Veterans rally behind Gulf War Marine in long fight for benefits

Independence County Veterans Service Officer Josh Morrison (left) assisted Desert Storm Veteran Tamara Diana (right) in obtaining her benefits.

This is the second of a two-part series about the weekly veterans’ breakfast held in Batesville.

By Andrea Bruner, White River Now

Tamara Diana served for years in the Desert Storm, and when she returned, she brought home a lot more than she bargained for: brain cancer.

She thought the country she had fought for would have her back in her time of need, only to find out that wasn’t the case.

Thirty years, four brain surgeries, and a multitude of side effects later, Diana had given up hope of ever getting disability benefits, but the group of veterans who meet for breakfast every Friday wasn’t ready to concede, including Independence County Veterans Service Officer Josh Morrison.

***

Born in 1971 in upstate New York, Diana moved to Florida when she was about 5 years old.

She was on the cross country, soccer, and track teams in high school, and she was an honor roll student, but she didn’t have a scholarship to attend college like many of her classmates.

“People said the Marine Corps is tough, and I said that’s what I want to do. The Marine recruiter was in my weightlifting class, and I got to talking to him and decided to join.”

That was in 1989, and the Gulf War was heating up.

About a year or so in, Diana said her supervisor brought her and another lance corporal into his office and informed them that one of them would be staying to work in the office, while the other would be going to Saudi Arabia. The other lance corporal would soon be going to officer’s candidate school, so it was Diana who packed her bags and flew out on New Year’s Eve.

“I was a little nervous, but I was excited at the same time,” she said.

A couple of weeks later, she celebrated her 20th birthday. “My mom sent me a Listerine bottle with tequila in it, a shampoo bottle with Triple Sec in it, and some margarita salt, so I had some bottles and made margaritas,” she said with a laugh.

One of the biggest health risks in Saudi Arabia, she later learned, were the massive fires.

“I was in a helicopter and I remember passing over a bunch of oil wells burning,” she said.

The military would also use open burn pits to dispose of waste in the Middle East, including trash, plastics, wood, metal, munitions, and even human waste. Chemicals were used as accelerants to ensure the items burned.

“One of my jobs there was burning the poop bucket. You put gas in it and you had to stir it to make sure it keeps burning,” she said.

She served in the Marines until 1993. After she got out of the service, she attended college in North Carolina and was taking an intense summer course, where she would have two semesters of Japanese in 5½ weeks.

At the time, she was living in a teepee on someone else’s property, and to pay for rent, she worked on the weekends.

“I was really busy, working on weekends and in class Monday through Friday, and I started getting headaches.

“Then my vision got blurry. I went to the eye doctor, and he said it’s not your eyes; it’s something behind your eyes that’s pushing on the optic nerve,” Diana said.

“That was a shock. … It hit me hard.”

Terrified, Diana had an MRI to confirm. The tumor was as big as an orange, and she would need surgery.

Her mother wanted her to have it in Florida, where she could take care of her, and Diana agreed. After surgery, however, Diana didn’t get better. She was lethargic and just wanted to sleep.

Her boyfriend insisted she go back to the hospital, where she got another MRI, and the surgeon said she was fine. Diana returned home, but her vision had worsened.

“I remember my aunt reading to me and then she left. The next thing I remember, I woke up in a hospital bed.”

Diana explained that she’d had a seizure and was taken to the hospital by ambulance. Another doctor looked at the previous MRI and saw fluid on her brain, so Diana had two separate emergency surgeries to put shunt tubes in her head.

Eventually, she said she recovered enough to return to college in North Carolina. At her next follow-up appointment, she found out the surgeon had only removed about half the tumor, and it appeared to be growing.

Diana was able to graduate college, then went to Florida and had her fourth brain surgery. “They said they got it all but the microscopic pieces that may not grow, and that I would need an MRI every year.”

