The Newnan Times-Herald
Newnan, Georgia – Thursday, July 2, 1987
By W. Winston Skinner
Assistant News Editor
It was – perhaps – the most daring role in Jere Beery’s career.
He has been a stuntman, an actor, a model. As a young man, he went to serve his country in Vietnam and suffered shrapnel damage to his leg that has never completely healed.
But after months of seemingly uncaring treatment and encounters with short-tempered staff at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Atlanta, Jere Beery had had enough. It was time to do something, and Beery decided to do something daring.
The problem, he found, had many facets – understaffing, lack of supplies, untrained personnel. The many parts added up to a very disturbing whole for Jere Beery – an unwillingness on the part of the American government to spend what it costs to have good medical care for those who fought for their homeland.
Beery knows what it means to give his best in service to America. He earned three purple hearts during his 27 months in Vietnam, including one on Valentine’s Day of 1968.
On March 1 of that year, he was serving with Special Forces there. While he stood at his post, he suffered a direct hit. He remained on his feet, but his intestines hung nearly to the deck of the ship.
“Most of my hip is gone,” he said.
An officer aboard the boat, Lt. Richard Godbehere, lay Beery down and helped get the ship and crew back to safety, despite his own wounds. Beery finds significance in his rescuer’s surname, pronounced “God-be-here.”
Lt. T. J. Cutler of the U> S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, is writing a book due out this summer with a chapter on Godbehere and Beery.
Beery also suffered permanent damage to his eye, and he received shrapnel wounds “all over my body,” he said. A re-evaluation of his case in 1976 said that Beery is “permanently and totally disabled, due to a service connected disability or disabilities.”
After his injury, he was told he would never walk again. At first, it appeared he would lose his leg.
“They seemed to think it would be easier to take the leg off than to repair all the damage,” Beery said. Instead, doctors opted for repairing the damage as best they could.
That first hospital stay lasted 18 months. “I received the best possible medical attention,” Beery said. Since that time, he has been in and out of Veterans Administration hospitals.
He noticed as he went to the hospital in Atlanta that the waiting was growing longer, and the patience of the staff was growing shorter. Beery decided to put his talents to work and try to find out what the problem was in the V.A. hospital.
Jere Beery comes from a theatrical family.
Before his parents married, his mother dated Buddy Ebsen. His father appeared in such films as “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and film actors Noah Beery and Wallace Beery are relatives.
Jere, known as Scooter as a child, made his acting debut in a little theater production at the age of 8.
After his war injury, he went to DeVry Institute and studied electronics. After graduating, he discovered that he had headaches when doing electronics work for an extended time.
He then turned to music, starting his own recording studio. That venture fell victim to a hearing problem of which Beery had been unaware.
“I went to the VA and learned I had frequency loss in my hearing,” he said.
From there, Beery tried the eclectic approach. He became a stuntman, actor and model. In 1979, he got the role of Burnett in a CBS special, “The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd” with Dennis Weaver and Susan Sullivan.
The same year, he had a role in a feature film, “The Prizefighter,” followed by roles or stunt work in “Tough City,” “Final Exam,” “Cannonball Run” and “Breaking Away” in 1980. That year he played the role of the welfare man, as well as performed some stunts, in “Baker County U.S.A.” filmed in the north Georgia town of Clayton.
Other feature films he has worked on include “Night Screams” and “Sharky’s Machine” in 1981, “Door to Door” in 1983, “Slugger’s Wife,” “Making the Grade,” “The Baron and the Kid” and “The Annihilators” in 1985.
He has also worked with the Georgia Department of Transportation on a DUI campaign, conducted training programs for the Georgia Police Academy and other groups and appeared in music videos.
Donna Beery “rigs” her husband for his stunts. In “Final Exam,” he did a 57-foot backwards fall. He did a back burn stunt for a benefit for the Atlanta Symphony in 1985.
I’ve rolled quite a few cars,” Beery said.
If Beery’s background and experience made him an ideal “undercover” agent to investigate the VA Hospital, it was his survival in Vietnam that gave him the sense that he had to do something to help his fellow veterans.
“I can’t help feeling I’m on a mission from God,” Beery said.
He said he wanted to do something to help other veterans, recalling the role of Godbehere and others in saving his life. “I owe everything I am and everything I have to them,” Beery said.
“I’m not a preacher, I’m not a politician. I’m a vet,” he said. “I’m supposed to do something sometime about something.”
Beery’s “something” is the condition of the VA hospitals and the treatment of veterans there and in such films as “The Deerhunter” and “Apocalypse Now.”
He has talked about burning his Screen Actors Guild card in protest of the movie industry’s depiction of Vietnam veterans as inhumane drug addicts. “I’m willing to go on television and burn it because of all the negative productions that have come out of Hollywood – not for the vet but against the vet,” Beery said.
His decision to enter the hospital on April 9 of this year took little effort.
He told a doctor about “fears” he could not overcome. After an evaluation with a social worker, he was admitted.
Again, Jere and Donna Beery were struck by the shortness and rude attitudes of many hospital employees. One woman took off the name tag “so I couldn’t get her name,” Mrs. Beery said.
