GPPR Podcast Editor Kharl Reynado (MPP’23) spoke to Margaret Kuzma from the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School and Alden Pinkham from the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center (CVLC) about the military discharge process and discharge upgrade law. Based on experience with veteran clients, they explain how an other-than-honorable discharge can negatively affect a veteran’s life, and how advocates can use the military discharge upgrade process to open doors for veterans benefits and return honor to those who served.
“One of my discharge upgrade clients … said, ‘It gives me such peace to know that when I die, they will give my daughter a flag.’ … That little moment of knowing that your country has recognized the service … has a really meaningful impact.”
Alden Pinkham
“It is per se unjust if somebody is punished and continues to be punished throughout their life for misconduct that was actually symptomatic of an underlying mental health illness that they incurred because of their service.”
Margaret Kuzma
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[Episode Starts]
Alden Pinkham: “One of my first discharge upgrade clients who was upgraded to fully honorable decades after his service, he said, “It gives me such peace to know that when I die, they will give my daughter a flag.”
Kharl Reynado: When a person leaves the military, they are given a discharge status. For civilians, we might be most familiar with what is called an honorable discharge. However, there are some who are given a discharge termed less-than-honorable. On this episode, we’re going to learn about why that might happen and what veterans can do about it. I spoke to Margaret Kuzma from the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School, and Alden Pinkham from the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center. Both Margaret and Alden are discharge upgrade attorneys, and they explain the military separation process, how a discharge status can affect a veteran’s life, and the discharge upgrade legal landscape. Alden also shares the results of a new Connecticut Veterans Legal Center report about racial disparities in the military separation process.
Reynado: I’m Kharl Reynado and you’re listening to the Georgetown Public Policy Review Podcast. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Reynado: Thank you so much for joining us, Margaret. Could you first just start off by introducing your and telling our listeners about what you do?
Margaret Kuzma: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. I’m an attorney at the Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School. I do primarily discharge upgrades for veterans with less than honorable discharges. Before coming to Harvard, I worked with Alden and you, Kharl, and all the other lovely people at CVLC. I was also focusing on discharge upgrades because that’s the area of the law that I fell in love with early on. I haven’t really wanted to do anything else since. Before becoming an attorney, I ran the sexual assault prevention and response programs at two different army bases.
Reynado: Thank you so much. Alden, could you please introduce yourself too?
Pinkham: Yes, and thank you also, Kharl, for having me on. I am a singer fellow, a fellow is someone who’s just starting their law career after law school, and I’m at the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center, and I also work with veterans who received a less than honorable discharge from their military service, and they’re trying to obtain either a discharge upgrade, or some other way to access their VA benefits and health care, specifically for mental health conditions.
Reynado: Today we are going to be talking about military discharge upgrades. Before we get to that, we need to learn about what a discharge status is. So, Margaret, could you tell us about what usually happens when somebody leaves the military?
Kuzma: So, when someone enlists in the military, they are signing a contract, and the vast majority finishes their contract and are given an honorable discharge. But some service members have to leave their term early for a variety of reasons, and those are where we usually see the veterans with discharges that need upgrading. When we talk about upgrading the discharge, What we are primarily talking about is changing the characterization of service listed on a document called the DD-214. The DD-214 is the Department of Defense Form Number 214, and that’s the document that all active-duty service members receive when they exit service.
Kuzma: So, regardless of the characterization they get, they all get this one-page piece of paper. Um, sometimes it’s two. But you know essentially this, this one-page summary of their entire time and service. That document – that’s what all active-duty service members have to then show to prove that they served. So they have to show it to the VA for benefits. They have to show it to places like the DMV for state benefits. They show it to employers. Sometimes places like colleges and universities ask for it, and many, many places will ask what your characterization of service was.
Kuzma: When a characterization is less than honorable, it can be very stigmatizing, and can sometimes preclude a veteran from receiving benefits or obtaining employment. Besides honorable, there are five types of characterizations. There’s general under honorable, other than honorable, bad conduct discharge, dishonorable discharge, and uncharacterized.
