the v.a. just doesn’t get it
dad died. not recently, thank you. going on about, oh, eight and a half years ago now. sometimes, though, i still struggle with the fact that i’m here in this world without him. to quote george from g.a., “i don’t know how to exist in a world where he doesn’t.” true that.
dad was a veteran. world war ii, actually. yeah, well, don’t go trying to calculate my age based on that. funny story: dad was twenty-eight years older than my mom. so he was fifty-five when i came along. and i have a kid brother. yeah, he was the man. a-n-y-way… dad was a veteran of wwii. and a few months back, the history channel did this thing on wwii. jogged my memory some. dad, like so many veterans of war, didn’t like to talk about it. but i want to know. i don’t know if i want to know everything, but i’d like to at least know things like where all he was deployed. what all countries he marched through. what battles he fought in. stuff that, you know, the veteran’s administration could tell me. if they wanted to.
so, since i’m obviously next of kin, i qualify for this info. for free. cause the request is free to all next of kin that ask. i asked for it. and then i waited. and waited some more. they said it’d take ten days to three weeks. i gave them four. then i asked again. they said, oh, sorry… we’ll get right on that. like, oh, you really did want that old stuff? our bad… so i waited some more. and then finally, when i got the letter in the mail (the letter, not the package) all it said was, sorry… your dad’s stuff was in that fire we keep complaining about. you know. the huge-freakin-oh-we-didn’t-think-it’d-ever-happen fire in 1973. apparently, dad’s shit was not in the lucky 20% of records that didn’t go up in flames, he was in the unfortunate 80% that was. so, you think that, you know, given the circumstances, they’d be all apologetic. something like, sorry, shit happens, but hey, here’s a copy of what we do have (which isn’t much). right?
wrong. they instead said we can give you a photocopy of a one page document called a final pay voucher for a fee. they wanted twenty bucks to send me a copy of one sheet of paper because they couldn’t come up with the full sheaf of papers that i asked for, that i could have had for free, had they not been torched back in the seventies.
thanks, veteran’s administration. way to make a girl feel proud.
TweetTags: dad, the v.a., veteran's administration, veteran's records, wwii
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 5:03 PM • rants, relatively speaking • RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.