VA Secretary Eric Shinseki's chief of staff will leave that post Sunday, saying "my wife and I decided it was time to retire," but the Department of Veterans Affairs honcho exits amid the sound of Capitol Hill criticism. 

John Gingrich, a retired Army colonel who commanded a field artillery battalion during the Gulf War, told VA staffers in a note that after 37 years of combined military and federal service, he had discussed his "transition" with Shinseki earlier this year, as the Obama administration began its second term. During that conversation, Gingrich and Shinseki "agreed to ensure a smooth transition and to set the conditions for an interim chief of staff, which will be completed by March 31," he wrote. 

"Over the last four years, I have had the tremendous honor to serve the Nation's Veterans, their families, and survivors as VA's Chief of Staff," Gingrich wrote to VA employees. "I will always be grateful for the opportunity that the Secretary afforded me. After a long career in the Army, and after four years of balancing my dedication to the department with my other responsibilities, it is time for me to shift my focus."

Word of his departure comes six days after members of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America met with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough about the chronically long claims-benefits backlog, which is managed by VA. The leader of that veteran's group, Paul Rieckhoff, called on President Obama to find an immediate fix for the backlog, adding the time had come "to go above the VA" on the problem. 

'Lack of judgement'
Also last week, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told NBC News "the president needs to take a personal interest" in the backlog. Miller, additionally, had called for Gingrich to resign in October after revelations surfaced detailing improper VA spending. Last fall, Miller condemned Gingrich’s approval of an $8 million budget for a pair of VA human resources conferences held in Florida during 2011. 

“Even though I deeply respect John Gingrich’s time in uniform and public service, the fact remains that his lack of judgment in approving a number of lavish VA events cost taxpayers more than $6 million and cast a lingering shadow over the department’s reputation," Miller said Tuesday in a statement.

"The task at hand for the department is finding a replacement who will avoid repeating Gingrich’s past mistakes," Miller said. "In addition to being a good steward of taxpayer dollars, Gingrich’s successor must be willing to have an honest conversation about the challenges VA faces and its ability to overcome those challenges — qualities that are absolutely essential for every VA leader to have.” 

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Traumatic brain injuries sustained by more than 200,000 U.S. troops may be fueling the military’s suicide crisis, according to a letter co-signed by 53 congressional members who are seeking additional data to investigate the new theory.

In the letter, sent Tuesday to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, the lawmakers urged both agencies to provide Congress with a raft of figures, including the number of Iraq and Afghanistan service members and veterans who committed suicide or tried to end their lives after being brain injured by the detonation of an improvised explosive device — “the weapon of choice” in both wars.

“Evidence has suggested that blast injuries, including but not limited to those causing damage to vision or hearing, can have a severe psychological impact ... that can play a major contributing role in suicides,” read the bi-partisan letter.

Between November 2011 and October 2012, there were more than 15,000 IED attacks against U.S. service members in Afghanistan, and 58 percent of all coalition casualties during that span were caused by the hidden bombs, the letter states.

At least three veterans groups, including the Blinded Veterans Association, are backing the congressional push to — as the letter to DOD and VA states — “get a better understanding of the connection between blast injuries and suicide.”

“I’ve talked to a lot of neurologists, military neurosurgeons and trauma surgeons who have all started to ponder if the IEDs that have caused the TBIs are the real cause of the suicides, versus the traditional approach that suicides are all caused by the psychological stresses of combat,” said Thomas Zampieri, head of government relations for the Blinded Veterans Association.

“Let’s collect more information and maybe the epidemiologists will find a way to unlock some of this mystery: Are military suicides actually more related to the brain injuries? I think there may be a big connection,” added Zampieri, who served as a Vietnam-era Army medic. “As the numbers of TBIs go up, the numbers of suicides continue to go up.”

The portion of U.S. service members who sustained TBIs increased each year from 2001 to 2011 — with a total of 266,810 brain injuries diagnosed in American troops between 2000 and 2012, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, part of the DOD. More than 80 percent of those injuries were not deployment-related cases, with many occurring amid crashes of privately owned cars and military vehicles. 

Army soldiers account for the vast majority of diagnosed TBI cases, and those injuries range from “mild” (a concussion) to “severe.” Within the Army, the suicide rate among active-duty members has risen from 9 per 100,000 in 2001 to nearly 23 per 100,000 in 2011, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

During that same span, according to the DOD’s brain injury center, the number of annual TBI diagnoses among American troops has ballooned from 11,580 in 2001 to 32,609 in 2011 — an increase of 182 percent.

“What is significant is that we are looking at a potential paradigm shift of significant proportion if the link between low-level TBI from IEDs emerges,” said retired Army Col. Bob Morris, founder of the Global Campaign against IEDs.

“The current automatic approach is to connect everything to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and look at it all as psychological when it may be a physiological,” Morris added. 

The lawmakers additionally asked the DOD and VA to supply "specific autopsy findings (of service members or veterans) potentially indicative of prior TBI." The members said they want to know whether such post-mortems found "chronic traumatic encephalopathy", which has been detected in the brains of a number of NFL players who recently committed suicide. 

Numerous Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been diagnosed with both TBIs and PTSD, as well as with hearing loss — the most common disability among the men and women who served in those wars. 

"There is no higher priority for VA than the mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation," said a VA spokesman, responding to the congressional letter. "Under the leadership of Secretary Shinseki, VA has made significant progress in providing increased access to mental health care services and strengthening our suicide prevention efforts, but there is more work to do. VA is committed to providing all Veterans the care and benefits they have earned and deserve.”

