Monte Wilson

Special to Veterans Advantage

If Monte Wilson had been a professional athlete, sportswriters would report with a sense of wonder how tough he must be to play through almost constant, drumming pain.

But Monte Wilson is no athlete, unless you consider scooting around on a Harley a sporting affair. And the pain he lives with every day saps his strength and sometimes his spirit. Yet he still gives his best in fighting for his fellow veterans as a service representative for Vietnam Veterans of America. At this, his chosen field, he has long been, to the chagrin of some in the benefits bureaucracy, one of the best in the business.

"Being a severely wounded Vietnam combat veteran who has devoted his life to veterans’ advocacy gives Monte a unique perspective in fighting for proper health care and compensation, particularly for disabled veterans," said Len Selfon, director of the Veterans Benefits Program for VVA. "He has dealt with the VA as both patient and service representative. He understands the frustrations of his clients personally and professionally and translates that understanding into positive action every time.

"I have worked in the veterans arena for a dozen years and I still learn something new from him on almost a daily basis."

Long Time Passing

The son of a district scout executive for the Boy Scouts of America, Monte Wilson grew up in Nevada and California in places like Las Vegas and Reno and Fresno. His mother worked in banks. He was the middle of three kids, a wild child who had "no clue" as to what he’d like to do with his life. With fighting raging halfway across the globe, he volunteered to be drafted. Trained as an artilleryman, a 13A10, he arrived in Vietnam in September 1968.

Monte and the other cherries flew into Danang. They were walking across the compound to the 517th Transit Company for assignment to the field when sniper fire and a barrage of incoming rockets and mortars greeted them. Just about everyone jumped into bunkers. Not Monte. "I was raised to look before I acted, and I saw this one guy standing against the wall of a building maybe a couple dozen meters away, smoking a cigarette, apparently unbothered by the incoming. This guy obviously knows more than the rest of us," Monte remembers thinking. He also had a weapon, a Marlin .444 large-bore rifle. Rather than jump into a crowded bunker filled with newbies and muddy water, Monte dashed over and stood next to him. It was the beginning of a friendship that has endured to this day.

Firebase Bastongne, late 1969

A couple of days later, Monte Wilson was assigned to the 1/83 Artillery to serve on a gun crew. His unit provided fire support for the 1st Battalion, 3rd Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division, which was operating in I Corps along the DMZ. Denny, his newfound friend, ran a four-man team that, accompanied by a rifle squad, would chopper out to the bush, set up on the high ground, usually on the side of a mountain, and observe enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Then they would call in fire missions before being extracted by chopper, back to Camp Eagle or FireBase Bastogne, before the NVA could pinpoint their location. Denny, impressed by Monte’s resourcefulness that first day in country, asked for Monte to join his team when he needed him.

Neat Stuff

"We weren’t LURPs, we were just guys who got drafted," Monte said, guys who were "scared to death just about every time we went out." Not that terror was the dominant emotion. "We did get to see a lot of neat stuff over there. We were walking down this road one time when we came to an old rock wall. The lieutenant wanted to go over it, make sure that no VC were about. Well, turns out it was the grounds of a big old Buddhist temple, abandoned and overgrown with weeds. It was littered with statues of dragons and warriors with masks on, almost like a giant sculpture garden.

"One of the guys climbed back up the wall and looked down. ‘It looks like a chessboard,’ he yelled to us." Chess was a game that Monte had long been familiar with, having been taught to play as a youngster by his father.

Two days out in the boonies with relative freedom of movement were better than having to "hump ammo for 175mm Howitzers or lay in the mud shooting cannon," he said. And in the dozen or so forays out, this squad never got into a firefight once, he said. "Our job was to observe and call in artillery, not to engage the enemy."

One time, though, they observed a large force heading their way, a truck convoy moving down the Trail." They skedaddled out of there, anticipating the potential for a mismatched confrontation. They called in a fire mission that plastered the entire area. A chopper came to extract them. They headed to Camp Eagle to be debriefed, then back to Bastogne for a meal and a hot shower.

This one time, though, they should have stayed out in the boonies.

