Bureaucratic Battle Saps Hero’s Spirit

Back then, in front of the television cameras and countless reporters scribbling down his words, Marine Cpl. Brett Doggett was happy. In the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, he felt the warmth of America’s patriotic fever up close.

Radio talk-show hosts would call him at his hospital bed in San Diego wanting to know, in detail, what it was like to step on an Iraqi mine and live to tell the tale. Strangers kept telling him what a hero he was. Women proposed via the mail.

And Doggett, usually a serious type, discovered that he could be a ham. He’d chase good-looking women around in his wheelchair, and they liked his style. He didn’t complain about his amputated foot, or the other with the missing and mauled toes, still peppered with shrapnel.

The reason was simple, really. Doggett had stared down death and it was death that had blinked. A general dropped by the hospital to pin a Purple Heart to his chest. And he even got to meet Gen. Colin Powell and his wife.

“Then after the limelight, it all went downhill,” Doggett says now at home in Orange.

Susan Doggett, who met the man who would become her husband after reading about him in The Times, has gone to retrieve a folder, thick with medical records and letters from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

When she returns, she talks of her journey through the federal bureaucracy in search of help for the man she loves. It’s taken more than a year already. She began even before marrying Doggett last year, on Nov. 10, the birthday of his beloved Marine Corps.

Now, exasperation and bitterness tinge Susan’s tone. And her husband is clearly a changed man.

“It’s like you’re going through your own private battle,” he says. “You fight for freedom and the American people, you’d think you’d get some help. But you go from one battlefield to another battlefield. And I’m from Desert Storm. The Vietnam guys are still going through the same thing.

“But you know how the American public is. It’s forgotten. You’re hot one minute and you’re not the next. I’ve kind of become withdrawn because I’m having to fight so much that it just wears you down.”

The evidence of the latest fight is documented in the folder on which Susan rests her hand. The jargon alone is daunting enough.

“The fact that the veteran did not meet the physical standards for a job does not necessarily reflect the degree of severity of his disability,” reads part of a document titled Supplemental Statement of the Case in the Appeal of Brett D. Doggett.

“Department of Veterans Affairs regulations require evaluation of disability based upon the symptomatology provided by the applicable schedular provisions.”

There is more, pages and pages of type, but it translates to this: The VA says that based on its rating system, Doggett is 80% disabled, up from 60% because he has been found to have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Moreover, it says the pain in Doggett’s back has nothing to do with the land mine he stepped on while on patrol in Kuwait on March 3 of last year, four days after President Bush had declared that the Persian Gulf War had been won.

The ruling was made even though Doggett’s legs, with or without a prothesis, are clearly of different lengths. It hurts him to walk, which he does with a limp. The pressure, he says, shows up in his back.

But because the VA regional office in Los Angeles has ruled that Doggett’s back problems are not a “service-related injury,” current and future back treatment, and any compensation for the same, has been denied. The Doggetts, in the process of compiling private medical opinions now, plan a final appeal of the decision to department headquarters in Washington.

The law forbids him from filing suit.

Now the man who never wanted anything as much as the chance to fight on America’s front lines--he was disappointed that during his two stints in Panama, he didn’t see enough combat--says this of that fateful moment in Kuwait:

“To be hurt for something so stupid, that wasn’t even my job, it’s just a real waste.”

Doggett, a machine gunner who commanded a light armored vehicle dispatched to the area around Kuwait’s El Wafra oil refinery, had stepped down from the turret to get a bite to eat on that March morning, about 10:30 a.m.

It was then that a captain was forming two foot patrols; there had been a report of snipers in the area the day before. Doggett says he wanted to stay with his vehicle but went where he was told.

The patrol walked past the remnants of buildings that had once housed chickens, their carcasses now rotting amid the rubble of warehouse walls. Wild dogs roamed about, attracted by the meat. As he was walking on a berm surrounding a parched garden, Doggett felt the blast that would change his life.

“I looked down and the foot of my left boot is gone and a little section of my right boot is peeled back,” he says. “I yelled ‘Corpsman!’ then I just dropped.”

Doggett’s left foot was amputated later at an American medical station in Saudi Arabia, and pins were placed in the toes of his right. His right big toe had been completely blown off. Bits of chicken bones and shrapnel were removed too, although more than 12 bits of metal remain.

He was discharged from the Marine Corps, after a promotion to sergeant, in September of last year after realizing that his injury would always keep him from combat. He had wanted to earn his college degree and return as an officer for a career in the corps.

But now in his senior year of studying political science at Cal State Fullerton, Doggett says he is having a very rough time. He is in three counseling groups sponsored by the VA.

“Denial” is what he calls the buoyant attitude that made him a media star upon his return from the Persian Gulf. At 27, his world today is framed by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“It just gets old,” Doggett says. “For every little thing, you have to fight them or complain.”

The Doggetts credit Patty Shay, the assistant to retiring U.S. Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), with helping them receive other VA benefits. Shay says she has “a whole drawer full” of cases in which veterans believe they have been unjustly denied help from the VA.

“A lot of people just give up,” she says. “They just don’t want to do all the paperwork. I see them far worse, and not as bad as the Doggetts. . . . It takes a lot of fight. Susan has been excellent. I think what she’s doing is good. She is fighting for her man.”

At the VA regional office, meantime, Assistant Director Dennis Kuewa, a Vietnam veteran, says that he is sorry Doggett feels as he does, although he can understand why. He talks of Doggett’s emotional state and of his “tragic injury” during the war.

He says, however, that Desert Storm veterans, including Doggett, have been given priority handling and that their cases have been handled faster than most. The decision on Doggett’s disability rating, he says, was a tough one to make.

“And I can see how the lay person, and I’m a lay person myself, would see that common sense would tell you that if someone is limping and hobbling around, there would be a problem with the back and spinal column, but in the rating process we need to have some medical evidence.”

Then Kuewa says that even though Doggett has not formally asked for one, he will schedule a new back examination--”Who knows? The results may show something different”--at the same time as another to determine whether Doggett’s skin condition is related to exposure to burning oil in Kuwait.

“We don’t enjoy hearing when people are having a difficult time,” Kuewa says.