A Pentagon spokeswoman said Hagel "responds directly to correspondence received" and that it would inappropriate for her comment on the letter. 

Rep. Dan Benishek, R-Mich., a surgeon who worked at a VA medical center for 20 years, led the effort to collect congressional signatures for the letter to Hagel and Shinseki.

“Far too many of our veterans and military personnel have taken their own life after bravely serving our nation. Frankly, it’s tragic and unacceptable,” Benishek said in a statement Tuesday. “I am hopeful that by working together we can make sure our guys and gals in the military and the VA have the support they need to recover from the damaging psychological effects of war.”

"There is particular evidence linking suicide to those wounded by IEDs," added Rep. Richard Hanna, R-N.Y. "It is my hope that through additional research we will be able to identify and reverse this painful trend. One suicide is too many and we should do all we can to address this as quickly as possible."

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Nearly half of eligible ex-service members who served in Iraq or Afghanistan are snubbing free, federal health care they earned in uniform because many harbor “huge mistrust” of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, contends a leading veterans advocacy group.

About 1.5 million men and women who served in those wars have since separated from the U.S. military. Among those eligible to access VA medical help, only 55 percent of veterans have done so through the third quarter of 2012, VA figures show.

“It’s because the VA has a branding problem, an image problem,” said Tom Tarantino, chief policy officer for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of American (IAVA), which has more than 200,000 members.

For many younger veterans, Tarantino said, the issue that has most sullied the VA’s reputation is the average time it takes to complete the disability-compensation claims submitted by wounded veterans. The average wait for that money has grown to 272.3 days, or about nine months, a 10-day increase from early December, according a federal website.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki last year vowed to shrink the so-called “VA backlog” to 125 days by 2015 as the agency finishes transitioning to a digital processing system.

“Any time we ever hear about the VA, what do we hear? That the backlog is astronomically high. Or, that the VA is late in providing GI Bill (tuition) checks. It’s not an antagonistic relationship. It’s: ‘Oh, there goes the VA again; they still don’t have it together.’ Meanwhile, the VA is pathologically incapable of telling its own story,” said Tarantino, who uses a VA medical center. The former Army captain spent time in Iraq, earning the Bronze Star. “The problem is there is a huge mistrust of the VA.

“And what’s unsettling is the VA is an outstanding health care system. But they have not done a good job to explain to the American people what it is they do or offer,” Tarantino added. “This is business 101. You can have the greatest product in the world but if people don’t know about or trust your product, you have a bad product.”

Asked if Tarantino’s assessment is fair, a VA spokesman responded to NBC News with an email listing the agency’s latest work: bolstering mental-health staffers by 49 percent, opening 80 additional clinics, enticing clients through social media, and launching initiatives that allow ex-troops to chat with doctors online or talk with “peer-to-peer specialists” with combat experience.

“Although we have made many improvements, there is still work to do,” read a response emailed by Mark Ballesteros, a VA spokesman. He also cited the VA’s shift to “a new model of health care” called Patient Aligned Care Teams (PACT), a “patient-centered, team-based” and “data-driven” system.

Advanced tactics, modern buildings and clever acronyms aside, the VA faces a long, tough sell with its youngest audience, according to interviews with several post-9/11 veterans. 

Pete Chinnici, 26, personifies the type of a public-relations damage VA officials must patch before forging deeper inroads within the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran communities.

After completing Marine Corps duty in Iraq from 2005 to 2007, Chinnici applied for VA health care in Phoenix. He’d been diagnosed with post-combat stress and hearing loss. But six months after stepping inside the pipeline, Chinnici said a VA employee told him his entire medical file was missing and that he’d need to start over.

“After having two friends who went through the VA process – it took one 9 months and the other almost a year (to gain entry) – and then being told they’d lost the paperwork, I never went back,” Chinnici said.

Three time zones east, another Marine, Alex Hill, visited the VA medical center in Brockton, Mass. after exiting Iraq in 2009, he said, “without a scratch.”

“The VA just wasn’t for me: the unmotivated staff members, the piles of bureaucracy,” said Hill, 26. “I also have objections with how they treat veterans by solving every problem they come across with a bottle of pills.”

The VA hopes to win back veterans like Hill and Chinnici, in part, via its 151 Facebook pages (which have more than 623,000 combined “likes”), its 581 posted YouTube videos, its 75 Twitter feeds, and its VAntage Point blog, which offers 500-plus articles authored by VA employees, veterans and family members, said VA spokesman Ballesteros.

“We’re reaching out to provide veterans with more options for care and more access to health care providers than ever,” Ballesteros wrote in the emailed statement. “Now patients can choose to come in for a face-to-face appointment with their doctor or avoid driving long distances, and instead interact with a provider through our (secure, online) telehealth programs.”

More than 380,000 veterans received “telehealth” services during the 2011 fiscal, he added.

But on the primary VA Facebook page that Ballesteros touted, there are many unhappy hints of the agency’s steep climb to win fresh hearts. On Jan. 19, Janet Woodworth Jennings posted there: “Hire VA doctors who actually care and know what they are doing.” Her comment was promptly “liked” by Luanne Pruesner-Van De Velde, who added: “I AGREE...Hire EMPLOYEES that care about Vets - Period!!!”

