No Longer a Soldier, Shinseki Has a New Mission

November 11, 2009 (New York Times) - It was a sad homecoming of sorts. On Tuesday, Eric Shinseki, the secretary of veterans affairs, returned to Fort Hood, Tex., where he was a division commander in the mid-1990s, to pay tribute to two veterans affairs employees who died in the shootings there last week.

But the visit also underscored Mr. Shinseki’s current mission: to modernize his problem-plagued agency, which was struggling to care for aging veterans even before the flood of young ones from Iraq and Afghanistan began.

For months, Mr. Shinseki has been crisscrossing the country as President Obama’s pinstriped evangelist for veterans’ care, raising concerns about a coming tide of post-traumatic stress cases, traumatic brain injuries and other physical and psychological scars of battle.

Having led soldiers in Vietnam as a young West Point graduate, until a mine tore off part of his right foot and nearly ended his Army career, he can speak about the “baggage” of war with deep feeling.

“All of us who went through combat, we were carrying a little bit of baggage from the experience, the stress,” he said in an interview before the Fort Hood shootings.

Even before the shootings, Mr. Shinseki was in a rush, telling people he figured he would have three years — the average tenure of a cabinet secretary, he says — to revamp the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In nine months, he has pushed the department to make it easier for veterans to receive compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder. The agency has expanded the list of illnesses presumed to have been caused by Agent Orange, smoothing the way for an estimated 200,000 Vietnam-era veterans to receive benefits. And he has requested what would be the largest single-year increase in the department’s budget in three decades, $15 billion, or 16 percent.

Mr. Shinseki has also pledged to streamline the backlog-plagued disability compensation system and is pushing to revamp an archaic computer system so electronic records track a veteran from enlistment to death.

Perhaps most ambitious is his goal of getting 131,000 homeless veterans off the street in six years. “I don’t think you can do this sort of thing if you don’t put a big number on the table,” he said.

But as much as anything, Mr. Shinseki talks about bringing “a change of culture” to the department. Widely viewed as indifferent or obstructionist by veterans’ groups, it needs to become more of an advocate for the people it serves, Mr. Shinseki says.

“I think what’s important for me is to make sure we aren’t seen as adversarial,” he said.

Veterans advocates who describe the department as a bastion of antiquated technology and hostile paper pushers, say he will need to do that and more to improve the sprawling agency, the government’s second largest after Defense.

“He faces one of the greatest rebranding challenges in American government,” said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “When I came home, my father, a Vietnam-era vet, said: ‘Don’t go to V.A. I wouldn’t go unless I was on fire.’ ”

The problems are daunting. Nearly 8 million of the 23.4 million veterans are enrolled in the veterans system, which administers compensation for disabled veterans and runs the nation’s largest health care system.

And the numbers are growing, partly because of the two wars, partly because of the recession, partly because the department has expanded certain programs and partly because it has reinstated benefits for hundreds of thousands of veterans who lost them several years ago.

At the same time, the department is widely criticized as inefficient or incompetent. Thousands of veterans have reported records being lost or destroyed. Applicants for compensation wait months for claims to be processed and years more for appeals to be adjudicated. And although the health care system is widely praised, it has had its share of scandals, including botched prostate surgeries and improperly cleaned colonoscopy equipment.

“They can’t do it the way they’ve done it in the past,” said Bob Wallace, executive director of the Washington office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “It won’t work.”

Mr. Shinseki, who grew up in Hawaii, the grandson of Japanese immigrants, has been in this kind of rush before. When he became the Army chief of staff in 1999, he pushed hard to modernize his hidebound service to prepare for new kinds of warfare.

Over protests, he ordered active-duty soldiers to wear black berets — once worn only by elite Army Rangers — as a symbol of unity and excellence. He also championed a lighter, eight-wheeled armored vehicle called the Stryker that is now in used in Afghanistan.

“If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less,” General Shinseki was fond of telling his commanders. (He has resurrected the line.)

He became perhaps better known for running afoul of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense in the Bush administration, when he said, on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that far more troops would be needed to secure the country. He was marginalized by the Pentagon leadership, but time proved him right.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and a member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said Mr. Shinseki has been pleasantly open about missteps, as when the administration proposed passing on some health care costs to veterans. There was an outcry among veterans, and Mr. Shinseki helped kill the proposal.

Later, when the agency was slow to send checks to veterans attending college on the post-9/11 G.I. bill, Mr. Shinseki ordered offices to open on a Saturday to issue payments to eligible students.

“Before, they would have said, tough, live with it,” Ms. Murray said.

But amid the plaudits, some advocates wonder how well a general can run a bureaucracy filled with unionized civil servants. He can hire and fire at will only a few dozen of the department’s 298,000 employees. And some friends worry whether Mr. Shinseki, famously plainspoken and earnest, can survive in sharp-elbowed Washington.

“He’s less likely to shape things to be palatable,” said Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, who is retired and served three times under Mr. Shinseki. “He’s more likely to go in and say: ‘This isn’t right, this isn’t how things should be done. Why can’t we fix it?’ And that’s not always the way to get things done in Washington.”

Mr. Shinseki acknowledged that he does not always know what works best in Washington. But in his four years as Army chief, he said, “I got enough done without having to do something unnatural for me. I think what’s natural for me is trying to tell the story that soldiers need told. It’s not my story, it’s their story.”

He suggests that he was as surprised as anyone when Mr. Obama, whom he had never met before the election, asked him to join the cabinet.

When friends express skepticism about whether he is enjoying his job, he says he tells them: “I get up every day and look forward to coming to work. The day isn’t long enough to solve the problems. I wish it was longer because there is lots to do.”

Written by James Dao and Thom Shanker