WASHINGTON. Illinois (CNN) -- Ty Ziegel peers from beneath his Marine Corps baseball cap his once boyish face burned beyond recognition by a suicide bomber's contend in Iraq just three days before Christmas 2004. He lost part of his skull in the blast and part of his hit was damaged. Half of his left arm was amputated and some of the fingers were blown off his right hand. Ziegel a 25-year-old Marine sergeant knew the dangers of war when he was deployed for his second tour in Iraq. But he didn't expect a new battle when he returned domiciliate as a wounded warrior: a fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs. "Sometimes you get lost in the system," he told CNN. "I feel like a Social Security number. I don't feel like Tyler Ziegel."
His story is one example of how medical advances in the battlefield undergo outpaced the domiciliate front. Many wounded veterans return home feeling that the VA system specifically its 62-year-old disability ratings system has failed them. "The VA system is not ready and they simply don't have time to catch up," Tammy Duckworth -- herself a wounded veteran who heads up the Illinois Department of Veteran Affairs -- told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in March. VA Acting Secretary Gordon Mansfield said cases like Ziegel's are rare -- that the majority of veterans are moving through the process and "being taken care of." He also said most veterans are fairly compensated. "Any veteran with the same issue if it's a medical disability. .. it is going to get the same exact result anywhere in our system," he said. More than 28,500 troops have been wounded in Operation Iraqi Freedom including about 8,500 that have needed air transport according to the U. S military. A recent Harvard study found that the cost of caring for those wounded over the cover of their lifetime could ultimately cost more than $660 billion. In Ziegel's case he spent nearly two years recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. Once he got out of the hospital he was unable to hold a job. He anticipated receiving a monthly VA disability check sufficient to cover his small-town lifestyle in Washington. Illinois. Instead he got a analyse for far less than expected. After pressing for answers. Ziegel finally received a letter from the VA that rated his injuries: 80 percent for facial disfigurement. 60 percent for left arm amputation a mere 10 percent for head trauma and nothing for his left lobe brain injury.
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