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Gregory Bull / AP, file

Homeless veteran Jerome Belton poses for a portrait at a homeless shelter in San Diego on September 19, 2012. A former Marine, Belton now lives on the streets in San Diego.

The latest report card on the Obama Administration’s push to end veteran homelessness by 2015 arrived Monday: the number of ex-service members sleeping in parks, under bridges or in public spaces declined by 7 percent this year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) confirmed.

But other advocates — including a small cadre of soldiers who use their spare time and combat skills to track, clothe and house veterans forced to live outside on home soil — say they still are seeing an "alarming" rise in younger homeless veterans, many of whom fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

HUD released Monday afternoon a full 2012 count of homeless Americans, including a fresh tally of homeless veterans: "On a single night in January 2012, 62,619 veterans were homeless," the agency said. Veteran homelessness has now been reduced by 17.2 percent since January 2009, the agency said. 

Before that report was made public, the head the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) said a fortified federal effort to house more disabled and low-income veterans is working.

“There’s been a big increase in resources to make sure it does decrease,” said Nan Roman, NAEH's president. “There’s been a lot of investment in newer strategies around housing — programs that are really solution-oriented.”

One of those approaches, Roman said, is a $60 million initiative by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that offers prompt financial help to ex-military members on the brink of eviction — or those recently turned out of their apartments. In fact, the VA estimates that its Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program will have helped the 42,000 veteran families by the end of 2012, according to an agency spokesman. 

“Sometimes people get laid off, can’t pay their rent, and lose their apartment. It’s a high cliff to get back into an apartment because you have to pay the first and last month’s rent plus deposits,” Roman said. “In most places, that’s $2,000 or $3,000, minimum. If you had $2,000 or $3,000, you probably wouldn’t have gotten evicted in the first place. So this program helps with that sort of thing.

"There’s been a lot of determination at VA to make the homeless veteran numbers go down," she added. "I’d be very disappointed if they don’t go down, frankly."

AP Photo / Gregory Bull

Veteran Arthur Lute holds his 5-month-old son Evan in his one-bedroom apartment in Chula Vista, Calif. on Oct. 9, 2012. Lute's arduous journey from his days as a U.S. Marine to his nights sleeping on the streets illustrates the challenge the Obama administration faces to make good on its promise to end homelessness among veterans by 2015.

VA spokesman Josh Taylor said the agency already had gauged critical gains as the rate of veteran homelessness dropped by 12 percent from 2010 to 2011. He cites, in part, SSVF – “our new homeless prevention and rapid re-housing program” which during the 2011 fiscal year helped house more than 35,000 people, including nearly 9,000 children, Taylor said.

A second federal program – one forged through a HUD-VA partnership – gives “eligible veterans” vouchers to pay for stays "in a residence of their own,” Taylor said, adding that nearly 40,000 veterans have accessed that program during the past two years.

According to a HUD report issued in December 2011, there were 67,495 homeless veterans in this country - down from 76,329 one year earlier. The same report projected the homeless veteran population would shrink to 45,797 during 2012. 

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In its 2013 budget request, the VA asked for $333 million in additional funding – an increase of 33 percent over 2012 – so that it could provide “specific programs to prevent and reduce homelessness," the VA said in making the pitch last February. The overall VA budget request for 2013 totaled $140.3 billion.

“We have made good progress, but there is more work to do,” Taylor said in an email to NBC News. “Our homeless initiatives are based on a strategy of rescue and prevention.

“The unprecedented effort under way, and the unprecedented resources being dedicated to it, have played a major part in the reduction of the veteran homeless population over the past couple of years. That work is ongoing and we expect it will continue to show progress,” Taylor added. 

Late last week, during the 2012 National Rural Housing Conference held in Washington, D.C, experts reported veteran homelessness is growing in many rural areas, in part because young men and women from small-town America are 21.5 percent more likely to join the military than their urban counterparts.

“Veterans’ homelessness isn’t going to end unless we work together,” said Kelly Caffarelli, president of The Home Depot Foundation, a conference sponsor. During the past two years, the Home Depot has donated more than $30 million to veteran housing issues and homelessness and recently announced it will be contributing another $50 million to those same issues over the next three years.

“We need the government, community-based groups, foundations, and the private sector to take up this challenge. Our veterans deserve nothing less than a safe place to call home,” Caffarelli said.

 'They are coming back messed up'

In Southern California, where Army veteran Joe Leal routinely leads a handful of active-duty and former service members on personal missions to find and help homeless veterans living “beneath bridges and in canyons,” Leal said he has encountered thousands of post-9/11 veterans without homes.

“It’s alarming,” said Leal, an Iraq War veteran who founded the Vet Hunters Project in 2010. His group, funded by private donations, has worked to place more than 2,600 veterans in temporary or permanent homes, he said.

“We house more Iraq and Afghanistan and younger veterans than older veterans. It used to be where a homeless vet was typically about 60 years old. Now, they’re 22 years old,” Leal said. “And a lot of them are female veterans who have witnessed combat. They are coming back messed up. They are coming back homeless.”

Monica Figueroa, 22, was an Army parachute rigger who served from 2009 to 2011, spending time in Germany, performing test jumps out of planes. She has a 17-month-old son and is married to Sgt. Jason Snyder, a 30-year-old Army reservist, who served four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Snyder was still overseas, Figueroa couldn’t hold a job and couldn’t find a home for herself or her son. She slept in a car for several weeks near Los Angeles, she said.

