Have you seen the Vanessa Turner story?" asks Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center (NGWRC), when I call to talk to him about the current state of veterans’ benefits. Vanessa who? "She’s the soldier who returned from Iraq and had the leg injury, and she went down to the VA and they told her it would take six months to get around to her." What? It sounds like a bad joke, with a black eye for a punch line. But no, the plight of Vanessa Turner — which, compared to the star-spangled Jessica Lynch story,...