Shirley man honored as veterans’ advocate

SHIRLEY – A local man who has dedicated his life to helping veterans get the services they are entitled to has been named this year’s national recipient of the Military Order of the Purple Heart 2004 Kenneth Richardson National Service Office Award.

Neal Williams, 53, who has served as an unpaid national service officer for the past 10 years, was recognized this month in Arlington, Va.

The national service program provides free assistance, service and representation to United States veterans and their dependents, survivors, widows and orphans throughout the country.

“I was really overwhelmed,” Williams said this week. “It is a very special honor.”

Sen. Susan Collins called Williams’ selection for the award a “well-deserved honor … My congratulations and my thanks to Neal for all the work he has done and continues to do on behalf of Maine’s veterans,” she wrote in a prepared statement.

Williams, who joined the U.S. Army in 1968 and retired as a chief warrant officer in 1981, decided 10 years ago to donate his time as one of about 85 national service officers in the nation.

Because the training was difficult for him and others to understand, Williams set out to make it easier. He developed an entry-level training program for new service officers that was more than his supervisors expected it to be.

Williams was asked to travel the country to teach volunteers the skills involved, from filling out an application to providing them with a basic knowledge of veterans law. Service officers are authorized to practice veterans law by the general council of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Confined to a wheelchair about five years ago as a result of a spinal cord injury, Williams works tirelessly on Tuesdays and other days at his Bangor office, the only Purple Heart National Service Program office in the state.

He helps veterans get the medical services they need and the benefits they deserve, and helps with employment opportunities.

The 400 health-related cases he is working on include an amputee from Afghanistan and a serviceman who was wounded in Iraq. He also said several of his cases involve sexual trauma.

From his own experiences, Williams knows the difficulties veterans have when they leave the battlefield and the military. He declines to revisit the 1970 bombing in Vietnam that killed all but three soldiers on the armed personnel carrier he was traveling in and left him with a broken back and shrapnel wounds.

But he is willing to share the struggles that veterans like him have had with the government they serve.

“There’s an extreme shortage of money to treat them,” Williams said. He said he has used his own savings and a large amount of his monthly income to advocate for his comrades.

He recalled one WWII veteran who came to his Bangor office for help. Williams said the veteran had been severely wounded in battle and had been living at a substandard level because he had not been adequately compensated by the government.

Williams was successful in getting him a total disability award. He recalls that the veteran’s wife, with tears streaming down her face, said, “‘Mr. Williams, this is the first time in 40 years we’ve been able to go out to dinner and have our bills paid at the end of the month.’ I cried right along with her.”

And nothing feels as good as helping the child of a veteran get the finances they need to attend college, Williams said. “You can’t put a price on that.”

To Williams, all of the men and women who serve the country are heroes and should be treated as such.

“The American public really doesn’t understand the sacrifices the young men and women in our military are making,” he said.

“The past two administrations have cut health care to substandard living for those very kids who bled on foreign soils for this country’s ideals.

“Those are the heroes I want to represent from WWII on,” he said.