Begich talks vets

PALMER — In a wide-ranging discussion Memorial Day, Sen. Mark Begich showed that military and veterans’ issues are clearly on his mind.

In terms of people stopping by his office seeking help, nothing can touch veterans’ health care.

“It’s the No. 1 issue,” Begich said during a holiday visit to the Frontiersman office. The office helps veterans, he said, but it’s not the way these issues should be handled. “All we do is triage on these things.”

He said his office has been working to streamline the process, to make the myriad of paperwork and bureaucracies less daunting to navigate. Toward that, he’s happy that the Veterans Administration is working with the Indian Health Service to reimburse Native facilities that treat veterans.

“That is huge for Alaska,” he said.

He said he’s also working with his colleagues to clear up record keeping issues that have plagued the VA. He said the IRS sends its records to the VA on antiquated data tapes and the Department of Defense sends over paper records. He said a meeting of one of the committees he sits on seems to have already made some headway.

“Magically, the IRS is beta-testing this electronic data transfer just in time for this meeting we had,” he said.

Begich also had a lot to say about another topic that has been roiling the military lately: the rate of sexual assaults reported in the services.

He said that one thing the military needs to do is change the way it tracks the problem. Begich compared it to municipalities. A person can go to any municipal police department and get numbers for rates of sexual assault. That’s useful for comparing communities and seeking out trouble spots.

But the military’s data is kept on a broader scale, not broken out into individual areas. That makes it harder to troubleshoot.

Begich also said he supports taking prosecution of offenders out of the chain of command. A bill he’s sponsoring would do that.

“They’re still there,” he said of commanders. “But they’re not able to influence or overcome or change any of the process.”

And, he said, the military needs to change its culture.

“You’ve got to change the culture. That culture is a good old boy culture and you’ve got to break it down,” he said.

But he sees signs for hope. He said the military is recognizing the problem and moving to address it. And the new generation he sees moving up through the ranks is very encouraging for its enlightened views on the matter.

He said personnel should be made to understand that the goal is zero — no sexual assault in the military — and toward that the military will have a zero-tolerance policy, discharging every offender.

Begich visited the Valley and caught the tail end of a Memorial Day ceremony at the Veteran’s Wall of Honor. He said that he’s glad to be in Alaska, glad to be out of Washington, D.C.

“Any time you can come back here in this weather is great,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.