Maimed Marine battles VA

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Ty Ziegel peers from beneath his Marine Corps baseball cap, his once boyish face burned beyond recognition by a suicide bomber's attack in Iraq just three days before Christmas 2004.

He lost part of his skull in the blast and part of his brain was damaged. Half of his left arm was amputated and some of the fingers were blown off his right hand.

Ziegel, a 25-year-old Marine sergeant, knew the dangers of war when he was deployed for his second tour in Iraq.
But he didn't expect a new battle when he returned home as a wounded warrior: a fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"Sometimes, you get lost in the system," he told CNN. "I feel like a Social Security number. I don't feel like Tyler Ziegel."

His story is one example of how medical advances in the battlefield have outpaced the home front. Many wounded veterans return home feeling that the VA system, specifically its 62-year-old disability ratings system, has failed them.

"The VA system is not ready, and they simply don't have time to catch up," Tammy Duckworth -- herself a wounded veteran who heads up the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs -- told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in March.

VA Acting Secretary Gordon Mansfield said cases like Ziegel's are rare -- that the majority of veterans are moving through the process and "being taken care of." He also said most veterans are fairly compensated.
"Any veteran with the same issue, if it's a medical disability, ... it is going to get the same exact result anywhere in our system," he said.

In Ziegel's case, he spent nearly two years recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. Once he got out of the hospital, he was unable to hold a job. He anticipated receiving a monthly VA disability check sufficient to cover his small-town lifestyle in Washington, Illinois.

Instead, he got a check for far less than expected. After pressing for answers, Ziegel finally received a letter from the VA that rated his injuries: 80 percent for facial disfigurement, 60 percent for left arm amputation, a mere 10 percent for head trauma and nothing for his left lobe brain injury, right eye blindness and jaw fracture.

"I don't get too mad about too many things," he said. "But once we've been getting into this, I'm ready to beat down the White House door if I need to."

"I'm not expecting to live in the lap of luxury," he added. "But I am asking them to make it comfortable to raise a family and not have to struggle."

Ziegel eventually won his battle. Still he feels for so many others he believes are getting cheated by the system.

"We're feeding the war machine, but you never think of the war machine that comes home and needs, you know, feeding back home," he said.

His family hopes they don't have to fight the VA again. In August, Ty Ziegel's brother, 22-year-old Zach Ziegel, was deployed to Iraq.

"I want to make the VA system better because if he has to go through anything I went through, that's really going to upset me. That'll make my fuse real short and hot," Ty Ziegel said.

See the story:
Maimed Marine battles VA


Ziegel describes his wounds