Battle Worn

Each branch of the military provides opportunities for injured service members to challenge their ratings, but most of the injured simply pocket their severance checks and go home. Only 20 percent of soldiers ask for a formal hearing, at which an attorney can present evidence and call witnesses, the Army says. Then only half of those soldiers proceed with the hearing.

Perhaps that indicates most injured soldiers are satisfied with their ratings. But veterans groups say that more wounded service members would challenge their ratings if it weren't so complicated and time-consuming.

"It's probably one of the most convoluted workman's compensation systems in the world," says Steve Robinson, government affairs director at Veterans for America.

Most of those hurt in the line of duty are young, weary of fighting and anxious to return to their civilian lives, Robinson and others point out. A severance check for $10,000 or $12,000 (the latter was Twohig's severance after 49 months of service) can seem to be a lot of money. If a case has already dragged on for months, seeking a formal hearing -- even if that's in a service member's best interest -- can require still more time and frustration.

All of which tends to discourage the injured from taking on the system -- and some veterans advocates suspect that the Pentagon, openly worried about ballooning health-care costs, prefers it that way. Medical benefits are not discretionary; the Defense Department must pay the tab. "Increasingly, it's having a direct impact on the department's ability to meet its needs for equipment, replacement equipment, personnel," says William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. "The costs of retirees, the health-care costs, are a great concern to us."

Nevertheless, the Defense Department says that each disability case "is evaluated on the basis of relevant clinical information," and the Army vehemently denies that its evaluation boards award lower ratings because of pressure, direct or indirect, to hold down costs.

"No one has discussed that financial burden with me at all," says Col. Carlton Buchanan, the new deputy commander of the Army's Physical Disability Agency, which oversees its evaluation system. "Nobody has said I have a particular requirement or a goal or a quota or a threshold that I can't surpass . . . I feel no pressure whatsoever to set limits on disability. We will do what's right."

Still, civilian attorneys who argue military disability cases see a pattern in the ratings.

"The informal board will tend to lowball," says Vaughan Taylor, who practices in Jacksonville, N.C., and has argued dozens of disability cases. Like many of the small fraternity of civilian lawyers who specialize in military cases, he is a former military lawyer, or judge advocate, himself. "It's almost as if the informal board exists to give out the standard 10 percent, and then see who squawks."

"The unwritten guidance seems to be: Push these people over to the VA, and let them pay for this," agrees Joseph W. Kastl, a former Air Force lawyer who now calls his Bethesda firm the Military Defender.

Sometimes, service members find the system works well for them. One of Taylor's clients, former Marine Sgt. Eric LeClair of Swansboro, N.C., was unhurt during the first wave of the Iraq invasion, only to take a bad landing during a martial arts test aboard the USS Iwo Jima in September 2003. His list of injuries was pages long: a traumatic brain injury, nerve palsy, bone spurs and degenerated discs. "I can't lift a half-gallon of milk above my waist, and it's been like that for two years," LeClair said this past summer.

The night before he was scheduled to learn his disability rating, he and his wife were too jittery to sleep. They had seen other seriously injured Marines "going through it and getting the shaft," in LeClair's opinion. Despite the pages of additional material and independent physicians' findings that his lawyer had amassed, LeClair expected the same result. But the next morning, to his surprise and his wife's enormous relief, he was placed on the temporary retirement list with a 60 percent rating -- no formal hearing needed.