It was May 12, 1969. About 0200, NVA regulars attacked Bastogne in force. Sappers sliced through the perimeter wire as the base came under a relentless barrage of rockets and mortars. Monte was at the side of a bunker. As a sapper came around the corner, he opened up. So did the sapper. Monte was hit initially in the leg. He stitched the sapper from groin to neck, blowing him into the bunker. The charge exploded, lifting Monte into the air and blowing him several dozen meters from where he had been standing. Lucky for him the sandbags had taken the brunt of the shrapnel from the exploding bunker. His buddy, Denny, called down a Huey to dust him off: by then Monte had taken 17 separate wounds and was bleeding profusely. Waiting for a medevac chopper was not an option.

Denny’s quick thinking, and the chopper pilot’s intrepidity saved Monte Wilson’s life.

Sister Morphine

The next several days were spent in a morphine cloud, as he was transported from one medical facility to another, from Phu Bai to Danang to Japan, then to Fort Ord in California. Hospital would be his home for the next 18 months. In one brief period of consciousness in Danang, some of the walking wounded who had survived Bastogne told him: the firebase had been overrun. The entire mortar platoon had been waxed. Scores of the 120 or so men who manned the base were KIA or WIA. Monte was lucky to be alive.

While he was lucky, he also was angry. He came to hold a healthy disrespect for much of military medicine, and the VA healthcare bureaucracy.

Encased in a full-body cast, he complained of things crawling across his body. "It’s all in your head," he was told. Until one day a sympathetic nurse broke open part of the cast and was amazed to discover maggots on the wounds. Monte filed a complaint with the IG, and one of his doctors, a lieutenant colonel, was cited for negligence.

As his condition improved, he’d take forays around the wards in his wheelchair. He saw orderlies spraying one unit with fire hoses to keep the patients in the psych unit in line. Then there was the incident with a young trooper whose foot was crushed in an accident in basic training.

"He was real young, maybe 16 or 17 years old," Monte said. "He had lied to get into the Army, he wanted to be a soldier so much. He went into surgery. They amputated the wrong foot. The wrong foot! When he came back to the ward, and when we found out what had happened, we all went ballistic." Monte, though, channeled his anger, something he would come to do many times over the course of his career. He read legal books to determined how best to help a young man whose life had been shattered. He wrote the first of what would be several thousand claims.

After being medically retired from the military in July 1970, Monte Wilson became a service rep, initially for the Military Order of the Purple Heart, which he had joined, then later for the Governor of the state of Nevada. There he transformed a one-man operation that handled three claims in a busy month to a 17-person volunteer operation that processed almost 1,700 claims a year.

He eventually accepted a six-month contract with the National Veterans Legal Services program, where his focus area was the insidious Agent Orange. And when Len Selfon asked him to work his magic for VVA, he found it hard to say no. "I just felt I owed VVA," Monte said, "and Len told me he really needed my help to turn VVA’s benefits program around and transform it into a really efficient operation."

During the course of his career, Monte Wilson has taken on numerous "unwinnable" claims and won them. He got retroactive compensation for an "atomic vet" who traced his illness to the bombing of Hiroshima. Outraged that the VA awarded a 10% disability rating for "anxiety neurosis" to "one guy who came back with just about every medal imaginable, a guy who was really suffering from PTSD," Monte made the case that upped the rating to 100% -- and won retroactive compensation. He won cases for Gulf War I vets, not against the VA but against the Army or the Navy.

"I don’t do this work for the money," Monte explained one recent evening from his home in Silver Spring, Maryland. "I could make more as a social worker, and you know social workers don’t make a hell of a lot to begin with. I do it because," he pauses, "if I don’t, who will? And I know what to do to win justice for guys who’ve been screwed by the system."

How much longer Monte will endure in this role is uncertain: The Hepatitis C virus which has afflicted him for the past nine years has increasingly debilitated him. He likely contracted this blood-borne pathogen during one of the dozen surgeries he underwent. His life is now marred by the constant pain of a diseased liver, exacerbated by the grievous wounds he suffered at Bastogne.

"I’m not the same person I was who went there," he said. "Physically I became a different person. I was forced into a different lifestyle, forced by having witnessed firsthand how too many of those charged with helping veterans in fact did just the opposite. I saw how little they cared for us despite what we had lost.

"I find this insulting. I watched them butcher that young black soldier with the crushed foot. They never even said they were sorry. They tried to buy me off. Instead, they just pissed me off."

After three decades, Monte Wilson is still pissed off - and he’s channeling his anger to make the system do what it’s charged with doing. Service-disabled veterans don’t know how lucky they are to have him as their advocate.