Insulting, exhausting, traumatic: the death benefits battle between the VA and families of vets who die by suicide

A CNN investigation found that even as the VA has invested hundreds of millions of dollars addressing the veteran suicide crisis, agency officials have denied crucial benefits to hundreds of families of veterans who killed themselves after being discharged from active duty.

(CNN) — During his deployment in Vietnam, James Goulding served as a sergeant in a Marine Corps battalion known as The Walking Dead, which suffered one of the highest casualty rates of the entire war. Forty years to the day after leaving Vietnam, Goulding himself became another victim of the war when he took his own life, according to his wife, Linda. “It started on this day,” he wrote in his suicide note. “I’ll end it on this day.” To Linda Goulding it was an obvious reference to her husband’s time in Vietnam and the years of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by his combat experiences while there. But convincing the Department of Veterans Affairs of that would be another matter. Because her husband never sought professional help for his mental health problems and was never officially diagnosed with PTSD, the VA denied Linda’s claim to receive dependent death benefits – a tax-free monthly payment worth thousands of dollars a year. Goulding battled the VA for nearly a decade before a judge ultimately ruled in her favor.