“When we met her, she was living in a garage where they repair vehicles,” Leal said. “She was bathing in a sink where they wash car parts. Monica was just overwhelmed. She joined the military when she was young. She got out. She had a child. She was used to the fast pace of military life. And then, in getting out, the transition (preparation she received from the Army) was lacking.

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters, file

Army veteran Tara Eid, 50, writes an essay at New Directions women's house, a long-term transitional program for female veterans dealing with issues of homelessness, trauma and addiction, in Los Angeles, Calif., on November 18, 2011. Eid has seven children and was homeless many times over a period of 10 years.

“A lot of the active-duty people are getting out even though they don’t have a plan” for post-military life, he added. “They’re so fed-up after five to six deployments. They say, ‘I don’t care what I do when I get out, I’ll just figure it out when I get out, but I know I don’t want to do this any more.’ That’s what I’m running into.”

The Vet Hunters Project helped Figueroa, her son and husband recently move into a furnished temporary apartment in Loma Linda, Calif., and enter a program that provides them financial counseling to prepare for an independent life.

“Before this, my living situation was very unstable, moving from one house to another. Just jumping. Just living anywhere I could, with family members, friends, anybody who could help me for two weeks or so,” Figueroa said. “I had to leave my son with my mother — there was no room for anyone else where they were living. So I stayed in a car that my dad owned.

“The thing that made it very rough was I had no idea of the benefits I had. All I knew about was the GI Bill. Otherwise, no one ever explained anything else to me (about post-military benefits). I was not prepared for the transition.”

It’s not uncommon, in fact, for the Vet Hunters to come across Army reservists who are still serving the country but who have no home, Leal said.

“These guys show up for service looking sharp,” Leal said. “Then they leave at the end of the day and go sleep in a Chevy.” 

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The average wait time for wounded veterans to see their disability-compensation claims completed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has now grown to 262 days — or nearly nine months — according to a federal website and three watchdog groups.

VA Secretary Eric Shinseki earlier this year vowed to shrink the so-called “VA backlog” to 125 days by 2015 as the agency finishes transitioning to a digital processing system.

Despite that promise, the claims-completion gap has expanded steadily during the past year. The VA’s benefits-aspiration web page shows the average claims-processing time was 223 days in October 2011, 246 days in April 2012, 257 days in July and 260 days in August. In fact, the backlog has doubled in size since 2008, congressional members report.

The agency called its widening claims backlog "unacceptable" but said it is taking steps to try to fix that problem.

"VA has completed a record-breaking 1 million claims per year the last three fiscal years. Yet too many Veterans have to wait too long to get the benefits they have earned and deserve," the VA said in a statement emailed to NBC News on Tuesday. "That’s unacceptable, and VA is building a strong foundation for a paperless, digital disability claims system — a lasting solution that will transform how we operate and eliminate the claims backlog. This paperless technology is being deployed to 18 regional offices in 2012, and it will reach all 56 VA Regional Offices by the end of 2013 to help deliver faster, better decisions for Veterans."

The move to paperless processing "will ensure we achieve" Shinseki's 2015 goal, the VA said, adding: "Fixing this decades-old problem isn’t easy, but we have an aggressive plan that is on track to succeed." In 2011, VA paid nearly $5 billion in compensation to wounded veterans, it reported. 

The VA cited four reasons for what it calls "claims growth": 

• Increased demand — "the result of 10 years of war" and due to many veterans returning "with severe, complex injuries";  
• in 2010, Shinseki decided the VA claims system should include the recognition of medical conditions related to Agent Orange exposure (240,000 claims were processed in 2011 for such exposure) as well as "Gulf War Illness"; 
• approximately 45 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are currently seeking compensation for injuries related to their service — and that marks a "historical high" for the VA following wars. Those claims include an average of eight to 10 medical issues per claim, more than double the Vietnam era;
• the VA says it is doing "better outreach" to veterans "to educate them about the benefits they’ve earned."

Still, the thickening backlog drew fire from veterans advocates and from Capitol Hill.

“These delays are indicative of a out-dated system," said Tom Tarantino, chief policy officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group representing more than 200,000 veterans.

"The Department of Veterans Affairs promises year after year that they'll reduce the backlog. Instead, it's gotten worse. While the reasons for this are complicated, the fact remains that these continuous delays greatly impact the daily lives of veterans who are waiting for care and benefits," Tarantino said. "Veterans deserve better.”

Last Wednesday, during a contentious hearing examining the VA’s spending and larger accountability, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told VA Deputy Secretary Scott Gould “the truce is over” between Congress and Gould's agency. Miller became visibly frustrated during the hearing after Gould repeatedly said he could not or would not answer specific questions from committee members on spending and the agency’s internal discipline over admitted ethical missteps.

Told Tuesday that the claims backlog has nearly reached nine-months long on average, Miller said the wait time is another example of VA’s failure to keep its promises to veterans.

Click here for more military-related coverage from NBC News.

“VA continues to tout its disability claims transformation plan to clean up the backlog by 2015. Without any details of the plan ... which continues to increase on a daily basis — and which has doubled in the past four years — I remain highly suspicious of any plan that claims to be able to reverse the problems in this process overnight,” Miller said in an email to NBC News.

“As Congress has said for many years now, VA needs to look at the root of the problem of the backlog — training, management, oversight, and technology — and work forward from those four points to address this problem,” Miller added. “Quick fixes will no longer work, and will continue to make veterans wait months, sometimes years, on end for an answer.”

