David Castillo served in the Navy and later as an administrator in President George W. Bush’s Department of Veterans Affairs.
On Wednesday night, the 3rd Congressional District candidate, an Olympia Republican, sat down with about 20 military veterans in Vancouver to hear their concerns at an informal veterans forum.
At the top of the list was a common complaint: the challenge of finding a job.
Some who attended said employers are reluctant to hire veterans recently deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan for fear they might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
There’s also a perception that veterans lack experience that’s useful in civilian life, said Vancouver City Councilman Larry Smith, an Army veteran.
“The civilian mindset is that veterans don’t have job skills” that are relevant in the private sector, Smith said. He said the federal government could do more to help veterans start their own businesses where they can put their skills to use.
Smith also suggested that more veterans enter the teaching profession, where they could serve as positive role models for young people and bring discipline to the classroom. “They would bring personal responsibility,” he said. “I think we’re not doing that enough.”
Castillo said he’d like to see veterans’ employment programs move from the U.S. Department of Labor to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “We need to take a holistic approach to services for veterans and make it a full-service agency,” he said in an interview.
He told fellow veterans he also wants to find ways to link veteran-owned businesses to military personnel while they are still on active duty, to help provide them with a smoother transition to civilian life. Service organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars could help fulfill that role, he said.
On the issue of veterans’ health care, Castillo said he favors giving veterans vouchers they could use to purchase medical care, whether inside or outside the VA system of hospitals and medical clinics.
“This has been discussed off and on for a number of years,” he said. “It’s extremely controversial. Democrats hate this. They think it’s an end run around the VA. But we need to get innovative.”
A Marine Corps veteran who was discharged in 2001 after serving in the Bosnia conflict and the first Gulf War told Castillo he thinks veterans of those conflicts take a back seat to those deployed since Sept. 11, 2001. “Those people still have problems but they are getting swept under the rug,” he said.
The Marine veteran said it took him 10 years to “get back to sanity” after his deployment, but “the guys who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan get all the attention.”
Castillo acknowledged that different waves of veterans get treated differently. “It’s been that way since the VA was created in 1930,” he said.
He added that the Department of Defense consistently lags far behind when it comes to dealing with war-related injuries and illnesses, whether the effects of exposure to the chemical Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, the Gulf War syndrome experienced by many who served in 1991, or the extreme injuries suffered in the current conflicts.
Defense officials “were at a complete loss on how to deal with traumatic brain injuries,” he said. “We need a lean organization that can transition with the conflict.”
Castillo, who supervised a staff of 60 at the DVA, said there’s deadwood in the Department of Veterans Affairs, as in every federal agency. “I couldn’t fire anybody, and some needed to go,” he said. “I believe we need to change workplace rules to make it easier to fire people, but also to promote people.”
He pledged to use the knowledge he gained inside the DVA to promote change as a member of Congress. “I’m going to be a real thorn in their side for veterans,” he said.
He also vowed to create a “veterans’ sounding board” in the 3rd District and meet with the group monthly so he could be a more effective advocate for veterans. Chris Boyd, a disabled Army veteran who briefly ran for the 3rd District seat and is now helping the Castillo campaign, would be in charge of setting it up, he said.
Castillo said later he learned some things at the forum, especially about alleged discrimination in the job market.
“This notion that there is some sort of stigma attached because of PTSD and mental health issues is something that surprised me a little,” he said. “I was really saddened.”
Larry Smith said the forum brought some important issues to the fore.
“Sometimes we give a lot of lip service to taking care of veterans, but it’s more than saying goodbye and transitioning out of the Army,” he said. “We need to stay longer with them. If they don’t get a job and have opportunities when they come out of the service, that contributes to their stress. We need to make sure we are doing everything we can to integrate them back into society.”
