NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Dustin Allison was riding in an armored vehicle at the head of a convoy in Iraq one morning in 2007 when an improvised explosive device went off, killing the driver and leaving Allison badly wounded.
Shrapnel struck the Utah National Guard platoon leader behind his left ear, fracturing his skull and taking off a small piece of his ear. The radio behind his head was destroyed.
“I was definitely lucky,” said Allison, a former Utah State Trooper from the Salt Lake City suburbs who had volunteered for duty in Iraq.
But unlike many wounded in war, Allison bore few outward signs of having been badly hurt. He has a scar, but once he returned to Utah he also found out he was incapable of running without getting sick. He also says he experienced vertigo as a result, but that can be difficult to prove to government bureaucrats looking to safeguard against fraud.
“If you lose your leg it’s pretty clear what happened, whereas if you get hit in the head and you get migraines and dizzy and vertigo and all kinds of more subjective things that happen, that makes it harder” to diagnose, said Allison, who now lives in Baltimore.
He joined thousands of others struggling to navigate the Veterans Administration’s benefits claims process. But his choice to attend business and law school at the College of William & Mary in 2008 allowed him to become one of the school’s first clients for a veterans benefits legal clinic its law school was starting.
The clinic uses law students and a faculty member to tackle complex cases on a pro bono basis in which veterans can have difficulty providing the evidence they need to substantiate their claims. Veterans receive disability compensation for injuries and illness incurred or aggravated during their active military service. The amount of the compensation is based on a rating assigned by the VA.
The cases the clinic takes on often involve post-traumatic stress disorder either from warfare or a sexual assault that there may be no record of. In one case, a World War II veteran who injured his knee in basic training in 1943 didn’t report a claim until 1971; the claim was repeatedly denied until the clinic stepped in.
The clinic is being touted by members of Congress as a national model for inexpensively dealing with the Veterans Administration’s backlog. Between 2009 and August 2012, the clinic has helped 46 clients with submission of 343 claimed injuries or illnesses.
“At 50 clients you’re directly representing at a time, that’s certainly not going to impact the backlog in a way that It needs to be. But if you get more law schools across the country to do this work then you’re exponentially leveraging the passion and the experience of law students across the country to help with that backlog,” said Patty Roberts, director of clinical programs at William & Mary’s law school.
The VA has come under heavy criticism for the number of disability claims pending longer than 125 days — about 570,000. That’s nearly two-thirds of all claims pending.
“We want to respect our veterans, but when you’ve got people waiting, often times in excess of a year to get their claims processed, that’s not a good sign,” said U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. “This is a national embarrassment.”
Warner has urged Senate colleagues to work with law schools in their states to create similar legal clinics. He also urged VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to help move that process along.