While the VA said its pilot paperless program has cut average processing times from 250 days to 119 days at those test offices, veterans in seven other cities were still waiting — as of October — longer than one year, on average, for their disability claims to complete their trek through the VA pipeline, according to the VA’s online chart.

Those cities — and the average claims-processing times in their VA regional offices are: Waco, Texas (418 days), Los Angeles (394 days), New York City (380 days), Chicago (378 days), Oakland (377 days), Indianapolis (373 days), and Phoenix (365 days), according to the VA site.

In October 2011, no veterans were waiting more than a year, on average, for their disability claims to be processed, the VA site shows. In Waco, the average wait during October 2011 was 309 days. That means the backlog has increased in that city by 35 percent during the past year.

“Despite promises of an improvement, veterans wait about three months longer than they did in May 2011. In fact, the VA's own numbers show the average wait time veterans face has gotten longer every single month over the last year and a half,” said Aaron Glantz, a reporter with the Berkeley, Calif.-based Center for Investigative Reporting.

The group keeps its own map, titled "Waiting For Help," which shows the backlog's highs and lows in individual cities. According to CIR's tally, 821,804 veterans now are waiting for their claims to be processed by the VA. That's actually a scrap of good news: it marks a slight decrease from in the number in that queue as compared to Aug. 25, when 899,000 veterans had compensation and pension claims pending. 

CIR describes itself as “the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization.” Glantz acknowledges a personal interest in the backlog that stems from his years (2003 to 2005) working as a journalist in Iraq.

“Ever since I returned home, I've been deluged with phone calls and emails from veterans who say they returned home from the war to face a battle with the government for the benefits they earned,” Glantz said. “I've seen veterans fall into suicide and homelessness while they wait.

“Today, I received a call from a female Iraq war veteran who is living on the street with her 20-month daughter,” he added. “She has been waiting for two years for the VA to rule on her disability claim for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

In a related development, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held an oversight hearing Tuesday to examine what it dubbed the tasks of “wading through warehouses of paper” and “the challenges of transitioning veterans records to paperless technology.” 

During the hearing, Rep. Jon Runyan, R-N.J., chairman of the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs, called for tighter collaboration between the VA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Runyan said improving those communications would smooth the transition for veterans now exiting the armed services. 

“VA has a statutory duty to assist a claimant in obtaining certain records. Accordingly, it is important that we work together to ensure that VA is able to communicate both effectively and efficiently with both the National Archives and DoD to comply with this duty,” Runyan said. 

The subcommittee added in a news release after the hearing: “It was recently brought to light that DoD’s poor record-keeping habits have in turn had a negative impact on VA’s ability to fully carry out its responsibility to assist veterans in obtaining records from their time in service.” 

Said Runyan: “Issues pertaining to the thoroughness of DoD’s record keeping have recently received media attention in light of evidence that some units were not properly documenting in-service events, such as combat-related incidents. This has been a source of significant frustration for many veterans who file claims with VA and are dependent on such documentation to substantiate their claims.”

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Courtesy John Bennett

John Bennett, shot by a sniper while serving with the Army in Iraq, is one of many wounded veterans to go hunting with the Sportsmen's Foundation for Military Families. He bagged a nine-foot alligator in Florida.

In the swamps and river bottoms near his Florida ranch, outfitter Danny SantAngelo has spent 20 years guiding veterans — some without arms, legs or sight — back to soothingly familiar country: in the field, stalking live prey, armed with weapons.

Often, such group hunting excursions were contract jobs that SantAngelo accepted from what he calls "these big, million-dollar-a-year projects for wounded soldiers."

"They take these soldiers and veterans, gather them up from different areas, and take them to a facility like mine where we’d house them, host them and hunt them for a few days," SantAngelo said. "A bunch of soldiers getting together in a camp again, sitting in the woods with guns, and maybe a lot of them even drink too much, so to say. And at the end, they’d high-five each other, hoot and holler and pull out of here.

"We've always donated 100 percent of our services to help these groups. And, of course, I never said no. I always said yes, and did it."

For SantAngelo, however, that changed three years ago when, during one outing, he spotted a veteran hunter with tears in his eyes.

“He was having a tough time. He confessed to me he couldn’t believe he’d been so selfish and had come. He’d been gone several years on tours, fighting in combat. He’d only been home a couple of months. But now he was off again with a bunch of soldiers, sitting around this campfire,” SantAngelo said. “He’d felt like he’d walked off and left his family all over again. Well, I began to see that for these guys, there’s really no benefit afterward.”

As large, organized hunting trips for veterans proliferate in popularity, SantAngelo is changing the rules, at least in his corner of the swamp. He's launched the Sportsmen’s Foundation for Military Families, escorting combat veterans — and their spouses, children, parents or siblings — onto land he leases for hunting to spend a few days, as he sees it, of badly needed family bonding.

He’s executing his mission, he said, on a sparse, nonprofit budget, guiding one family per week. His two-person operation — it’s just SantAngelo and his wife, Carla — is headquartered on their ranch along the Kissimmee River in central Florida, about 30 miles north of Lake Okeechobee.

“You don’t come here with a couple of war buddies. You come here to be with your family,” SantAngelo said. “We try to support the people who suffered back home while their hero was away.

