Guest Column by Al Franken

Al Franken is a U.S. senator from Minnesota.

Each year on Veterans Day, I think about the military men and women I had the honor to meet when I took part in several overseas USO tours before I became a U.S. senator.

Those tours not only gave me the chance to help entertain our troops stationed in places like Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, but they also allowed me to sit down with many of them and understand the sacrifices they make to defend our nation, and more importantly, the toll it can take on them and their families.

As senator, when I’ve visited Walter Reed Medical Center near Washington, D.C., I’ve met brave service men and women who have made unimaginable physical and psychological sacrifices to ensure our freedoms. These are the troops whose battles did not end when they came home.  What’s most striking is that when I meet them, they often tell me that despite their own suffering, they think more about their fellow service members, especially those who didn’t make it home.

Keeping promises to veterans

What do our veterans in Minnesota and across the country ask in return for their service? Usually, they want nothing more than the benefits they were told would be there for them when they leave military service. 

I recently met with Veterans Secretary Robert McDonald and urged him to continue to make the changes necessary to address the VA’s recent benefits backlog that had forced far too many returning veterans to wait far too long to receive the medical care they need to treat both the visible and invisible scars of war. I told him I’m going to continue my fight to ensure that veterans not only get timely and quality care at our VA medical facilities, but also receive the education, training and housing benefits they were promised to help ease their transition back into civilian life. When I talk to Minnesota veterans and meet with the leaders of our state’s veterans groups, they tell me that ensuring access to these important benefits must continue to be a top priority. 

During the current Congress, I, along with Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz, have pushed our “Quicker Veterans Benefits Delivery Act,” to get benefits into the hands of veterans with service-related disabilities as quickly as possible.  A key feature of the bill is to allow veterans to receive a disability diagnosis from doctors outside the VA system so that they can access their disability benefits more quickly.

This year, I’ve also pressed to ensure that Minnesota National Guard and Reserve members who were called to active duty can access their hard-earned veterans benefits.  Unfortunately, some Minnesota Guard and Reserve members who were deployed to the hostile Sinai Peninsula in Egypt had their GI Bill applications rejected after returning home. I’ve worked with Sen. Amy Klobuchar to fix this problem by pushing to ensure that Guard and Reserve men and women who were called to active duty — including the Minnesotans deployed to the Sinai — are no longer denied these important benefits.

Helping atomic veterans

I’m also working to help thousands of service members who in the late 1970s were unwittingly exposed to high levels of radiation when they helped clean up nuclear testing sites in the Marshall Islands without proper protection. Today these “atomic veterans,” suffer from high rates of cancer, heart disease and respiratory issues and are not being adequately compensated for their medical costs.

To correct this injustice, I, along with Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have pushed a bipartisan bill to extend key medical benefits to these veterans so they can get the care they should have gotten long ago.

Honoring veterans’ sacrifice

I’ll continue to listen to Minnesota veterans and fight on their behalf in the U.S. Senate to ensure they have access to the VA benefits they were promised in return for the sacrifice and service. Perhaps President Reagan said it best on Veterans Day in 1985, when he spoke of those who laid down their lives for our country. “Most of them were boys when they died,” he said, “and they gave up two lives — the one they were living and the one they would have lived.”

Today, for us to honor our veterans’ “second life,” we must do more than thank them for their service. We must ensure that we keep our promises to get them the medical care they need, and deliver the education, training and housing benefits they’ve earned in a timely manner. Keeping our promises will not only help ease a veteran’s transition back into civilian life, but it will reflect the true meaning of Veterans Day.