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Wounding Warriors: How Bad Policy Is Making Veterans Sicker and Poorer
According to General Jim Mattis, former US Secretary of Defense, Wounding Warriors is “an unflinching appraisal…a must-read for those committed to caring for our Veterans who have borne the battle.” Indeed, Wounding Warriors : How Bad Policy Is Making Veterans Sicker and Poorer is a transformational effort of research into the Department of Veterans Affairs and the US military. Authors Daniel Gade — retired US Army lieutenant colonel, professor, public policy leader, and former US Senate candidate from Virginia — and former Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Huang interviewed dozens of veterans who saw the perverse structure of incentives within the VA from the inside. The authors also combed through years of literature and compiled a wealth of data that demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt that our system of caring for veterans, post-military, is broken. As former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said in his review of the book, it is “an unflinching appraisal” of how the Department of Veterans Affairs rewards disingenuity and dishonesty. Wounding Warriors , however, does more than identify flaws in how veterans are cared for after their time in service is up. It also outlines solutions that would move veterans to take a healthy approach to post-military life. Wounding Warriors is a must-read for veterans, their families, and anyone who has felt subjected to a corrupt system of bad incentives.
381 pages, Hardcover
Published October 26, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 15, 2021
Having read this book, cover to cover, I cannot say that I disliked it or that I am a fan of it. While the book is well written and obviously fairly well-researched, I am not convinced that we actually see truth as it should be seen. What a reader can see is quite a bit of conjecture, speculation, personal anecdotal assumptions, and “sensational fiction as if it is truth” interlaced amid what is touted as a scientific explanation of a “problem”.
The book, laced with good information, is written in a manner that expounds a great deal of confirmation bias in support of a rather negative discourse concerning the Veteran’s Administration and the people who support/fund its activities. There are, in fact, a number of inaccuracies, related to healthcare, VA disability claims/adjudication, as well as general leadership constructs that would result in errant outcomes throughout the book. In example, the author(s) spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on sensationalized claims related to PTSD (not entirely grounded in fact (e.g., PTSD is a combat related illness, etc.)) as well as one veteran’s claim for the loss of his penis in combat. The author repeatedly claims that if one has not "seen combat" they do not warrant a clinical diagnosis or disability rating for such experiences and refer to the loss of a “sex organ” as not worthy of a disability claim. Perhaps the author(s) need to concentrate, for a minute or two, on research relating to PTSD and review some high school anatomy textbook literature to re-learn that a penis is not just a sex organ but serves other bodily function as well….I digress.
The author(s) spends so much time focusing on PTSD and negating clinical diagnoses that they perceptibly fail to see the true nature of underlying mental health issues that plague our nation and our veterans. The fact is, contrary to the author(s) assertions, PTSD is no longer just a combat related ailment. One does not, again contrary to the author(s) assertion, have to “see combat” for PTSD to impact a person’s life. Amid clinical research, varying degrees of PTSD have been realized in many scenarios and some of those situations had nothing to do with combat. As an aside, every veteran sees battle from varying perspectives and one does not have to be a “frontline” troop in order to see combat. We must remain mindful that it takes approximately 20 job specialties supporting “frontline” troops for the combatants to remain successful. Those who may be less than informed need to first understand, there truly is no frontline anymore anyway. Many of those support troops, for whom the author(s) disdain is rather clear, will be found on convoys and many other types of missions as well. Let’s not ostracize any categories of supporting roles in our effort to make one job specialty any more important than others. Many service men and women amid many specialties serve, hurt, get injured, and unfortunately die in combat; one’s view of a deployment may be very different from another’s – but all are equally valuable and deserving of benefits earned.
All things about the author(s) narrative was not negative. I wholeheartedly agree with the supposition that many exiting service men and women are coached, unashamedly, to seek restitution for their service. Veterans, in many instances, are taught amid their respective transition phases to seek as much benefits as the VA will allow – it is important to note, these are earned benefits, not entitlements as the author(s) repeatedly state throughout the book. I, personally, have witnessed, senior-level officers and non-commissioned officers in some cases, researching online the things to say, actions to take, conditions that grant the most payment, and methods for documenting ailments to ensure the maximum amount of payout possible. I recall one officer telling me, as he called to hire a “writer” for his clams, that he intended to “never have to work again” and that the VA “owed him for his service”. This is a preposterous attitude and is a shameful approach to seeking remunerative benefits from a career’s worth of service, hard knocks, and physical “punishment” to one’s body. I recall, amid my own transition experience, the worthless attendance at a Transition Assistance Program wherein a retired command sergeant major VA rep literally stomped his foot each time he described things that should be documented. How did we arrive at the idea that giving the proverbial answers to the test are okay?