Reynado: So, what can cause someone to get a discharge that is other than honorable?
Kuzma: Generally, this means that there was some type of misconduct, but misconduct in the military can be very different from misconduct in the civilian world. For one thing, it’s a twenty-four-hour job. So essentially everything you do is on the job. Unlike in the civilian world. That also means that whatever you do is your commander’s business. So, a lot of the “misconduct” is for behavior like underage drinking or substance abuse that might have happened on leave or after hours that, you know, if you were in a civilian job that would not be your employer’s business, but it is very much the military’s business.
Kuzma: It can also be for things that civilians would consider incredibly minor, and probably not misconduct, like being out of uniform or showing up late for duty. Especially if someone has several minor infractions like this, they may face separation with a less than honorable discharge. And many of the cases that we see have an underlying mental health component. So, for example, if someone has been the victim of military sexual trauma, they may be suffering from PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – or depression. They may have trouble getting up in the morning, and they don’t get to physical fitness on time.
Kuzma: Or they may start self-medicating or substance abuse. Same with somebody who’s suffering from combat-related PTSD. Or someone who has been involved or witnessed to a terrible training accident. We see circumstances like that all the time.
Pinkham: And I’ll add that in the military separation process, so much of what characterization of service the person gets is up to what their command thinks. So for these common types of discharges that we often see, like other than honorable. The difference between getting an honorable and an other than honorable or a general discharge is really up to your command. So there’s a lot of discretion baked into this process, which means that a person who commits some type of misconduct in one position say, like underage drinking, might wind up with an honorable discharge. And a person who engages in the exact same conduct elsewhere might wind up with an other than honorable discharge. And it is really down more to the command than to what the service member actually did in a lot of cases.
Reynado: So, Margaret mentioned that the DD-214 form is used a lot to receive, you know, federal benefits or state benefits. How does someone discharge status affect their life?
Pinkham: Someone who has a discharge status that is less than honorable. We often call bad paper, because that form DD-214 is what unlocks a person’s access to key benefits. For veterans who have an other-than-honorable in particular, they face the presumptive loss of VA benefits. And these benefits are designed for veterans returning home to make sure that they are able to deescalate from military life, that they’re able to acclimate back into civilian life, to help compensate them for any disabilities that they acquired while they were serving their country, and to otherwise help compensate them for what, for many people is four years, six years or more of time away from their careers and families.
Pinkham: The other-than-honorable creates a presumptive loss of those benefits. So I say presumptive, because someone with an other-than-honorable can go through a process at VA to try to convince VA that they are worthy of benefits. And a lot of veterans don’t even know this. They think, “Oh, I have, and other-than-honorable. I can’t go to the VA.” The truth is that they can go to the VA and try to get those benefits. But it’s also equally truthful to say that in the majority of cases veterans with an OTH lose in that process, and they don’t get access to those benefits.
Pinkham: I should mention that Congress is aware that in many instances veterans with other-than-honorable discharges, are not able to get VA healthcare, but they have service-connected disability or trauma, and there are some ways for veterans to access care. So one of these is a law passed in two thousand and eighteen, called the Honor Our Commitment Act, which instructs VA to give mental health care to anybody who experienced military sexual trauma, or was in combat for a period of one hundred days, including someone who was a drone pilot.
Pinkham: Those individuals can get VA mental health care, even if they have an other-than-honorable discharge, and they don’t have to go through the VA characterization of service process to access this. However, unfortunately, what we’ve seen is that VA is not even totally aware of this law that requires them to provide services. And so, in our experience, veterans go in, many of whom don’t have any knowledge of this law either, and they ask VA, “What am I eligible for?: And VA tells them, “Nothing. You have to go address your discharge.”
