Veteran suicide by self-immolation

This is where a Navy veteran died by self-immolation on March 24, 2016. Clinically, most cases of suicide by self-immolation seem to be related to bipolar illness, but I have no knowledge of this poor fellow's case. I do think that VA facilities should have evening and weekend hours. And I think that veterans should be free to pursue care wherever they wish.



RCP, Michelle Malkin

"While President Obama sashayed in Buenos Aires two weeks ago, proud Navy veteran Charles Richard Ingram III, 51, made his last life's journey. He walked nine miles from his home in Egg Harbor Township, N.J., to the curb in front of the Northfield, N.J., VA clinic on New Road.

With a large blue wooden cross looming on the side of a chapel in the background, Ingram stood on the lawn, poured gas all over his body and lit a match. A firefighter told The Daily Beast that the retired chief petty officer, known as "Rich" to family and friends, was "100 percent burned." A bystander had rushed to his side with blankets to snuff out the flames and first responders arrived within minutes.CPO Ingram leaves behind a grieving wife, two young children ages 3 and 5, and a charred patch of brown and blackened grass 75 feet from the entrance of the VA's Atlantic County Community Based Outpatient Clinic.

The bloated VA system now employs nearly 400,000 people to carry out its purported "mission of caring." The CBOCs were established to "to more efficiently and effectively serve eligible veterans and provide care in the most appropriate setting," according to the feds. But nobody from Ingram's CBOC -- one of 800 such offices run by the VA, which boasts a record $150 billion budget -- was there to help on that Saturday when Ingram perished.

Why not? Because the facility is closed on weekends. Its daytime, weekday hours (8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) serve the convenience of the government employees, not of the men and women who put their lives on the line for their country.

Area veterans' advocates and local officials in both political parties have pushed for years to address chronic understaffing and Soviet-era wait times. The Atlantic City Press reports that there is just one lone psychologist to provide therapy to 200 veterans on any given day.

"To make matters worse," local Democratic state senator Jeff Van Drew (who worked in the VA system as a dentist) pointed out last week, "there are no Veterans Affairs hospitals in the region, so even if a veteran is able to schedule a timely appointment at the nearest VA hospital, he or she would have to travel hours to Philadelphia, Penn., northern New Jersey or Delaware to receive care."

Would it have been too much to ask the VA's employees to open for just one day of weekend appointments and one weekday of late-night appointments? Apparently, that was too much of a sacrifice for the 8-to-4:30-ers. Vets' groups petitioned for extended hours for years. Nothing happened.

How about a pilot program to free the VA's hostages and allow vets to receive health care from personal doctors and local hospitals, as Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J., has long proposed? There must be no escape hatches, anti-privatization special interests have decreed. All must suffer for the Greater Good."