The bottom line is this – in reading the author’s information on the jacket flap, it is easy to see that one is a self-aggrandizing, self-proclaimed, failed politician and the other is a "freelance journalist". Current public sentiment to both of these categories aside, it is clear that this book is written with an underlying agenda. This becomes profoundly clear in the first few lines of the Epilogue when the author discloses, “…reform to the VA disability compensation system is crucial to ensuring that veterans can lead lives of meaning, purpose, and value. The current system disempowers veterans and treats them as a victim class, rather than placing them in the driver’s seat of their own transitions from active service to civilian life” (p. 329). Most veterans actually do lead meaningful, purpose-filled lives after the military so we should be very careful about using a few bad examples to devalue the majority. I would challenge the author to re-examine the narrative to emphasize just how many hundreds, thousands, millions of veterans for whom the VA is a help in realizing a valuable life amid civilians who may/may not always understand their history.
As I found, throughout the book, the author(s) Epilogue statement (as well as many others throughout the book) paints every veteran with the same brush as if every one of us is a money-grubbing, helpless, societal reject and dependent upon a system that disallows any of us to be successful after the military. Nothing could be further from the truth. The narrative is so clear that even my college son (who never served in the military) listened to a portion of the book as I read out loud and reflected, “this book sounds to me as if the author(s) are raging against what they deem to be the politicization of an issue which doesn’t even seem to exist. The author seems angry that other veterans are just as human as he, other veterans display pain and other emotions, but other veterans don’t deserve as much as the author himself – oh, and the author feels he deserves more than others because he got shot in combat”. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
The book, laced with good information, is written in a manner that expounds a great deal of confirmation bias in support of a rather negative discourse concerning the Veteran’s Administration and the people who support/fund its activities. There are, in fact, a number of inaccuracies, related to healthcare, VA disability claims/adjudication, as well as general leadership constructs that would result in errant outcomes throughout the book. In example, the author(s) spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on sensationalized claims related to PTSD (not entirely grounded in fact (e.g., PTSD is a combat related illness, etc.)) as well as one veteran’s claim for the loss of his penis in combat. The author repeatedly claims that if one has not "seen combat" they do not warrant a clinical diagnosis or disability rating for such experiences and refer to the loss of a “sex organ” as not worthy of a disability claim. Perhaps the author(s) need to concentrate, for a minute or two, on research relating to PTSD and review some high school anatomy textbook literature to re-learn that a penis is not just a sex organ but serves other bodily function as well….I digress.
The author(s) spends so much time focusing on PTSD and negating clinical diagnoses that they perceptibly fail to see the true nature of underlying mental health issues that plague our nation and our veterans. The fact is, contrary to the author(s) assertions, PTSD is no longer just a combat related ailment. One does not, again contrary to the author(s) assertion, have to “see combat” for PTSD to impact a person’s life. Amid clinical research, varying degrees of PTSD have been realized in many scenarios and some of those situations had nothing to do with combat. As an aside, every veteran sees battle from varying perspectives and one does not have to be a “frontline” troop in order to see combat. We must remain mindful that it takes approximately 20 job specialties supporting “frontline” troops for the combatants to remain successful. Those who may be less than informed need to first understand, there truly is no frontline anymore anyway. Many of those support troops, for whom the author(s) disdain is rather clear, will be found on convoys and many other types of missions as well. Let’s not ostracize any categories of supporting roles in our effort to make one job specialty any more important than others. Many service men and women amid many specialties serve, hurt, get injured, and unfortunately die in combat; one’s view of a deployment may be very different from another’s – but all are equally valuable and deserving of benefits earned.
