I was helping a veteran fill out his benefits paperwork when the supervisor LAUGHED – actually laughed – and said the man’s tremors were probably just “nerves about getting a free handout.”
That veteran was Dennis Kowalski, 58 years old, two tours in Fallujah, and his hands hadn’t stopped shaking since 2007.
I’ve worked this VA office for eleven years. I’ve seen a lot of bad days. But I’d never seen a supervisor – Gary Pittman, the kind of man who’d never left the county he was born in – mock a combat veteran to his face like it was nothing.
Dennis just looked down at the table.
That’s what got me. He didn’t argue. He just looked down, like he’d been trained to absorb it.
I finished the paperwork with Dennis and walked him out. He said, “It’s fine, sweetheart, I’m used to it.” That was the worst part.
I went back to my desk and pulled up Gary’s personnel file.
Then I started looking at other files. Complaint logs. Closed cases. Denial patterns.
Gary had been flagging certain applications – veterans with PTSD diagnoses, traumatic brain injuries, visible disabilities – and kicking them to a secondary review queue that almost never got processed.
Dozens of them. Going back THREE YEARS.
I saved everything to my personal drive that night.
I sent copies to the regional inspector general’s office, the Veterans Service Organization rep I’d worked with before, and a journalist at the local paper who’d covered VA backlogs before.
Then I waited.
Gary called me into his office two weeks later, smiling, and said he was putting me on a performance improvement plan for “unauthorized file access.”
I sat down across from him.
“Gary,” I said, “I think you should check your email before we go any further.”
His smile didn’t move, but something behind his eyes did.
He opened his laptop.
The color left his face so fast it looked like someone had pulled a drain.
Then his phone rang, and I heard him say, very quietly, “Yes, sir. She’s right here with me now.”
The Office Nobody Wanted to Work In
Our VA office sits in a squat brick building off Route 9, between a payday loan place and a nail salon. The parking lot floods when it rains. The waiting room chairs are the stackable kind from a church basement, and the fluorescent light over bay three has been flickering since I started.
I took the job in 2013 because I needed health insurance and I had a cousin who’d come back from Kandahar and spent eight months fighting the VA for basic hearing aid coverage. I figured I could do some good from the inside.
Mostly, I think I have. Most days are just paperwork. Pension claims, education benefits, burial allowances. You learn what documentation they need before they ask. You learn which forms trip the system and which don’t. You build relationships with the VSO reps and the regional office contacts, and you get things through.
Gary Pittman had been there two years when I started. He made supervisor eighteen months after that, which nobody understood, because Gary had the interpersonal warmth of a parking ticket. But he knew someone in the regional office, and that was that.
He wasn’t loud about the way he felt. That was the thing. He didn’t make speeches. He just had this way of sighing when a certain kind of file landed on his desk. A small exhale through his nose, like he’d been asked to do something beneath him. He’d say things like “these guys” or “this crowd” and let the rest sit unsaid.
I heard him once, on the phone, call a veteran’s claimed disability “creative writing.” He laughed at his own joke. The other person on the line laughed too.
I should have pulled the files then. I didn’t.
Dennis
Dennis Kowalski came in on a Thursday in October. Gray coat, clean shave, an American Legion cap he’d probably had since the early 2000s. His hands were going when he walked through the door and they didn’t stop the whole time he was with me.
Parkinson’s-adjacent, his neurologist had written. Onset following blast exposure, 2007. Service-connected, documented, not in dispute. He was there to supplement an existing claim because his condition had progressed and he’d lost enough fine motor function that he couldn’t work the machinist job he’d held since he got back.
We were going through the forms when Gary walked by. He didn’t stop. He slowed down, looked at Dennis’s hands moving against the table, and said it. The handout line. Smiling like he’d said something clever.
Dennis looked down.
He’d been back from Fallujah for sixteen years. Sixteen years of VA waiting rooms and forms and people behind desks looking at him like he was a problem to be managed. He’d learned how to make himself small in those chairs. He’d learned not to push back.
I kept my voice level. I finished the form. I walked him out.
“I’ll follow up on this personally,” I told him at the door.
“It’s fine, sweetheart, I’m used to it.”
He meant it as reassurance. That’s what made it so bad.
I watched him walk to his truck. He had trouble with the door handle. He got it eventually. He drove away.
I stood there for a second in the cold, and then I went back inside.
What Three Years Looks Like
Gary’s personnel file was thin and unrevealing. Two commendations, both from the same regional supervisor who’d promoted him. One complaint from 2019, marked resolved, no details.
I moved to the case logs.
Our office uses a pretty simple queue system. Claims come in, get assigned, get processed, get closed. There’s a secondary review designation for cases that need additional documentation or have some procedural flag. Secondary review is supposed to be a temporary holding status. Two to three weeks, typically.
Gary had cases sitting in secondary review going back to March 2021.
Not a few. Not an anomaly. Dozens. I started sorting by disability type and the pattern came up fast. PTSD diagnoses. TBI claims. Cases with documented mental health treatment, visible physical disability, anything that required a judgment call rather than a straight calculation.
