U.S. soldiers risk ruin while waiting for benefit checks
(AP)
<p><img src="http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20080616/capt.452c6d4cb2a4481695606f6b3840ab49.waiting_wounded_ny201.jpg?x=130&y=80&q=85&sig=PgC1AANNd0MJdY2IX5fkhA--" align="left" height="80" width="130" alt="Isaac Stevens is photographed at his Operation Homefront apartment in San Antonio, Wednesday, March 19, 2008. Stevens was moved to the Operation Homefront apartment after a social worker at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, acting on her own initiative, intervened to rescue Stevens from a homeless shelter there. Stevens suffered a head injury and spinal damage after a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. The injury alone didn't put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy ? specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)" border="0" /> (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080617/ap_on_re_us/waiting_wounded)AP - His lifelong dream of becoming a soldier had, in the end, come to this for Isaac Stevens: 28, penniless, in a wheelchair, fending off the sexual advances of another man in a homeless shelter.</p><br clear="all"/>
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