Is Shinseki the next to resign or retire?
Sgt. Chris Peden is stuck. The Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldier is spending his last months in the Army too damaged to be the gung-ho paratrooper of his first Iraq deployment but not ill enough to be cut loose from his enlistment with his Stryker brigade.
He’s in the limbo of a disability system the Defense Department created seven years ago with good intentions. It was designed to make sure wounded service members smoothly enroll for veterans benefits and start receiving checks within a month of leaving uniform.
For Peden, the downside comes in the hundreds of days he’s had to continue showing up at battalion headquarters even though he can’t concentrate, struggles with mood swings and has physical injuries that slow him. With little to do because he can’t handle much responsibility, he sometimes passes the time playing games on his cellphone.
“I can’t do what I used to do. I’m not capable,” said Peden, 32, a Tacoma resident diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and who endured several head injuries early in his military service.
A year and a half ago, he was sent home early from a Stryker tour in Afghanistan.
“My brain literally just doesn’t work the way it used to,” he said.
He is among about 700 soldiers in Lewis-McChord’s 7th Infantry Division who are leaving the Army for medical reasons through a joint Defense Department and Veterans Affairs program known as the Integrated Disability Evaluation System.
The IDES process is supposed to take 295 days from the time the Army begins considering a soldier for an early medical retirement to the day that soldier starts receiving VA benefits.
But the military and the VA have yet to hit the deadlines they set in 2007 when they laid the groundwork for the program. The average time soldiers spend in the system sits just shy of 400 days — about 3½ months longer than the target.
Altogether, that makes more than a year of waiting in uniform for soldiers who know they can’t continue their military careers.
“Why would you force a soldier to be in a unit when there’s not a job for him and you’ve already determined he can’t do the job?” Peden said.
The IDES system is used by all of the Armed Forces, but the Army is its biggest component because of the heavy toll the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took on the nation’s ground forces.
The Army and the VA say they’re now swiftly making up ground on a backlog of IDES cases that accumulated in years when the system enrolled thousands more cases than it completed.
In 2011, for instance, the system enrolled 18,651 military service members but finished just 7,106 cases, according to a 2012 Government Accountability Office report.
Now, the Army and the VA are starting to finish more cases than they start each month, said Col. Carl Johnson, chief of the Army’s Physical Disability Agency.
Last year, the Army alone accounted for 22,037 new cases. The service completed 23,432 cases.
Johnson considers the trend a good sign for the program.
“We’re on track to break the back of this backlog,” he said.