Virgina Tech
There’s been incidents in my life where I lost someone very close to me. But I’m not sure that’s why I feel so nonchalant about this latest shooting at Virginia Tech. I think I would feel exactly the same way if it happened at UC Berkeley, and I felt the same nothingness when it happened at Columbine. Let me know if you think I am wrong, and why. My mom was very confused as to why I didn’t feel anything. Nothing really shocks me anymore.
You know, it really wasn’t exactly an easy thing for my brother and I,either. We came in 1992 and we were frequently threatened, made fun of, pushed around. Sometimes, I listen to stories like this VT korean dude and wish I could have had the chance to just speak with him for an hour or so. I’m sure we’ll have a great laugh about the things we had to go through and nothing like this would have happened.
Active Reserve Career Over
This weekend will be momentous for me. 22 APR 07 will be the last drill date I’ll be attending with the United States Army. So what am I doing up at 1:20 AM? Well, I just got done writing a hand written letter (which is shamefully becoming a dying tradition), and I don’t need to go too early tomorrow morning because I’ve already passed my PT test for the year. The final day of my 8 year army commitment will be 17 DEC 08, at which point I will receive my general discharge papers. This means that although I won’t be attending military drills starting Sunday, I could still be called to full time duty until December 08. It’s always been a love/hate relationship with the Army. I am sorry to see this particular come to an end, knowing that the men I served overseas with will be closer to me than most people I will ever meet. But it’s time to let go, and carry on with the next chapter of my life.
12/2000 – United States Army Oakland, California
Present Soldier Kuwait, Djibouti, Kenya
• Led a 60 man Company element in several training missions, including a platoon size ambush, claymore mine awareness, physical fitness, military bearings, and convoy safety for Operation Iraqi Freedom
• Directed communication networks between American embassies and bases in Kenya and Djibouti, relaying sensitive and classified information instrumental to the success of US Central Command’s special forces operations
• Managed a 15 man platoon, increasing platoon efficiency by allocating human resources to more applicable time tables and positions while working over 80 hours a week
• Provided force protection for incoming and outgoing soldiers while traveling and operating in various countries such as Kuwait, Djibouti, Kenya, Qatar, Bahrain, Cyprus, and Germany
3/23/2004 Soldier of the Quarter Award Combined Joint Task Forces – Horn of Africa
• Competitive award recognizing 1 out of 1600 soldiers stationed in Camp Lemonier, Djibouti for displaying physical prowess and leadership abilities and potential, while also undergoing fierce questionnaire by Army Special Forces and Marine Expeditionary Force leaders regarding knowledge of military protocol and values
7/3/2002 Certificate of Achievement Ft. Jackson, South Carolina
• Voted by the 18 peers in my class and 2 Company cadres (Drill Sergeants) as the one that best epitomizes the Army values, while also serving as the Company Guidon (Flag) Bearer, representing an element of 180 soldiers
I’ve never had a summer vacation since my Freshman year of High School.
Summer 2000 (Sophomore), Summer School.
Summer 2001 (Junior), Basic Combat Training, Ft. Jackson, SC. I had a week of rest after having flown out the day after my final day of class.
Summer 2002 (Senior), Advanced Individual Training, Ft. Jackson, SC. I missed graduation for this.
Summer 2003 (Freshman, College), Long Beach, CA, to Ft. McCoy, WI, to Camp Wolf, Kuwait, to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, to Kuwaiti Naval Base, Kuwait. From there, we’d travel to Djibuoti, Kenya, Qatar, Bahrain
and Germany. A couple people have an idea where else we went.
Summer 2004 (Freshman, College) After having taken 2 summer courses during the war, I took a couple more courses at Cerritos College immediately following the return from the 1.5 year deployment. That was the only way I lost only a year of my life due to the deployment. I would have lost 2 full years if I didn’t.
Summer 2005 (Sophomore, College), Summer School and Smith Barney internship. I woke up at 6AM every weekday to get to work by 7:30 AM in San Francisco, a week after end of Spring Semester. When mandatory Business Summer Courses started in July, I went to work all the same, but returned to Berkeley by 1 PM to take about 5-6 hours of courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Summer 2006 (Junior, College), IBM internship in New York, 3 days after my last Final. I got to see my brother, who was visiting my parents in LA. It was the first time our entire immediate family had a dinner together since I believe 2002. I work an average of 80 hours a week for 11 weeks.