Pinkham: And that is not the case, and I would certainly encourage any veterans who are listening who have a bad paper discharge if they’re interested in getting some kind of VA service, and VA has told them, “No.” It is still worthwhile to go and check with the lawyers. There may be something that you could access even now, before you’ve gone through the entire discharge upgrade process which can take years.
Pinkham: And when we talk about benefits, this can seem really obscure. But to break down what this actually means for returning veterans who don’t have access to VA benefits: They have much higher rates of suicide then either just people in the general population in the us or other veterans. So, of all veterans, who are already more likely to die by suicide than just average Americans, two-thirds of all veterans who die by suicide are veterans who are not using VA health care. So, access to VA healthcare is a massive benefit that reduces the unnecessary death of veterans. Veterans with other than honorable discharges also have higher rates of homelessness than other veterans. They have higher rates of substance use, which can also lead to incarceration, and all of these things are linked to lack of those protective benefits that VA offers.
Pinkham: Veterans have difficulty obtaining jobs. So, for instance, if you are trying to access a job or another opportunity that requires showing your proof of military service. It says right there on the face of it, “other than honorable.” Or sometimes it’ll say misconduct, or sometimes it’ll say drug use, and that can cause someone to lose access to opportunities that they otherwise might have. And then a final way it affects people’s lives is their dignity. These are people who served. They believe in their service. The veterans that I speak to say, “I don’t feel like I served badly. I served honorably, and I want my country to recognize that service.” So, it has an important meaning to the person as well.
Reynado: So, it sounds like the DD-214, and this is discharge status really follows people throughout their life after they have left the military. And it has massive repercussions for healthcare access, like you said. Mental health. Homelessness. How does someone go about changing the status of their discharge or challenging it?
Kuzma: It’s not a fast fix. It’s a long process The Department of Defense has military review boards that can upgrade a veteran’s discharge. The good news about the process is, they can only upgrade. They can’t downgrade, so you can’t go to a board with a general under honorable, and then wind up with an other than honorable. You can only go up. So, that’s the good news. The bad news is they’re really backlogged, and it takes a really long time.
Kuzma: It also takes a very long time to prepare, because ideally a veteran whether they are going pro se, or whether they are being represented should have access to their military records, and those can take a very long time to get as well. Especially for older veterans who don’t have access to it online. So, it’s a long process, but it’s a very powerful remedy. So, for all the reasons, all then just talked about that that these stigmatizing um discharges follow somebody through their lives. Both the dignitary aspects which Alden touched on. And then all the more tangible benefits. In addition to changing that characterization of service that can make veterans eligible, they can also change the stigmatizing narrative reason. Alden mentioned, you know, drug abuse, misconduct. Sometimes it’s serious misconduct. Sometimes that form can say things like personality, disorder, or homosexual conduct.
Kuzma: They could say a whole host of information that you might not want to present when you’re interviewing for a job, or you know, when you’re trying to prove your service. These Defense these Department of Defense Boards can do quite a bit, but they do take quite a bit of time. There is a lower level board that is staffed by military officers, and then there’s a another level that is civilians. The legal standards, and I don’t want to get into too much law here. But the legal standards are propriety or equity, or error or injustice, and I mentioned that because to me it’s a really fun area of law with a lot of creativity.
Kuzma: You’re essentially arguing fairness in these cases, and you really get to tell the veteran’s story and tell what happened. And we have a lot of veterans who, regardless of the outcome, obviously we want to win, and they want to win. But regardless of the outcome, just having their story told and being heard, can be incredibly validating.
Reynado: What are the rules or guidelines that govern how the process goes?
Kuzma: The boards are set up. They were set up by Congress. There are statutory guidelines. There are regulatory guidelines, and then there are Department of Defense memoranda, and it’s actually a pretty dynamic area of the law. There have been quite a few of those Department of Defense memoranda recently. That are all very helpful for veterans who are trying to get that status upgraded. Relatively recently there have been three mental health-based memoranda, starting in 2014 with the Hagel memoranda. Essentially that came out of a class action that uh students at Yale University brought on behalf of Vietnam veterans. These Vietnam veterans have been living for decades with less than honorable discharges. They tried at these boards to get those discharges upgraded and got nowhere. And one of the things that the Board was looking for was proof of PTSD, which these veterans had, proof of PTSD and service that then led to the misconduct.
