Veterans’ Services director is failing at job

By Adrian Cole

The director of Maine’s Bureau of Veterans’ Services, Peter Ogden, is failing in his charge to support all veterans. While his efforts to help care for aging veterans and memorializing those who have passed are commendable, he has shown a consistent disrespect and lack of concern for anyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I attended a meeting in December in Brunswick with state legislators, where Ogden laid out his agenda for the coming year.

He referred to the roughly 60,000 Maine veterans of America’s most recent wars as “kids” so many times that I lost count. This was only part of the insult, though, as his policy stance and inaction as a leader, revealed during the course of the meeting, proved more egregious than his insults.

He discussed a report conducted by the University of Maine, outlining the areas his agency needed to improve upon in order to serve the new generation of veterans returning to our state. He did not provide specifics of the report at the time, but I was able to obtain a copy after the meeting.

Almost every statement he made about veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was false, and his stated policy agenda is not meant to address any of the issues outlined in the report.

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