Summer 2007 (Graduated Senior, College), trip to South America. I work at IBM starting in September 10th, which gives me about 3 months to make this trip on a recently bought 1980 Mercedes Benz 300SD Turbo Diesel, my home from late May – late August.
Walter Reed
Military bureaucracy and its ineffectiveness was broadly exposed during findings at Walter Reed Hospital. I’m glad someone wrote an article on it, and that it became as big of an issue as it did. There is no reason why the military should be so inefficient when it comes to taking care of its own. Here’s my story:
2002. Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, was the first time I heard of the phrase “motrine farm.” Everything in between headaches and muscle cramps, to simple surgery remedies were preceded by a general prescription of motrine, or ibuprofen. It started out at 400mg, but it quickly built its way up to 800mg in a hurry, with its effectiveness quickly becoming belittled. During the final week of basic training, I marched 15 miles with some 40 pounds of weight on an ingrown toenail. The nurse treated me the next day by numbing my toe with anesthetics through a needle 2 inches long, inserting it directly into my toe. She said that some women compared the pain to giving birth. Afterwards, I was given motrine to hop on my one good leg.
2003. Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. This was the first time my jaw started popping in and out. The doctors didn’t know what it was, and thought it’d go away if they just gave me painkillers. I took 2 doses of 800mg of motrine everyday.
2004. Ft. McCoy, WI. I was diagnosed with TMJ (Temporalmandibular Joint Disorder) not by a doctor, but by a Sergeant who had some knowledge of TMJ. It was by complete accident. I was complaining about growing pain in my jaw, how it consistently popped in and out, and that oftentimes I would wake up with a migrain. It took great effort just to get up every morning. I went to go see a doctor, who didn’t know what to do with it, so he told me to see the dentist. The dentist made me a soft mouth guard, which took a week to make. It made the problem worse. He then told me to take it off, said he couldn’t help me, and said to seek help after I get back from deployment. He prescribed 3 daily doses of 800 mg of motrine.
Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. I went to see a dentist, who sent me to see a doctor. The doctor didn’t understand why the dentist would do such a thing. He sends me back to the dentist’s office, and I see a different one this time. He makes me a hard mouth guard this time, which seems to help the problem. He also puts me on antidepressants, Elavil, which makes me drowsy and uncharacteristic of myself when waking up in the morning, attributing to me receiving Article 15 and losing my Sergeant promotion when I cannot control my emotions during a confrontation when my First Sergeant wakes me up for a weekly PT. I was still on 3 daily doses of 800 mg of motrine. I highly contemplate getting a surgery at Camp Doha, Kuwait. But the 8 percent success rate of surgery scares me, and getting out of Camp Arifjan and receiving authorization of a highly unsuccessful surgery outside the wires becomes increasinly difficult.
2005. Camp Lemonier, Djiboti. I renew my efforts to seek medical help. Although my pain didn’t regress during deployment, the Navy does a fantastic job of seeing me. Instead of juggling my appointments between the physician and the dentists, they both see me concurrently, putting me on a variety of medicine. They put me off Elavil, as it didn’t ease the pain, and also put me off motrine. Instead, they put me on moderate doses of Naproxen, toradol, and most importantly, Celebrex. Celebrex was the most important, as it was the COX-2 inhibitor that stopped the arthritic pain signals from being exhibited to the brain. I was on moderate doses, and it was effective for 2 weeks, as pain went away temporarily. However, I had to constantly increases my doses afterwards, which led me to believe that the structural problem wasn’t being solved. The only thing that the medicine was doing was temporarily easing the pain. When I returned from duty, the medicine Celebrex would come under national scrutiny, mostly because it was revealed that it could lead to heart complications. I’m not sure what came out of those allegations, and they had pulled Celebrex from prescriptions for a while, but I had long since lost hope in medicine and was no longer taking the medicine.