He was parking them there and leaving them.
Some of these men and women had followed up. I could see the contact logs. Phone calls, office visits, letters. Marked received. Not acted on.
One file I opened belonged to a woman named Carol Pruitt, 43, Army medic, two deployments to Afghanistan. She’d filed in January 2022. She’d called the office four times. She’d come in twice. Her claim was sitting in secondary review, untouched, flagged by Gary, for nineteen months.
I sat at my desk and the office was quiet around me because it was after six and everyone else had gone home.
I kept opening files.
By the time I stopped, I had documented sixty-one cases. Sixty-one. Some of them had resolution dates that had come and gone years ago. Some of the veterans, I had no way of knowing if they were still waiting or if they’d just given up. A few of the addresses had changed. One file had a date-of-death notation added by a family member who’d written in to ask what to do now.
I copied everything. Claim numbers, contact logs, Gary’s flagging notations, the dates. I put it on my personal drive and I sat there for a minute with my coat still on.
Then I went home and started writing emails.
Three Envelopes
The regional inspector general’s office got the full documentation package with a cover letter that was three pages long and very dry and stuck entirely to facts. Dates, case numbers, patterns. I’d worked with their office before on a different procedural complaint and I knew what they wanted.
Ray Gutierrez at the Veterans Service Organization got a shorter version with a phone call beforehand. Ray’s been in that role for fourteen years. He doesn’t get surprised easily, but he was quiet on the phone for a moment before he said, “Send it.”
The journalist was Pam Fischer at the Courier-Herald. She’d done a solid two-part series on regional VA backlogs in 2022, sourced carefully, nothing sensational. I’d talked to her once before, off the record, about a different issue. I sent her the summary document and told her I was a current employee and that I’d talk to her when I could.
I sent all three on a Sunday night.
Then I went to work Monday morning and sat at my desk and answered the phone and processed claims and didn’t say anything to anyone.
The Performance Improvement Plan
Gary called me in on a Friday afternoon, sixteen days after I’d sent the emails.
He was smiling. He had a manila folder in front of him and his hands were folded on top of it, relaxed, and he said he’d been reviewing access logs and had some concerns about files I’d pulled outside my assigned caseload.
“Unauthorized access,” he said. “It’s a serious issue.”
The PIP paperwork was already printed. He slid it across the desk.
I looked at it. I didn’t pick it up.
“Gary,” I said, “I think you should check your email before we go any further.”
He smiled wider, the kind of smile that’s meant to communicate that nothing I could say would change anything. He opened the laptop on his desk, more to humor me than anything.
I watched his face.
The smile went first, just the edges of it, like something underneath had shifted. He scrolled. He stopped scrolling. He went back up and read something again more carefully.
The color left him fast. Not gradually. Fast.
His phone buzzed on the desk. He looked at the screen. He picked it up.
“Yes, sir.” A pause. “Yes.” Another pause, longer. “She’s right here with me now.”
He set the phone down. He didn’t look at me right away.
The PIP paperwork was still sitting between us on the desk. Neither of us touched it.
After
The regional IG investigation opened formally the following week. Gary was placed on administrative leave before the month was out.
Ray Gutierrez’s organization filed a formal complaint with the VA’s central office and started the process of contacting the sixty-one veterans whose cases had been buried. Some of them were reachable. Some weren’t. Carol Pruitt’s claim got processed in December. She called the office to confirm, and I happened to pick up, and she didn’t know it was me specifically who’d flagged her case, and I didn’t tell her. She just said, “Finally,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Pam Fischer ran the story in March. She was careful with it. Gary wasn’t named until the IG findings were public. I wasn’t named at all, which was what I’d asked for.
The PIP was withdrawn. Quietly, without acknowledgment, just a note in my file that the matter had been closed.
I don’t know what happened to Gary after that. I heard he resigned before any formal action was taken, which is how these things usually go. Somebody somewhere probably gave him a reference.
Dennis Kowalski’s supplemental claim was approved in February. I know because I processed it myself.
I don’t know if he knows why it moved so fast. I hope he’s okay. I hope his hands are giving him less trouble, though I know they probably aren’t.
I think about what he said at the door sometimes. It’s fine, sweetheart, I’m used to it. Said without bitterness, without any particular expectation that things would be different.
He’d been absorbing it for sixteen years.
Sixty-one people had been absorbing it, most of them not even knowing their files were sitting in a dead queue, waiting on a man who’d decided they weren’t worth his time.
I still work at the office off Route 9. The light over bay three still flickers. The parking lot still floods.
I answer the phone. I process the claims. I walk people to the door.
If this one landed with you, pass it along. There are a lot of people who need to read it.
For more stories about jaw-dropping moments, check out “My Husband Begged Me Not to Read That Text”, or read about how “My Daughter’s Insurance Denial Had Nothing to Do With Her Doctor”. And if you’re in the mood for another wild ride, “My Best Man Called Her “Just Us” on Venmo and I Still Didn’t Want to Believe It” is sure to entertain.
