I remain immensely proud to have also served our nation as a Marine during the Korean
"conflict," as that brutal war was initially called. During two tours of duty, I was commended for "leadership abilities" and served 1956-58 as a member of the elite Marine security detachment at our American Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.
But I write today not about me, but about my late brother Bob, who passed away last year from accrued health complications that began with his service abroad.
Robert Martin was also a Marine and a combat-decorated veteran of the Vietnam War.
Bob was 1st Battalion 9th Marines — a unit so effective North Vietnamese President Ho Chi
Minh ordered his top general, Vo Nguyen Giap, to use all the resources needed to destroy
the 1/9. As a birthday promise to the communist dictator, the general almost delivered.
The battle of A Shau Valley on Feb. 22, 1969, was inconceivably brutal, so devastating the 1/9 became famously known as the "Walking Dead." My brother Bob and his fellow Marines — being Marines — proudly adopted the moniker.
Every U.S. Marine officer and noncommissioned officer was killed. Bob nearly lost his right eye taking shrapnel to the face. Please pardon Bob's Marine bluntness: He said the explosion
"picked me up like a rag doll and put me on my a**."
Experiences like this create bonds between war veterans — unlike any other bond between
humans. Bob spent the rest of his life honoring those bonds by helping his fellow veterans.
Bob lived in Pompano Beach, Florida, where he served as sergeant-at-arms for American
Legion Post 142 and as adjutant to Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Unit 133.
It was in these capacities that he witnessed so many veterans struggle so mightily with the
Department of Veterans Affairs and where he often helped them file claims with the VA, which is to say nothing of his own individual experiences with the agency.
The VA has long been operating in super slow motion and in antiquated fashion, which is
incredibly unfair to the veterans it is supposed to be serving and incredibly dangerous to their health.
Unfortunately, it's a story that doesn't receive nearly as much attention as it deserves precisely because the story's victims — we veterans — are trained to silently endure everything we encounter.
My brother Bob made it his life's mission to make veterans' lives better, which is exactly what the VA is supposed to be doing. Too often, the agency has fallen short. Thankfully, the VA is making a major move in the right direction.
Most VA hospitals still use a decades' old computer system for veterans' health records. Each
hospital has spent those decades understandably tailoring its system to its needs.
Unfortunately, this has rendered each hospital's system unable to communicate with any other system. Each VA facility is an island. Other VA facilities, Defense Department (DOD) facilities, private facilities — none of them can interact digitally with a veteran's home hospital.
This records isolation far too often leaves veterans unable to get the healthcare they need.
This is antiquated, ridiculous, and dangerous.
Fortunately, Congress acted to dramatically improve this untenable situation for the VA and
the DOD. The new, fully interoperable health records system — MHS GENESIS — has now been successfully implemented by the entirety of the DOD.
And now the VA has begun implementation. Thus far, five of the nation's 84 VA
hospitals have successfully upgraded.
The latest is the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center outside Chicago, which VA Under Secretary for Health Dr. Shereef Elnahal reportedly described as one of the most successful deployments of the system.
"I think in part because of the incredible teamwork between VA and DOD, but also the learnings we've had — significant learnings over the last several years — we think the deployment is going quite well so far," he said.
The fact that the DOD can now begin to digitally interact with the VA is itself a major
improvement. That interoperability will continue to improve as more VA hospitals come online.
These massive computer upgrades take time and are never without hiccups. But with the
entire DOD online — and the VA underway — we are on the downside of the hill. As Dr. Elnahal notes: The more we implement, the easier the rest of the implementations will continue to be.
My late brother Bob spent the last years of his life dealing with the slowness and inaccessibility of the VA for himself and for the veterans whose lives he spent his last years trying to make better and easier.
I am sure Bob would be quite pleased with MHS GENESIS's major improvements to veterans' healthcare. I know I am.
James L. Martin is founder and chairman of the SixtyPlus Seniors Association.
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