Date: 08-13-2015
WWII vet claims he can’t get help from VA
HI HAT — A Floyd County World War II veteran claims he cannot receive health care or other benefits from the Veterans Administration, and his family and friends don’t understand why.
Bluford “Buddy” Smith, a 92-year-old WW II veteran from Hi Hat, said he has been trying to obtain services from the VA for several years.
“It’s not right,” said Tina Mills, vice president and loan officer at First Guaranty Bank of Martin. “He’s been done wrong by our federal government, by the VA. They’ve knocked him every time he’s tried, and they are not helping him.”
Mills befriended Smith, a customer at her bank, and she started trying to help him in 2008. Since then, she’s collected mounds of documents — a copy of his honorable discharge from the army, chapters of a book that details his service as a radio technician during WWII, and, among other items, letters from attorneys she contacted for help.
She recently helped him receive eye glasses and hearing aids — items that are available from VA health care — through a Prestonsburg vocational rehabilitation program.
“He’s just a wonderful man that has done a lot and continues to do a lot for the community,” she said. “It’s not right that he’s been done wrong. He didn’t ask me to help. I just took it upon myself to try to help him because it’s just not right.”
Smith’s children and grandchildren are upset that he owes tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills for services they believe he should have gotten free or at lower costs from the VA.
“He pays [payments] every month to all of these medical bills, and it’s killed him,” his daughter Deanna Smith Nanny of Louisville said. “I was about two years old when he was discharged after the war. Since then, he’s never been able to receive anything. At first, they said it was because his records burned, but there is plenty of verification that he served.”
She was talking about a 1973 fire that ripped through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, destroying between 16 and 18 million official military personnel files.
When Smith sought help getting his retirement from the United Mine Workers of America decades ago, he said he was told the army had no record of his military service, and because there was no record, he didn’t qualify for his miner’s pension. He claims he would have been eligible for that pension if his years of military service was counted as part of his work in the mines, a practice that the UMWA pension plan authorized in 1974, according to a report on the agency’s website. Not knowing what steps to take, he just dropped it, and went on living his life with his wife, Helen, who died last month, running his television repair business and serving as an Emergency Medical Technician with the Left Beaver Rescue Squad and as deputy coroner for Floyd County — services he still provides today. READ MORE
By Mary Meadows
Floyd County Chronicle