“So many of these vets go on different hunting trips all over the country. But I see a lot of bad things going on out there through these big nonprofit groups," SantAngelo said. "A lot of these guys are on medications (for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). They get there with a group of guys they don’t even know. They go to drinking while on medications. Not good. So you have veterans researching all these free hunting trips that are out there for them. But those trips have nothing to do with their families. And what do they really get out of that? They go home and have all the same problems.”

Iraq veteran John Bennett, 41, has been on several of those group-hunting expeditions, despite using a wheelchair since a sniper shot him in 2005 while he was on patrol north of Baghdad, acknowledging: “Those trips are wonderful, don’t get me wrong.”

But two years ago, Bennett personally saw SantAngelo's vision: hunting plus family may equal better days. He headed to Florida to track alligators at night with one of SantAngelo’s hired guides. For that visit, Bennett had hoped to bring his daughter, but she couldn’t attend. Instead, Bennett spent time with another veteran and his family, he said, riding in a pontoon boat, armed with a bow and arrows, searching for his intended catch.

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“It’s really neat to be able to include your family, especially your kids, so they can see that dad can get out there and still do the things he used to do,” said Bennett, who bagged a nine-foot gator. SantAngelo later shipped him the meat. (If a veteran-client's spouse or children prefer not to hunt, they can fish or canoe or ride horses while at SantAngelo's ranch.)

“The military was such a big part of my life,” added Bennett, a former infantry soldier who joined the Montana Army National Guard in 1991. He lives in Cascade, Mont. “Even if I had not been a hunter before, just knowing that I could still shoot a firearm and not be completely freaked out by it was good.”

Indeed, SantAngelo contends hunting and fishing can serve as a form of rustic therapy for combat veterans from all wars, a return to some of the tactics and tools they once knew intimately, but now utilized in a safe, quiet environment.

For that reason, SantAngelo’s foundation foots the bill to bring in and then guide ex-military members with an array of devastating wounds.

Blind veterans who come to his ranch use a double-stocked rifle, sharing the weapon with a guide who — when the prey is in the scope — whispers to inch the barrel slightly up or down, left or right, then instructs the best moment to squeeze the trigger. Veterans without arms can blow into a special tube, which actives the trigger of a rifle. Veterans without full use of extremities use laptops and joysticks to aim their weapons and fire at wild boar, alligators, coyotes and turkeys. SantAngelo also takes his clients on the river to fish for trophy bass.

Meshing outdoors sports with the tricky transition from the battlefield to home front is a concept the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also has adopted. VA officials have seen the same behaviors SantAngelo has witnessed: that many large hunts arranged for veterans morph into drinking parties and families are never invited.

“He’s exactly right,” said Jose Llamas, the community and public affairs officer for the VA's National Veterans Sports Programs. “These other organizations put on weekend trips where it’s hunting, camping, fishing. But it’s drinking, and there’s no follow-up at the end.”

In addition to hosting adaptive sports summits across the country where family members are encouraged to join disabled veterans in surfing, cycling, skiing, fishing and target shooting, VA recreational therapists — via various VA medical centers — routinely take local veterans fishing, Llamas said.

“Hunting is not one of those things you can do in every community,” he added. “But from our Paralympic grant program, we just gave $25,000 to a VA hospital in Grand Junction, Colo., to get the equipment needed to take the (disabled) veterans out hunting.

“What we do is incorporate (hunting, fishing and other sports) into the health-life plan of the veteran,” Llamas said. “The secretary of the VA, Eric Shinseki, is very adamant about this being not just one weekend out of the year, not a vacation, but a step in the right direction of the veteran becoming more productive in the community by living a healthy lifestyle, by being an example to other veterans.”

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Members of Congress angrily vowed Wednesday to crank its investigative floodlights far brighter on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, accusing agency leaders of dodging direct questions on travel and conference spending, failing to disclose a gathering in Las Vegas, and exhibiting “total incompetence” as veterans wait in record-long lines for medical help.

During a hearing before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said that one day after he and VA Deputy Secretary Scott Gould had held a “civil conversation” on the same issues, Gould’s vague responses to the panel's precise and lengthy interrogation “raised the hackles on the back of my neck.”

“The truce is over. It lasted less than 24 hours. Expect much more oversight from this committee,” Miller said. “Expect more questions from this committee because they’re coming — in great volumes.”

The fiery, two-hour hearing was primarily held to examine how the VA plans to prevent future, exorbitant spending lapses like the estimated $9 million the agency doled out for two Orlando gatherings in 2011. During those conferences for VA human resources personnel, the VA invested, for example, $84,000 for VA-branded promotional items, including pens, highlighters and hand sanitizers, according to Office of the Inspector General. But at the close of the hearing, Gould complained the committee’s line of questioning had devolved into “a slap at the employees who work at VA every day.”

Miller interrupted Gould.

“No, no, no, no,” Miller said, his voice rising. “Don’t you ever accuse a Democrat or a Republican on this committee of slapping any of the hardworking 300,000 VA employees. Rest assured, it’s the leadership that we’re concerned with.”

Earlier, Gould opened by describing the VA’s beefed-up oversight to block other Orlando-type escapades, which he called: “abdications of responsibility, failures of judgment, and serious lapses of stewardship.”

Those tightened measures include requirements that all VA conference planning now include “a detailed business case analysis.” And, from this point, any VA gatherings estimated to cost $20,000 to $100,000 must receive prior approval by a VA under secretary or assistant secretary, conferences estimated to cost $100,000 to $500,000 must be approved by the deputy secretary, and conferences costing more than $500,000 “are generally not permitted,” he said. 

