until age 101, when arthritis finally took her wrinkled fingers captive.

I've haunted its halls as a newspaperman seeking stories, and as a patient seeking care--there isn't a true cure--for prenatal psychic wounds sustained on the battlefield of my mother's womb. They led to lifelong clinical depression, incipient alcoholism and the accompanying scars of life that people like me sustain. We are ill-equipped by fate, or the careless hand of Our Maker, to be heroic in any real way.

I was drafted Dec, 10, 1963, two weeks and 13 days after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, in spite of these flaws revealed to induction personnel. I became an expert rifleman who never went to war.

There have been many heroes here. We may not all have earned the distinctive silver Combat Infantryman's Badge--a long rifle on a field of blue enamel--which has no inscription (for none is needed). The CIB alone signifies a foot soldier baptized in fire, defending America. Purple Hearts for war wounds are more common among patients than the Bronze or Silver stars, the Navy Cross, or the Air Medal.

We served. We share this in common: We answered the country's call to arms. We gave of ourselves, whether to dig trenches, peel potatoes, go silently beneath dark seas in submarines, or shiver in flak-filled skies aboard shrapnel-torn B-24s.

We served. The Long Beach VA Medical Center has evolved over six decades into a modern, HMO-organized health care system that now serves us and often our families or dependents.

The halls and walls--once painted government-issue pea-soup green and beige--are being redone in warm decorator colors with elegantly framed art prints throughout. Architecture once wooden-boxy and barracks-like, takes shape as gracefully as the steel, concrete and glass statuary in the four new buildings. There's still plenty of gauze, tape and Betadine, but also MRI technology, organ transplants and sophisticated cancer diagnostic tools and treatment.


  The Spinal Cord Injury Unit (SCIU) is the most advanced among nearly 200 VA hospitals and larger Medical Centers from Puerto Rico to Guam. Life expectancy for paraplegics in 1945 was five years. Now, it's often decades longer--sometimes a lifetime. Here, amputees get sophisticated prosthetic limbs and driver training for their specially designed handicap vans.

The facility's patients haven't changed, only the wars in which they've fought or filled support roles, and the wounds and diseases they bring home.

Like a murmur of history, sometimes smothered under the clatter of modern health care delivery, our stories fill the halls of Long Beach Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Patch's tour of reporting duty will appear as we return to the VA tower on the hill, to shine a light on some of the 45,000 Americans locally--coming from Orange County north to the Long Beach Freeway--who are treated here yearly and helped with the fall-out of serving their country. We welcome your questions and thoughts as we proceed to share these dispatches from the home front.

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