Los Angeles. After having returned from duty, I saw a doctor and a dentist in the Veterans Affair’s main South California headquarters in Long Beach. They said they couldn’t help me, and put my medical status on file. This file was completely independent of the military file, and they kept 2 seperate records. Which meant that I had to make the trip to my unit to borrow my medical files to hand over to the VA hospital for every visit. The VA puts me in their program, which is only good for 2 years anyway. To receive some sort of diagnoses and treatment, I was in line to receive MRI, but I was starting school in Berkeley and their mobile MRI unit was filled up for 2 months.
I also tried seeing TriCare, the military’s outpatient insurance program to see doctors outside the military. I waste an entire day waiting for a physician, who is confused as to why I am sitting in his office. I tell him that the dentist told me to see him. He tells me to go back to the dentist and say that TMJ is their problem. I return to the same dentist, who evaluates me and asks me vague questions as to how much pain I am in, at which point I realize to my dismay that I know more about TMJ than the doctor does. I rate everything between 7 and 10, 10 being worst. I am recommended seeing a doctor in San Diego, who is the only TMJ specialist in the western region, who is only available, if that, for selected days of the week during selected times. He was also taking a 2 week vacation, which meant that I couldn’t see him before I came up here to Berkeley.
Having lost hope with the military, I see 2 Korean dentists in LA. 1 says I will always live with the pain, and that they’ll try to ease the pain. The other says they can fix the problem. I go with the latter, although it is twice as expensive, and going against the fact that even though I didn’t like the doctor too much at that time, I believed her. I paid $1000 for the diagnoses alone, and an additional $5000 for some dentures that stabilizes my jaw and returns my bite to its normal position. During this process, I realize that the right side of my jaw has completely collapsed, while the left jaw had collapsed enough that the gap was no longer existent. The condyle (lower jaw), which usually has half a centimeter of gap in between it and the upper jaw, was in fact in contact with the upper jaw. The X ray showed it rubbing against my upper jaw, and it was clear that the round condyle was taking a beating: by this point, after years of abuse, it was instead flat, slowly griding itself away with every bite and word, while crushing main nerves that run in between the jaw and up to the brain.
2006. Berkeley, CA. The doctor who I saw in LA was a TMJ specialist, who went down there two weekends a month to help out a fellow Korean Dentist with TMJ patients in that region. She works up here in Fremont, and I make the monthly (sometimes semi-monthly) 3 hour roundtrip BART ride to Fremont to see her. But I’m extremely glad that she divides her time to both offices. It has worked out for me marvelously in that way. My other option would have been to fly down to Cerritos to see her for every appointment. And I am happy to say, that she has lived up to her claim: I am now recovering from TMJ. Some reoccurring pains linger on, but it is in no way close to what I was feeling before. I am forever grateful for this.
I receive a call from the Veteran’s Hospital, saying that someone apparently put a claim in my name and that they’ll pay for everything that I’ve been paying for out of my pocket for outside help while the claim was going through. Having paid over $10000 at this point in time for the treatment, this is great news. I call the day after to the number the person recommended, after having received some sort of notice in the mail. It ended up being an appointment notice to see the VA doctor to see if there’s anything they can do for me. Absolutely nothing came out of this.
I decide to file for a claim through the military. I am told to make a visit to a place about 30 miles away for my jaw. The dentist that saw me said that I am a totally helpless case, that I will live through the pain for the rest of my life. There’s nothing he can do for me, he says. He files the findings for the Veteran’s Affairs’ claims department.
About 9 months later, I receive a letter from the VA claims department, saying that they have settled it with a 10% disability rating. This means that I will receive about $100 a month every month for the rest of my life, also adjusting for inflation.
Sometimes I don’t tell the immediately preceding part of the story because most people don’t understand. The bureaucracy of the military is in such disastrous disarray, that the specialized help I could have received at any point in time to fix the pain instead of prolonging it was not an available option to me during the nursing of my jaws for the better part of this century. If I had to choose between the mild pains that I feel now after over $10000 in treatment, hours, days, and years lost due to waiting for military’s hopeless responses, and the $100 monthly settlement versus having no pain at all, I would choose the latter every time.
My time’s done, and I will no longer have to bother with the military. But something’s gotta be done, to provide the correct, efficient, and timely medical assistance to the very ones that protect our freedom. I don’t understand why the ineffective procedure which suggests that they don’t deserve exactly that is in place.