Kuzma: Well, PTSD did not become a diagnosis until 1980, so you know, if you’re serving in Vietnam, it’s probably not going to show up in your military record. So, it was just a catch twenty-two for these veterans. And what the Hagel memoranda said was, you know, you can look at symptoms, you can look at other things that are in the military record and infer that this was PTSD. And that memorandum has been kind of expounded upon a couple of different times in subsequent memoranda that really make these cases easier for veterans who are trying to prove that connection. Because going, you know, going back to what I said before with the legal standard, you’re essentially arguing fairness.
Kuzma: And it is per se unjust if somebody is punished and continues to be punished throughout their life for misconduct that was actually, you know, symptomatic of an underlying mental health illness that they incurred because of their service. So that’s what these memoranda are about. There are also some other really helpful DOD, Department of Defense, memoranda that focuses. There’s one that focuses on second chances. Fundamental fairness. You don’t have to have a mental health disorder to use that one. It talks about how you can have honorable service, but you know not have it be perfect service. And then there are several for people who served during times like, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and even before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
Kuzma: So now those veterans can get up upgraded as well, because we have a lot of service members who were discharged just on the basis of their sexual orientation. So, lots of lots of advocacy can really go a long way in this area of the law, I would say. Even though it’s a slow process. It’s pretty dynamic. And there’s lots of room to help veterans.
Reynado: After a veteran, you know, pursues the discharge upgrade process, like you mentioned it can be very long and burdensome. How have you seen the discharge upgrade to fully honorable affect a veteran’s life?
Pinkham: I think it can really affect someone’s life. The discharge upgrade is binding on the VA, which means that if someone had an other than honorable, and even if they had tried to convince VA to let them in the door, and to give them access to benefits, and lost, the discharge upgrade changes everything. So, one thing that we’ve seen are veterans that have been told by VA, “You’re not honorable. You’re not eligible for any benefits.” When they finally prevail and get the discharge upgrade, even if it’s just an upgrade from other than honorable to general, that affords access to most of, you know, not all, but most VA benefits. And a discharge all the way to fully honorable affords access to all the possible benefits.
Pinkham: Everything at VA becomes possible for the veteran. They can get health care without any questions asked. If they have a service-connected disability, they can get compensation for that disability. They can get access to a home loan so that they might be able to afford a home. All of these things help veterans stay healthy, stay housed, and to do great things with their lives.
Pinkham: But I think one of the big impact for the veterans that I’ve served has been that psychological benefit. So, I’ll always remember one of my first discharge upgrade clients who was upgraded to fully honorable decades after his service, and he said, “It gives me such peace to know that when I die, they will give my daughter a flag.” So just that little moment of knowing that your country has recognized the service that you provided has a really meaningful impact for people.
Kuzma: One of the veterans that I worked with told me that getting a less than honorable discharge was like being excommunicated. I’ve mentioned when you enlist, you sign a contract, and it’s a job. But it’s more than that. This is this is really their life. And it is like being excommunicated, being kind of shunned from the tribe when you are kicked out with a less than honorable, and it can just be tremendously important to have that upgraded. We had a recent veteran get upgraded that had tried on his own a couple of times, and it was really life changing for him to have it upgraded. He was a Persian Gulf era veteran um. He had seen multiple traumas, including a helicopter crash that he actually had to sift through the debris on um to try to find some remains. And he developed PTSD like a lot of our clients have.