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But the hearing quickly turned into larger prosecution of VA leadership by the committee. The members complained about what they called the VA’s chronic lack of responses — or its fuzzy answers — to dozens of congressional requests for information on items ranging from VA spending to its internal discipline of employees caught making ethical errors. 

For example, on Aug. 16, Congress asked the VA to disclose how much it spent during 2011 on conferences. According to Miller, the VA first reported the price of those events was $20 million but later amended that figure to more than $100 million. At Wednesday’s hearing, VA Chief Financial Officer Todd Grams testified that the events cost, in total, $86.5 million.

Miller asked Gould if he “or anyone at the table” had been ordered to withhold information from Congress. Gould responded: “No.” Miller then blasted VA leaders for failing to answer 75 specific congressional questions.

“Unfortunately, lengthy delays or not responding to requests at all has become normal for VA,” Miller said. “We clearly have a problem here.”

The Orlando conferences had served as the initial spark for ramped up congressional scrutiny of the agency. But several members said the VA’s lack of answers had left them increasingly irked — and several members sounded so Wednesday, their voices sometimes breaking or shaking, including Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.

“It’s been 106 days since I asked some of these questions. I have asked for: a list of the attendees at the July 2011 conference in Orlando; a list of attendees at the August 2011 conference in Orlando; a list of individuals involved in planning these conferences; the names and titles of employees who are being held accountable. Why have you refused to answer all of these?” Huelskamp asked Gould. “Those were all ignored. When will you find it out — in another 106 days? These are simple questions.

“This is an issue of competence, the failure to either know the answers or refuse to answer them,” Huelskamp added. “It’s about a gentleman in Syracuse, Kan., who had to drive 522 miles to the nearest VA hospital. In that time, you could fly folks to Orlando for a great conference. And you won’t even tell the American people who attended? Either you’re trying to hide something or it’s total incompetence.”

In response, Gould testified that VA leaders “understand we have an obligation to respond to Congress.” He further testified that, following the many information requests from Congress, the VA has supplied 35,000 documents and answered 6,000 policy questions and attended 100 hearings and 1,100 staff briefings.

“Sir,” Gould added, “you can sit here and shake your head, but the reality is there’s a tremendous amount of information that flows to this committee and others on a daily basis by a very competent team.”

But Congress has grown so impatient with the VA’s silence on the issues, Miller said, he and other congressional members and their staffs have begun perusing VA’s Facebook and Twitter accounts to try to independently piece together a more complete list of the VA conferences and training seminars.

Miller discovered, for example, posts on the VA Facebook page about a VA senior management conference at Las Vegas' Venetian Hotel in August 2010. That event included teachings on “yoga, massage therapy (and) acupuncture,” according to the VA Facebook post, which showed pictures of people — ostensibly VA employees — getting massages. Beneath those images, someone commented: “Sounds like my kind of conference!” That observation was followed by a comment posted by the administrator of the Facebook page for VA’s Veterans Canteen Services: “It’s amazing how immediate the results are!”

Miller asked Gould why the VA had not mentioned the Vegas conference when Congress had requested a full accounting of all VA conferences since 2005.

Gould testified that he had no explanation other than the VA has hosted thousands of conferences since 2005.

That post on the VA Facebook page was removed shortly after the hearing. 

“The perception out there, if you’re a taxpayer just barely getting by ... is you’ve got one set of rules for people in government, and (another set for) the rest of us out there in the real world, said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn. “And perception is reality.

"It’s embarrassing for me to go home and try to explain to people why their money is being wasted,” added Roe, a physician. “I have veterans who come up and say, ‘I can’t get into a hospital down here, Doc. I’m in a line 40 miles long.’ And then they show me this plush event that occurred in Orlando. It’s very hard to explain that to people. It’s embarrassing for the 300,000 hardworking VA people who are then tagged with this.” 

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Congressional members charged with overseeing the interests of former American service members have asked the Department of Veterans Affairs for a briefing to explain why its "work study" program is often months late paying many of its employees: college students who served in the military. 

Kami Fluetsch

Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Ashley Metcalf, now a student at the University of Colorado Denver, says he and other students employed by the VA to help fellow vets transition into college frequently wait months for VA wages to arrive.

The House Committee on Veterans Affairs issued that request of VA officials on Wednesday, one day after NBC News reported student veterans hired by the VA to help fellow ex-service members transition into college have routinely waited one to two months — and, in one case, four months — for unpaid wages. Delayed compensation from the VA has caused eviction worries and mounting debt among some of those student veterans. 

A call by NBC News to VA media relations officials Wednesday seeking comment on the Congressional briefing was not returned by Thursday morning. 

Rep. Jeff Miller, R. Fla., chairman of the committee on veterans affairs, said the VA's sluggish payment-pipeline seems to be "just another example" of a federal agency purposely sticking to outmoded practices versus modernizing its approach in order to help veterans. He also called for a wholesale streamlining in the way student veterans who work for the VA on campuses across the nation are reimbursed for their hours logged on the job.

"It is my understanding that VA's policy is to have student veterans accumulate 50 to 100 hours of work before submitting their claim for payment to VA. That payment schedule is counterintuitive to how people pay their living expenses," Miller said. 

"Therefore, GI Bill work study participants should be able to verify their working hours on a calendar basis, similar to the way Montgomery GI Bill students verify their enrollment on a monthly basis, as they have for decades," Miller added. "VA has the technology to set up the system in this way already. So, this problem appears to be just another example of government bureaucracy being satisfied with business as usual instead of evolving to serve veterans more efficiently."

