Missouri's Veterans of Foreign Wars gave U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, their 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award Saturday in Jefferson City.
"It is important to have elected officials who are fully committed to helping our service members and their families," the organization said in its news release reporting the Saturday morning presentation, also noting Blunt "has demonstrated this commitment" since joining the U.S. House from Missouri's 7th District in 1997.
The news release and the award noted: "With more and more veterans returning from deployments across the world, we need leaders in Congress who have a proven track record of looking out for our nation's heroes - someone committed to helping veterans and their families find good-paying jobs or ensuring our veterans receive the quality medical treatment they deserve."
Blunt, 66, joined the U.S. Senate in 2011 and is running for re-election this year, but VFW officials emphasized the award was a recognition of Blunt's work, not an endorsement for this year's elections.
Democrat Jason Kander, 34, Missouri's current secretary of state and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, also is running for the Senate seat.
Blunt told the VFW's Mid Winter Council of Administration meeting at the Capitol Plaza Hotel: "I can't think of any recognition I've ever had that I'm more touched by than this one."
Blunt reported Congress currently is working on the Military Families Stability Act - which he and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, have co-sponsored - to improve ways the U.S. government can help its military families move from one assignment to another.
"The strength of the American military is in the families of the American military," he said.
Part of the Pentagon's budget pays to move families and their belongings from one base to another when the service member is transferred. However, it doesn't pay to move the spouse and children separately.
One family told Congress about preparing to transfer from Hawaii to Fort Leonard Wood, he said, explaining the service member's wife "got into the Ph.D. completion program at St. Louis University and got a teaching contract at Missouri University of Science and Technology at Rolla" starting in August - and then the transfer was delayed.
Instead of being moved at the military's expense as part of transferring the entire family, Blunt said, "she had to move herself and pay the expenses of that move herself - where her husband could have easily stayed in Bachelor Quarters on the (Hawaii) base" until his transfer was finally ordered, and "there would have been no extra costs to taxpayers but a real benefit to the family."
Another family, he reported, faced the service member being transferred from Germany to the Pentagon six weeks before school ended for the year, and "there was no way that the military could figure out for that family to finish school and then follow him."
The bill is important, Blunt told the VFW members, because, "As people serve and spouses are more likely to have job requirements and as kids are, obviously, obligated in school, I think we can do a lot more to let families stay a little longer or leave a little earlier - if that makes the work opportunity or the job opportunity work better."
Blunt said he was surprised a lot of young veterans have supported his Excellence in Mental Health bill, introduced a couple of years ago. They see it as being "designed to establish more places where they can go, where mental health and behavioral health will be treated like all other health (issues)," he explained.
He later told reporters more and more military commanders are understanding the national statistic that "one in four adult Americans has a diagnosable and almost always treatable behavioral health/mental health issue" also applies to the military.
Blunt also said Vietnam-era veterans are continuing to experience post-traumatic-stress issues related to their service a half-century ago, and Congress is working on a Memory Act to make sure service documents show the in-service incidents that may lead to medical or mental health issues later in life.
Blunt said he and others in Washington continue working to get the Veterans Administration to improve its services - including allowing more veterans to get medical treatment at the VA's expense even if the treatment is provided by non-VA doctors and facilities.
"For too long, in my view, the Veterans Administration's been more concerned about what is good for the Veterans Administration than what was good for veterans," he said.
At the end of his remarks Saturday morning, Blunt recognized the dozen VFW Voice of Democracy winners who were honored at Saturday night's banquet.
He recalled Ronald Reagan's comment, "even in a country as great as ours, you can't pass freedom along in the bloodstream - every generation of Americans has to secure freedom for itself."