Kuzma: He wasn’t actually diagnosed until 2017 so decades later he found out, you know, why he was having all of these symptoms when he was in service. He wasn’t being treated for anything, and he was self-medicating with alcohol, which is what led to his getting and other than honorable. But, like Alden said, he went to the VA and he was turned away. They didn’t do the VA process that they are supposed to do to see if he was eligible. He then went back several decades later, before he came to us, though, and tried again. They did go through the process, and they denied him. And at that point he was suffering from physical disabilities and was essentially homebound. So, he really needed VA care. He also just really needed financial help, and one of the services that the VA has is they can service connect you, and give you monthly compensation for your disabilities. And that can be tremendous. If you get a hundred percent, that’s over three thousand dollars a month.
Kuzma: So you know, this was critical for his family to get this this compensation, and for him because he was homebound and he couldn’t work anymore. He tried to get a DU, discharge upgrade on his own and failed. We were able to go back to the board and using some of those memoranda that I mentioned get the board to re look at his case, and he was upgraded to fully honorable. So, he now has access to everything, and is going through the service connection process. But it’s been a long road. And it’s really been life changing for him.
Reynado: I think it can be difficult for civilians to understand the weight that the status carries for people, and it is really amazing to hear how you as advocates are able to provide this kind of support and help. Margaret, you just mentioned that the client you recently worked with, had tried on their own, and was pretty unsuccessful, but after getting legal help they were more successful. You are both legal advocates who work with veteran clients on discharge upgrades. How did the both of you get into this kind of work?
Kuzma: I got into it because my husband is a military veteran. And I worked on army bases before I went to law school. And I really wanted to do something with that population post law school, but specifically discharge upgrades spoke to me because when my husband was serving, we were in the midst of two wars. Two very long wars, and he was infantry and deployed to Baghdad, and he himself came back unscathed. We were very lucky, but you know there were a lot of people in his unit – this was 2006 – that did not come back the same. And I remember, in particular, it was an infantry unit, but they were pretty good about understanding, you know, what each other had had gone through. And there was one person in particular who was really struggling, and was having migraines, and couldn’t go to work, and was showing up to work on late when he could go, and the first sergeant was very protective. And helped him through the process, and I think he eventually got medically discharged.
Kuzma: But that could have gone very differently, and he could have gotten kicked out um with another than honorable discharge very, very easily, for all of the medical symptoms that he was having from possibly a traumatic brain injury. Back then they didn’t know as much as they know now. But very probably also PTSD. And just thinking about how that case was handled, and how it could have been handled. And knowing the people involved is chilling for me, because I know how many don’t turn out that way, and, as Alden said early on you know, so much depends on how that command looks at it, and what they decide to do. And if you don’t have somebody who understands mental health, which many people don’t. It can go very badly and affect somebody for the rest of their life. So that’s what really got me into this work. I wanted to be able to tell those stories and try to make things right for people who didn’t get the benefit that that soldier got.
Pinkham: On my end, I don’t have a particular connection to the military. But before I decided to become a lawyer, I had spent many years working on a crisis hotline for trauma survivors. Occasionally, on that hotline, we would get calls from service members who had experienced military sexual trauma, and we’re just looking for someone to turn to, because they weren’t getting any help while they were still in the military, or shortly after. A large part of my role was connecting trauma survivors with lawyers who could help them with their legal claims, because we often have systems that are designed to assist trauma survivors with particular things: Immigration, for instance, or the discharge upgrade process. But at the same time these systems can be very difficult to navigate on your own. So, I decided to go into law to play that role of helping trauma survivors get the legal help that they needed.
Pinkham: And for me as a civilian, when I learned that there was such a thing as these middle ground discharge statuses, other than honorable, and how they interrupted access to crucial benefits for veterans. It just was obvious to me that those other than honorable discharges or less than honorable discharges in a lot of circumstance would have to be related to trauma, and that that would be largely out of control for the veteran themselves. So, I’m really happy to have found this type of work where I can help somebody navigate the system that’s designed to help remedy something that may have happened years and years ago outside their control. But that system itself can be re-traumatizing and hard to access without legal help.
