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 Vallarta Living | Veteran Affairs | April 2006 
The Trip Home
 David Lord - PVNN
| | Kerry Foster, from Shreveport, La., and dog 'Ranger' search a home on Tennessee Street in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans on Tuesday April 4, 2006. Searches for human remains continue in some of the hardest hit areas after Hurricane Katrina. (AP/Alex Brandon) |
The trip home from the Annual National Veterans Service Training was an education, seeing the neglect that Homeland Securities F.E.M.A. have left behind. It is beyond depressing for those living there, and a disaster that I have only seen in war.
I left the Nashville TN area last Friday the 31st of March. It is now the 4th of April, and I am in San Antonio getting ready for the final drive to Puerto Vallarta. The trip to Nashville for training was a three day drive, but on the return trip, I decided to travel through the four states most devastated by Hurricane Katrina and Rita.
I had given thirty days of my time to the victims last August and September after Katrina hit, and during Rita at the shelters on Kelly USA I processed claims for federal benefits as they related to US veterans laws.
The days I spent getting set up at the shelter and finding the connections that I needed to help the veterans was a long process of explaining what I do and how the Veterans would benefit. The reply to my explanations was generally misunderstood.
"The Department of Veterans Affairs was going to have tables set up to help the Veterans," they would say. I would again explain that their tables were there to facilitate veteran's with medical problems or hospital care, not the claims process.
I was finally assisted in, and appreciated, when they understood what it was I do. I actually got F.E.M.A. and the Red Cross to ask the proper questions pertaining to military service on their shelter entry form.
Eight months later, as I travel from Mobile, Alabama west through Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, I see the total destruction that I had seen on TV hundreds of time before. The difference this time is that I can smell the mold and feel the silence of those graveyard-like neighborhoods.
If it was my home gone, I would be without a clue or a guess as to where my home would have been. I drive through the once placid neighborhoods, now destroyed and leveled.
I see a few homes still standing with the F.E.M.A. trailers parked in the yards next to these uninhabitable homes. The garbage stands high in the street, garage doors are open wide and piled high to the rafters with the home's former contents. They are still waiting for the clean up inside the home. Roofs are a patchwork of blue tarps.
The folks with blankness on their faces, their eyes hollow and haunting, best describes the survivors of these storms that I have seen before. I knew them as well as I knew my own face. They are the same faces of Marines just after combat. The combat goes on right here, right now, eight months later for those in the path of the storm.
Our service men and women trained for war are fighting thousands of miles from home, and I know that most of them would find more value in fighting here to regain a normal life for Americans, rather than Iraqis.
The level of destruction is as great as any combat area in Iraq, and our people here have just as great a need. We spend billions of taxpayers' dollars for the rebuilding of a middle eastern country that will spit in our face in the end.
They will demand billions more dollars for the clean up of depleted uranium contamination. The fact that the USA is the only military force that uses Depleted Uranium in our arsenal and that there is no naturally occurring uranium in Iraq, will make for easy detection of the three hundred tons we have used to free the country.
We have treated 144,000 in our VA Hospitals as a direct result of ailments from this war on terror,(this figure does not include those still on active duty who are treated at Military Hospitals.) These veterans' lives have changed forever due to the illness and wounds suffered and acquired from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Do you know the consequence of not caring for our Own? The insurance companies are not paying thousands of homeowner policy holders as they argue that damage was caused by tidal flood and it is not insured. What of those without insurance? Are these AMERICANS citizens worth less than the citizens of Iraq?
 David Lord served in Vietnam as combat Marine for 1st Battalion 26th Marines, during which time he was severely wounded. He received the Purple Heart and the Presidential Unit Citation for his actions during the war in Vietnam. In Mexico, David now represents all veterans south of the U.S. border all the way to Panama, before the V.A. and the Board of Veterans Appeals. David Lord provides service to veterans at no fee. Veterans are welcome to drop in and discuss claims/benefits to which they are entitled by law at his office located at Bayside Properties, 160 Francisca Rodriguez, tel.: 223-4424, call him at home 299-5367, on his cell: 044 (322) 205-1323, or email him at mophmx@@yahoo.com or david.lord@yahoo.com.
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