Dana Montalto

NBC 5 Responds to the family of a Vietnam veteran trying to access military benefits. The family said the former service member’s discharge from the…

An op-ed by Dana Montalto, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic: A veteran with a fever and hacking cough that suggest a possible coronavirus infection tries to make a doctor’s appointment, only to be turned away by a receptionist who personally decides the would-be patient can’t see a physician. A former service member and sexual assault survivor at risk of suicide is denied access to mental health services by a bureaucratic gatekeeper stationed at the therapist’s front desk. These are two of thousands of examples of veterans seeking the Veterans Affairs healthcare they’re legally entitled to — and being wrongly refused it. This is due to a pervasive misunderstanding, and misapplication, of the rules regarding other-than-honorable discharges.

The Pentagon will reopen a records database that helps service members who are appealing a less-than-honorable discharge, a veterans group said Friday. The National Veterans Legal Services Program had sued the Defense Department over a lack of access to the database, arguing that the military had been breaking federal law since April. The database contains decisions by military review boards that grant or deny a veteran’s request to upgrade a discharge. Veterans and their lawyers study those decisions in hopes of building successful arguments of their own...Dana Montalto, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic, told The Associated Press earlier this month that post-9/11 vets have the highest rate of receiving less-than-honorable discharges. She added some veterans can wait years to get a decision from a military review board.