Reynado: Last episode, I talked about the PACT Act with Cindy Johnson and Amy Antioho. Cindy Johnson is the Deputy Director at the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center. And she walked us through what CVLC does to help veterans access disability benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Alden, can you tell us a a bit more about what CVLC does specifically in the discharge upgrade work that you do.
Pinkham: CVLC has a very well-defined mission. Our mission is to help veterans recovering from homelessness and mental illness, overcome legal barriers to housing health care and income. And the way that we fulfill our mission is through partnership with the VA. We’re a medical legal partnership, and so that structure is designed with the idea that a person’s lawyers, social workers, and health care teams can all work together to help with problems. So, for example, if somebody is facing eviction, that’s a legal problem that can impact their mental and their physical health. If somebody has a mental health issue that they’re dealing with, and they’re in crisis, that’s a medical problem that could impact their legal issue. So we all try to work together, and that partnership works really, really well for the majority of our veteran clients. Except we have this subgroup of veterans, those with bad paper, less than honorable discharges, who don’t have access to the VA to the same degree as our other clients, and that’s what our Discharge Upgrade program is designed to assist with.
Pinkham: So those veterans, if we didn’t have a discharge upgrade program would be shut out from our medical legal partnership services as well. So, we work with the veterans to try to get them access to any VA benefits that they might qualify for right now and then also get a discharge upgrade to expand access to VA benefits later.
Reynado: CVLC released a report about the military’s administrative separation process and racial disparities. Could you tell us about a bit about what prompted this study and what were the results?
Pinkham: CVLC just released a report on Veterans Day looking into race disparities in the less than honorable discharge status. So, we know from the work of other advocates how certain groups of people are disproportionately impacted by bad paper. So, we already knew people with mental health conditions, PTSD or TBI, people who suffered from military sexual trauma. People with LGTBQ identities. All of these groups disproportionately receive bad paper. But there’s been comparatively little recent research on race, and a couple of years ago another organization called Protect Our Defenders released a report that showed that service members of color, while they were in service, disproportionately faced court martial.
Pinkham: Now a court martial is like a military prosecution, and it can lead to the worst forms of discharge. A bad conduct discharge, or a dishonorable discharge. But we were also wondering how some of the more common, less than honorable discharges, so general and other than honorable, which don’t require court martial, but require just a command process to separate someone from the military, whether there was a disparity based on race in those discharges as well. So, we FOIA-ed (Freedom of Information Act) data from the government on separations of service members between 2014 and 2020.
Pinkham: And when we analyze that data we found that, yes, there’s a significant disparity based on race that impacts Black service members in particular. So we got back data. We cleaned the data. We took out some information that had to do with people whose race were unknown, or whose discharge status was unknown or uncharacterized. But in the end we were working with over a million separations. And from those we found that Black service members are about eighteen percent of all separations from the military. And so you would expect, just based on the math that they would get close to eighteen percent of each type of discharge. So, you would expect about eighteen percent of all honorable discharges. About eighteen percent of all other than honorable discharges, et cetera, would go to Black service members. But that’s not what the data showed.
Pinkham: So instead, the data showed that Black service members got less than you would expect of honorable discharges. So, they received a little over sixteen percent of honorable discharges compared to their eighteen percent representation, but they received over twenty-five percent of the other than honorable discharges, and over thirty percent of the general discharges.
Pinkham: So those are unexpectedly high percentages, and then the reverse was true for White service members. So White service members received more than their share of honorable discharges, and less than their share of general and other than honorable discharges. So we took this data. We also ran a multinomial logistic regression on the data which confirmed that the disparities were statistically significant. So that means that it’s extremely unlikely that this result would have occurred by chance with this data set.
