Navy Vet Creates 7-Point Plan to Fix the VA. But He Needs Your Signature by Christmas.
Since 2015, there have been at least a dozen reported cases of military veteran suicide on Veterans Administration medical facility grounds. The most recent occurred just before Thanksgiving, when Army Sgt. John Toombs, who served in Afghanistan, hanged himself on the grounds of the Alvin C. York VA Medical Center in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
In a viral video recorded hours before he ended his life at the age of 32, Toombs, who suffered from PTSD and depression, claims he was kicked out of a drug treatment program for “trivial reasons.”
Like many of his peers, Joe Schmitt, a Navy veteran and hospital corpsman, is fed up with way the government has failed servicemen and women. After hearing of Sgt. Toombs’ untimely death, he decided to do something about it.
Schmitt has authored not one, not two, but seven petitions asking the White House to address what he believes are major flaws in the VA. Why seven? WhiteHouse.gov has an 800-word limit for petitions. To get around this, Schmitt created a separate petition for each proposed area of reform:
Leadership employment requirements
Intern employment expectations
Veteran health care education
Release of records upon death
Higher accountability for VA employees
Drug and alcohol treatment programs
Termination of redundant studies that waste VA money
In order for the White House to consider all of these reforms, he will need a total of 700,000 signatures by Jan. 3.
Schmitt, a Brooklyn native who joined the Navy in 1986 at age 17, has had to deal with the flawed VA system in the wake of a traumatic brain injury (TBI) he suffered after an IED explosion in Afghanistan in 2011.
Speaking to Conservative Review, he noted that the reforms listed above had long been on his mind, but John Toombs’ untimely death was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Schmitt said he actually had two chance encounters with Toombs.
The first encounter was at a local bar in Tennessee. Schmitt, who currently resides in Tennessee, recalls “talking to a kid from the Tennessee National Guard that was telling me about his PTSD and his drug problem, and how he wanted to better himself for his daughter.”
At the time, Schmitt advised Toombs to get honest with himself and get the help he needed to “have a decent life.”
The second and last time he saw Toombs was when he went to drop off paperwork at the Alvin C. York center.
“He was sitting on a couch there, and it had to have been after he’d gotten kicked out of the program, because he did not look happy at all,” Schmitt said. “And then when I see him in the video, I’m like, ‘Oh my God … that was him.’”
Toombs’ death was a wakeup call for Schmitt, who says he’s had to deal with incompetent VA personnel who overlook or ignore serious medical problems. He has gone so far as to spend $9,000 of his own money to seek external medical services at a TBI clinic in Maryland.
“It kind of irritates me that you can bring in individuals who are refugees from another country, or have someone who is here illegally, and they can get top medical care,” he told CR. “But you have all of these veterans who’ve sacrificed so much, and it’s a struggle for them to get care.”
Schmitt explained that many veterans who are fed up with the Veterans Administration end up homeless, addicted to drugs, or worse, as in the case of Sgt. Toombs.
“Here’s the thing,” he explained. “When it comes to John Toombs, PTSD is the main cause of the addiction, because the veterans are trying to self-medicate. So, yeah, you’ve got to treat the addiction. But you need to treat the PTSD as the primary cause, and then work a recovery system around that.”
Joe Schmitt said he doesn’t think the majority of VA health care providers “really, truly understand” veterans. Part 6 of his petition addresses this point.
“You know how some people have workplace sensitivity courses? Well, they should have something like that regarding veterans, where providers try to understand the world of a veteran, and what makes them different from a civilian,” he said.
“I can sit there and direct my care because I’m a corpsman,” he said. “But what happens to these guys who don’t have the background — or don’t know any better — that put their blind trust and faith in a system that’s supposed to be there for them? And it fails them?”
“You don’t have suicides in [regular] hospitals around the country,” he continued. “But the fact that you have the 12 suicides since 2015, on VA property … that’s a personal thing. That’s a personal message.”
That is why Schmitt drafted his seven-part petition – in the hope of preventing similar incidents from happening.
“The veterans and our service members sacrifice so much, and we ask so much from them,” he said. “They’re all heroes in the fact that they raised their hand and said, ‘Look, U.S. military, send me wherever you’re going to go.’”
Schmitt created a Facebook event for the petition, including links to each of the seven parts and a record of the 12 veteran suicides since 2015. (For more from the author of “Navy Vet Creates 7-Point Plan to Fix the VA. But He Needs Your Signature by Christmas.” please click HERE)
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