All things about the author(s) narrative was not negative. I wholeheartedly agree with the supposition that many exiting service men and women are coached, unashamedly, to seek restitution for their service. Veterans, in many instances, are taught amid their respective transition phases to seek as much benefits as the VA will allow – it is important to note, these are earned benefits, not entitlements as the author(s) repeatedly state throughout the book. I, personally, have witnessed, senior-level officers and non-commissioned officers in some cases, researching online the things to say, actions to take, conditions that grant the most payment, and methods for documenting ailments to ensure the maximum amount of payout possible. I recall one officer telling me, as he called to hire a “writer” for his clams, that he intended to “never have to work again” and that the VA “owed him for his service”. This is a preposterous attitude and is a shameful approach to seeking remunerative benefits from a career’s worth of service, hard knocks, and physical “punishment” to one’s body. I recall, amid my own transition experience, the worthless attendance at a Transition Assistance Program wherein a retired command sergeant major VA rep literally stomped his foot each time he described things that should be documented. How did we arrive at the idea that giving the proverbial answers to the test are okay?
The bottom line is this – in reading the author’s information on the jacket flap, it is easy to see that one is a self-aggrandizing, self-proclaimed, failed politician and the other is a "freelance journalist". Current public sentiment to both of these categories aside, it is clear that this book is written with an underlying agenda. This becomes profoundly clear in the first few lines of the Epilogue when the author discloses, “…reform to the VA disability compensation system is crucial to ensuring that veterans can lead lives of meaning, purpose, and value. The current system disempowers veterans and treats them as a victim class, rather than placing them in the driver’s seat of their own transitions from active service to civilian life” (p. 329). Most veterans actually do lead meaningful, purpose-filled lives after the military so we should be very careful about using a few bad examples to devalue the majority. I would challenge the author to re-examine the narrative to emphasize just how many hundreds, thousands, millions of veterans for whom the VA is a help in realizing a valuable life amid civilians who may/may not always understand their history.
As I found, throughout the book, the author(s) Epilogue statement (as well as many others throughout the book) paints every veteran with the same brush as if every one of us is a money-grubbing, helpless, societal reject and dependent upon a system that disallows any of us to be successful after the military. Nothing could be further from the truth. The narrative is so clear that even my college son (who never served in the military) listened to a portion of the book as I read out loud and reflected, “this book sounds to me as if the author(s) are raging against what they deem to be the politicization of an issue which doesn’t even seem to exist. The author seems angry that other veterans are just as human as he, other veterans display pain and other emotions, but other veterans don’t deserve as much as the author himself – oh, and the author feels he deserves more than others because he got shot in combat”. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
January 3, 2022
This is an attempt to stay relevant while waiting to run for office again. Short: a rich elitist and a kid who published one article at WSJ are now VA experts on ALL veterans. Kerouac said it best: we view the world through our own keyhole. The view from the keyhole of these elitists and mysoginists stinks.
July 10, 2022
The book’s key takeaways are obscured by the many anecdotes. While these vignettes offer an emotional connection, many of them are unnecessary to illustrate Gade’s argument.
The best portion of is the epilogue. Gade distills ~300 pages of fluff down to ~5. If you want to understand the book’s key messages without wading through story after story, read the epilogue.
The best portion of is the epilogue. Gade distills ~300 pages of fluff down to ~5. If you want to understand the book’s key messages without wading through story after story, read the epilogue.
December 9, 2022
Mandatory reading for any medical provider or legislator dealing with military healthcare. Illuminates a system ripe with corruption, fraud, and simple unbalanced incentive systems making veterans (usually non combat, never deployed, with objectively no real disability) dependent on the government instead of participating in society.
May 7, 2022
Very interesting content -- elaborating on the basic theme of Sebastian Junger's "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" -- and serviceable writing. Worth reading re analysis of how efforts to support veterans, specifically with money, backfire -- and the impossible quagmire that has resulted.
May 1, 2022
This made me completely rethink my transition and opened my eyes to a lot
July 25, 2022
A thought-provoking read for anyone working with Veteran populations.
January 3, 2023
Interesting read that does point out flaws in the system. However, the author seems to have an agenda of being holy and above the fray. Take each chapter with a grain of salt.
October 6, 2025
Eye-opening and provocative
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews