For some veterans, just walking into a Veterans Affairs office is a trigger for them. We often talk about the “brown envelope syndrome”. When you get communications from Veterans Affairs, they're in a brown envelope. We have veterans tell us that they have a pile of brown envelopes, and they don't open them. There could be important stuff in there, but they just don't open them. A lot of the veterans who are overwhelmed have already applied for benefits and been denied, and due to their frame of mind at the time they just don't have the fight in them to continue that.
Usually when we come in contact with a veteran we say that the first thing we're going to do is take them to Veterans Affairs, and they say no, they want nothing nothing to do with Veterans Affairs. We have to explain to them that it's kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face. That's where we come in at times to act as a buffer, and it usually makes the process a little smoother.