COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
Veterans clinic jam-packed
Brantley Hargrove, The (Gillette) News-Record
March 21, 2007
GILLETTE, Wyo. - In an 8-by- 10-foot office in the Veterans Assistance Clinic here, Dr. Margaret McCreery sits at her desk under the flickering fluorescent light.Dennis Miller, a registered nurse, enters the cramped office and shuffles past and opened the door to a storage closet. Miller makes sure he doesn't open the door too wide, lest he smack the doctor and her desk with it.
Outside the office, the story is much the same - a collection of examination rooms that would be more suited as walk-in closets.
A few Vietnam veterans recline in one of the seven chairs in the master bedroom-size waiting room or lean against the waist-high partitions, commiserating about the hippies who spat on them and cursed them when they returned to American soil.
At a time when the Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital - thought to be the gem of soldier care - is being lambasted for dilapidated facilities and shoddy administrative work, the tiny VA Clinic in Gillette has fought an uphill battle to accommodate the burgeoning ranks of veterans in Campbell County drawn here by the promise of work, especially in coal mining and coal-bed methane development.
"Everything is breaking down and getting old," said Bonnie Wolff, a nurse at the clinic. "We feel like we're out here at the edge of nowhere, in the industrial zone."
And it's almost fitting, considering the background of many of the clinic patrons. The clinic sits about 100 yards off South Douglas Highway, out at the edge of town, past a row of gleaming yellow John Deere front-end loaders and just down potholed Winland Drive behind National Oilwell Varco.
The 1,400-square-foot corrugated steel building is actually a part of Inter-Mountain Laboratories. It's the VA clinic's landlord.
The clinic opened in 2001. It was easy then. It was small, but so was the number of patients. But as Gillette has grown by leaps and bounds, so has the VA roster. The clinic now has about 1,000 patients.
The doctors and nurses, as a result, have become masters of space utilization. Every room has more than one use. The laboratory doubles as a family counseling room. The break room is also a teleconference room. Veterans can speak with a social worker about post-traumatic stress disorder here. But at lunchtime, it's the cafeteria, and the doctors and nurses microwave their lunches and relax in a room that opens into the waiting room.
"We don't have any privacy," Wolff said in the makeshift break room. "We could definitely use some more space. But you make do with what you got."
In the waiting room, the Vietnam veterans chatted. Wes McKinney, 66, told Fred Smiley, 59, about the Tet Offensive. McKinney was the commander of a personnel carrier.
"Infantry wouldn't ride with us because those RPGs would hit us," he said. "We were a moving target. They'd follow us, but they wouldn't ride with us."
Smiley was an Army radio/telephone operator for the forward observer attached to an infantry unit. The forward observer would follow the unit into skirmishes and call in artillery.
The ages and needs of the veterans vary as widely as any clinic or hospital. McKinney was there to get a prescription for a pill that could help him quit smoking.
Smiley was there to receive counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder. Like many veterans returning from violent conflict, Smiley is plagued by flashbacks.
"There are times when I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking about what happened over there," Smiley said.
The clinic is busting at the seams. They don't have a social worker on staff to talk to guys like Smiley.
David Allhusen, a social worker, drives up from Casper four times a month. Allhusen wants to add full-time social workers for every clinic.
But for the near future, it's not in the cards. As with the Casper clinic he is based out of, the Gillette clinic will have to prove demand first.
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