After her final surgery, Diana’s boyfriend at the time was applying for grad school, and she was going to go with him, wherever he was accepted. He was hoping to go out West, where his brother lived, but Diana said she was hoping he would go to New York City where she could fulfill her dream of teaching in the Bronx.

When the boyfriend’s acceptance letter came, it was from a grad school in New York.

“It was fate. I ended up getting a job in the Bronx. The first year was rough. The second year was somehow worse,” Diana remembered. “I wanted to teach in the inner city and make a difference in kids’ lives.”

She said teaching is rough, especially the first year, but her second year, the administration sent someone to observe her. The other teachers told her that was not the norm, and Diana felt she was about to be fired.

Thinking that a change of pace was needed, Diana moved to Portland, Oregon, to teach SAT prep classes. She wasn’t certified there, so she would need to go back to college, which also meant accumulating more debt for college loans to acquire her master’s degree.

“I almost failed the student teaching part – I barely passed it,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I got a job at the high school in Madras, Oregon, and that was a nightmare. I thought I could do it, but that’s when I realized this was too much. Some of the kids liked me, but a lot of them couldn’t stand me. I thought, I’m trying, why do they hate me so much?”

By the end of the year, her boss told her to resign, or she would be fired.

“It was humiliating. I ended up working part-time jobs, and some students actually worked the same jobs. I went from being a teacher to being a co-worker with these kids. That was just weird and really demeaning,” she said.

“These part-time jobs were getting to me. I wanted to teach. I was working at a pizza place alongside students, and I thought, I can’t do this anymore. I was drinking because I was depressed. I needed to do something else.”

Teaching was still her dream, and she thought about volunteering in an ESL (English as a Second Language) classroom at the local community college. This, she thought, would be a sure path to a teaching job, but in order to do that, she would have to learn Spanish.

Diana said she spent hours studying, but no matter how time she put in, she couldn’t retain her lessons. “It just wasn’t sticking.”

Her mother had been telling her she thought the cancer was from her service, and that the brain surgery had affected her memory and was causing her difficulties in the classroom.

“That’s a sign of traumatic brain injury, where you can’t keep focus on one thing. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until it was pointed out to me,” Diana said. “I didn’t want to accept it. I wanted to be a teacher. The thought that I can’t do it because of my brain surgery hit me hard.”

Her next step was to apply to become a substitute teacher. She went to the school to get an application, and while there, she saw a poster on the wall for the local VA rep – with an address.

Diana said she had been calling the local VA rep in Oregon multiple times, but never got a return phone call.

“I went to his office and told him I’d called him several times, but he said he was ‘too busy’ to respond to calls.”

Nevertheless, Diana told him her story, and he said they needed to file for her Non-Service Connected Pension – a benefit for veterans who have disabilities not connected to their military service.

The VA rep told her she couldn’t work, but Diana had not given up her dream of teaching.

She applied for two jobs – one as a lot attendant at a car dealership and the other as a daycare teacher. She got the job as the lot attendant but was eventually fired from that job, too.

That’s when she had had enough. She went back to the VA office and filled out the paperwork to show that she couldn’t complete job tasks, but she was denied benefits.

It was hard to hold out hope that she would ever be approved, and she silently struggled for years.

Her father had purchased a house and some land in Cord, Arkansas, and Diana was reluctant to move. Her mom gave her money to buy a motorhome to put on some property in Oregon, but Diana said her boyfriend had broken up with her. Since she was on her own, she felt it was best to move to Arkansas.

Diana said she was afraid to drive the motor home, so her mother flew from Florida so she could drive. About halfway through the trip, one of the tires had worn down to the point it was showing metal.

“If that tire blew, we could have died,” Diana said.

Rather than continue on and keep the vehicle, they donated it and rented a U-Haul for the rest of the trip.

Diana arrived here in September 2018.

***

From time to time, Diana would call the Veterans Service Office in Batesville to schedule a ride on the van to her appointments in Little Rock.

