Newsbytes April 5, 2024

In this issue:
Last Survivor of USS Arizona Passes Away
Numerous Military Families Not Advocating Military Service
SVAC Hearing on Vet Centers Supporting Mental Health
GAO Says VA Needs to do a Better Job Tracking Orthopedic Devices
 

Last Survivor of USS Arizona Passes Away
The last survivor serving aboard the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has died. Lou Conter, one of the last living survivors of that day of infamy, recently passed away at his home in Grass Valley, California. He was a member of FRA (Branch 230) and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1939 at the age of 18. Two years later, he would be a witness to the Japanese sneak attack on December 7, 1941, that finally pushed the United States into the Second World War.

Lou was a 20-year-old quartermaster who helped rescue fellow crewmen during the Japanese attack. A total of 1,177 fellow Arizona crew members were killed that day, most of them still entombed on the ship with their names etched on the USS Arizona Memorial. Lou was among the 335 Arizona crew members to survive the attack, and he outlived all of them. The second to the last was Ken Potts, who died last year in Provo, Utah, at the age of 102.

Lou’s military service continued after the Pearl Harbor attack, and he went on to become a VP-11 Black Cat pilot. He survived two shoot-downs in World War II, including one off the coast of New Guinea in which the crew was surrounded by sharks.

Following World War II, he became an intelligence officer and flew combat missions in Korea. He is widely revered in the military intelligence community, known for creating the Navy’s first SERE program (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) He was a military adviser to Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Numerous Military Families Not Advocating Military Service
A recent poll by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families indicates that many military families are not promoting military service. This may, in part, explain why the service branches are having difficulty reaching their recruiting goals. Less than one-third of active-duty troops or their family members would recommend military service to those considering joining. That number represents a significant plunge (40 percent) in support from just eight years ago when more than half would have promoted military service.

The reasons given for troops and their families not endorsing a career in the military covered a variety of challenges. The most common reason was the amount of time service members spend away from their families. Deployments while the country is at war or engaged in foreign operations tend to be much longer. That is particularly true in the Navy, where ships may remain overseas for as long as nine months or even more.

Military families are also hit with the same challenges as civilians back home. Another common complaint was inflation. Married service members receive a monthly stipend to help pay for groceries for their family, but those payments don't tend to include offsets to adjust for inflation. This has reportedly led to incidents of food insecurity impacting the families of service members.

Blue Star Families and Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families examined the responses from 7,400 people — including active-duty troops, National Guard members, and military reserve family members — and found that although the top issue disturbing them was time spent away from their families, increasing inflation was a major issue as it caused food insecurity.

SVAC Hearing on Vet Centers Supporting Mental Health
The Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs held an oversight hearing on how Vet Centers support the mental health needs of service members, veterans, and their families. Vet Centers are community-based counseling centers that provide a wide range of social and psychological services, including professional counseling to eligible veterans, service members, including National Guard and Reserve components, and their families. Counseling is offered to make a successful transition from military to civilian life or after a traumatic event experienced in the military. Individual, group, marriage, and family counseling are offered in addition to referral and connection to other VA or community benefits and services.

The witness panel consisted of two representatives from VA and one from the Government Accountability Office. It was noted at the hearing that more veterans are eligible for services at Vet Centers than ever before. Members can watch the hearing at: https://www.veterans.senate.gov/2024/1/vet-centers-supporting-the-mental-health-needs-of-servicemembers-veterans-and-their-families 

GAO Says VA Needs to do a Better Job Tracking Orthopedic Devices
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (24-106621) claims that if there was a need for recall of an artificial knee, hip implant, or other implantable medical device—after it's already in a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) patient that the VHA policies do not currently ensure that these types of devices are trackable by the VHA. The GAO report recommends that the Veterans Health Administration needs to ensure that health care providers can contact them for follow-up care. For example, if VHA needed to identify all patients with a specific orthopedic implant, it would have to do a time-intensive search of patients' individual medical records. Cardiac electronic devices, however, are tracked separately from the patient record.