By Peter Hirschfeld

WALDEN - Sgt. Douglas Rivers cannot sit still. Even in his own Walden home, sitting at a round kitchen table across from his wife, he squirms in and out of his chair.

"Today is OK," he says, though poorly veiled grimaces suggest otherwise. "Some days I can hardly stand up. I pretty much just lay down for the whole day."

Four years ago, Rivers enjoyed snowmobiling, hunting, horsing around with his two young kids and working at a metal works factory in Lyndon. Today, the 44-year-old East Haven native lies at home and eats pain pills, all but immobilized by a back injury suffered during a yearlong tour of duty in Kuwait with the Vermont National Guard.

Rivers has been out of work for 11 months now. A caseworker at Vermont's Division of Vocational Rehabilitation has deemed him "unemployable." But the disability pay meant to keep injured soldiers like Rivers financially afloat has yet to materialize. And as Douglas and Sandy Rivers await the disability compensation they applied for more than six months ago, this family sinks further into a hole from which Sandy fears they'll never escape.

"I thought the worst year of my life would be the year my husband was gone," Sandy Rivers says. "And that was a piece of cake compared to what we've been through in the last two years."

Douglas Rivers is spare with words. Sandy Rivers, a 38-year-old paraeducator at Twinfield Union School, is not.

She is frustrated with the way the U.S. military and Veterans Affairs have treated her husband. She believed that the government would support military families whose earning power was diminished by their service overseas.

The Rivers' experience, it turns out, is hardly unique. It takes Veterans Affairs eight to 12 months to process disability claims, according to state officials familiar with the system. And for men and women unable to work during that that time, the lag between injury and the first disability payment can compound the stress of families already coping with injuries or battle wounds.

"It clearly creates a financial problem for people who are unable to work because of their disability," says Clayton Clark, head of the Vermont office of Veterans Affairs in Montpelier. "For that period of time, from when they apply to when they get a claim, it certainly is a challenge for them to find funds to cover living expenses."

Nationally, the VA - which handles long-term disability claims once a soldier has been medically discharged from service by the Department of Defense - faces a backlog of more than 600,000 claims. More than 100 Vermont veterans wounded in Iraq, Afghanistan or Kuwait have disability claims pending with the VA in White River Junction.

Douglas Rivers' injury didn't occur in the line of fire. The tank turret mechanic deployed to Kuwait in late 2004 with the more than 600 members of Task Force Green Mountain. He joined the guard in 1983, right after graduating from Lyndon Institute. The trip to Kuwait was his first overseas deployment, and he was assigned duty as a security guard at the front gate of a U.S. military base in Kuwait.

In June 2005, about halfway through the deployment, Rivers engaged in pedestrian training exercise in which a colleague played the role of a would-be combatant.

"This guy attacked me, and we struggled for quite awhile and I fell on my back," Rivers says.

He felt a sharp pain travel from his lower back into his stomach and legs. He was initially diagnosed with a pulled muscle. But the pain got worse. In November, after having been relegated to desk duty (which he sometimes had to perform while lying on a couch), Rivers was sent home early.

The pain grew progressively worse in the months that followed. In February 2006, River collapsed in the driveway outside the family's gray, doublewide modular home.

An MRI revealed what military doctors had previously missed - a chipped vertebrae and partially herniated disk. Rivers had surgery, and three months later he returned to work, until one day he couldn't move.

"I worked for three or four hours and pain just started shooting down my legs," Rivers says.

Disability claims are awarded based on the severity of the injury and its impact on future earning power. Awards range from $115 a month (for a 10 percent claim) to $2,471 (for 100 percent disability).

In Vermont, which has more than 55,000 veterans, about 10 percent, or 5,572, are receiving some level of disability compensation from the VA, according to the undersecretary of benefits for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C.

Richard Reid is a veterans service officer for the Vermont office of Veterans Affairs. He travels the state helping veterans prepare their claims.

"On average, initial claims are taking eight months to a year to be adjudicated," Reid explains.

Reid has more than 350 active claims on his ledger right now, which includes veterans of wars from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom. He says the White River VA office is far more responsive and efficient than VA branches in other states. But he sympathizes with out-of-work vets waiting for an income stream to arrive.

"It is very frustrating for veterans and it does require a great deal of patience," Reid says. "From their perspective, they're dealing with this big, faceless bureaucracy."

Sandy Rivers is tired of wading through the reams of paperwork. And she doesn't want to make any more phone calls. Her husband's deployment orders came only weeks before he left for duty. Why then, Sandy Rivers wonders, should it take the government eight months to compensate her family for the injury he suffered during his deployment?

"It's stressful. It's just so stressful, and I don't want to have to do this anymore," she says. "Someone isn't doing their job. It's that simple. And I'm tired of it."

Reid says Rivers' angry response isn't an unusual.

"A common complaint is - 'How hard can it be to do this?'" Reid says.

Sandy Rivers, who served as the family readiness leader of Douglas' Guard unit for 10 years, has called her congressman, reached out to the National Guard and contacted the office of Veterans Affairs for help. Each organization has service officers available, free of charge, to help veterans and their families navigate the process.

She might take the wait in stride if she knew there was money at the end. But at this point she has no idea how much disability her husband will be awarded.

"I've got mortgage payments. I've got car payments," she says.

The Rivers are living on Sandy's modest paycheck from Twinfield and the long-term disability Douglas earns from his former union job at Kennametal in Lyndonville. But even with the austere lifestyle they've adopted, Sandy says, they'll be unable to stay afloat much longer.

"We've been through hell and back," she says. "My husband gave 25 years of his life to the military … and this is how we get treated?"

On the yellow walls of the Rivers' kitchen are several framed pictures of Douglas in uniform. In one shot, he stands next to Adjutant Gen. Martha Rainville at a medal ceremony in Northfield, following his deployment. He walked with crutches under his arms to the event.

"If people in Washington hear what we have to say, and how the disability process has been for us, you'd think that would be enough for people in Washington to open their eyes," Sandy Rivers says. "If they hear about this, what we've been through, they'll have to open their eyes."