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Veterans Benefits Checks Delayed: Soldiers Risk Financial Ruin

Isaac Stevens is photographed at his Operation Homefront apartment in San Antonio, Wednesday, March 19, 2008. Stevens was moved to the Operation Homefront apartment after a social worker at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, acting on her own initiative, intervened to rescue Stevens from a homeless shelter there. Stevens suffered a head injury and spinal damage after a headfirst fall over a wall on the obstacle course at Fort Benning, Ga. The injury alone didn't put him in a homeless shelter. Instead, it was military bureaucracy _ specifically, the way injured soldiers are discharged on just a fraction of their salary and then forced to wait six to nine months, and sometimes even more than a year, before their full disability payments begin to flow. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)