Back from war, Lynchburg soldier fights for disability benefits

Robert Blanchard joined the Army in May 2005 a happy-go-lucky guy, a youth leader at his church and an athletic standout at Heritage High School.

Within eight months, he shipped off to Afghanistan. A few weeks into combat, shrapnel from a grenade tore into his left foot and leg, Army reports show.

He spent a year at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in multiple surgeries and rehabilitation to save his leg, and received a Purple Heart from former Secretary of State Colin Powell. While there, his best friend was killed in Afghanistan, doing the job that had been Blanchard’s until he was wounded.

Two years to the month of his enlistment, Blanchard left the Army with a medical discharge, a broken man. The 24-year-old often sleeps in snatches, an hour at a time. He has been married. He has been divorced. He has been hospitalized by doctors who feared he would kill himself.

“Some days I think it would have been better if he lost a limb,” said his mom Lisa Eberhardt.

“Instead, he lost his soul.”

For longer now than Blanchard served in the Army, his family has fought the government for benefits related to his combat experience — not just for the obvious physical scars, but for the mental ones, too.

At the urging of his doctors, he applied last year for increased disability payments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Six months later, in September, the Veteran’s Administration sent him a letter denying his request. It stated that while the VA had diagnosed and treated him for PTSD, a doctor who examined him in June did not believe he still suffered from it.

The response baffled his family. How could the VA diagnose him with PTSD, they questioned, and then say more than a year later he didn’t have it?

Three months into an investigation by The News & Advance into Blanchard’s case, a new letter came from the VA, backdating PTSD and other mental health benefits to 2007. It said Blanchard’s condition actually had worsened as of the June evaluation, prompting a further increase in his benefits.

VA spokesman Bruce Sprecher said the newspaper’s inquiry sparked a review of Blanchard’s file. The decision was reversed in less than a week.

The latest Veteran’s Administration report on Blanchard’s condition, from December, noted that he appears to be able to take care of himself, but his ability to work and interact with others is impaired.

“You were noted to be paranoid, and you perceive others as being judgmental and untrustworthy…” the letter stated. “You reported sleep impairment and combat related dreams 3-4 times per week. You reported that you have emotional numbing and lack of motivation. You reported feeling angry often, and feeling jumpy. You spend a considerable amount of time alone and tend to be reclusive.”

No one, especially Blanchard, believes more money from disability payments will make him better. But it does provide enough in monthly disability payments — nearly $1,000 per month compared to the $243 per month he received for most of 2009 — to provide a measure of financial security that he feels he has earned.

When he put on the Army uniform and promised to protect the country, the government promised to take care of him, he said.

“After… choosing at the time to sign six years of my life away to the government at a time of war, getting hit by a grenade, losing close friends to the war over there and all that, I am worth $243 a month to the government,” he said in an October interview. “That’s the price they’ve put on my head.

“A lot of people will be like, ‘It’s better than nothing.’ Yeah, but if you could go through everything that I did to get that money, would you? Of course, everybody’s answer is ‘no.’”

Blanchard is one of more than a quarter of a million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have gotten at least a tentative diagnosis of mental illness by the VA in the last eight years, according to a VA report tracking the diagnoses from 2002 through the third quarter of 2009. The influx of these veterans has caused backlogs in processing benefits claims as cited by the VA’s chief watchdog, its own inspector general.

An inspector general report issued this month on the Roanoke regional office that has been overseeing Blanchard’s benefits showed that nearly a quarter of benefits cases reviewed in its inspection had some kind of error.

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Blanchard can’t really say why he signed up for the Army in May 2005, except that a recruiter caught him at the right moment and played into what he called a “huge ego” by flattering him.

He was enrolled in Liberty University’s aviation program and had a track-and-field scholarship. Based on his athleticism, the recruiter said, he would be guaranteed a shot at Special Forces training. If he qualified and stuck with the program, he would undergo two years of training before seeing the battlefield.

But after infantry training, Blanchard said, he narrowly failed a fitness test for Special Forces training. By October, said his stepfather Whit Eberhardt, he was sent to Fort Drum in New York to join the 10th Mountain Division, one of the Army’s most frequently deployed units.

Before going to Afghanistan in February, he and three close friends went to Red Lobster near the base for a going-away dinner, spending as much as they could and stuffing themselves.

“Out of the four of us, I’m the only one who came home,” he said. “They were all killed … They lost their lives over there.”

Blanchard’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team landed in a hot spot near the Pakistan border as attacks against U.S. soldiers ramped up in Afghanistan.

On April 19, 2006, Blanchard and nine other soldiers sprung an ambush against insurgents. During the attack, a grenade that Blanchard said was thrown by someone in his unit fell short. The shrapnel riddled his left leg and foot.

Blanchard’s medical records from Walter Reed reference the injury as being as the result of a “terrorist explosion,” although some note the injuries were caused by a grenade. He said the Army was reluctant to acknowledge his injuries were from friendly fire.