Beery was admitted to the fourth floor lockup area for acute mental patients. He and Donna said their good-byes, and the doors closed.
“I was in. Little did I realize at the time how much I had bitten off,” Beery said.
What Beery found in the mental ward made him even more disconsolate and more determined to improve the situation at the hospital. He was struck “by how dirty it was,” he said.
He found it to be “a mental ward that is mentally disturbing.”
While the bottom floor of the hospital, where the public generally goes, is spotless, he said, the mental ward was dirty. Beery said he found rusted bathroom fixtures, missing floorboard trim, repairs made with masking tape, stained walls and ceiling tiles, missing switch plates, windows coated with greasy film and bathrooms in need of extensive cleaning.
One night Jere awoke to a shock. “There were roaches crawling on me in the middle of the night,” he said.
While Jere lived on the mental ward for five days, talking with patients and taking notes and photographs, Donna visited with employees and families in the cafeteria and in other locations around the hospital.
She was told hospital personnel have had only a three percent raise in the past five years. “We went in thinking it was all the staff,” Jere said of the problems.
His wife learned that many of the women working at the hospital are spouses of veterans. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t even be there,” she said.
Donna Beery also said she found that victims of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS – were not quarantined in the hospital, but were scatted among the other patients.
For five days, Beery “acted like a sponge – soaking up all I could, “he said. He talked with the other men on the ward – many of them older men who fought in Korea or in the first or second world wars.
Many of the residents on the floor were disoriented much of the time, Beery said. One man had been in various VA hospitals for 26 years.
Most of the doctors at the hospital are young and have little experience, while medical students also provide care at the facility, Beery said. “You get practiced on,” he said.
Robert E. Long, associate director at the VA Medical Center in Atlanta, disagreed with some of Beery’s assertions. He said the Veterans Administration “fares extremely well as far as competition for the federal dollar goes.”
He said salaries for VA employees are set by the government and, therefore, employees in some fields are paid less than in private hospitals. “All federal programs are controlled from a federal point of view,” he said.
Long insisted that the hospitals do receive sufficient funds, and he said cleanliness is emphasized at the Atlanta facility. He described the VA Medical Center as being “as clean a hospital as there is in this city.”
Back at home, Jere Beery could not forget about what he had seen and experienced at the VA Hospital.
He and Donna read everything they could find on the shrinking veteran’s benefits package. Publications of the Disabled American Veterans organizations warned of many attacks on benefits for veterans and chronicled the history of the removal of benefits promised to veterans during the Vietnam era.
Beery – and many other veterans – are upset by the fact that the White House has sent a bill to Congress categorizing some veteran’s programs as “welfare.” The bill would place the VA disability pension program, health care for non-service disabilities and other programs under state welfare systems.
Many veterans are shocked that the United States government would place benefits which they were promised – and which they feel they have earned – into a welfare program.
An article in the DAV Magazine in February chronicled the attacks on veteran’s benefits which first began in 1973 before the United States was completely disengaged from combat in Vietnam.
The proposals in government to cut services to veterans continued yearly. In 1979, extensive cuts were made in hospital beds and personnel in VA facilities. In 1979 extensive cuts were made in hospital beds and personnel in VA facilities. “The quality of care veterans received at VA medical centers began to deteriorate seriously,” the article stated.
In 1983 a few months after dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, the Grace Commission recommended that the Veterans Administration be eliminated as an agency of the government. That effort failed.
Two years later, the healthy care system was continuing to deteriorate. “The VA admitted that lack of resources was forcing its medical system to deny care to several thousand veterans each month,” according to the DAV Magazine.
“Last year was clearly the worst year yet. It was proposed that 7,500 employees and 2,700 hospital beds be stripped from the VA system. The number of veterans turned away from the VA medical system without treatment continued its upward climb,” the article continued.
Correspondence from the VA Hospital in Atlanta confirmed the DAV reports of shrinking hospital benefits. Earlier this year, the Beerys received a notice stating that travel reimbursement was being greatly curtailed. The Beerys had learned that many veterans’ families used the money they received for travel to pay a sitter to keep their children.
Under the new regulations, someone who traveled 120 miles to reach the hospital would receive $2.20. Beery used to get $4.88 for the trek from Union City to Atlanta, and no reimbursement is now being given for travel of less than 100 miles.
The Beerys predicted that cutting out the travel benefit will prevent many veterans living at a distance from the VA facilities from seeking the care they are entitled to there.
As veteran’s benefits drop, the number of older Americans with a service record grows. According to information distributed by the DAV, there were 3.3 million veterans over age 65 in 1980. That number is expected to grow to 7.3 million by 1990 and 9 million by 2000.
Something must be done, Jere Beery believes, to save the programs that help people who were willing to give their lives for American freedom. “I don’t think the general public is aware of the situation,” he said.
Donna Beery said the attitude of the veterans themselves is heartbreaking when she sees the frustration of the personnel and the increasing decline in the facilities. The veterans remain friendly and smiling despite the problems at the hospital.
Mrs. Beery said everyone should just sit in the hospital one day and see the veterans who come there for help. “It’s the saddest thing in the world,” she said.