Jay Rockefeller: “I am very pleased my friend from Minnesota is in the Chair because he is on the Armed Services Committee, and so it…”

“I am very pleased my friend from Minnesota is in the Chair because he is on the Armed Services Committee, and so it makes me very happy to be able to present this argument to him. We are all very familiar with this practice of requiring military retirees to choose between military pay for retirement and disability benefits. There is a history of this which I will get into. The money comes from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but it is a very sad state of affairs that we have come into. This is a practice that my friend, Bill Stubblefield, of Martinsburg, which is a large town in West Virginia, who serves on the board of directors of the Retired Officers Association, told me 'is patently unfair when a serviceman or woman, who has devoted 20 plus years of their life in service to this country--suffering physically as a consequence--has to be penalized by having their VA disability offset by their retirement pay.' It is a huge subject. We have been fighting for years to eliminate this injustice.”