For veterans in rural areas, care hard to reach
He was tired and frustrated, but it was much more than that. The steep road isn't only his way into town. It is his lifeline. He had just returned from a four-hour round trip drive to the nearest veterans hospital for treatment of wounds sustained in Iraq. It was the latest, draining stage in a battle he and his wife, Doreen, have been waging with the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal Department of Veterans Affairs to get the care he, like all veterans, had been promised.
But in rural America, as he and many across the nation have found, it is a promise often unkept. The VA is struggling and often failing to do right by the many veterans with serious combat injuries who need closely supervised care but live in remote areas, a Globe review has found. Realigned in the 1990s to concentrate specialized care in urban areas, the system now finds itself overwhelmed by the wounded from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- engagements that have, even more than other modern-day conflicts, been fought by soldiers from rural America.
Interviews with dozens of wounded vet erans who live in hill towns and farm country across America found story after story much like Swallow's. The system that provides the hospital care most wounded soldiers praise has, for many of the nation's 6 million rural veterans, no adequate equivalent once they leave the service.