He remembers bleeding into the snow and watching soldiers around him firing a fury of grenades while he was being patched up, then lifted 100 feet through the air into a helicopter.

Surgery in the field and in Germany followed in quick succession and by April 22, Blanchard had arrived stateside at Walter Reed.

While his leg began to heal that summer, his mental state continued to deteriorate. In August, he learned two of the men he had gone to Red Lobster with back in February had been killed in combat.

The death of his best friend two months later, on Oct. 31, 2006, sent Blanchard into a free fall. He still struggles to discuss it three years later.

The two were roommates and inseparable at Fort Drum. He adopted the soldier, 18-year-old Californian Alex Oceguera, as a younger brother.

In Afghanistan, Blanchard was the designated driver anytime they took a Humvee on patrol. After his departure, Oceguera took over the job. That’s what he was doing when a roadside bomb exploded and killed three soldiers in the Humvee, according to a 10th Division report.

Blanchard can’t escape feeling responsible.

“It still hurts me to think he was there in my stead,” he said.

By January 2007, doctors at Walter Reed diagnosed Blanchard with adjustment disorder, a catch-all diagnosis for people who experience his symptoms after trauma but do not meet criteria for other disorders such as PTSD. Medical records show doctors, citing depression, advised him prior to his discharge in May to follow up with therapists.

Nine months later, Blanchard said, life had almost completely unraveled. A quick marriage fell apart within seven months. By his own account, he blew a shot at minor-league baseball by not re-enrolling at Liberty.

He moved in with his stepfather on the condition that he seek counseling at the VA Medical Center in Salem.

“It was an all-time low… I wasn’t in any kind of mental state to do really anything,” Blanchard said. “I kind of laid around and did nothing. I called out of work. I don’t know. It was bad.”

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Within a year of his discharge from Walter Reed, a doctor at the VA in Salem had him involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility on suicide watch in April 2008, his VA records show.

The doctor who discharged him three days later diagnosed him with PTSD, as did another therapist he had been seeing in Roanoke, a letter from the VA shows.

Blanchard and his family did not immediately pursue the additional disability benefits from a PTSD diagnosis. But as the months passed, his mental state showed little improvement.

Finally, at the urging of one of his therapists, he applied to the VA for PTSD compensation. After it took six months for a reply — and the reply was a denial — Blanchard had all but given up. His mother and stepfather, who have largely taken up the fight against the government for him in the last few years, were left unsure how to proceed.

“I can only do this a little at a time,” Lisa Eberhardt said in November. “This whole experience has been so traumatizing for me that I’m afraid I’m going to end up like Robert.”

Blanchard, meanwhile, moved to Delaware with a former Walter Reed roommate in late October, looking for a fresh start.

Then, in December, Blanchard went to the bank and found out he had much more money in his account than he expected.

That was the first indication something had changed, his mother said. Then they received a Veteran’s Administration letter dated Dec. 17 and confirming the PTSD diagnosis.

His monthly disability payments nearly tripled to $947.

Sprecher, the VA spokesman, said he believes the Veterans Benefits Administration does a good job, but said in some cases, compensation decisions such as Blanchard’s aren’t always right the first time.

Dr. Dell Short, a psychiatrist and chief of mental health services at the VA hospital in Salem, said the administration is divided in two: the benefits administration works to assign disability ratings and to pay veterans while the hospitals provide treatment. Short said the people who decide whether a veteran should be paid for a mental illness are often not the same people who are treating him for the illness.

He said it’s also possible for two doctors to have a different view of a diagnosis based on the same information. Patients may report some symptoms one day to one doctor and other symptoms to another doctor on a different day, leading to varying diagnoses.

A system that pays people who are sick or report symptoms complicates treatment, too, he said.

“It would be nice if we could give people a lump sum… and then they never have to show they have these symptoms again,” he said. “They’d be free to get well and do better, instead of a system where you have to show that you continue to be disabled.”

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Reached earlier this month at his new home in Delaware, Blanchard said there is no doubt the increased payments have eased some financial stress. But they haven’t changed his overall quality of life.

He still doesn’t go out very much, he said, nor has he made many friends. And he’s still having a lot of trouble sleeping.

“It’s nice they were able to reverse themselves,” he said. “But I wish they would have done it for what I have done for my country instead of trying to cover their butts.”

After being in the Dover area for a few months, he said he recently visited a VA office there. He said he is optimistic and that caseworkers seem more receptive than others he has had.

Whit Eberhardt said he fears his stepson is putting on a public good face. He thinks Blanchard may be having a tougher time than he admits. Not having him here to check up on makes it that much harder.

“My concern for Robert goes much deeper than the VA PTSD compensation,” Whit Eberhardt said. “It’s that he continue to receive proper treatment from the VA. I don’t think I’ll ever have the Robert back that moved out of the house to go to Liberty University.

“That was a Robert who saw the world with a loving eye and a giving heart. After a year in the Army, he sees the world as an evil place … My concern is that he comes back to seeing the world not just as evil, but evil and good and the people in it as all different shades… because that’s reality.”