Captain Ellis sat down next to Walt at the Golden Corral, loud enough for my husband to hear, and then he turned to Gary and said, I am Walts VA benefits officer, and I have been trying to reach you for three months about a check that was mailed to your address.
It was not just the forty-five hundred dollars Gary took from his fathers hearing aid savings. There was a VA check, a benefit owed to Walt, that had gone to Garys address because Gary had quietly changed the mailing address on file. Gary had been cashing what belonged to his father.
Captain Ellis had served with Walt and never forgot him. When the benefit check stopped reaching Walt and the address did not match, he did what good men do. He dug, and he drove to a birthday lunch to put it right in front of everyone.
Gary asked what an eighty-one year old man could possibly need to hear. He wanted to hear his great-grandbabies laugh. That is what the money was for.
Redirecting another persons VA benefits to your own mailbox is not a family loan. It is fraud against a veteran and against the government, and the VA does not look away from it. Gary sat very still while Captain Ellis laid out the dates, the address change, the cashed check.
Faced with a federal benefits officer and a paper trail, Gary paid back every dollar fast, the hearing aid money and the benefit both, because the alternative was a great deal worse than embarrassment at a buffet.
Walt got the good hearing aids, the ones the VA does not fully cover, within two weeks. Captain Ellis made sure of it.
The first Sunday Walt wore them, our great-granddaughter laughed at something across the room, and Walt turned his head toward the sound and smiled so wide I thought my heart would give out. Eighty-one years old, and he heard his babys laugh again. Gary showed up late to that, too. Walt heard him come in. He heard everything now.