Pinkham: So, we think that this shows evidence of implicit or explicit bias in the military separation process. The military itself is actually a pretty good control for other things that might cause an apparent disparity. So, in the recruitment process, they’re already looking at education levels. They’re looking at testing scores. They’re looking at prior criminal history. Other things that could explain a disparity like this are already somewhat controlled for in the military context, and we’re really quite concerned about the level of racial disparity that we found. And this is not data from decades ago.
Pinkham: In that same data set we also got results on gender, and where our initial calculations are also showing a disparity on gender, we’ll be looking at that data more closely and doing a similar in depth analysis of it, and we expect we’ll have some findings on that to release in the spring.
Reynado: CVLC’s report says that Black service members fare significantly worse in the administrative discharge system, which means that Black veterans are disproportionately cut off from veteran’s benefits. The report also says that while they did not find that service members of other races were not disadvantaged, they are concerned that the data provided by the Department of Defense is not rich enough to ascertain disparities that may nonetheless exist, particularly for Asian, Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern service members.
Reynado: The discharge upgrade field has a lot of room for advocacy, and you can really help people through this work. What would you say, Margaret, to people who are listening to this episode and are interested in getting involved or learning more about helping veterans through the discharge upgrade field.
Kuzma: It’s nuanced. It’s a bit esoteric. But it’s also an area that has a lot of the same social justice themes that you see across the board like the report that Alden just talked about. Criminal justice writ large, these disparities, unfortunately, show up. So if you’re interested in racial justice, if you’re interested in social justice.
Kuzma: If you’re interested in LGBTQ issues. If you’re interested in gender issues. They all overlap in this area, and please bring your expertise to military law, to veterans law, because this is a population of people who stepped up to serve, but they in many ways are the same as us. You know they have the same problems. They face the same barriers, and they need the same help. So I would just say, you know the doors are open. And this is a dynamic and exciting area and an area that needs a lot of help. So, if you’re interested in any of these issues, please come and join us!
Pinkham: There are several things people could ask Congress to do, their elected representatives to do. I mean one thing we’ve talked about a lot today is the way that the military imposes a discharge status, and then the way that in turn the VA excludes people from benefits based on that discharge status. That’s not the law.
Pinkham: That’s a regulation that VA has decided on. VA can take away that problem at any time that they want by rescinding the regulation that bars the majority of veterans with an other than honorable discharge from benefits. Advocates um like Margaret, myself, the groups that we work for, have been asking VA for years to rescind this regulation. They’re currently considering it. And that’s a fight that people can bring to their Congress people. And if VA doesn’t do it on their own, Congress can revoke that regulation by law. They should clarify that veterans should never be barred from benefits except for very specific circumstances where Congress has decided that benefits shouldn’t be afforded.
Pinkham: Another thing that people can do is to ask for additional memos like the ones that Margaret talked about earlier. So, these memoranda have helped go back. They kind of reach back in time and right wrongs for individuals from long ago. So you know, in the Vietnam era, where people were discharged with other than honorable discharges, because we had no collective understanding of what PTSD was at that time. Now someone can go back and get an upgrade on the basis of symptoms of in-service PTSD. We should have a similar type of memo for all forms of discrimination, so race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality.
Pinkham: Anyone who face discrimination in their separation process should have the same opportunity to go back and write that wrong. And currently, the legal structures are just not robust enough to make that meaningful for advocates, veterans who are working with advocates who are trying to go back and address those issues.
Reynado: Thank you for listening to my conversation with Margaret Kuzma and Alden Pinkham. Prior to joining the McCourt School, I worked as the Intake Coordinator and Legal Assistant for the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center. I extend deep thanks to Margaret and Alden for joining me today’s episode. I hope you learned something new today. If you are interested in checking out the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center report on racial disparities in the military separation process, you can check it on their website or you can see a link on our website.
Reynado: Please visit GPPReview.com to learn more about the Georgetown Public Policy Review and to check out more podcast episodes. My name is Kharl Reynado. Thank you for tuning in.
[Episode Ends]
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