The Veterans Movie No One Wants to Make

Americans celebrate Veterans Day today. But for many, our understanding of what a serviceman goes through in war is shaped by dramatic battle scenes from Hollywood films — although two recent films, “American Sniper” and “Lone Survivor,” have shown the gritty yet surreal experience of war.

Meanwhile, Hollywood pushes “Got Your 6,” a national veteran campaign to shift the perception of veterans in popular culture and help returning vets re-integrate into their communities. The program recently approved several film projects as positive portrayals of veterans, including two that take a politically correct approach to how they present vets.

Hollywood loves to highlight the torment and atrocities of war.

In one, “Hacksaw Ridge,” a soldier is drafted and ostracized for his pacifist stance, only to emerge a hero. The other, a SundanceTV series called “Hap and Leonard,” highlights a gay Vietnam vet.

These films may have good intentions — but the story modern veterans need to be told on the big screen is about the corrupt and unaccountable Department of Veterans Affairs.

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Hollywood loves to highlight the torment and atrocities of war — but, given most stars’ preference for big government, it’s surprising how little Tinseltown has to say about the big injustices veterans endure from their own government.

Rip into Wall Street capitalists or the Catholic Church in films such as “Spotlight”? No problem.

Go after the agency that is supposed to look after the men and women who protect us? Not so much.

But then, portraying this scandal means that filmmakers must admit the Obama administration’s wastefulness, inefficiency, corruption, and unaccountable nature. Now the picture becomes clearer.

Time and again, the Obama administration was called out for the greedy, heartless bureaucrats who ran its VA system into utter dysfunction — and time and again, the administration refused to do anything about it.

In 2014, Americans learned that VA officials had manipulated the calculations of veteran wait times to get medical care — and that 40 vets had died waiting for care at VA facilities in Phoenix. The administration forced Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki to resign, but did little else.

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Last year, the new VA secretary, Robert McDonald, claimed the department had fired 900 people — 60 of whom reportedly had been involved in manipulating wait times. A few months later, The New York Times discovered through documents that only three people actually had been fired.

Since 2014, the system has improved little and continues to place veterans’ lives at risk through its inefficient, top-down, government-run, socialized approach to medicine. But to make a movie about that or the collapse of Obamacare or other bureaucratic messes that have left Washington positively sclerotic is to admit the failures of big government — which Hollywood can’t bring itself to do.

Moreover, the problems of the VA go well beyond health care wait times. The VA recently fired an employee for armed robbery — only to have her union reinstate her with back pay. Another VA worker stayed on the payroll while she was facing manslaughter charges for the blunt force trauma of a 70-year-old veteran’s head.

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In addition, several VA officials used the system to rake in undeserved bonuses. One Waco, Texas, VA director made more than $53,000 in bonuses while forcing veterans to wait longer. In Buffalo, New York, another worker brought in $26,000 in bonuses for misusing insulin pens. In Atlanta, a medical center director oversaw the preventable deaths of four veterans — but still made $65,000 in bonuses.

The list of corruption goes on and on. When congressional committees tried to look into the scandals, they had to fight tooth and nail to get information or to get Obama administration officials to answer for the agency in hearings.

Even if Hollywood would take on this story about veterans, it’s unlikely the “Got Your 6” campaign would give it a seal of approval. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has provided counsel to the campaign.

After Tuesday’s election, we can only hope a Donald Trump presidency will clean house and fix it so that our veterans don’t have to worry about surviving after the war has ended.