Ashley Metcalf, a student veteran — and a "work study" employee who uncovered the scope of the payment snags via a survey of 18 colleges — said Miller's plan to fix the issue would solve the VA's payment snags. 

"He's absolutely correct," said Metcalf, an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I started school under the Montgomery GI bill in 2007 and used that online system to verify my school attendance. This option seems like a solution that simply requires reallocating resources and tweaking the system a bit to fit work study requirements."

Metcalf, a student at the University of Colorado Denver, told NBC News he's been living on credit cards since June and was forced to obtain an emergency loan because the VA has failed to compensate him for about 100 hours he's logged in the VA work study program. 

According to the VA website, the “work-study allowance” is available through the post-9/11 GI Bill. Student veterans employed by the program earn the minimum wage from the VA for devoting hours to specified, on-campus jobs such as “providing assistance to veteran students with general inquiries about veteran benefits,” the site says, adding: "VA will pay you each time you complete 50 hours of service."

But Metcalf's survey earlier this year found VA work-study employees at five campuses who reported waiting one month to two months for payments — and a student in North Dakota who was not compensated for four months. (Among the 18 schools represented in the survey were Texas A&M, Florida State and the University of Kentucky). Survey participants also revealed that a number of student veterans have quit their work-study jobs due to the chronic payment delays, hamstringing veteran-services departments at some campuses. 

On Wednesday, a VA spokesperson offered an e-mailed reaction to Metcalf's survey results, in part putting the onus back on colleges where work-study employees have been hired to help fellow vets: "VA will review any issues with the work-study to ensure payments are delivered in a timely manner. To allow more timely payments to work-study students, our regional processing offices recommend that employers submit time records to the work-study coordinator once 50 work hours have been accrued. In some cases, time records are submitted after a student has accrued 100 or more hours."

The same e-mail from VA added: "VA regional processing offices for work-study typically process time cards quickly, on average less than a week."

"The word 'typically' would suggest that we are an anomaly. And that’s not by any means the case," Metcalf responded. 

Beyond finding delayed VA payments to student veterans at more than a dozen campuses covered by his survey, Metcalf said student veterans in two additional states — Michigan and Washington — contacted him after NBC News reported the glitches and added  their late-payment complaints to the growing list. 

"If we were an anomaly, it would only be happening to us," Metcalf said. "Before we even sent out the survey, we called different schools and different organizations. We went online to find out if other schools are having the same issue. That’s the reason we started the survey — we were talking to student veterans who were all having the same problems in different states."

He also responded to the VA's claim of "typically" processing time cards in less than a week with one word: "preposterous."

According to Metcalf and many of the students he surveyed at the 18 other colleges, the VA has frequently failed to respond to calls and e-mails from student veterans seeking to learn when their owed wages would be arriving and asking for explanations for the compensation holdups. 

"We’ve been trying to tell them," Metcalf said, "and no one there is listening."

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A packed convention center — even a place staffed with PTSD experts — is precisely the type of environment most service members and veterans are likely to avoid. 

For many military folks dealing with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress, crowds make them jumpy. And due to the attached social stigma of the disorder, the thought of being spotted at such an gathering would make lots of veterans cringe. 

But a virtual get-together where disabled veterans can anonymously ask questions about the anxieties weighing them down?

That's part of the thinking behind the first True Help Disability Web Expo taking place Thursday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Central Standard Time. The free event, organized by Allsup — a nationwide provider of services for people with disabilities — loops together more than a dozen leading health, disability, advocacy and social service organizations, several of them adept at working specifically with current and former service members.

Attendees simply need to register to chat all day from the comfort of their homes, local coffee shops, or their places of work. The expo will provide a "veterans booth" where military personnel past and present can seek and find suggestions, tips and advice on how and where to get treatment — including a primer on how to successfully access and steer through the monolithic U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, said Brett Buchanan, an Allsup’s VA-accredited claims agent. 

"In my experience dealing with veterans with PTSD and with depression, I find that the veterans do much better over the phone, when they’re in their house," Buchanan said. "I can have better conversations with them then when I meet them face to face.

"I think, absolutely, when you’re going to compare a Web expo to a live expo at an actual convention center, I don’t think you would get those individuals anywhere near that environment with those crowds," he added.

Allsup will bring together representatives from 15 national nonprofit groups that specialize in disabilities, including the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Brain Injury Association of America, the Invisible Disabilities Association and the National Family Caregivers Association. 

"Our hope is that veterans will find valuable information and resources that they just didn’t know existed," said Rebecca Ray, director of corporate public relations for Allsup. "We know veterans have a lot of options through the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense. But there are a lot of groups that help veterans that may be new to them." 

While attendees can live chat with experts throughout the day, the expo will offer two moderated sessions for service members and their families: "What You Need to Know About Veterans Disability," from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. CST, and "Wounded Warriors — A Discussion on Veteran Disability Resources," from 2:35 to 3:00 p.m. CST.

"We dive into little nuances of the VA disability system," Buchanan said. "There are special considerations for different veterans — specifically if the veteran has more than one disability that’s related to service, or if they’re a combat veteran they are given special consideration.

"We’ll be talking about the VA process," he added. "We’ll be taking people through, step by step, on filing a claim, what happens if the claim is denied, or what happens if you get a decision and you’re not satisfied with it: are you able to appeal it?"

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