Both his grandfather and great uncle served in World War II, said Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., but only his great uncle entered a Nazi death camp as the war came to a close.

"According to the story my grandmother told," the senator said, "when he got home, he went up to his parents' house, into the attic, and didn't talk for about six months."

It was an era, Obama said, in which many veterans struggled through the trauma of war, without counseling or disability pay.

Obama had several generations of veterans in mind, he suggested, when he joined fellow Democrats Richard Durbin (Ill.), Patty Murray (Wash.) and Daniel Akaka (Hawai'i) Sept. 22 on a successful amendment to block the Department of Veterans Affairs from reviewing case files of 72,000 veterans rated 100-percent disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder.

The House version of the bill has no such clause, so a House-Senate conference committee will decide its fate during final negotiations on the bill.

VA officials believe some PTSD claims have been decided for veterans without proper documentation. They announced their massive review only after the VA inspector general studied 2,100 randomly selected cases of PTSD disability awards and found that 25 percent lacked documents to verify that a traumatic, service-connected incident occurred.

Given the poor staff work, VA said that in January it would begin to review paperwork for all of the 100-percent disabled PTSD cases decided over five years, from October 1999 through September 2004. In that period, the inspector general said, the number of veterans receiving compensation for PTSD rose by 80 percent and annual PTSD payments rose from $1.7 billion to $4.3 billion.

But the Senate's amendment would bar the VA from conducting its case review until it justifies the program to Congress. It also would prohibit the VA from lowering PTSD awards except in cases of fraud.

"None of us wants to see any fraud or waste in government spending," said Obama, who serves on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. "But nowhere should we be more willing to give people the benefit of the doubt than with the brave men and women who served our country."

VA, he said, "is presuming significant fraud for people who have received 100 percent disability payments on PTSD claims. They are not conducting a comparable survey of people whose claims were denied. What that indicates, to me at least, is there is some bias against those who have received payments."

Obama noted that the original inspector general investigation was launched because of veterans' complaints of wide disparities in claim awards among VA regions.

"There were a couple of ways the VA could have handled it. They could have said, 'You know, this is troubling. It seems that some veterans are being shortchanged. Let's make sure all veterans are being treated fairly and generously.' "

Instead, the VA decided to "level down rather than up" on benefits.

He predicted House conferees will concede to the Senate on this issue.

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