That was when Morrison became aware of her case and knew he wanted to help her, but it wasn’t until the PACT Act was passed that he really felt like her case would go somewhere.

The Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act expanded health care and benefits for veterans exposed to the burn pits in Saudi Arabia, among other things. This opened up coverage for those diagnosed with head and neck cancers, sinusitis, rhinitis, chronic bronchitis, asthma, COPD, and other conditions.

Morrison called Diana and told her to come in ASAP, saying she should fall into that category. Diana was approved, but her benefits were zero because technically, she doesn’t have brain cancer anymore.

“That’s messed up,” Morrison said.

“I was super excited – I thought I was going to get you a bunch (of money) right then,” he told Diana, but Diana, however, was more apprehensive that she would see any money at this point.

Morrison doubled down on his efforts, cataloging effects like memory loss and a lack of focus and concentration, but also on the mental health side, things like depression and anxiety.

“I didn’t want you to fall through the cracks,” Morrison said.

Her first appointment with the examiner was a disaster – there was a traffic jam, and she arrived late. The examiner wouldn’t even answer the door or see her because she’d missed the time, so she had to reschedule.

The second time, a friend took her, and this time, the face behind the door was much friendlier.

“I had so much anxiety, and I just remember looking at her,” Diana recalled. “She looked me right in the eye and let me know she wanted to help. That changed everything. At the end, she gave me her number and said, ‘Call me and tell me how things go.’”

“Every once in a while, you get someone that goes the extra mile,” Morrison said.

While waiting for benefits to come through, Diana said she’s thought about applying for jobs here in Independence County, but then she gets a vision of the person training looking at her like the others before.

“I don’t want to go through that again, where you try so hard and just fail.”

***

A few weeks ago, Diana was sitting in her truck about to get gas when she looked at her bank app to see how much she could afford to put in her tank.

The number floored her – it was four figures more than what should have been in her account.

“I was not expecting it – I was in shock. I didn’t know what to think.”

Morrison wasn’t ready to close Diana’s case, even with partial benefits. “What I’m going for now is like the trailer to the truck. I’m going to ask for everything.”

And, he said, he was hoping to have the rest of her benefits within a year. “You can’t deserve it anymore,” Morrison told Diana at the time.

Diana, 54, said she will always have the effects of her cancer, and they prevent her from working a regular job like everyone else. She said the brain cancer and surgeries have changed her personality. She has anxiety and often loses track of what she was saying – a far cry from who she was before the burn pits in Saudi Arabia, an A and B student in high school and receiving honors in boot camp.

Even without the benefits, Diana has built a new life. These days, she spends time walking the trails on her property with her two dogs. She also has eight cats (four of which were strays she adopted) and one duck.

“At least I got this much,” she said.

***

A few weeks later, Diana was notified she would be receiving full benefits for her disability, going back to December 2023.

Morrison said veterans struggling with receiving benefits shouldn’t give up, and that Diana is the perfect example.

Morrison said they have a tradition at the veterans’ weekly breakfast when someone receives “good news,” as he puts it. Often, an announcement is made and a manila envelope is presented to the veteran who has most recently received disability benefits, but Diana’s case, he said, was special.

“Sometimes we fall through the cracks. Sometimes things don’t get noticed. Sometimes we get rejected several times and then finally, we come in contact with the right person, and we fit in; things go well for us,” he said.

Qualifying for disability benefits from the VA can be a very difficult process, he said, but the group has been behind Diana every step of the way.

The breakfast group didn’t have to serve alongside her and the burning pits of Saudi Arabia to be her brothers and sisters. They didn’t have to travel from Florida to New York to Oregon to Arkansas to walk a mile in her shoes. Morrison said they’ve been there for her and all the others who have come before her and will come after her.

“You are my favorite story,” he told Diana. “You are a tremendous success story of how you have persevered.

“This one is a victory for the whole group.”