Forgotten Heroes

Still, a jump in disability claims in recent years has created a bottleneck. Daniel Cooper, the VA's under secretary for benefits, confirmed his department was coping with a backlog of 400,000 applications and appeals; 75 percent of them were still within a "reasonable" reviewing time frame, he says. Yet, most of those claims were filed by veterans of previous wars (a veteran can file or appeal a claim even decades after discharge). As more servicemen and women return from Iraq, the backlog is likely to increase. Cooper says the average waiting time for a benefits claim is about six months. NEWSWEEK turned up a number of veterans who'd waited longer. Keri Christensen, a National Guard veteran and a mother of two, says the VA in Chicago took 10 months to process her application. Rory Dunn, who nearly died in an IED attack outside Fallujah, says his application was delayed because, among other things, the VA mixed up his file with that of a Korean War veteran.

Feges's claim was finally approved last month: after NEWSWEEK and the advocacy group Veterans for America began looking into his case, he got a call from a VA official in Waco, Texas, with the news that his money would come through. Last week he received back pay to the date of his application.

The compensation is not huge. A veteran with a disability rating of 100 percent gets about $2,400 a month—more if he or she has children. A 50 percent rating brings in around $700 a month. But for many returning servicemen burdened with wounds, it is, initially at least, their sole income. "When I started school, that's when it became really hard not to have that money," says Feges.

One reason to worry about a crush of new vets at the VA has to do with the proportion of wounded to dead Americans in Iraq. Though we tend to mark the grim timeline of the war by counting fatalities, what really distinguishes this conflict is how many soldiers don't die, but suffer appalling injuries. In Vietnam and Korea, about three Americans were wounded for every one who died. The ratio in WWII was nearly 2-1. In Iraq, 16 soldiers are wounded or get sick for every one who dies. The yawning ratio marks progress: better body armor and helmets are shielding more soldiers from fatal wounds. And advanced emergency care is keeping more of the wounded alive. The VA's Kussman says that soldiers who survive the first few minutes after an explosion have a 98 percent chance of surviving altogether. But that means an increased burden on the VA's health-care system.

Two such survivors are Albert and Connie Ross. Albert lost a leg when a rocket-propelled grenade landed close to him in August 2004 while he was on patrol in Baghdad. Connie lived through a 2004 suicide bombing in Mosul but suffered multiple fractures and burns. When the two met in a hallway at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, Connie thought she noticed a certain swagger in Albert's walk. "He had this weird dip in his walk, so I asked him, 'Why are you pimp-walking in a hospital?' And he said: 'I'm not pimp-walking, I'm an amputee.' I was so embarrassed." The two married earlier this year and are expecting a child.

Though he's been in the VA system for more than two years now, Albert still doesn't have a primary-care doctor. Without one, getting appointments with specialists can be difficult. "You're supposed to be assigned one right away," says Albert, who now lives in San Antonio. "I'm not frustrated so much as worried—worried if and when something does go wrong, something will happen with one of my legs ... They [primary-care doctors] are the ones who have to fill out a work-order form; it's impossible to do anything without them."

One thing Albert desperately wants to do: get a new prosthetic. He's one of the early African-American amputees of the war. But the fake limb he's been given matches the skin tone of a Caucasian. It so embarrasses Albert that he always wears a sock over it—even if he's in sandals. "He's very self-conscious about it," says Connie. "It really bothers him."