Journalist Aaron Glantz tells Terry Gross about the backlog of benefits-related paperwork at offices for the Department of Veterans Affairs:
If you go into any VA office you’ll see stacks and stacks of paper, giant manila envelopes going up to the ceiling sometimes into the hallways. The VA inspector general reported that at the office in Winston-Salem, N.C. there was literally so much paperwork in the office that it was inhibiting the structural integrity of the building. The frustrating thing is President Obama and the VA repeatedly say that they’re solving this problem and they’ve spent … half a billion dollars so far to launch this computer system, but then when you look at the reality on the ground you see that it has only been deployed to fewer than half of the offices … and that in those offices a very small number of claims are actually in the computer system. It’s full of bugs. There have been a lot of problems and the agency has not really been able to get it off the ground in a way that it can make a meaningful difference for veterans.
image via juvencioroldan
![In 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War during a firefight at a major Baghdad intersection, Marines fired on three cars that didn’t heed their warnings to stop or turn around. Three members of the Kachadoorian family were killed. Former Marine Lu Lobello doesn’t know if his bullets were responsible for their deaths, but years later, still haunted by the experience, he found a New York Times article by Dexter Filkins, that helped him track down and meet with two survivors. Here’s Filkins, on finding the story:
It was a week after Saddam [Hussein] fell, his government fell, and Baghdad was just total chaos. There was looting everywhere. There were people being killed in the streets. There were buildings on fire — it was just total anarchy.
So I was just driving around trying to figure things out, and I saw this crazy scene in front of a hospital, and this was happening at all the hospitals: There was a giant crowd of people trying to get inside so they could just tear everything apart and basically carry away anything of value … And I watched a doctor come out, you know, a guy in a white lab coat with an automatic rifle, and shoot it over the heads of the crowd to kind of scare them back. And what a scene. So I just pulled over, and I went inside the hospital to see what I could see, not knowing what I would find.
And it was a scene inside the hospital, which was very much like the outside — total pandemonium. Most of the hospital had been looted. There was no electricity. The water was gone. There were people walking around carrying, holding their bleeding limbs. It was extraordinary. And a doctor walked up to me, an Iraqi doctor. I had been there for a while looking around, and he just pulled me aside and said, ‘There’s something I want to show you.’ And I said, ‘OK.’
And I followed him into this ward in the back of the hospital, and there was this woman who turned out to be Nora Kachadoorian, a young woman probably 21 years old at the time. Her mother and her aunt were standing over her in a hospital bed, and her shoulder had been really, really badly wounded.
So I just kind of sat down and talked to them about what had happened, and she — Nora, and her mom, Margaret — they kind of reconstructed this event, what had happened and how it came that she had been shot in the shoulder, and Nora’s two brothers and her father had been killed just a couple days before. And so it was quite a story.
So this was one really sad, traumatic event in this gigantic scene that was happening, this gigantic historical event, so I focused on that for a while, and I somehow managed to find the Marines camped out in the field a couple miles away. And I can’t remember how I managed to get lucky like that, but I found them, and they were all very upset, and they told me what happened from their perspective.
And so I was able to piece together what had happened at this terrible moment at this intersection … And that was April 2003, and I wrote that story, and it stayed with me because the Kachadoorians — they were very sweet people, and what had happened to them was terribly sad. And years went by. I spent almost four years in Baghdad, and I used to ask about them, and I used to look around for them every now and then. I saw a lot of death, but I never found them again and never heard from them again until a couple of months ago, and got a Facebook message from Lu.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcd7jf1gLL1qd9dz2o1_500.jpg "In 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War during a firefight at a major Baghdad intersection, Marines fired on three cars that didn’t heed their warnings to stop or turn around. Three members of the Kachadoorian family were killed. Former Marine Lu Lobello doesn’t know if his bullets were responsible for their deaths, but years later, still haunted by the experience, he found a New York Times article by Dexter Filkins, that helped him track down and meet with two survivors. Here’s Filkins, on finding the story:
It was a week after Saddam [Hussein] fell, his government fell, and Baghdad was just total chaos. There was looting everywhere. There were people being killed in the streets. There were buildings on fire — it was just total anarchy.
So I was just driving around trying to figure things out, and I saw this crazy scene in front of a hospital, and this was happening at all the hospitals: There was a giant crowd of people trying to get inside so they could just tear everything apart and basically carry away anything of value … And I watched a doctor come out, you know, a guy in a white lab coat with an automatic rifle, and shoot it over the heads of the crowd to kind of scare them back. And what a scene. So I just pulled over, and I went inside the hospital to see what I could see, not knowing what I would find.
And it was a scene inside the hospital, which was very much like the outside — total pandemonium. Most of the hospital had been looted. There was no electricity. The water was gone. There were people walking around carrying, holding their bleeding limbs. It was extraordinary. And a doctor walked up to me, an Iraqi doctor. I had been there for a while looking around, and he just pulled me aside and said, ‘There’s something I want to show you.’ And I said, ‘OK.’
And I followed him into this ward in the back of the hospital, and there was this woman who turned out to be Nora Kachadoorian, a young woman probably 21 years old at the time. Her mother and her aunt were standing over her in a hospital bed, and her shoulder had been really, really badly wounded.
So I just kind of sat down and talked to them about what had happened, and she — Nora, and her mom, Margaret — they kind of reconstructed this event, what had happened and how it came that she had been shot in the shoulder, and Nora’s two brothers and her father had been killed just a couple days before. And so it was quite a story.
So this was one really sad, traumatic event in this gigantic scene that was happening, this gigantic historical event, so I focused on that for a while, and I somehow managed to find the Marines camped out in the field a couple miles away. And I can’t remember how I managed to get lucky like that, but I found them, and they were all very upset, and they told me what happened from their perspective.
And so I was able to piece together what had happened at this terrible moment at this intersection … And that was April 2003, and I wrote that story, and it stayed with me because the Kachadoorians — they were very sweet people, and what had happened to them was terribly sad. And years went by. I spent almost four years in Baghdad, and I used to ask about them, and I used to look around for them every now and then. I saw a lot of death, but I never found them again and never heard from them again until a couple of months ago, and got a Facebook message from Lu.")
