My father's wartime experience, and then his time at the end in the 90s, at a VA hospital, present nice bookends for federal government involvement in his life, other than just paying taxes.
He was drafted in his 20s. He went to a training camp. It had been sited in a mosquito infested swampy area in the South.
Apparently a very high number of the inductees contracted rheumatic fever, and spent months if not years in military hospitals. My father was one of these unfortunates. He never saw any military action, spent the remainder of the war at a typewriter, and never really talked about the experience as I recall. I only learned about the surrounding circumstances much later, on my own. My father in law, an orthopedic surgeon and a WWII veteran, knew the facts about the training camp sites, and the rheumatic fever problem, quite well. Perhaps it was partly because his medical practice partner, also a WWII veteran, had worked at the VA in retirement.
Flash forward to my father's last few years. He had smoked all his life. He ended up in a mental ward, at the VA, having had emphysema and lack of oxygen to the brain, unbeknownst to my mother, for several years.
The VA then decided to do an experimental surgery, to try to clear his lungs of tar. No one had survived at that time, after this procedure, but the VA was willing to allow veterans to undergo this procedure rather than linger on on oxygen. It was a way of gaining knowledge of the possibilities. One cannot try this on laboratory animals. Guess why: they don't smoke!
My mother made the decision, although her powers of reasoning have never been very acute. My father's intensive care nurse, with whom I spoke after his operation, characterized the surgeon as a butcher.....I would think he might know a little something. He didn't say this cooly and analytically. No. He bemoaned this situation, 'bemoaned' is the right word, in which he was the nurse, with tears streaming down his face. I was, to him, a total stranger.
My mother made the decision, although her powers of reasoning have never been very acute. My father's intensive care nurse, with whom I spoke after his operation, characterized the surgeon as a butcher.....I would think he might know a little something. He didn't say this cooly and analytically. No. He bemoaned this situation, 'bemoaned' is the right word, in which he was the nurse, with tears streaming down his face. I was, to him, a total stranger.
Well, low and behold, it turned out, on autopsy, that he had had a narrowed mitral valve, which, it was parenthetically argued, had prevented his recovery from surgery. This is precisely the kind of heart damage often caused by rheumatic fever.
While in my judgment he could never have recovered anyway, this seems a nice capstone for my father's experiences with the federal system, going back to the war, and coming forward to the 90s.
Postscript: he did apply for some sort of disability benefit, at the time of his honorable discharge, but that application was denied, although he had been in a military hospital for over a year, and had contracted rheumatic fever because the federal government cared so little about the average American that they were perfectly willing to build a training camp in a swamp, even though there are millions of acres of non swamp usable land in this country.
My family has never made any claim whatsoever for special American Indian benefits, even though, for example, my father was one quarter Cherokee. My family was ashamed of the fact, frankly. My paternal Cherokee great grandmother, Maw Sally, was well known to all my relatives, and was universally considered to be mean as a snake.
Just to put it in context, my great uncle was reputed to have lived in the woods, near Oxford, with not one but two black women.
Postscript: he did apply for some sort of disability benefit, at the time of his honorable discharge, but that application was denied, although he had been in a military hospital for over a year, and had contracted rheumatic fever because the federal government cared so little about the average American that they were perfectly willing to build a training camp in a swamp, even though there are millions of acres of non swamp usable land in this country.
My family has never made any claim whatsoever for special American Indian benefits, even though, for example, my father was one quarter Cherokee. My family was ashamed of the fact, frankly. My paternal Cherokee great grandmother, Maw Sally, was well known to all my relatives, and was universally considered to be mean as a snake.
Just to put it in context, my great uncle was reputed to have lived in the woods, near Oxford, with not one but two black women.
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