A Hero of Mine

My local hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News, recently published an article on what I consider to be one of the hero’s of the local military community. The Article is located at http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/buffaloerie/story/236956.html. They wrote an article on my VA representative, Ms. Tracy Kinn. Tracy was the VA rep I ran into at my local Amherst, NY City Hall one day not long after getting back from Afghanistan. I am not even sure why I was in city hall that day, but I just remember looking down the hall and seeing a sign that stated “Veteran Affairs”, which of course caught my eye.

I thought to myself “well let’s go check that out” and I walked in to meet Tracy and her brand new starting-that-day secretary. I asked Tracy what she did and she told me what her role was, that she worked for the VA in this remote location and that one of her jobs was to help veterans to apply for benefits to include disability benefits. Since I have collected medical disability since I got out of active duty in 1996 and I needed to start it back up after getting back from Afghanistan, I was pretty happy to run into her. I had been planning to go to the VA offices in Buffalo directly and try to navigate the red tape and paperwork myself to do that. After Tracy told me that it was he job to help with that, help with getting medical appointments set up and several other things that I know I needed to do, I knew that God had led me into her office. This was the lady I needed to talk to as I was sure she could help me with the whole process.

I have written on this blog a few times about my experiences at the local VA hospital and how it has not been the typical slow, painful bureaucratic process as it has been in the past. What I have never mentioned on here was that it was Tracy who helped kick-start me into moving forward. On those times when we talked and I said things like “I will get around to it” or “one day” it was her, the bulldog as I like to call her, who said “bullcrap, you need to do that now…”. She motivates and (as a female civilian and not a weathered old senior NCO) it catches you off guard when she tells it like it is. She is the voice of many a veteran and just like a good platoon sergeant or first sergeant, she keeps the pressure on all of the vets she helps to keep moving forward and not to procrastinate.

Hero is a very over-used word and unfortunately in today’s world clichéd so much that it has demeaned the true value of the word. However it is not one I throw around that often or use in any context. So it means a lot to me and to anyone who knows me when I say that Tracy Kinn is a Hero to me. She did not have to serve on a battlefield, pull anyone from a burning Humvee or throw herself on a grenade to be that either. She throws herself on the grenade of bureaucracy everyday for guys and gals she has never met before.

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